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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
From Zero to Seven Figures: How Jonathan Breeden Built a Thriving Family Law Practice
In this episode of The Renegade Lawyer Podcast, I sit down with Jonathan Breeden, the founder of Breeden Law Firm, to talk about his incredible journey from a solo practice in 2000 to a multi-seven-figure law firm with nine attorneys and 24 employees in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Jonathan shares how he overcame massive challenges—including losing his entire staff at once—to rebuild and scale his firm using smart marketing strategies, data-driven hiring, and a relentless focus on client experience. We dive deep into:
✅ How he leverages niche marketing & local SEO
✅ Why hiring “baby lawyers” has been a game-changer
✅ The power of intake & follow-ups (and why most lawyers lose leads!)
✅ How he’s using a community podcast to dominate local visibility
This episode is packed with insights for any lawyer looking to grow, scale, and thrive in a competitive market.
🔊 Listen now and take notes—this is one you don’t want to miss!
🎧 Available on Spotify | Apple Podcasts
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.
I had to do something, and so you have to take a step forward, to move forward, and you can't just feel sorry for yourself because that doesn't accomplish anything. So I decided we would start this thing back up and I went and started looking for a coach and I still had this great website, and the rest is history from there.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass. Welcome back. This is the Renegade Lawyer Podcast where each and every episode, I get to interview really interesting people inside or outside of legal Today I'm speaking with attorney Jonathan Breeden. Jonathan and I met probably 18 months ago. I was speaking at a Richard James event. Jonathan has been coaching with Richard James, a good friend of mine, for many years now and we had some connections. His son is a soccer player and I grew up playing soccer, but Jonathan's got a really powerful family law practice doing multiple seven figures.
Speaker 2:Jonathan looked like six lawyers, or seven lawyers total in the firm and really growing in the suburbs of Raleigh. I thought it would be interesting to get Jonathan on. He's doing some interesting marketing. He's starting to do some even niche within the niche marketing and so I think this would be great because, as everyone knows, I'm a full contingent fee personal injury and disability lawyer. I've never had to bill a client or take a retainer or anything like that. But I think a lot of lawyers are challenged by that and they would like to grow a practice like what you have grown and are still growing, jonathan, thanks for carving out some time to be with us.
Speaker 1:Having me. I'm a regular listener to your podcast. I read your newsletter every month and I'm a thin glass fan boy, but I've learned a ton by listening to what you say on your podcast, reading your newsletter. I was even on Marilyn Starnes' podcast the other day. She writes for your newsletter as well. So, anyway, it's a really small world when you get into this entrepreneurial attorney world that you're in. That Richard James is in Everybody's connected and I'm a big fan of Jay Henderson and Real Talent Hiring. I know he's written for your newsletter as well. So, yeah, it's great. I'm looking forward to sharing what I've learned. It's been an unbelievable ride. It's almost like it's not real, but it is real. And if some guy from Laurenburg, north Carolina, can do this, anybody listening to this podcast can do it, if they put their mind to it.
Speaker 2:I was just with our friend Jay Henderson last week, like a week ago. Today, as we're recording this, we're in a different mastermind group together and he's doing great. So let me ask you this just hearing your energy and your enthusiasm as you have been a lawyer, have you always had what I would call the entrepreneurial DNA, or is that something you discovered? I discovered it for myself as I was struggling when I started my own practice, discovered Kennedy and some other influencers and marketers. What was that like for you? Have you been an entrepreneur from day one?
Speaker 1:I decided that I wanted to go to law school. When I was in ninth grade and I acquired a civics class in North Carolina. I read the Federalist Papers and the Constitution and I was like this is fascinating the concept of life and liberty and all men are created equal and this sort of sense of justice that those columnists were looking for at the time. I know you went to William Mary and I'd love to go to Colonial Williamsburg. I go every year. I learn something every time I go, but anyway I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.
Speaker 1:Then I was growing up in a small town, lorneburg, north Carolina. I was right on the North Carolina South Carolina line, about 30 minutes from south of the border Anybody who's ever driven down 95 and seen that sort of sideshow based on Mexican culture or whatever? But I decided I wanted to go to law school, and it was not long after that. I wanted to work for myself. My father was a CPA and he worked for himself there in the small town and he never made a million dollars but he never complained one day about going to work because it was his. And so when I started trying to decide where I wanted to go to law school, I started looking at law schools that provided more practical training because I knew I wanted to work for myself. I knew I wanted to give this thing a whack, and I ended up going to Campbell's Law School, which was, at the time, one of the top trial ad practical law schools in America. At that time it was in Buies Creek, which is about 45 minutes south of Raleigh. It's now in downtown Raleigh, about one block from the Capitol. And the reason I wanted to go to that law school is it had a start your law firm program where they actually helped you do it and teach it, and so that was one of the things that drew me to it.
