Join us on The Renegade Lawyers Podcast as we sit down with David Vicknair of Scott Vicknair, LLC. Discover how their firm has achieved significant growth, their strategies for geographic expansion, and insights into managing a dynamic legal practice. Dive into the world of personal injury law and estate planning with a firm that's making waves in New Orleans and beyond. Don't miss this episode full of valuable lessons for any legal professional looking to innovate and expand. Tune in now!
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.
We've always been proud of the tools we give lawyers to create the law firms of their dreams. We know exactly what modules you should, software you should utilize, and the strategies you need to employ to build a law-firm that is a cash-generating machine. When someone initially becomes a GLM member, you can bet that they're joining for the tactics and tools that we offer.
Join us on The Renegade Lawyers Podcast as we sit down with David Vicknair of Scott Vicknair, LLC. Discover how their firm has achieved significant growth, their strategies for geographic expansion, and insights into managing a dynamic legal practice. Dive into the world of personal injury law and estate planning with a firm that's making waves in New Orleans and beyond. Don't miss this episode full of valuable lessons for any legal professional looking to innovate and expand. Tune in now!
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.
We've always been proud of the tools we give lawyers to create the law firms of their dreams. We know exactly what modules you should, software you should utilize, and the strategies you need to employ to build a law-firm that is a cash-generating machine. When someone initially becomes a GLM member, you can bet that they're joining for the tactics and tools that we offer.
How is the firm organized? What's your management structure? Because you're at the high end 28, 29 employees, 11 lawyers. Are you running pods? Do you practice area groups? What does that look like generally?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a little different. Obviously, we had the injury and the estate side, so I'm just talking about the injury side. Both practice groups have a separate office administrator and HR director. Both practice groups have a separate marketing coordinator who's managed by a fractional.
Speaker 3:We have a fractional CMO who you know a little bit about, tiffany, and so 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 1:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass, the Renegade Lawyer podcast. Welcome back. For each episode I get to interview folks who are doing cool things in the world, either inside or outside of legal, and today we're inside of legal mainly, although we have a broad variety of topics. I have David Vickner the firm is Scott Vickner based, headquartered out of New Orleans, louisiana. They are a great legal marketing member firm Bunch of lawyers under roof doing a lot of personal injury on one side, and then Brad Scott is doing and developing a state planning and, I think, a state litigation practice, and so I wanted to catch up with David because they've had a lot of growth in the last three years or so and just talk about some of the things that he and Brad are doing to make this happen. So thanks for carving out some time, my friend.
Speaker 2:Ben, thank you so much, happy to be with you. We are huge supporters and believers in Great Legal Marketing and I'd like to describe you as my mindset person and it really puts me in the right mindset from a leadership in law firm development standpoint, so it's really honor to chat with you today.
Speaker 1:Very kind and you have your own podcast, the Overruled Podcast, which is, as we said before we went live, mostly not about law, but about life and business and philanthropy and things like that. So folks should go check out the Overruled Podcast with Scott Bickner, the name of the firm. So awesome, so thank you. Let's give people a picture of today what the firm looks like in terms of people under roof. I think you've got a couple of different offices. At least let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Sure. So we're a total of 11 attorneys, including my law partner, brad Scott, and me, so 11 attorneys in the firm, about 28 to 29 employees all under roof. We have two primary offices. One is our downtown New Orleans office, which has a couple of employees in our state group, but it's primarily our injury group in the New Orleans office, and then Covington, which, for people in this area would know, there's a big lake, lake Pontchartourn, and it's right on the north side of that lake which is primarily our state practice group, and we've begun to expand. We've opened two appointment-only offices, both in Metterie, which is a suburb of New Orleans, and Covington and Cut-Off Louisiana, which is very, very South. People who aren't from Louisiana typically think that once you get to New Orleans the golf is right underneath there, but in fact there's a lot of Louisiana under New Orleans, and so it is in a region that services the offshore industry, and so we have appointment-only offices that we're just opening in those two locations as well.
Speaker 1:So people are always interested in that sort of a marketing strategy. Is geographic expansion there's all these discussions about. Do I staff them, do I not? Do I make them appointment-only? So are these unstaffed most of the time, except for when there's appointments, or do you actually have people working out of the offices?
Speaker 2:Unstaffed appointment-only as of right now. One of those offices may end up having an attorney in it, but for our purposes of opening them or to just have a footprint, to develop the G&B, to be geographically diverse and grow and expand with the capability to put people in them later, but there's nobody in them right now.
