The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Conrad Saam on Finding Your Law Firm's Unfair Advantage
In this episode of The Renegade Lawyers Podcast, join us as we dive into the world of digital marketing with Conrad Saam, the president of Mockingbird Marketing. We discuss the challenges and strategies for small to medium-sized law firms looking to make an impact online. Discover the importance of identifying your firm's unfair advantage and how to navigate the competitive landscape without getting lost in the noise. If you're looking to grow your practice and want real insights into legal marketing, this is a must-listen!
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
It's funny. I get this and I've talked about this many times. What do you do? I do digital marketing for lawyers. Oh my gosh, the people who don't know. But lawyers, honestly, make really amazingly good clients. They make great clients, and there are a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1:I grew up on the East Coast, despite the fact that I'm in bleeding heart Seattle. I like the bluntness, I like the candor, I like the fast pace, I like when it escalates to respected disagreement. I like that stuff and that doesn't turn me off. Lawyers are ambitious and I think a lot of times lawyers get painted with the like you guys don't understand business, you don't understand technology. I don't buy that at all. There are law firms who get it. There are law firms who are figuring out. There are florists who get it. There are veterinarians who get it. There are law firms who are figuring out. There are florists who get it. There are veterinarians who get it right, and so I love working with lawyers and the other part of it that I don't think I remember when this happened to me, looking at the legal industry from the outside. Most people hate lawyers, but they like their lawyer, right?
Speaker 2:Let me tell you what this is not. This is not an event where, under the guise of a seminar, we're going to be selling you websites, pay-per-click ads or other digital marketing media. That's not our space in the market. This is where you're going to learn how to effectively use your next hour and your next dollar in growing your law firm. We'll be part lecture and part workshop. There'll be some prep work to do before the event and some post-event follow-up so we can answer lingering questions and keep you motivated to building a better life for you and your family Together. Let's figure out why you're not making more money, getting better cases and converting more of your leads. Again, this is August 1 and 2 in our offices in Fairfax, virginia, and if you want to be on the early list of people who are getting up-to-date information, just shoot me an email at ben at greatlegalmarketingcom. That's ben at greatlegalmarketingcom, and I'll make sure you're one of the first to know.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, ben Glass, the founder of the law firm Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, virginia, and Great Legal Marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, this is Ben. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast where, as you know, each episode I get to interview interesting people inside and outside of legal who are making a ding in the world. Today's going to be a fun one. What you probably don't know is like we just hit record on some of these, like with guys or gals who I know well, have known for a long time, we don't exchange questions in advance. We just got to hit record and in fact, Conrad, if we had hit record 90 seconds earlier, we could have had a great video view, which would have been even better because I just said I hate it when technology doesn't work and then completely Boom.
Speaker 2:So Conrad Sam is, of course, a well-known president of Mockingbird Marketing, started at Avvo back in the day. His two favorite companies are Google and Fine Law. We'll talk a little bit of that. By the way, disclaimer, these are opinions we're expressing here, but, conrad, I feel like you and I get to talk every week because the podcast that you do with Guy Sakalakis Lunch Hour Legal Marketing is really like just being in the room with two guys who happen to be competitors, great friends just discussing stuff that I think is really relevant and important to the folks who listen to this podcast, which is the solo and small firm market, the guys and gals who typically are not spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on anything, let alone a specific vertical like paid advertising or even SEO and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:So I have picked up a lot. I ping you with questions, with bad questions, that you try to answer, even though it's asynchronous questions and answers, and so I appreciate that, but I think that you and Guy do a really good job. It is literally, honestly, one of my favorite podcasts and it is one of those that I listen to as soon as the episode is released, as soon as I can listen to it. So, hey, welcome to our program.
Speaker 1:I'm super excited to be here. I am not good at a lot of things. I love talking marketing. Right, if this was all I did, if it was just the talking part, that's the dream job for me. But there's other parts of running a business which we'll talk about, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:That social media question like what could you get up and talk?
Speaker 2:on for 30 minutes with no prep, like this would be one of them. Well, very good. Well, let's just start with your podcast Wiki, because I noticed it when it first was born. Because I noticed it when it first was born and I did it did not surprise me, but you two are competing in the marketplace for web services web design, seo, web advice, marketing advice, all of that stuff. So can you take us inside the dinner conversation or whatever it was that said hey, I have this.
Speaker 1:One of you said well, he invited me to join and I was like I mean he, so it's owned. I mean, the pod is owned by the little talk network. And so, full disclosure, they do all of the hard work. We this is my perfect situation we show up, we plan for an hour, we talk for an hour and then that's it. So they do all of the hard stuff. And Guy had this opportunity and he was like why don't you join me? And I was like are you sure you want me, of all people, to sit down and join you? And he was like yeah, of course. And Guy and I have very similar companies. We have very similar businesses.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that's a little bit in vogue is to talk about collaboration and sharing stuff and masterminds. And we have a I mean, it's two of us, but I will share. We share all sorts of stuff from tactical SEO stuff. We're trying to get our teams together to talk about what they're doing. It makes the intelligence of my firm larger. But I share my P&L with a guy, a direct competitor, on the regular, because I'm always learning from him and he's always learning from me. And the other thing, Ben and I hate to say this, but the industry is not great. The agency world that's serving law firms, it's not really great, and so we've gone completely open with each other and almost to the exclusion of other opportunities, like to other relationships in the agency world, but it's been super valuable. It's weird, I know it's a weird relationship, but it works, and we were at the University of Michigan at the same time and didn't know each other.