Speaker 1:And so that's how serious I was about being an entrepreneur from the jump, and my parents were like you the little jobs I had, I struggled working for other people. I'm one of these people. That's like Jay Anderson says I'm interdirected. I want things the way I want things, and if they're not the way I want things, I'm going to be real stressed about it. And so I was like my parents. We didn't know the science of it, but they were like look, your dad's starting to work with other people, but he's really good working for himself. Maybe you need to look at working for yourself as well, because you want things done the way you want things done and that doesn't work in the real world.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my familiarity with Campbell is when I played soccer with Mary. We played every couple of years in the way game, I think, and to us this is the other end of the world. Same guys, Troy. Yeah, we're like what is this? I think they were like the.
Speaker 1:Campbells, yes, the Campbells, yes, the Campbells. I did start my own law firm in 2000, straight out of law school at 25 years old, and I came to the suburbs of Raleigh not knowing anybody. One of the things I learned in the Start your Own Law Reform program at Campbell was that there were too many lawyers in the cities and there were not enough lawyers in the suburbs or in the rural areas of North Carolina. And now that North Carolina and all the states are facing these legal deserts where there's less than one attorney for every 1000 people, I knew I probably didn't need to be in Raleigh itself. I was into politics. I was a campus Republican and a law Republican and I got myself to the state Republican Party Executive Committee.
Speaker 1:I ran for the state house as a senior at NC State in a district that was 86% Democrat. I had no chance in the world of winning, but I had a good time running and I was looking around if I'm ever going to run for office. Chance in the world of winning, but I had a good time running and I was looking around. If I'm ever going to run for office, raleigh is probably not it because Raleigh's not electing a whole lot of Republicans because it's a city, and so I was like, let me go into the suburbs. And so I started looking in the suburbs and areas that were tending to start to vote more Republican, just so if I ever wanted to run for office I'd have a reasonable chance and an area that was underserved.
Speaker 1:So I came to Johnston County, which was one of the fastest growing counties in America and still probably is one of the top 10 or 15 fastest growing counties in America. In my county I-95 and I-40 meet. So if you've ever been down, they're the two biggest interstates in the United States. They meet right here. It is good for commerce but it is bad for drugs. This area was absolutely exploding because of the sheer grove of Raleigh and the Research Triangle Park and Durham and Chapel Hill and all of that, and so I thought if I go where there's not enough lawyers, even if I'm not a good one, I'll probably fall into making some money.
Speaker 2:So this is a strategy. Today, so many lawyers like they want to be I want to move into Fairfax and dominate Fairfax and internet search engines and we're like there's only like 80 billion lawyers right where you're trying to get some traction. So you either accidentally or deliberately, stumbled on really a great marketing strategy. And you are right. These so-called legal deserts. We have one. Are you still there? I'm here. I don't know what happened. No lights flashed at all. But I'm going to start over. We were talking before electricity interrupted us. These legal deserts, which I think have been self-created in part by Virginia with its insistence on nobody can do stuff except the lawyers can do it. But as we look around for expansion purposes in Virginia, we look like where could we go where there is nobody or where there is no internet competition out there? So in 2000, you started your firm. We're recording this in late 2024. Give us a picture of what the firm looks like in terms of number of lawyers, number of support team.
Speaker 1:So now we have me plus eight lawyers, so there's nine lawyers here. We have about I lose track, unfortunately, of the sheer number of employees. We have about 24 employees. We have three paralegals an executive assistant, a client care director which I think is very important Somebody who's focused on making sure the clients are happy. We have a legal assistant. We have four people in El Salvador who answer our phones and make outbound phone calls, and I hired my first employee in the Philippines yesterday and we also have a consultant who helps us as well. A couple of days a week for a couple hours. They come in A lady named Shauna Smurser, of Peaceful Law.
Speaker 1:She was with Lee Rosen for a long time and then she was with Elise Bowie, so she understands this world and the scaling and what we need to focus on, and so she's been a big help as well. Yeah, so there's about 24 of us total and we're just growing extremely fast. In June of 2020, I had three employees, but they all quit at the same time, and then you have to make a decision Like you cry and I did cry, but you got to get. You got to get up. You got to keep moving and I did cry, but you got to get, you got to get up, you got to keep moving.
Speaker 2:Hey everyone, this is Ben, and if you're like most solo and small law firms, hiring is the bane of your existence. For over a decade, ben Glass Law and Great Legal Marketing have relied upon our good friend, jay Henderson, to make great hiring decisions. Jay's focus is on helping law firm owners eliminate the bad hiring decisions which we all know can be so expensive, so that you can increase your focus and implementation on your key hiring strategies. And for any firms that are in that 50 to 200 employees space, jay has performance management coaching program. This includes measuring their teams and showing them how to capture more of the blocked potential by coaching their people to higher performance.