Speaker 1:And what sort of are these shared office environments? Are they an office inside another professional's office? What are you working on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one of them is an office inside another professional's office, so we just sub-lease out the space. We have signage on the front and have office. We can use the office anytime we need during business hours. The other is gonna would take us down a SEO rabbit hole. The other is a Regis office, which you can get both sides of the equation on whether or not Google treats that negatively or not. We, for various reasons I won't discuss here, we kind of inherited that office and so it was something we were gonna do, irrespective of Regis being an SEO flag or not, and we ran it by somebody who we really trust on SEO and we don't see it having any pertinent issues as of this time.
Speaker 1:No, that's awesome and of course, the Regis spaces I've seen are nice spaces. Generally they do a pretty good job All right. So I know you've had a lot of growth in the last three years or so, but take us back a little bit farther than three years and if you're a young guy, tell us a little bit about your own growth as an attorney and then your own running or being a part of running a law firm. Yeah, has your name.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I actually was very lucky because when I was coming out of law school in 2011, pure dumb luck, it just so happened I was finishing law school in a geographic location which was giving rise to the largest litigation in the history of the United States, which was BP. And so, because of the type of, for four years after law school, I worked for a really really good lawyer, a true trial lawyer, a guy named Red Fabre, who actually, coincidentally, is how Brad and I met, because Brad was trained and worked underneath him, and so did I, and Red had a real diverse practice. He was doing both business and PI work, and that afforded me the opportunity to both use his existing clientele and use my relationships to develop clients in the BP process, which ended up being really successful for both Red, me and the firm, and that kind of gave me the financial capability to really jump off the ledge. Four years in, and at that time, it was both that and Brad really convinced me to go and, you know, rent off the space from him he had kind of, from lack of just a bunch of circumstances at the firm that he was a managing partner at, kind of went out on his own and from scratch, started in a state practice and I was not looking to get into a state but I had a pretty big business clientele with some maybe five or 10 good PI cases and I knew doing the math on the back of a napkin with Brad at lunch one day back in 2015, and I could probably financially sustain working on my own and it just kind of went from there and I just kind of figured a lot of stuff out along the way.
Speaker 2:I figured a lot of stuff out along the way with Brad's help and, truthfully, brad's strength has always been that he understands marketing and he has an ownership mentality. I learned a lot of that from him. Glm helped him with a lot of that and we kind of have not really looked back. The last two years have been critical for us. For me, I kind of had an eye-opening experience coming to the first GLM conference about a year and a half or two years ago and then reading Mike Morse's book Fireproof in Florida in the swimming pool two years ago, and once I read that book came to GLM, I realized I was an idiot and I needed to really overhaul my thinking on the structure of my practice, what I was doing do more of what Brad was doing in niching and specializing, and that has led to a lot of good things. It's led to me learning a lot of good new things as well.
Speaker 1:Are you doing any legal work yourself now?
Speaker 2:Very minimal and at this stage I would say the main, the only legal work I really do is I help in settlement. I will sit first share in trials and I will obviously have an open door with the lawyers and my practice on our practice teams and we've just restructured the teams for legal issues specifically that they may need just secondhand opinions or guidance someone are asking me about.
Speaker 1:So a lot of lawyers who are founders as they discover us, other groups like us Reed Scott Morris's book. I mean there's a lot of really good rooms out there right now that teach lawyers how to be better business people. But a lot of lawyers who are going through that journey have a hard time, and I did with the mindset side of no, I was born to be a lawyer, I need to be a lawyer. No one else can do this as good as I can. So talk to us a little bit about. Was that a challenge for you and, if so, how did you convince yourself and how did you walk through that to where you could actually, you know, we call delegate and elevate the legal work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's just no two ways around it. Like it is difficult, right, it just is. It was very difficult for me to because your sense of who you are as a lawyer, as a litigator, so the idea that you cannot be managing these cases which you have for me 12 years now develop skill sets and strategy and understanding positioning, and understanding different positions to take and preliminary motions at mediation, things like that, and how to prepare a case for trial. It's hard, you know. Reading Mike Morse's book was a huge help. Listening to your podcast and understanding your mindset, coaching and development was probably the biggest. And then the third would be the constant help of my law partner, brad, remind me you gotta let the tiger's tail go. You just have to.