Speaker 2:Well, look. So, folks, you could like turn the podcast off now and just think about what you just heard, because it is. It is brilliant, it is and it is not. It is not sharing for sharing sake, but it's sharing when you understand that the the market is vast, america is a the best place ever to be running a small business and you will learn more. For years, conrad said to local PI lawyers in Northern Virginia come over, we'll show you everything. We'll show you everything that we do, and some taking us up on that. Sometimes we've grown competitors, for sure, but the reality is we learn more and we have an impact on the market and we learn more. And what you said there was very important, like your team's education gets broader because it's not all coming just through. You right, and that's an important part of, I think, masterminds and bringing your team to masterminds and bringing your team to some of these seminars and conferences that we go to.
Speaker 1:And I feel like, if you're part of a mastermind with a group and you probably know this better than I do that you see people's development over time. It's almost like you're running four or five different companies right, Like you have the expertise and the experience and the heartache and the wins of multiple companies. It's like you are doing this entrepreneur thing four times, five times at the same time, instead of just once.
Speaker 2:And if you're into, in this case, learning about marketing but, more importantly, learning about personal growth, business growth, learning about marketing but more importantly learning about personal growth, business growth, which is really agnostic to the vertical that you're in, then things like masterminds, things like the collaboration that you and Guy are doing, are just invaluable and they're rare. They're relatively rare as many masterminds as you and I now see advertised out there in the legal world. It's still a rare event, like there's still so many lawyers who've never heard of you, never heard of me, never heard of Guy, never heard of Mike Mogul or any of these names.
Speaker 2:It's amazing right, and so the market is big. So have you, do you know like? Have you or Guy's seen an uptick in leads or inquiries or clients? Do you think because? Of the podcast. Has that been?
Speaker 1:effective for you. So it is one of many touch points that we have and it's in some cases it's the only touch point like people only know me from this. I go to conferences now and people know me from the podcast um, which is weird. But in many, many cases it's like another touch point or it's another thing where it's like this is someone that we've been talking to for seven years, right, and it's a way to continuously hang around in their brain, and I was literally just talking to my coach about this. We've never been successful at outbound sales and I don't really ever. Maybe it'd be great, but I would much rather have people talking to us who know us, who know the way we think, where it's not like a really awkward first blind date when we're doing that pitch, the initial discovery call, but it's like a conversation that is continuing on from stuff that they've heard about us and our perspective for, in some cases, years.
Speaker 2:That's a very interesting observation because there are some in the coaching space who are really good at coaching and teaching on sales and sales, closing and sales conversions and I've always been like I suck at that, right, but I'm a really good marketer, I think, right or decent anyway, so that when people come, the conversation really is exactly what you said. It's a continuation of a conversation. We've already entered the conversation that's in their head and frame the issue in the legal, in the law firm space. Frame the issue Is your case like good enough to come into the Benghazi law space and for us to represent you Because I would suck at outbound cold marketing or sales and closing and things like that and there are agencies that do very well with this right.
Speaker 1:So, like it's not a terrible challenge, it's just for me and for what we do and the way I like to think. I also, if you have a sales function, you're trying to close sales right Instead of like are we a good fit? Is what you need and what we do? Are those two things? Is there at least an 80% Venn diagram overlap on that? And if there is, let's keep talking, and if there's not, like I don't want to try and push those circles together to try and make it work.
Speaker 2:Do you ever regret choosing at some point in your life, to serve the lawyer market versus taking your skills to serve Not?
Speaker 1:at all. I, I, it's funny, funny, I get this and I've talked about this many times. What do you do? I do digital marketing for lawyers. Oh my gosh, the people who don't know. But lawyers, honestly, make really amazingly good clients. They make great clients, and there are a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1:I grew up on the East Coast, despite the fact that I'm in bleeding heart Seattle. I like the bluntness, I like the candor, I like the fast pace, I like when it escalates to respected disagreement. I like that stuff and that doesn't turn me off. Lawyers are ambitious and I think a lot of times lawyers get painted with like you guys don't understand business, you don't understand technology. I don't buy that at all. There are law firms who get it, there are law firms who are figuring out, there are florists who get it, there are veterinarians who get it right, and so I love working with lawyers and the other part of it that I don't think I remember when this happened to me.
Speaker 1:Looking at the legal industry from the outside, most people hate lawyers but they like their lawyer right. That's the kind of cute little key Because I've been in here for so long. I see legal, the legal system, the institution to be a counterpoint to the awful crap that can happen in the country. Well, we won't even go in the world, but in the country. So you've got the worst day of your life, your spouse has slept with a pool boy, you've been hit by a car, the tax guy is coming Systemically. The legal industry is the counterbalance to all the awful crap that can happen. If you are black and pulled over by the police, if you are poor and don't have access to resources. In some cases not always If you're a business getting screwed by someone, the legal industry is the backdrop and I've had the opportunity to see that and respect that. Now are all my clients doing amazing, wonderful Superman things? No, but that's the part that I get to play in and I love it because of that.
Speaker 2:Do your clients run the gamut? Certainly, a lot of your clients are consumer-facing directly consumer-facing PI lawyers, criminal defense lawyers, whatever. Do you have clients who are really corporate-facing? It's one of those.