Speaker 2:Again, ben Glass Law and Great Legal Marketing have relied on Jay for every single hire we have made in the last decade. No one gets hired here without going through profile test and it's amazing, and actually you should do it for you and your partners anyway, just to see what this test and Jay's evaluation is all about, you can find Jay Henderson at jayhendersonorg. His company is called Real Talent Hiring and we can't endorse Jay enough. Okay, now back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:I had a wife at home. I had two kids. She was staying home, we were starting a homeschool, our kids were in the middle of COVID. I had to do something, and so you have to take a step forward, to move forward, and you can't just feel sorry for yourself because that doesn't accomplish anything. So I decided we would start this thing back up and I went and started looking for a coach and I still had this great website.
Speaker 2:And the rest is history from there. I'm curious with that many people running under roof. If you would share with us your management structure, your meeting structure, whether the firm is divided into pods or units of some way, I take it you're the sole equity owner.
Speaker 1:Correct, correct, correct. I'm the only correct peer. Yeah, so the way we've done this is we have a supervising attorney who is in charge of the other seven associates, and then we have an executive assistant who is in charge of the intake team and the admins, and then we have the consultant. So the leadership team is the consultant, the supervising attorney, the executive assistant and me.
Speaker 1:Now within the teams we do these sort of five minute, 10 minute standup meetings. We call them scrums. I know Bert Diener has been teaching this inside Richard James, the whole flow model from the book the Goal that came out 30 years ago, and there's sort of 10 minute stand-up meetings that Toyota's mastered. If you want to get in study flow, it's really fascinating. And so those meetings you don't want more than seven or eight in each of those stand-up meetings.
Speaker 1:So the intake team is a meeting, so you have the four people in El Salvador and the three people here in the office, and then the attorneys are split into two teams and each team has a paralegal, and so you have one paralegal to three attorneys, but then we have one part-time paralegal, who's an attorney that we were trying to hire, who didn't pass the bar, but hopefully she'll pass the bar and be an attorney in a few months for us, and so that's how it's structured. So we have two attorney teams and then we have the admin intake team and they all meet every morning for five or 10 minutes and it's what did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? Are there any problems that I can help you with being your supervisor to allow you to accomplish what you need to accomplish today? The other thing is important because we build by the hour and we have KPIs and we're asking these family law attorneys to build 108 hours a month after 90 days of being here.
Speaker 1:I do think it's important that they are responsible to report to their supervisor how many hours they build the day before, so that there's a chart and there's some accountability to their team, because their team has a goal and they have a goal and they get bonus if they get there and their team gets there as well. And I think that's important, particularly for brand new attorneys, because seven of the attorneys we have here have two years or less experience. Five have one year or less experience. So we're growing this massive firm of all baby lawyers and that's its own adventure, which is part of the reason I'm losing my hair.
Speaker 2:Okay, so there's a bunch packed into this, so let me ask you a couple of questions that does the supervising attorney have her own caseload as well, or is she not? I don't want to say merely, but is she her responsibility to actually make sure? Baby lawyers?
Speaker 1:She has a few. Her name's Holly grow. She came to us from the Rosen Law Firm. Lee Rosen, the Rosen Institute another great coach out there had a few cases when she got here. She's been here about 15 months. We've given her a couple of the more complicated cases that were too much for the baby attorneys, but I think she's down to less than 10 actual litigation cases. She's doing some of the uncontested divorce stuff for us just so we can streamline it.
Speaker 1:But the goal at this point is to try to get her down to as few cases, to almost none as possible, so that she can actually supervise and train and go to court with these young attorneys. That's the thing we really need to be going to court, watching them, providing real-time feedback and probably adding some gravitas to have somebody like her who's well-respected by the judges, because we're going against very good lawyers that have been here a long time. You got the baby lawyer. The judge doesn't know. I do think, a she can help coach, but B I do think it adds some weight in these custody hearings that okay, she's there, she's respected, she's prepared this attorney we're not coming to hear a bunch of BS wasting this judge's time because I'm not there so I can't do it. So I think that's important as well, but they need to go, they need to go watch them, they need to take notes, they need to coach them, just like football coaches break down tape, because that's how they're going to learn.
Speaker 2:And are you handling any cases at all?
Speaker 1:I'm down to about three or four, I've got some that I've just had. Forever they won't go away. High conflict, sick people that are just. We've got parenting coordinators. We've got and so I really need to be done with those. But some of those cases I've had 10 years and I'm thinking will these kids ever turn 18?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So there's a lot of lawyers and law firms who are shy or hesitant about hiring baby lawyers. So tell us a little bit about the onboarding and training, because you have put a lot of the marbles into young lawyers. Great Good for you. How do you besides hey, let's go to court and we'll bring the supervising lawyer Do you have a system in place for?