Speaker 2:And it is hard and we should just all accept that it's hard and acknowledge that it's hard, but also acknowledge that, like you say, which is true, we're not the only people who, uniquely, can do good legal work.
Speaker 2:I have really good lawyers working for me right now and there is no dip in the legal services that we provide our clients, because I am not involved in every facet of a case and in fact, I would argue our legal services are far superior to them when I was involved in the cases, because now, when I get involved in settlement discussions, I'm more objective in what the value of the case truly should be because I haven't been entrenched in it. Number two when I come and prepare for trial, I'm more fresh and I'm not bogged down by the minutiae of the individual file. And three, in the rare situation, one of which happened today, because the really old case that I used to be heavily involved with when they asked me to edit a brief, which I rarely ever do these days, it's just a fresh set of eyes with a skill set just over many years of me editing hundreds of briefs that really makes the writing even better.
Speaker 1:So I like to do that. So most of my today legal work is two-fold one consulting with high-end lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs who are thinking about going out of disability and kind of planning that path for them, and then editing the briefs, because it's somewhat more fun than having to start with a blank piece of paper typing. It was a dark and stormy night. Here's the introduction, here's the standard of review and all that stuff. And, like you, I've got good lawyers who are working. So in our practice Brian runs the personal injury side, I run the long-term disability side under ERISA and I've got a couple of lawyers who are just great at writing stuff.
Speaker 1:But it is really cool to come in as a sort of a veteran writer and think about okay, got some judge or judges, law clerks who are reading this stuff. How can we make it cleaner, crisper, more interesting? From just a pure readership, not even legal, just pure readership perspective. And so I like to do that. Who else has inspired you? You mentioned Mike Morse. They have groups. I don't know. You've been to other events like who have you gotten good energy from and good ideas from? Who are also out running these rooms and conferences and events that people are saying, yeah, look, it's okay to not be the lawyer 100%. In fact, it's better for clients, and I agree with you 100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the other one is really Ken Hortison and Pilma. I got good advice from a good lawyer down in South Florida a couple of years ago at GLM, whose name's escaping me right now. He spoke at the GLM summit and he and I, just having cocktails in the bar, recommended that from my specific practice group and where I was stage-wise, a Pilma mastermind would be a great idea, and he was 100% right. I have some great, great group members like as you probably know, having run masterminds for many years now.
Speaker 2:The strength of a mastermind is the quality and the positioning of the other members in the room, and so I'm ending the first year being a part of that mastermind group and that's been a huge value benefit to me, if anything else, been just from the standpoint of, like, leaving the office and forcing yourself to look at the numbers, to look at what are our average case fees on premises, liability cases versus MVAs, what are our attorney compensation percentages as attributed to revenue? Where are we at on profit? What is our administrative percentages. It forces you really to look at all those things and be critical of your financial statements and where the position of the business is and also spitball the same problems that we all have in this side of the game, at least in injury. It's the same hang-ups everybody's struggling to fix it's disbursements, hang-ups on medical leans how do we structure it? We're doing medical leans.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we're all coming up with new ideas in the advent of AI and new technology, as well as employees in Mexico and offshoring to help make those things more efficient and profitable for everybody at the company.
Speaker 1:How is the firm organized? What's your management structure? Because you're at the high end 28, 29 employees, 11 lawyers. Are you running pods? You have practice area groups. What does that look like generally?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's a little different. Obviously, we had the injury and the estate side. So I'm just talking about on the injury side, both practice groups have a separate office administrator and HR director. Both practice groups have a separate marketing coordinator who's managed by a fractional. We have a fractional CMO who you know a little bit about, tiffany, and so, oh, okay, yeah, and then so that's kind of the administrative and marketing structure, and then on the production side of it, at least the injury group, we're in pods. So we have two practice teams with a senior litigation attorney, a pre-litigation attorney, a pre-litigation case manager or paralegal, and then a litigation case manager and paralegal.
Speaker 1:And then, in terms of well, you mentioned Morris's book. Are you right, guys running EOS?
Speaker 2:So we just hired them to do our EOS implementation.
Speaker 1:Oh you're working with, like I'm interviewing. What's your name? Mikazel, coming up in an interview Like tomorrow I am.