Speaker 1:Business school conversations where it's like oh, here's this whole other market that we could go after and we should target them because they've got deep pockets and blah, blah blah. It's a different purchase cycle. Should target them because they've got deep pockets and blah, blah, blah, but it's a different purchase cycle. It's a different consideration set. If you are a corporate law firm, you're not starting with need M&A lawyer. You're not going to Google with top M&A lawyer in Sheboygan, you're just not. You've already got that figured out and so it's a very different mindset. Now. They are much more sophisticated in general on CRM. They're much more sophisticated on, and some of them are much more sophisticated on automation than consumer-facing law. So there is some stuff that we can learn from that group, but by and large, outside of LinkedIn and a website that shows a good result when someone searches for Bill Smith attorney.
Speaker 2:It's just not that important when you were in college.
Speaker 1:What did you think you wanted to be when you grew up? Oh, boy, when I went into, this is going to show you how naive I was. My career paths were veterinarian, professional jazz musician and I thought in the US, becoming a professional rugby player would be a really good move. So I was as naive as you could possibly get. I had no clue. And even when I left college with a sense of like, we send kids and this is happening today, although we're starting to question it. We send kids to college to figure out what they want to do and I remember at graduation I was like uh-oh, what class did I miss where we were supposed to do that part? Because I have no idea what I'm going to do and no one wants to employ someone with an economics degree, no one's drawing marginal cost curves as their first job out of college, and it was like I left college just like I have no idea.
Speaker 2:You got your MBA at the University of Michigan. Was that a direct path from the university or did you have it was two years out.
Speaker 1:So I left college. I worked for a guy this is your listeners may find this funny I worked for a guy who had just gotten his MBA from Cornell. He was the fourth generation in a company and my now wife was dating a guy who also went to the same school at Cornell. And so I got a US News and World Report book on top MBA schools and I drew my line at Cornell and I looked at all the schools above Cornell because I was petty. But that was my second plan. My first plan was, honestly, I was going to go. That was my second plan. My first plan was, honestly, I was going to go into the OCS for the Marines. And then I got super lucky and got into Michigan. And that's one of those forks in the road where you have no idea where your life was going to go.
Speaker 2:But you had choices if you were going to go to graduate school, because maybe you still could have gone and become a veterinarian, which is an awesome profession. So I have a daughter who's a dog groomer. So out of high school, no college degree, struggled a lot. Adopted at 11, makes healthy six figures and more than a couple of my kiddos with four-year tens of thousand dollar degrees. So there's a space there. So that's another investment, like MBA investment of a couple of years and a bunch of money.
Speaker 1:Did you have a?
Speaker 2:vision at that point.
Speaker 1:Besides the girl, no, I mean I left business. So I was the youngest person in my business school class, which was a really huge asset because I got to learn from all these people. Like, in my grad school class we had a pilot from Air France, we had a Navy SEAL who ran Eastern Europe for all of the SEALs. We had these amazing people and I had finished puberty a couple of weeks earlier and it was so awesome because I got to learn from all of these amazing people more than they. I mean, I'm not sure anyone learned anything from me, but I got to have all of these experiences from all these amazing people. But then I left and I was like, okay, I like technology, I like entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1:But the reality has been my experience is most MBAs the MBA is the least risky degree you could possibly get and most people who go and get an MBA are not entrepreneurial by nature. They may think they are, but ultimately they're making a very low-risk decision. You get an MBA that is a smart, obvious, easy degree that is going to pay off, and I believe that. But that self-selects out people who are like well, I would be better off spending the next two years and $80,000 trying to start a company or learn this, and so it weeds out what I will call genuinely entrepreneurial people, and for better or worse it didn't weed me out.
Speaker 1:But I find MBAs to be risk-averse, like lawyers they're very. They struggle to be entrepreneurial right, they really do. And think about the great technology businesses that have come out. The visionary, the leadership of that rarely is sitting on MBA right Now. They may employ a whole bunch of them, but and that's the getting stuff done thing blah, blah, blah. But it's rarely someone who is. I had this business school professor at B-School who said if you're not dancing on the edge of silliness, you aren't doing anything really revolutionary. And I remember that and I was like I live on the edge of silliness, but I don't think that resonated with anyone else.
Speaker 2:It's amazing that he was still allowed to do that. Yeah, and he was like everyone wanted to be entrepreneurial.
Speaker 1:but people would say to me at business school I'd love to start a company, I just don't have any ideas. And I was like I've got 50 ideas today, right 2011.
Speaker 2:I remember when I first met Mark Britton he was in DC, came by to visit many years ago and Alva was a thing back in the day. I mean, it was for a while there, a force. I'm curious as to what your learning was, because you said in MBA school you were like surrounded.
Speaker 1:Now, my question is did you?
Speaker 2:appreciate it at the time.
Speaker 1:It was amazing. It was amazing. People are like, oh, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you. And I was like nailed it. It was amazing, it was the best experience, Best two years of my life by far yeah.
Speaker 2:That's cool, that's cool. So then, what was the learning at Avvo? Avo, because that must have been that. That was you know. Obviously it was new, but the genre it really was so cool.