Speaker 1:the North Carolina family. I do. Actually, I do have a system. One of the things that Richard James taught me was you needed to develop a set onboarding system. You needed to type it out, write it out and be able to track it. And so, about two and a half years ago, when I realized that baby lawyers were how I was going to grow it, because I was unable to attract attorneys who knew what they were doing to the suburbs because they didn't want to leave. They wanted to live in downtown Raleigh, work at the courthouse of downtown Raleigh, walk everywhere. They didn't want to drive down here, they didn't want to cover three courthouses. So I knew that the baby attorneys was the way I was going to have to go. I developed a program. I have a it's like a 32 point checklist now of the things they need to do in the first 90 days, which includes read the book I wrote.
Speaker 1:Listen to the podcast. It's a community podcast. We'll talk about that a little bit, but every fourth or fifth episode I answer. It's called best of Johnson County, but I answer legal questions. So listen to the 10 episodes when I'm answering legal questions. Go watch the 150 YouTube videos I have where I answer common questions. Also, I have made probably seven or eight one-hour training videos where we just do a lunch and learn, where I just stand there recording on Zoom, recording on my iPhone, and I just go through the top things you need to know about domestic violence, protective orders, custody, equitable distribution, alimony. We have videos for guardianships. I just did one for domestic violence protective orders yesterday. So I'm constantly teaching the people that are here and I'm recording it, saving it and then having the new attorneys watch it when they come in and ask us questions about it.
Speaker 2:This is so important. I don't want anyone who's listening to this to miss this point or this strategy that Jonathan has just explained and described to you. Anytime we do any kind of a training to the extent we possibly can we are recording it. You're speaking at a CLE for North Carolina. Whatever, even if they're not recording it, hire your own videographer, come in and record it. This is critical because you're going to have growth. You've had tremendous growth. You're going to continue to have growth. You will have some turnover at some point. Hopefully you won't have a repeat of lawyers leaving en masse at some point, but you're building this tremendous library that anybody lawyer, legal assistant, supervising lawyer can go and access. So that's huge.
Speaker 1:The other thing I'd say, ben, is I'm making videos for the clients too. So now I've made a video on how to fill out a Johnston County financial affidavit. I made a video on how to fill out a Wake County financial affidavit. Why each county in North Carolina has different financial affidavit. I made a video on how to fill out a Wake County financial affidavit. Why each county in North Carolina has different financial affidavits, I have no idea, but they didn't ask me, and so we made a video on how to fill out an equal distribution inventory affidavit for each county, and we're sending those out to our clients as well. It's real easy to just sit here, pick a thing and video stuff that you can send out to people and then, once you've done it, once you can send it forever.
Speaker 2:I want to switch topics. One of the challenges for a lot of hourly billing lawyers flat fee lawyers is actually collections and having this communication with the client. How do you all do it to make sure that clients aren't getting behind and you don't have significant account receivable?
Speaker 1:You send them a bill every one to two weeks or every time you do $1,500. That's how you get paid, because then everybody knows where they are. So we have 230 cases going on here right now. We're going to send 200 to 250 bills a month. If something is going on and if we do $50,000 work in three days, you're going to get a bill and so you're constantly being made aware of where you are.
Speaker 1:We also do this hybrid model that nobody does anymore. I do. Fixed fee is where everything's going, and then there's the straight billing. We do this sort of alternative minimum fee. So where we charge, say $7,000, is a minimum fee that we can put in our pockets immediately, and then we put a couple thousand dollars in trust for overruns on a minimum fee and then we track our time and if we can get it done for less than an hourly rate in the $7,000 or whatever we charge to start, then that's good for us, good for you. You're not out anything else because you didn't get it with a minimum fee. But once we go past that minimum fee and in almost all litigations you are, because they're complicated then it's straight billing out of the trust account and we're going to be asking you to replenish at $3,500 and $5,000 a clip, but you're going to be getting a bill by the time we get through with the 7,000, which takes about 90 to 120 days. In your average case, you've probably gotten six.
Speaker 1:The other thing about billing is the billing needs to be descriptive, particularly hourly billing. I learned this from Elise Bowie many years ago when I heard her speak and I've never met her, but it was like the bill should tell a story, right, it's another way to communicate with the client and it should tell the story of what you're doing and if you do that, you will not get a lot of pushback on the billing because the story is there. It's another way of communicating. You're documenting everything you're doing. You're using descriptive terms in Clio so they know exactly what you did and I don't care if we write three lines for point one. You're going to know what happened and that's important, and so we collect well over 97% of all of the billing that we do.