Speaker 2:They're newest client on the coaching side. So they're gonna they're we're their newest client from we're gonna use them for EOS implementation and the injury group and they're gonna help us with the annual, the quarterlies, weekly, et cetera, and that's kind of their coaching component. I think. As they've kind of delved a little bit into you and Ken's arena, I think they've settled on this framework of like what we're really good at is EOS implementation for injury firms is at least my read on it and they seem to be like the perfect partner for me in the injury group. I think Brad will likely implement EOS in the next year or two in the estate group as well, just probably with a different type of vendor who's not necessarily niched and specialized to injury, like our proof is.
Speaker 1:I think I think you know the danger is this is gonna take you to a whole nother level. So it's two years from now. You're gonna be dealing with issues you don't even know. They're all good issues Like it's really good. As you move up the ladder right of success, the things you have to continue to learn to be better at are just different, things you've never had to do before, even though obviously you've been very successful, particularly as a young guy like very successful to date. Let's talk about. Let's talk about marketing. I know you're doing a bunch of grass we call grass roots marketing. I don't know whether you're doing any broadcast sort of typical broadcast marketing at all. So tell us a little bit about what the marketing mix looks like for you in the PI side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so on the PI side it's probably a little bit of everything thus far, except for TV billboards and radio. But we haven't jumped into that yet. We're about to jump in the TV and at some point there will be some mix of radio and billboard, I suspect, in there. But we have really kind of harped and one of our strengths has been the GLM play. I will call the GLM playbook, which is and this even came up in my mastermind meetings three weeks ago and Ken's talking about back when he was running his firm he's spending millions of dollars in marketing but if you really track it, 43% of his cases we're still coming from referrals. So it's like the low hanging fruit, like the protecting.
Speaker 2:I read the newsletter. There's this true protecting the list, managing the list, growing the list and staying in front of the list is like everything that Brad and I think about, talk about and live. And so you know, from a list standpoint, referral marketing standpoint, we have a client newsletter that goes out every month in paper and digital and throughout the year we use different things to get in front of those clients. Like we do a summer event magnet where we'll put, like different festivals, we do a fall magnet with the football schedules, we do different chords.
Speaker 2:The neatest thing we did this year in general in which we got from Fireproof is we actually sent a gratitude book out to all of our clients and former clients.
Speaker 2:It's a quote, a book full of quotes of gratitude no ask, not associated with the holiday, just hey, we're grateful for you. It's specialized to that particular client and has their name on the cover. And it was like mind blowing to Brad and I the amount of text messages that we got back about that book from the people in our list and like not just the amount of text messages like I don't want to share it here but the contents of them, like some of the lawyers cried reading them. And so I think, from a marketing perspective, that was like a case study and explaining. You know you don't always have to be asking for something or checking ROI or looking for what client that I generated from this specific endeavor. You should really be asking am I developing and deepening this relationship with this client and former client so that they trust me as somebody who cares about them, which we do and who is a trusted legal advisor in the case that they will need us?
Speaker 1:It's interesting because, as you're recording this, it won't come out before this, but I'm speaking next week in Tampa for Andy Stickle and Bill Hauser at the SMB. They have a big virtual conference. So they asked me like okay, 40 years in best lead gen and I'm like it's being an interesting, influential person to you know, to a list, to a tribe or to several tribes. It has nothing to do with legal. It's actually being fascinating enough that someone will pay attention to you before they have a need and will think enough of you after they have a need. Or someone knows close to them has a need where they'll take the personal risk of making a referral, because that is a person where you tell someone go to a restaurant. You know like your reputation now is on the line. You do that. So, and that gratitude book, what a great idea.
Speaker 4:Hey guys, this is Ben. If you like what you've been hearing on this podcast not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts. You should know that my son, brian, and I have built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives of their own design and creating tremendous value for the world within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys. Check us out at greatlabelarketingcom.
Speaker 2:So is the guts of the book the same, and then it's personalized at the front to each client, or are you yeah, so the whole book is just gratitude quotes, daily gratitude quotes from people like Abraham Lincoln, john F Kennedy and different people like that. And then the guts the same really nice paper bound book, and then the cover is personalized to each client and it's got a little insert letter from me and Brad thanking them for being a client and telling them that we're sharing this gratitude book with them because we're thankful for them and for them putting their trust in us. And really, you know it's funny you said that because, like, the gratitude book is just this kind of hit me three or four months ago, I think.
Speaker 2:As lawyers sometimes we like overcomplicate everything, but at the end of the day, everything we do externally with our clients and former clients and third parties who are either vendors and or potential clients, is about relationships. That's, from my perspective. What marketing is is relationships. But then, like, the firm is all about relationships, because you can't grow the firm if you don't have a good culture, and a good culture has to be. You have to have solid and strong relationships internally. So really kind of like, if you ball everything that we all do down into one simple thing, from my perspective it's about relationships.