Speaker 1:I was so lucky to get recruited into that company at the time that I did, and it was so lucky for me to have a couple of connections. And so what happened is my friend I had a friend who was the CMO at Zillow. He was from business school and so the guy who started Zillow financed Avvo. He's also the guy who started Expedia. So lots of money going around. And I got hit up by this headhunter and I connect the dots and I said to my friend at Zillow I'm like listen, can you just prep me for my interview? And I went over and we split a six pack of beer and he taught me everything.
Speaker 1:At that point in time you needed to know about SEO. And the next day I went in and I looked like a genius because I'd spent two hours learning SEO from my buddy, mark, but it was literally two hours of information. I could tell you the theory, I could tell you what it was, but I had no hands-on experience at all. The good thing is that Seattle, for whatever reason, was full of really high-end SEO nerds and it was a community at that point in time. And so Vanessa Fox was here, todd Friesen was here, rand Fishkin was here and they invited me into this community and I got to learn from all of these people who had made their. These were the non-MBAs, right, these were the people who had used technology to make a ton of money, had made a ton of mistakes, had learned a bunch of things, were sharing it. It was this big, beautiful, open community and it was awesome.
Speaker 1:And at that time, no one in legal was doing it well, except for Justia. Tim Stanley at Justia, who originally started FineLaw, sold it to Thomson Reuters and then hated them and started this firm, justia, instead. So Tim Stanley and I were the only two people who knew anything about SEO in legal for a very long time. So Ava was able to kill it, not because I was brilliant, but because I was surrounded by a bunch of people who were feeding me the how to do it and nobody else knew what they were doing, and so that was amazingly powerful. And the other thing, ben and this is maybe a little bit twisted, but of my role grew there. I used to feel the questions and the complaints from lawyers about avo like or you review us online. You can't do that. We're a profession, we're there's. It's a noble profession. You can't do that, and you're like you. A you don't know how the web works, and and B I got this experience of interfacing with angry lawyers and I loved it.
Speaker 2:It was awesome, so how did the director of marketing end up fielding? I mean, we were small.
Speaker 1:I was the sixth hire there and you know, when we launched we would get these complaints and we had. We eventually hired a woman named Kristen who ran like our customer success team, which was basically at the time just answering the phone, and sometimes that phone call was an angry lawyer and if she had enough she passed them up to me and because no one else was doing it that's the entrepreneurial thing there was no one else filling that seat, so I was like, okay, someone's got to take it and for whatever reason, I loved it.
Speaker 2:Someone's got to take it and for whatever reason, I loved it. What do you think was the smartest thing that Avvo did for itself as a business and what do you think the smartest thing Avvo did for?
Speaker 1:lawyers. The number one was obviously rating lawyers. That was an SEO genius move, Because as soon as you rate lawyers on a scale of 1 to 10, you know you're going to get sued. So Avvo planned on getting sued before they launched Right, and that was our. That was a PR move, but it was really a link building move, which was awesome, because what I got to do with see like we were covered by the New York times four days after we launched, because we got sued three days after we launched and that wasn't by accident. And then, when the New York times covered us my job I just reached out and it was like here's my pitch this is a new website that has raised $3 million, which is not a lot of money, and they're rating lawyers. And lo and behold, they got sued.
Speaker 1:And so I reached out to all of these. It was a planned press opportunity and that happened, and so we got sued. And then we had all these influential bloggers who hated or who all wanted to weigh in. So this goes way back when there were, you know, I don't know when Kevin's Lex blog was a really tiny little company, but like you could identify all the people who were talking about technology and the law over blogs and I reached out to all of them and some of them hated me and I would have these long heated conversations which always turned into an article and a link back to Ava. So we were killing the SEO game. It was awesome.
Speaker 1:It was like so much fun, it's so twisted, but I loved every moment of it.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, it's not really twisted it's it is.
Speaker 1:It was, yeah, it was so it was so much fun. Ben, I talk about. I like talking. That's what I did. I talked and I generated links and it was amazing.
Speaker 2:The easiest thing ever. You recently have, on some of your social media, talked about Mockingbird and the difference between a year ago or so and now, and your use of EOS and just getting the team.
Speaker 3:I think my words more organized.
Speaker 2:As you know, we are huge fans, brian and I use EOS Entrepreneur Operating System from the book Traction in both of our businesses the law firm and in great legal marketing, and it benefited a lot.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I recall I may have been the one to convince you to go get a coach, but talk about that for a moment, because you know so many. You're an established company, you're doing good stuff and everyone who listens to this knows like running a business can be really hard, like you can have highs that are highs, lows that are lows. The entrepreneur, you're wearing the weight of all of that on your shoulders every single day. You're often the first to end, the last to leave and sometimes the last to get paid. But talk to us a little bit fundamentally. You think of what has changed inside of Mockingbird as a business operating system, so to speak, because it's not like you went out and discovered the next new SEO magic. No, black hat, white hat trick, right, but you've changed something, and so I think listeners would be interested in hearing what you did, and obviously lots of other companies who are using traction.
Speaker 1:So the funny thing is, go back to my MBA roots. I'm a little bit arrogant and I was like I don't need some third party template of how to run a business because I have an MBA and I don't need someone telling me about CFO stuff because I have an MBA and we self-implemented it for a while and it was fine but it never really fundamentally shifted who we were and you don't know what, you don't know when you're self-employed.