Speaker 1:The average family lawyers is probably in the upper 60s, but I think it's because we send so many bills and I've got somebody I've got a former secretary that I pay offsite part-time to make the bills out of Clio. I've got a legal assistant that does the math. I wish Clio did the math automatically. And then I actually still look. I know this is bad and Richard James gets on me. I still look. I know this bad and Richard James gets on me. I still look at all the bills. I still send most of the bills out. I'm still making a lot of decisions on how much more money we need from the people. But now Richard James would teach you to go to evergreen retainer where you would take a credit card on file and once the trust account got to a thousand or $2,000, you just charge it back up $5,000. And if the credit card doesn't charge, then you have a problem.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to that, but the people that I know in Richard James that have been successful with that as well and I probably should do that Can you talk to us a little bit about and you don't have to name numbers but generally the compensation system or scheme or formula that you have for your lawyers? Is it based on amounts billed and received something different from that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, they get. I wish I could get them on a straight percentage. In a perfect world they would get 20 to 30% of what they collect or whatever. But you're not going to get young lawyers to do that Now. They want a guarantee, they want to know how much money they're going to make and they don't want to ride the roller coaster with you in November, december in family law where it could be slow, and then you're tilling it in February, March when tax returns come back.
Speaker 1:So we pay them a base salary. They need to bill and collect 108 hours a month and then they get 20% of everything they bill and collect over 110 hours in a month, and then we usually do that quarterly. We've been debating about whether to change it back to monthly or take it out to six months, but right now we're doing it in quarter increments where they get 20 percent of what they do over that 108 hour. The 108 hour minimum that we're asking for 1300 a year. We're family lawyers. We can't bill for everything. We're not billing corporations. I understand big law. It's 1800, 1900, 2000. So I can't sit down here, work for eight hours and build McDonald's for eight hours of work, right, like I'm working with individuals that have to pay this money. This is a lot of money to whoever you're representing. Thousands of dollars in a divorce are already stressed, so we do need to be cognizant that it is real people and real money.
Speaker 2:No for sure. And what's remarkable is you're doing multiple seven figures. So you're doing what a lot of law firms your size would just kill for, and you're doing it in a part of the state where you're representing, as you said, like real people for whom every dollar, virtually, is very important. So talk to us a little bit about the marketing you mentioned. I can't remember now you mentioned we're on air or off air. You've got a great website. I'm going to come back and talk about the podcast, because the podcast is one of the central focuses of the front page of the website. So that's interesting. But what are you doing to acquire clients? Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass.
Speaker 2:I still remember the day that my friend Joe Rotolo of Intaker first showed me the Intaker product. This is now several years ago at a great legal marketing conference. I was blown away and immediately canceled the then current contract we had with our chat engine. Today, intaker puts AI to work in your law firm by combining empathy with automation across all of your channels website, sms, google, lsa and more. It works alongside your current systems like Filevine or Clio, so you don't have to change the way you operate, and the firms I know love using Intaker for three big reasons. First, it engages leads with natural, case-specific chat conversations that help build trust. Second, it helps automate your follow-up sequences to keep your leads warm when you can't get back to them. We know how hard that is these days just getting back in contact with people who've reached out to us in some way, shape or form through our website. Finally, it qualifies leads instantly and takes smart action, like connecting qualified PI cases to you directly by phone.
Speaker 2:Intaker is the perfect chat widget for your website and it's perfect for consumer law firms, pi, family, criminal, estate planning, anyone who wants to convert more website visitors into clients while saving time on manual tasks. And, unlike most automation tools, it's simple enough that you can configure it yourself. I did it at our website, but if you need help, the Intaker team is wonderful. Again, we can't recommend Intaker enough. Joe Rotolo and his team have been great friends of ours over the years and if you're using any other chat widget right now, you're probably falling behind. Okay, now back to the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have the podcast, we have the website. We're going to talk about that. The supervising attorney gets a percentage of the gross of the phone and now doesn't have a billable hour requirement. So that is something to keep in mind. If you have a supervising attorney or whatever, if you don't want them focused on billing, you want them going to court and training these new lawyers, then get rid of their billable hour requirement and not have them do cases and then have them focus on that, because you're better off getting seven associates to 108 than getting a single supervising attorney to 1,500 hours billable.
Speaker 1:But to the marketing we have a website breedinfirmcom. It is arguably one of the top 10 websites in North Carolina. It was built by Postale. It's a website company out of Columbus, ohio. They're also in charge of really all of our marketing. I've been with them since 2016.
Speaker 1:Before that, I was with Fine Law. I had a site that wasn't working. There's tons of podcasts and books about what was going on with Fine Law back then. We won't go there, but we did switch to Postale, which was probably the single best decision I've made in the business, because I went from a website that wasn't working to a website that was working and if you don't have leads you're not going to have any of this, but we do have the website.