Speaker 1:And then so that's then, how do you coach that or make sure that the rest of the 29 people under roof like buy into that, understand it and execute on it?
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of the stuff that you already talk about is number one. You have to go through the growth process of having the wrong people in the wrong seats, moving the C people out, moving the B minuses out when you can't get them to an A, and finding all the A players, which is easy to just say in eight seconds, but it's actually very important practice Cause if you're a good person and you have a good heart and you care about people, like the concept of firing and terminating people, you have to like, learn it and get better at it and understand the mindset for it that you are letting them go to the place like you say they should be. They're not the right fit for here. That's something we're not perfect at. We've learned to get better at over the years.
Speaker 2:I still failed at it with the team member this year holding one home too long. I'm also always critical and introspective of the mistakes that I do make and learn from them and grow as a person, and I think the biggest thing is living it right Is like in our weekly meetings and how I treat everybody here and the positive reinforcement that I give. I'm always kind of working on creating a culture of thinking about like you don't when you're internally thinking about it. You don't think like if I walk into that younger attorney's office and tell him today what a great job he did on a brief, like how much that's gonna impact his day and his happiness here. We don't think about it like that, but it does, and so it's like a constant discipline of reminding yourself to go back and give reinforcement to people on the team.
Speaker 1:And not only is that a great thing to do, but if you've hired lawyers as lateral moves from other firms, it's almost guaranteed they haven't seen this. In fact, they've experienced the opposite, where maybe the only time a partner comes into the office is to point out faults or deficits or something. Right. They come to work for a place like you or they hear about it. Like we have a lot of firms in JLM. Like there's a waiting list actually of lawyers and non-lawyer teams that want to come to that firm because they've heard about it. Maybe they've experienced it. You know our paralegals would go to paralegal events. Like they're always just listening, like who's a good person, who's having a miserable life over this other firm? Could we recruit them?
Speaker 2:And it's small little things. Like we, you know, use slack in our practice, which is a great way to streamline interruptions in our office and communicate efficiently, and so it's a small little thing. Like you put like an, as we have like an SV wins channel on our Slack to where, like I or other people, other attorneys or team members who are not attorneys will post about different wins that we have Something as simple as, like you know, we gave a water to the FedEx guy when he came in and he was talking about how wonderful we are, like really small things, and then when you see everybody else start to post in there and buy into it, because at first you're like, is this corny, is this cheesy? Like are they going to buy into it? This? Like you have those internal concerns. But it's a really neat thing Whenever you see all these things that you have an idea about come to fruition and the team actually buy into it.
Speaker 1:And you know you're doing it. Yeah, you know you're doing it. Well, when the FedEx guy members and you and make sure that none of your stuff gets rained on, well, think about it.
Speaker 2:So we had and I actually stole this from. I remember the attorney who gave me this idea. It's Craig Goldenforb down in Florida. Yeah, he had this. You know, great guy, and he has. When somebody walks in his office he has a menu of like snacks and drinks that they can order and everybody like we have that menu now because I'm like man, that's brilliant Cause, like that FedEx guy or the process server for the petitions and whatnot. How many law firms offer them snacks and drinks when they pop into the lobby? They're not going to forget you if you do that consistently.
Speaker 1:So and nobody else in the building is doing that either. No, the doctors or the countants, whoever else is in your building, right? So talk to us. I know you guys are big and you've alluded to it here about just customer service, just just making, and we believe this, like Brian, and I believe that you know we're good lawyers, but we're the absolute best in our area at customer service, client service. So what are you all doing to make you the best in the area at client service?
Speaker 2:Whew, that's a complicated question. So for starters I'm going back to like you have to have the right people in the right seats, because if they are the right people and they have the commitment and the consistent commitment to providing it, then that's a big piece of it. The second is like having the culture and the team understanding and communicating as a leader consistently, weekly, the importance of customer service, and a component of that is call listening and understanding that, like one of our core values is we hold each other accountable and so, like when we fall short in customer service which we're going to do a lot because we're not perfect and nobody is that we learn from it, we analyze what happened and we fix it. There have been at least three or four situations in the last four or five months where we really botched in a new client case evaluation or a call with a client or things of that nature, and in the old days I was so busy with my hair on fire because I was stuck in the middle of the files. It would just be like cause me to like lose my patience and burst.