Speaker 1:You and I had a conversation about getting someone as a coach to do this, and I talked to a lot of people about it. But you're right, this was, it was the catalyst that changed everything. And so we, about a year ago and, by the way, these people are very expensive we hired a third-party integrator and, by the way, these people are very expensive. We hired a third-party integrator and I think, which forces you to take EOS I mean, we were doing it. I don't want to call it as like a side hustle, but it was not. There was no discipline or accountability pushed into it because we were holding ourselves disciplined and accountable to varying degrees of it, and it wasn't until I brought on an integrator, third party, and it's shifted everything. It has completely shifted everything. And for the listener, if you're like, oh, is this something I should think about, I will tell you.
Speaker 1:For me, the reason it was everything is I knew I had problems that I was not confronting. I knew we had issues that I preferred not to deal with because they were hard and it was very much the ostrich with his head in the sand. It's not like these were issues that I discovered because of EOS, but I dealt with them because of EOS and, by the way, we're not done. We're not even close to done. The accountability of a really good coach is so unbelievably valuable and I think you have to get a really good coach. I don't think you want someone who's just figuring this out and I hate to say this, but, like this is a but. Like don't like get Michael Jordan to coach the team Right, because otherwise you're going to. You need someone who's going to that taskmaster, that that accountability person, that person who's going to hold me accountable for, like I'm, I keep pushing things off and she won't let me. It's awesome, it's so good.
Speaker 2:Well, some of you know we we self-implemented for about like a week, and then I figured I didn't know what I was doing right, because I was just reading one chapter ahead in the book.
Speaker 2:And you know, internally at the law firm we've been doing it for a bit longer than at Great Legal Marketing and we've had some of the rawest I wouldn't say fierce, but challenging discussions in the room with some you know, in our case, my son and others who you're working very closely with, and it's been. It's beautiful, if that's the right word for it, because the promise that you make to each other and it took some time to get the right leadership team too like we churned through leadership team but the promise you make is that we're going to, we're going to debate, we're going to be honest with each other, we're going to ask questions with the intent to know the answer, not the intent to serve an agenda necessarily, but when we walk out, we're going to be aligned. There's not going to be a conversation in the hall about, you know, undermining the decision we just made, and that too can be, that can be hard sometimes. Have you done like you've done? Your two day?
Speaker 1:And in fact I'm leaving on Wednesday night to do another one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, those have been. Those have been amazingly fun and deep experiences for us, so so good for you for doing that, and I think you know my analogy is you're in a $10 a month gym and a $300 a month CrossFit gym or something like that, the one you're investing a ton in. You're going to show up and do it, and you just don't want to show up, I think, unprepared.
Speaker 1:So good for you on that. And again, I feel like we're just at the beginning, like I've often felt like we're a company in puberty and we've just figured it out and we're now like now it's opening up, right, and it's very exciting.
Speaker 2:Well, well, let me tell you what the good news and the bad news is. What we have discovered is, as you grow, you always are in puberty because you're going to. You grow to a space that you've never been in before. You've not been a leader at that level, you may not have the right people at that level, and again you're. So you're in the talent search, you're in the processes search and, as the leader, you're going out to learn things that you never, even though you have your fancy MBA right, you've never had to deal with before and so.
Speaker 2:But we think this is fun because it is new learning. Right, it's just and guys like us, people like us, we're kind of addicted to new learning, like let's go, school's never out, so it never gets to easy street, it's just different. It's different issues, yeah, but they fun to to learn and then to go and try to solve and that. And brian would say, my son would say like that's because, dad, because you're the eternal optimist and like you, you see growth and opportunity and even the work where even the hardest discussions that we've had and I'm pointing now to our training center room he said to me once is there anything ever? That's horrible? I said, well, sudden unexpected death, that would be horrible.
Speaker 1:But outside of that Part of me is like I feel like you have to have a level of irrational optimism to own a company, because otherwise you'd be like I'm just going to get a job. Right, I have to. I feel like you have to have that in you, because the lows are really low and the highs are really high and you have to keep your eye up instead of down and you have to have that level of optimism.
Speaker 2:Let's, let's switch gears, let's talk a little bit of internet, because you know we can have this. We're recording this, by the way, in July of 2024, so if you listen to it in three months, all the answers Conrad's going to give are probably going to be different, because everything changes. As you know, conrad, our market is generally, as I said earlier, it's not the lawyers who are spending tens of thousand dollars a month on anything, that's, on almost anything, right, and particularly a particular vertical of marketing. But it does seem to me that every time you and gee release an episode, something has changed in google's world. That just makes it challenging. So so, guys and gals who are running small to medium firms doing anywhere from 800k to 3 million, I'll tell you if you didn't know this, like they're very frustrated because they hear something new all the time.
Speaker 2:They try things, but they often don't have the money to fund doing the thing at the very high level. That's maybe necessary for the thing If we're talking about buying pay-per-click ads and being really good at pay-per-click or LSAs and stuff.
Speaker 2:And you guys get on and depress us all the time. So help them, help our listeners, with a framework for thinking about the investment of time and energy into their digital platform, be it website, google, local, anything else. What do you think is the appropriate, reasonable framework to think about how these lawyers are going to spend their hours?
Speaker 1:I think a lot of this starts with two really simple elements to understand but hard to actually analyze. Number one is like where do you want to go? This is why the annual planning system for EOS makes a ton of sense. It's why we're going. We just started Q3 right now and we're planning. What does the template look like that we bring to our clients who are engaged in EOS and do we get a seat at their table? When is their annual meeting?