Speaker 1:We also have local service ads, the LSAs. We have been able to bait six, seven, eight, nine to one on LSAs in this area and we target Raleigh and the surrounding areas of our counties. We're in Johnson County as well as Harnett County as well, so we're in these three counties, raleigh being in Wake County and then Harnett and Johnson being two suburban Wake County counties. It also helps us that Fort Bragg, which is now Fort Liberty, is in Fayetteville and a lot of those military members live in Harnett County. So we represent a lot of military members as well because they live in Harnett County. So we've done local service ads and we're doing anywhere from six to nine to one, depending on the month, the local service ads on initial retainers. I don't even track where we end up, I'm just looking at what the initial retainer. So I'm probably even better than that right.
Speaker 2:It will be if you start to track lifetime value Correct. So that's interesting because a lot of lawyers again are frustrated with LSAs. What do you think is the reason for your great ROI on LSAs?
Speaker 1:It's because I have this intake team in El Salvador answering the phone and then calling people back. Most of this growth is because of outbound phone calls, and when I met Richard James, I didn't know what a client relationship manager was. I know a little bit about Clio Grow, but I didn't know how to make it work and it was not nearly as good as it is now. Clio Grow is much better than it was four years ago and I really think that most of the calls are junk. Right, ben, I'm not going to lie. Right, if I get 120 calls, I might get six or seven hires, but at $8,000 or $9,000 a shot. If I paid $10,000 for those 120 calls and I made 50, I'm good, but you've got to be able to. You've got to be able to call them back and you've got to be able to weep through the junk. You've got to be able to realize and now they won't let you. We used to be able to challenge LSA leads if it wasn't germane, and then they use their AI to say that even though they called me asking for an ice machine, I still had to pay for it. So I even quit challenging them, and now they only do it themselves and whatever. At some point you just got to look at it and say it costs what it costs and am I making money? And so you have to have your intake process down to a science, which we do.
Speaker 1:We have scripts that all our phone team follows the 11 steps to a phone call that Richard James talks about Some of the stuff you've talked about as well. You have a phone script thing too in your program, and so we try to build a relationship with them. We can get people set within 24, 48. We never need about more than 72 hours out. People in family law are in crisis. We're going to get them in here and we're going to be able to talk to them and then, if they don't book with us, we're going to keep track of them in our CRM and we're going to call them for the next six months, because not everybody's ready to go in family law when they first call.
Speaker 1:Right, it's a very difficult decision and I tell these people in El Salvador that bad husbands don't get better. So keep calling and you never know when the woman's going to finally decide that she's had it with the bad husband and women start 70% of all divorces or whatever it is, so we need to keep calling people. So I do think it's. I think it's our intake process and our ability to follow up. If you call me and I get your email address, even if you don't book, I'm going to put you in an email drip campaign. I'm going to send you emails of articles and blogs I've written. I'm going to send you electronic version of my book. We're going to keep calling you, we're going to keep following up and that's really the key is that most people that are listening to your podcast have enough leads. They're just not managing the leads they have.
Speaker 2:That's the bottom line. The leads are leaking out of the bottom of the bucket, so you have four animals?
Speaker 1:I do, and I use a company called BBL Communications out of Anaheim, california, to employ those people. And a call center there in San Salvador. Are they working exclusively for you? Correct, they work exclusively for me, and they cost anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000 a person.
Speaker 2:That's it. So you must have pretty tremendous call volumes. Are they your answering team for everything A vendor calls you? Yes, okay, yes.
Speaker 1:And I know I probably should create a VIP card and give all the clients the phone number here at the office. But I want these people working. I don't want them distracted by the phone ringing and all of that stuff. I don't want a lot of unscheduled phone calls. I know you're big on that. I think we need. We have Integer chat on our website. We get over 100 Integer chat bot form fills on the website every month and then we get probably another 75 just form fills on the website, not even through the chat bot. Just there as well, we're trying to capture leads. If you download the book, we're going to call you. You know what I mean. You just come and you get the book that we wrote. That's great, but we're going to call you.
Speaker 2:We're going to put you and we're going to continue to try to nurture these leads until you're actually ready to buy. That's a very so hats off to you. And now we understand really why you're such a powerful force. Now let me ask are you doing anything in particular in the community in terms of marketing, grassroots marketing, being in front of other crowds?
Speaker 1:I Almost every ball team there is. I probably give my local high school $20,000 a year in advertising. My logo is on the football field, my logo on the band trailer, my logo is at the barn with the animals for the FFA. So we do a lot of that and I don't know if I can get anything back from that, but somebody did it for me in a small town so I'm doing it for these kids. Right, they got to buy helmets and jerseys and the band's got to go to these competitions and all of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:So I do a ton of just sponsoring local teams the middle school band, the high school bands, the high school athletic departments. I do a fair amount of that. I also sponsored the domestic violence shelters big gala. I'm one of the top sponsors for the backpack buddies program. I've been very fortunate to have the success I have and as I continue to have more success, the more I'm able to give back to this community. And if we get something out of it, great. Can you put ROI on it? No, but it's the right thing to do.