Speaker 2:Now, like I'm really here to focus on those problems, and I almost get more excited when we make a mistake, because then it becomes. I had the mental perspective. Now it's like this is an opportunity for us to learn and improve and put a system in place that makes us better. So once you build that mindset with everybody and they see you doing that consistently and communicating that and they understand and I kind of picked this up a bit from a book that Mickey Love and Pilma had recommended called the power of moments when you understand that, when the team feels that they are safe and they are in a culture where, like, if they make a mistake, like there's not a firing culture but like an improvement culture, then that lets them become more creative, that lets them be use their talents more effectively and for the company to really get the maximum amount out of each of their abilities and skillset.
Speaker 1:I love that when the team feels that they're safe. You probably have heard me say like one of the questions we ask, if you were working here, is how can we make this perfect for you? I can't guarantee I can make it perfect, but if you're not thinking about that and you're not communicating it to us, like how can we ever even run at it?
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So and I know this translates over into you were telling me before we went live about getting Google reviews from folks who, whose cases you probably evaluate and have a strategy call can't help them and they're still giving you a review. So let's talk about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so kind of a couple of ideas, like I'm just like I'm a vociferous reader of different legal things every month and like one of the newsletters that I will always read is John Fisher's newsletter from up in New York, because he's always there's always like a little nugget in there that I'm just like really clever. He's such a smart guy. I know you probably know him well.
Speaker 1:I'm assuming yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's a year, one year, yeah, and so his you know his new Google review project that he calls it streaking, where they are tracking it weekly, have a competition weekly, analyze it weekly. I've just completely adopted that and the team has really bought into that. I think that actually plays into some of the successes we've been starting to have in our LSA account. You know, lsa is like the bane of every lawyer's existence. But the consistency of reviews, I think, or a critical piece of that gumbo have you have like ingredient in the gumbo of like how the LSA works. So that's one piece of it. But the other piece of it is, you know, for me personally I don't. You know we get a lot of leads off the LSA account and off of Google which are not going to be qualified leads. They still and you know we're still trying to get them in a lead docket refer them out. But it really became an emphasis for us recently, about two or three months ago. I was like, okay, we have this client box the shock in all boxes branded Scott vignier, injure lores. We send them this stuff when they sign up as a client. But maybe we're missing an opportunity with somebody who calls us and doesn't become a client. Like, we still want them on the list. So we have to get them on the list and lead docket has these integrations with Zapier that can just push them into keep immediately once they get in the lead docket. So then we have them on the list because they've opted in our marketing and we pass all the ethical rules. It's like you know, we have a Scott. Now we have a Scott vignier bag which is branded, which, with the you know the swag stuff in it's probably we're all in with shipping around 10 or 11 bucks. And I just started running the numbers and was like you know, we could send out 100 or 200 of these bags a year for five or $6,000. Then we could get these people in our client database and they get a newsletter every month, they get a Magnus throughout the year, they get a July 4th court, they get a gratitude. But you know, whatever it is, it seems to me that I'm probably going to develop a case or two off of all that and the order why will be exponential from the five or ten thousand dollars is sending these bags out.
Speaker 2:And then I really learned from one of our mastermind members in film. They were having a lot of success with their case evaluation director. We don't call in taking case evaluation director having Real success in getting people who don't even sign and leaving on Google reviews and our case value direct case evaluation director page is just fantastic telling she gets a Google review to every single week from somebody who doesn't even sign with the client. It's a case that we never wanted but, like, as you know, in every lawyer, listening to this is highly valuable to have this Google. How did you find? Her office manager is going to get all the credit for that and she's been really fabulous. We've had her for about six or seven months and I think I see her as we grow growing into leadership position with us and she's just a wonderful person. She's really good at it.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and that's right.
Speaker 2:It's tough to find somebody who treats the phone like a professional. But part of the things that we've tried to like really sort of explain into the team is like look, at the end of the day, the one thing we can't outsource to Mexico, the one thing we can't outsource is the culture of the firm, the culture, understanding the core values, understanding what's important to us. That will be implicitly conveyed to the clients on the phone. We can outsource a lot of the back of the house, stuff no different than like a restaurant, but the front of you are the front of the house and so what you put out is critical and I think Consistently me saying that over and over and over again for the last six months has emphasized to all of them the importance of the phone and how we treat people on the phone.