Speaker 1:My people are literally right now trying to figure out what the calendar is for the annual meeting for our clients who are running EOS. So we should be at least feeding content to whomever holds that seat or where we are there in the room with that seat. And so the answer to your question is like where do you want to go next year and some of you want to take over the state. We have clients who look like that Some of you want to go next year, right, and some of you want to take over the state. We have clients who look like that Some of you want to keep the lights on. Those are two very different things. Some of you may be terrified about Morgan and Morgan moving in. Some of you may want to add another location. Hire four lawyers. What are we trying to do?
Speaker 2:And I think in Do you actually Let me interrupt? Do you actually have a seat in any EOS? Do you actually let me interrupt? Do you actually have a seat in any eos, any law firm eos?
Speaker 1:the marketing seat. So you're in on the quarterly lease in the annual.
Speaker 2:What would we be doing? Like that's it. I agree, no, I well, I agree, but I hadn't really thought about that.
Speaker 1:And the other part is like and and so this is a tangent, but like there's this real change where, like, we have coos who are really wearing the marketing hat they're internal coOs who are really wearing the marketing hat. They're internal COOs who are really wearing the marketing hat, but like we're feeding them and we're supporting them, right. But like, if you're not bringing your agency in, like maybe they're just doing tactical stuff for you, which is fine, there's someone leading internally, but otherwise, like, yes, of course, and you know, you have to be a good guest, right, you can't come in and be like I think next year you should take over florida. That's not our job. But like, our job is to understand if you want to take over florida, okay, let's come up with the plan and the metrics and the rocks to say that we're actually making that happen so the fact that you are eos trained you know and running us at mockingbird.
Speaker 2:That's got to be dog whistle language to firms who really get it.
Speaker 1:Probably, probably, I do think, and I think this is a fair hit. I think firms who are at a level of sophistication I'm making broad brushstrokes here where they would be implementing EOS more than 12 or six to 12 months in, they probably don't trust marketing people, they probably don't trust agencies, and it takes a lot of trust to get that seat at the table, and I think that lack of trust is well earned by the digital marketing space, and so it's the special client where that happens. But I'm headed off to Nashville soon to go and do exactly this. And they have a very clear objective they want to move into a very large city. So they've been on the periphery.
Speaker 1:We're all getting together, and it's not just me. We're the digital vendor, we've got offline vendors coming in and we are working out what is the plan to win this city and it's top three. What is it going to take? And we're all getting together like of course we should do that, and then, when you do that, we're bought in to like, okay, these are the things that need to happen over the next four quarters and it goes right into an EOS system and that's how it should work. But you got to work with an agency that you trust, and we have done a terrible job of building trust as an industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, We'll talk about that in a second. But what you just said I hadn't even thought of. It would strike me that telling that story, which you just told, is a marketing. It's got to be a marketing tool for you.
Speaker 1:This is the funny thing, ben like no one. No one is. It's like. This is like writing a will no one is going out there right now thinking about I want to write a will today. If you're thinking about writing a will, it's too late and so no one's proactively looking for that. There are things that people, there are things that people need lawyers for that no one is proactively looking for. I don't think people are looking for like eos trained digital marketing agency. I think it's a nice when it when it connects, but it isn't kind of it's not in the psyche of law firms as they're looking for a vendor out of it?
Speaker 2:I mean the fact that, hey, inside some of the most significant law firms in the country and let me just, without disclosing anything proprietary, let me just tell you what they do they bring their vendors in and together we think about this problem and thus avoid the problem of vendor on the left-hand side telling us one thing over here, vendor on the right-hand side, my internal and marketing person, telling me something else. We just get in the room and have open and honest, and sometimes hard discussions to try to figure this out.
Speaker 1:So all right, and I interrupt you.
Speaker 2:So you said, right, let's figure out. You know the advice like where do you want to go?
Speaker 1:Number one and the next part and this is increasingly difficult, especially for the smaller your firm size is. This is increasingly difficult. What are the marketing channels that I can play in and what are the marketing channels that I just shouldn't bother? So if you are a two-person, two-lawyer personal injury firm in downtown Chicago, you've got a brand new website and zero reviews, you should not play. Don't try and play SEO. Don't try and play SEO. Don't try and play local. Just don't, because you'll never win. It's a waste of time.
Speaker 1:Now, that's an extreme example, but you need to look at them, and I'm a very big believer that you need to understand and see the entire chessboard and understand all of the pieces in order to determine which piece you actually want to play at any given moment, and sometimes you got to leave the pieces where they stand. I'm drawing the analogy way too far, but there are certainly some tactical things that small firms should not be doing, that they don't have a chance to ever win at, and you need to stay away from those things. On the flip side, there are some advantages that a small firm has that a Morgan Morgan can never replicate, and what are those? What channels do I play in? How can I win there while avoiding the pit of competition where you're never going to win?
Speaker 1:Some agencies, some SEO people will be like I can take any law firm and get them to page one. No, not for anything that you're going to be hired for. There are no tips and tricks. There's no three easy steps. Those opportunities get discovered and exploited and shared so fast that there's no. It's hard, it's a hard game and for me I love the entrepreneur, I love the scrappiness, I love the visionary it's become a big budget game in many cases for many channels, and you just need to not play in those channels, play elsewhere on the episode about the industry, the agency industry, not having done a good job of garnering trust with customers, in this case law firms.