Speaker 2:I'm sure you're getting stuff back from it and it's really cool. So everyone could have the thing that they're interested in. So, brian and I, as you, are very interested in youth sports, high school sports, like all of that sort of stuff and just we're always sitting here thinking what could we? Here's one thing we did with our gym. Everybody knows we're at a CrossFit gym here in Northern Virginia, so we made these really great. They're gym bag tags, fluorescent yellow, gave away hundreds and hundreds. It has the gym's brand on one side, our brand on the other, just always asking ourselves all right, what could we do? That's cool, that's giving, and so hats off to you for that. Let's talk in the last couple of minutes here. I do want to talk about the podcast. It is featured pretty prominently on the website. You called it, I think, a local podcast or something, all the way down to who's helping you run it, how you're getting guests and do you have a strategy, overall strategy for the podcast?
Speaker 1:Matthews and they do a really good job for me. I think they're out of Florida and the concept was when I met you, richard Matthews gave that talk about the community podcast and I know the loyal pods guys out there and he put his community podcast and I don't know if he's known your podcast, but I've heard him on other podcasts and he says community podcast won't work because you have to compete with Joe Rogan. I'm like you know what, maybe I don't have to compete with Joe Rogan If I'm interviewing your neighbor and your dentist and your financial advisor and or my financial advisor and my dentist or whoever I can find, or your county commissioner or your parks and rec director or whatever. That's a way for you to be educated about your community and we've had tremendous success just interviewing local people, small businesses, trying to promote them, putting out positive aspects of the community, trying to convince people that they don't have to go to Raleigh to shop for any service at all. My primary county now has 270,000 people. In 1990, it had 60,000 people. You know about crazy growth here and we have people to do everything. We have everything you would need here. You don't have to drive to Raleigh to get it, even though most of the people that live here drive to Raleigh to work.
Speaker 1:And so I'm just trying to promote these businesses and these community leaders, because there's a lot of people here who don't know who their county commissioners are, they don't know who their local state reps are, and I'm fortunate that I've been friends with a lot of these people for a long time. I've been on the board of the local community college, I've been on the local county economic development board, I've been on varying other community groups and boards in the community trying to give back. I've been a for many years I was in the JCs before that and so I have relationships with all of these people. They're willing to come on and tell their stories about how they come to Johnston County, how they love Johnston County and what they're doing. And we're educating people, particularly on the Western edge, closest to Raleigh. That sort of this is like a bedroom community you know how that is in Fairfax so they sleep here and they work in Raleigh and I'm trying to educate them about everything else that's here that they may not be aware of.
Speaker 1:And if I get something out of it, great, and if I don't, it's still the right thing to do and it's been fascinating to me how many people download that podcast and then we put it on YouTube and then the podcast company cuts it up and they put it out every day in these 60 second bits and our average episode, somebody. We will get 1800 to 2000 views within 10 days of some part of a 20 minute podcast interviewing a County commissioner, ms Miss Teen America, the local dentist, the county parks and rec director, just local Little Caesars owners. This week Just flood that and it's fascinating.
Speaker 2:And I learned a ton.
Speaker 1:I learned so much, just like you do, from doing your podcast about businesses, because my business is no different than yours, ben, and it's no different from the guy with the Little Caesars. We spent the entire time talking about customer service and how he tripled his Little Caesars by answering the phone, putting out a more quality product and making right when people complain by giving them free cheesy bread. It's the same Little Caesars John L Breed, law Ben Glass.
Speaker 2:Law, it's all the same. All the same, it strikes me you need your own radio show next. It's all the same. It's all the same, it strikes me you need your own radio show next. And this is but the strategy you're describing is a strategy that built small town newspapers and by just mentioning everybody in the town having a lot of local stories, and now they stopped that strategy and now most of them have died and gone away. Right, all right. So we're recording this. It is late 2024. I'm curious what are you working on now, jonathan? You look forward two or three years with the law firm Knots. Do you have to untie and where do you think if we have this?
Speaker 1:discussion in three years. What are we going to be talking about? I hope we're continuing to grow. To me, growing is just showing that we're doing the right thing and providing a high quality service. I honestly believe that we provide a better service than the other law firms around here because we actually work the case, we actually try to finish the case and we communicate with our clients. So if I can do more of that, I think I'm doing more for the world, more for this community by providing better legal service.