Speaker 1:We're recording this near the end of 2023. If we're having a discussion together in December of 2020 for your life in your firm, what will have had to happen? You think you go, man. 2024 was like the best thing ever. I'm looking forward to your. So you starting with fire proof. So I'll tell you that's a whole new level and you're going to get a ton out of. You have got a lot of great management structure. It sounds like you're gonna have more management structure. There's going to be a learning curve not want to beat your head against the wall for a bit, beginning because you think you're doing things really right, but they'll expose opportunities. But what are you really looking forward to for 2024 day?
Speaker 2:So you know I follow Brian a lot on LinkedIn. I read a lot of what his he says and I think he and I have a pretty similar mentality. I relate to a lot of his perspective on a lot of this, which is for me, you know it, look, it is about like, at the end of the day, like we have to manage the finances and we have to hit the profit percentage, because the business can't grow without capital. It needs capital fuel to grow period in the story. But for me, I find like the bigger we get, the more important thing about Brad and I is that we get the freedom to choose what it is that we want to do, and the bigger we get, that's the neatest thing about this.
Speaker 2:For me is like I get to really be selective and decide what I want to do with my time, which to me, brad I'm sure to you, to Brian is the most valuable thing that you have. And so I would hope you know we definitely have strategic plans for which positions and people we need to add, and that will probably be for proven to be wrong and will make a lot of mistakes in 2024 and learn a lot of hard, valuable lessons, no different than we did this year. But I find every year we get bigger, we get better at projections, we get better at management and I get more freedom in choosing what I do, and and that's that would be a successful year for us. If we obviously we want to hit our revenue and growth goals and and add the key team members and have the team members here be elevated, those are important. But getting to a point where I'm more and more getting to decide what I want to do with the success defined for me, what is it you like to do outside of the legal?
Speaker 2:hobby wise, my golf game needs some attention. I'm struggling around the green and so I like to play golf a lot. I'm I like to cook, I really love to travel, and so a lot of EOS and growth for me is not only Stability and strong growth for the firm, which benefits everybody on my team from a compensation and skillset perspective, but also in giving me the freedom to travel more, to manage the firm more remotely, to have a leadership team in place to take some of the day to day stuff off of me, and in 21 and 22 and this year that has happened more and more, and so I'm really excited to see where that goes.
Speaker 1:This has been awesome. The firm is Scott McNair. This has been interviewing David out of New Orleans. Now with expanding geographic office presence, folks want to check you out. I know you have guys. I say have multiple websites because you got a separate website for your PI side and the separate website for for Scott stuff. So once you give both of those I think they're I look at them. They're both worth people going to look at and see what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. So the both practice groups are branded, like on different websites and social stacks the injury group is Scott McNair dot com and then the estate group is Louisiana succession attorney dot com. Actually, brad gets a significant amount of a state clients from out of state who are hiring Louisiana attorneys, and his domain rating and authority has been a critical thing for his growth and so, yeah, really enjoy talking to you. Obviously I was actually coincidentally talking about you at the PILMA master my meeting I was at three weeks ago in Vegas, because there's an attorney in my group not going to name him. He's really successful lawyer. I mean, he has just not pulled himself out of the files yet, not just listen, and so I was like you really need been glass.
Speaker 2:I was like download his podcast and start listening, and we're going to talk again in Key West in two months or you're going to call me in between and or email me, but just like with the firm he's built, which is a super strong firm, just that mindset shift for him and like getting out of the files is going to be like putting rocket fuel on a fire burning. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:So that's a very good deal, yeah, and for us, we really are so happy being members and appreciate everything you have done for us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, ken and I good friends who grew up in the Dan Kennedy world together, and so that's right. But you know it's, it's it's amazing, you know it's amazing, you know it's amazing, you know it's amazing, you know it's amazing, you know it's amazing. You look at some of these really, really successful firms but then if you actually look at the life some lawyers are leaning is like wow, it's still stressed out life. So appreciate you spreading the word, appreciate you carving out some time. You've done a remarkable job again for a young guy, yes, or maybe you have that good kick at the beginning walking into the world's largest litigation that that was the oil rig disaster, right yeah talking about yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you got some experience, made some money and you're doing great. I can't wait. Let me, let's do this again next December, because I'd love to. I'd love to catch up and see what 2024 is brought you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would love to do that. Thanks for talking, ben. It's been a pleasure being with you.
Speaker 1:All right man.
Speaker 2:Talk later.
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