Speaker 2:I'm curious like what you mean by that. And then we'll loop into Conrad, the eternal question, which is the lawyers who are looking. And again it's hard because you know the pitch is hey, I'm going to do an SEO audit. You get five audits, 5,000 different things that are wrong and screwing with your digital marketing, and then how do we pick? So what do you mean when you say the agency world hasn't done a great job? And then how does Mr and Mrs sole and small firm lawyer kind of work through that to find Again, we're always coaching the best investment of time and money for?
Speaker 1:our market for our lawyers. I feel like the industry by and large is run with the perspective of my former classmate who have MBAs and they're optimizing for the agency instead of their client, and it is a short-term mindset. That can be. By the way, it's super profitable From a business perspective. It can make a lot of sense. It's just not the way I think law firms should hire an agency and it's not the way I want to run my agency. But you can get I'll use some extreme examples Proprietary technical platforms.
Speaker 1:You're on a website that you can't get off of, right that you're tied to your agency. That's dumb. You're contractually tied to your agency, even if they are terrible, also dumb. Why would you do that? It's worse than a marriage right, and it is a marriage right. There are lots of ways that agencies. Let me use a simplistic example. Agencies like to show up and to the right. Okay, so up and to the right. You're growing raw, we're doing great, but how many of you are listening? You're like, yeah, my agency is showing me the graph up into the right, and yet here we are. We're still four people two years in and nothing's really changed.
Speaker 1:Let me use two really obscene examples of how agencies abuse this Leads, right? So I know, because I have the data, that 84% of the leads that we generate 83% to 84% of the leads phone call form, fill text or chat don't turn into a consultation. So why are you counting leads? But agencies will do things like they're going to count the seven times that opposing counsel called you through the tracking number that they set up as seven different leads. It's garbage, right? We put a man on the moon in the 60s. We can clearly figure out that wasn't seven different leads, it wasn't one lead. In fact, it was opposing counsel, right? So we can figure that out. And so agencies will go out of their way to overcount leads when we have the technology to take that problem away really easily, and it's simple. This number has already been seen in our database. Don't count it as a new lead. That's all you have to do. Right in our database. Don't count it as a new lead. That's all you have to do. So that drives me crazy. Let me use another example.
Speaker 1:Agencies like to talk about growing traffic as an SEO metric. It's a terrible SEO metric. It's a terrible metric for a law firm. So think about this If my job as an agency. If I've convinced you, ben, that the thing that we need to do is grow traffic for your site, I'm going to do whatever it takes to grow traffic, regardless of the quality of that traffic, and so I might put out a bunch of content that's so high up in the funnel, or not even in the funnel, that it's going to attract visitors, but no one cares. We literally talked to a law firm in New York that was ranking and getting traffic for Brooklyn-style pizza because they had written up about a pizza restaurant that did Brooklyn-style pizza. No one is winning that game, but they were never going to hire this law firm. That's stupid, but it gets even more insidious, and this is where agencies really are awful.
Speaker 1:I've now convinced you, ben, that you need to see up and to the right, and you know what? The graph has been flat for two months. I can go buy you for $10 another 1,200 visits to your website tomorrow, right? And now your graphs look up and to the right and I told you I'm doing what we're doing. We agreed that the goal here was to drive traffic, and now I'm being insidious and you will never know, you will never have a clue that I'm actually doing that and don't have the naivety that that's not happening. That is 100% happening, that I'm actually doing that and don't have the naivety that that's not happening. That is 100% happening.
Speaker 1:And that's why I hate this industry, because we get you to look over here at these technical things, we get you to think about things that aren't your business metrics and then we can absolutely backdoor away. You want followers? Great, I've got 10,000 followers from Uzbekistan. These things. Just it's so bad and it's so rampant and I hate it. I hate the industry. I love being in it, but overall it's gross. It's gross.
Speaker 2:And it's it gives you opportunity and you could look at it from my perspective and look at some of the way lawyers operate their businesses and the way they market their practices. And it is gross and disgusting for some of them, right? But you know, it ends up being an opportunity for us. Let me ask you this Now your next lead is the perfect avatar lawyer or law firm that's calling Mockingbird to say, hey, we'd like to have a discussion. What does that firm or that lawyer look like psychographically, if you want to use that phrase, budget-wise, in any metric that you'd like to use, who's your favorite? That you want to say, hey, I've got a call with such and such.
Speaker 1:This is going to be an awesome call.
Speaker 1:The best firm is a growth-oriented mindset, and it's genuine growth-oriented mindset, which means you've married your budgeting to your objectives, to where you want to go. You have a realistic. We had a firm employment law firm in Texas Two lawyers, three lawyers every year. Conrad, I want to take over Texas and I'm like Dan, you got to spend more than $4,000 a month. If you want to take over Texas, it's just never going to go anywhere. So that was a great example of we parted ways because they were never going to get to where they wanted to go, because they didn't really want to put into it what was going to have to happen.
Speaker 1:The other thing, ben, that I love. This is not the right sales answer, but I do love this. I like the aggressive firm that has the unfair advantage, and I'll use employment as an example. There aren't big employment firms. Employment tends to be onesies, twosies, and so we've built. One of our clients is one of the biggest employment law firms in the country, if not the biggest, depending on what yardstick you want to use.