Speaker 1:But the things we're working on now is we have to be better. We have to have better systems here to continue to train these young attorneys to be able to continue to provide a high level of customer support. I just shot those videos I talked about earlier about how to fill out your financial affidavit, how to fill out your property inventory affidavit for your divorce. So continuing to make the client experience better. We just redid and made a better client welcome packet that we can email out. That gives people timelines and documents that we're going to start to need. I know you've always you've done that. One of the ideas came from you, so I'm trying to continue to mastermind this experience, one of the things Richard James had. The first time I went to an event he had a guy from Disney speak and he's a guy out of Maryland. I think he now owns coffee cleaning businesses.
Speaker 2:You may know him Dan Smorris, smorris.
Speaker 1:He came and spoke in Phoenix, arizona, in August of 2020 and he talked about Disney-fying your business and that was the single best talk I may have ever heard, because he just talked about when was the last time you walked in the front door of your business? What do people see? Is it clean? The magazine's current? Is it nice? What are the five senses? He talked about that and he talked about how Disney tries to mastermind the experience and told all these little tricks that I didn't know. Fascinating talk, so fascinating talk.
Speaker 1:And I came back and I've spent the last four years just continuing to try to make the client experience better, because in family law, 85% of what's going to happen is done before they ever walk in the door. They are drunk, drugs, they beat their wife, they cheated, they, whatever it is already done and I'm not changing the facts, but I can change the experience you have, I can communicate with you, I can work on it. So we're going to keep working on trying to train the new attorneys, trying to make more stuff for our clients so we can get out like these videos, like the client welcome packets and stuff like that, and then, ultimately, when I feel like we're doing a pretty good job here. We're going to expand in the other parts of the state, so in three years we'll be in other parts of North Carolina.
Speaker 2:No, there's no doubt, and you'll be looking for additional legal deserts and investigating internet competition and moving in because you've built a tremendous system and I think your enthusiasm is what is going to keep attracting great employees to your law firm, and that's critical. My end of the year rant and I think you're exactly right at this point that you just made is that customer service is almost everything. Yes, we spend money on getting leads. We do all that. So many businesses I've just dealt with in December.
Speaker 2:Just, I don't know, maybe I just on a really bad streak of running into poor onboarding really bad streak of running into poor onboarding. Poor information at website, poor experience when I try to reach out and give them money. Right, here's something I need. I will pay you for your service or product and the experience is horrible and it's one of the easiest things, I think, for lawyers and law firms to work on and to fix, as you did.
Speaker 2:It doesn't take a genius to walk through your front door and say what does this experience actually feel like? How do we speak when we are on the phone or in Zoom with clients? How do we speak to them? How frequently are we actually on the phone or on Zoom, versus sending a stupid email that they then have a question about, which now ends up being five emails back and forth which is my recent experience with tax advisor Like it's horrible. Look, I very much appreciate you being on the program today. If folks want to see this website which I think is very cool, listen to the podcast, maybe even download the book. Give us a website and they'll go track you down and stalk you.
Speaker 1:The website is breeditcom, that's B-R-D-E-N-L-A-Wcom. The podcast is called Best of Johnston County. It's available on Apple, spotify, itunes. It has its own YouTube channel that has now 33, 3400 subscribers and I didn't create the YouTube channel till March of 24. Just talking to community members, people really want to know this stuff. I can be reached at Jonathan at BreedenLawcom, and that BreedenLawcom was the old final site. We now have BreedenFirmcom. Be glad to talk to anybody about that.
Speaker 1:What we've done, how we've done it it's been a fascinating journey and I love going out on podcasts and talking to people and listening to podcasts. I do think we didn't get in a ton of this, but you got to get your mind part of what I was dealing with some pretty bad anxiety and one of the things that made a big difference was I made a conscious effort to get my mind right and try not to focus on scarcity and believe that what I wanted was out there and started taking steps to do it and fought through the anxiety and the paralysis analysis type stuff and just kept making decisions, one right after another, and that's what you need to do and there are tons of mindset podcasts out there that are great that you can listen to. The Successful Mind Podcast is a great one that goes out of Charlotte. Rob Dahl Jr has one as well. It's just get your mind, because if your mind's not right you can't do what I've done.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to do this. We're in a running business. It's a very competitive business. You've done a wonderful job and again I want to thank you for being on the program today. That was awesome.
Speaker 1:All right. Thanks a lot for having me, ben, on the program today.
Speaker 2:That was awesome, all right. Thanks a lot for having me, ben, and that's a wrap for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. If you found this episode valuable, do me a favor, subscribe, leave a review and share this with a fellow lawyer who needs to hear it For more powerful strategies on marketing practice, growth and taking control of your legal career. Head over to greatlegalmarketingcom. You can also find us on LinkedIn Search for Great Legal Marketing and Benjamin Glass to connect. Stay tuned.