Speaker 1:It started with three guys, right, and no one's doing employment really well. They are and they're killing it because of that, and it doesn't have to be. It's not even necessarily practice area. You're the firm that does everything in the tertiary market, right, I can kill it for you.
Speaker 1:We like doing personal injury. It helps my top line keep going up and we learn a lot from personal injury. They spend a lot. It's probably a third of our clients and two thirds of our revenue, our PI. So we'll do that all day long. But I love when I can be like okay, this personal injury firm I've talked about this North Carolina firm why do they have an unfair advantage? Are they doing things differently? Are they willing to come out and not just do the expected stuff? Is there something more behind them? Right? And those firms that are like we're a little different, we're trying something else, we have a, we own the local market. We really care about this. Like I can do stuff with that when it's just like I'm another you know dude in a suit who wants to keep the lights on.
Speaker 2:Like I well, that's a great. I mean, look so again. If you're listening to this, like rewind the last 90 seconds and ask yourself, like spend some deep thinking time to ask yourself what is my unfair advantage. Ask your team what is our unfair advantage and you team what is our unfair advantage, and you may struggle with that. Okay, that's opportunity, like we can go figure something out. Or you may go here's our unfair advantage, but, gee, are we using it? No, all right, now there's an opportunity to exploit our unfair advantage. That's really. Can you give us any other examples generally, conrad of what an unfair advantage.
Speaker 1:It can be your positioning right. It can be like I remember that this site it's not alive anymore, but it was called my LA Jewish Lawyer right, it's like they've nailed a very specific market and most people can't compete with that right, but they're leaning totally into positioning. It can be your practice area right, it can absolutely be your practice area. It can be the goodwill that you have built up in your community. It can be the charismatic approach to the leader. I'll give you another one. This is a guy I won't name him, but every year for years he ran on the Libertarian Party, right, so he ran for the Libertarian Party. He did it as an SEO exercise, because the press is all taught to cover all the angles and he made sure that every single story he was covered, which included a link because all his political stuff was on his own law firm website. Like, that's an amazing unfair advantage, right, it's things like this. You have to look at things. If you look at everything linear and within this box, you almost have to go for a long drive or a shower or work out like crazy. And where is your brain going outside of the expected? It's there. You just have to find it, you have to draw it out. You could be pushing women in Sacramento. Whatever it might be, there's so much more to you than I'm a lawyer. Find your unfair advantage and if you feel you are stuck fighting in a market that is just a bloodbath, it probably is.
Speaker 1:I remember one of my business school lessons. We did this case study and it was corporate strategy 101 or four, whatever they call it, in grad school and the whole point of the case. It was amazing. It was the first case that we ever did and we did it around Alcoa steel building, aluminum plants and the whole class. We're all trying to figure out what should Alcoa do and what are the unfair advantages. And at the very end, my professor, alan Afu I'll never forget this. He's from Cameroon, he's an amazing guy, super thick accent. He said students, this industry sucks right, they should get out. It just sucks right. And sometimes it just sucks right and sometimes you're just in this brutally brutal competitive environment where you have to move into something else where you're not going to get killed.
Speaker 2:You know, it's another reason, I think, to get into mastermind groups with non-lawyers, because they can be the ones that when you're telling your story, if they ask the right questions, they can help you discover, like, what is my unfair advantage? Dan Kennedy often tells the story of, you know, being an all-day consult with people and they finally, in the last hour, like they're telling some wacko story of something that happened in their life with a product, he's like that's it. That's the angle here. Conrad, this has been fun, as always. You'll be visiting us in a couple of months.
Speaker 2:I look forward to that. We'll figure out exactly what we're going to do when you are here, if folks listening to this want to have a discussion or continue this discussion with you or someone on your team so the good thing is I have a really unique name, so that's like talk about seo.
Speaker 1:We go straight back to seo. Uh, it's s-a-a-m with two, two a's, and if you can't find me, I'm not doing my job Very easy to find. I like talking about this stuff.
Speaker 2:We didn't even get to the controversial parts and the companies that you hate and love and all that stuff. We'll do that live in person, maybe Gross. I listened to the Lunch Hour Marketing. Lunch Hour Marketing. If you listen to this podcast, you've got to have Conrad and Guy's podcast. You're mixed too. It is really awesome. And then you even referred us to another one that talks a lot about local search. I forget the name of it.
Speaker 1:You mentioned it Darren Shaw, andrew Shotland, there's a bunch of people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good and that's, I think, at the end of the day, you know the unfair advantage that everything you talk about is an unfair advantage, or way or things that those, the big giant law firms, they really they don't do, they don't really have the. They have the capacity, they don't have the willingness to do. Some of this is work. It's one thing to write a big excuse me, big giant check, there's nothing to go and to think deeply about. Okay, like, how are we really different?
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:How could we take advantage here?
Speaker 3:And then yeah, go take over the state.
Speaker 2:That's okay too All right man.
Speaker 1:Thank you, ben, and I am looking forward. I look forward to seeing you in August. Oh, it's October, is it?
Speaker 2:August, october.
Speaker 1:No, no, no.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I've got it's filled up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's October. I think October 10. Okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is Right, it is October, all right, thanks. If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer podcast, you may be a perfect fit for Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high-quality legal services coupled with top-notch customer service to clients who pay, stay and refer. Learn more at GreatLegalMarketingcom. That's GreatLegalMarketingcom.
