Ep. 188 – Designing a Life and Practice You Actually Want (Part 3) aka “The World Owes You Nothing… and That’s Great News”

What if radical ownership—not luck, not hustle—was the real secret to building a practice (and life) you actually want?

In this third installment of a four-part series, Ben Glass delivers a powerful, practical session on designing your law firm and life around clarity, personal responsibility, and strategic marketing. This one was recorded live with the Great Legal Marketing community—and it’s packed with wisdom.

You’ll hear:

• Why “the world owes you nothing” is actually the most liberating mindset shift you'll ever make
• How to use clarity (about money, time, and goals) to get the universe to respond
• The role of adversity in entrepreneurship—and how Ben flipped dark days into rocket fuel
• The truth about marketing (job #1), how to be genuinely interesting, and why most legal marketing fails
• How Ben built a team culture where people and their families thrive—and how you can too

To-do from this episode:
On a single sheet of paper, write:

1. Your perfect income number and by when
2. Your 100-word story that’s not just “I’m a lawyer”
3. One marketing asset you will own (in-house) within 90 days

Who It’s For

This episode is for solo and small firm lawyers, professional service entrepreneurs, and leaders who are tired of chasing every shiny tactic and are ready to design with intention.

Listen Now

Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your 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.

Chapters

• 0:00 Clients Aren’t The Master
• 0:28 Show Intro & Ben’s Mission
• 1:22 Radical Responsibility & Ownership
• 3:23 Clarity: Money, Timelines, Targets
• 5:28 Pain As Teacher, Coaches As Force
• 10:43 Marketing Is Job Number One
• 13:05 Be Interesting, Not Commoditized
• 16:35 Start Conversations, Not Hard Sells
• 18:39 Accountability For Marketers
• 22:14 Build A Business People Thrive In
• 26:42 Culture: Protect Your Team First
• 29:20 Community, Tribes, And VIPs
• 33:15 Own, Don’t Rent, Your Marketing
• 37:19 Students Of Business, Not Just Law
• 41:06 Plant Flags: 1, 3, 10-Year Models
• 45:48 Invest In People Who Think

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

Clients do not run our lives. The client is not the master. I know that's what everybody says the client is the master. Not in my practice. We are the experts. We're good at what we do. We have confidence in what we do. Sure, we want to get be aligned with the client, but we'll figure out early if we're not having alignment on where you want to go or and that you're not respectful to us, and that your expectations are so far out of line that no matter what I do and how good my team is, we're not going to make you happy. You're gone.

SPEAKER_04: 0:28

Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business, and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach, and father of nine, this show is about more than just practice. For over 40 years, Ben has built a law firm that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money, do meaningful work, and still make it home for dinner. Each week, Ben brings you real conversations with guests who are challenging the status quo. Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22

Hey everyone, this is Ben, and this is part three on our series of designing a life and a law practice that you actually want. On today's episode, listen closely while I unpack a few hard-won truths that change everything. Look, the world owes you nothing. And why well actually that's kind of liberating. How radical personal responsibility accelerates your growth, and why clarity about money, targets, and timeliness will make the universe respond. We'll dig into using coaches and manners to shorten the learning curve, turning adversity into your advantage, and then pivot to the business engine, marketing as job number one, being genuinely interesting, not commoditized, starting conversations instead of selling, holding your marketers accountable to results, and owning, not renting, your marketing assets. I'll also share how we built a culture where our people and their families who come to Ben Glass Law can thrive, track real numbers, and plant flags for the next one, three, and ten years. Your to-do from this episode will be this on one sheet of paper, write your perfect income number and by when. Write your 100-word story that makes you interesting. That's something besides. I'm a lawyer, and you'll listen to you'll hear that on this recording. And one marketing asset you will own in-house within 90 days. All right, here we go. The moment that you start, so the second principle is the world owes you nothing. These are default positions that let me do it this way. The moment you start to think, I've worked really hard. I struggled to high school and college and law school. I'm in an area of the country that's not so affluent, but I work hard to build my business. I do charity work or I raise kids or whatever. The moment you start to think that any of that stuff gets you anything at all from the world, that the world owes you anything, you're on a path to self-destruction. All right. It's the same thing. So here's a cool thing. When I talk to my kids as they were growing up and sitting around the breakfast table, same conversation, right? It's easy when you're congruent and you're philosophically aligned with yourself first, right? It's really easy because I don't have to make up any of this stuff. All right. But understanding that just being good at what you do and doing good work does not mean that anybody, the world at writ large, or any individual owes you anything. Start there. You and only you are responsible for everything. Again, default position. When we get to that painful point in our practice where we have to let somebody go where it's not working, and a small practice, you know, you know everybody, you know your friends, that you are friends with them, you know their families, you've worked together. It's never their fault. The default has to be that there's something you did, maybe in the hiring, maybe in the training, maybe in the ongoing relationship. When you live in the world of where I am today as a product of the decisions that I have made and not what Colin did or Charlie did or my wife did or my kids did. When you live in that world, it's just a better place to be. And it's painful sometimes, but it does you no good to be blaming other people that you don't have control over for your life. That's just anxiety. That's just misery. All right. So in our dark days, Ben Glass, financial, I tried to wreck the law firm thing like three times. I literally got it done deep way under the water because I didn't know things I didn't know about. But I always reflected back that this was my responsibility to figure it out. And that I would invest whatever time, energy, money in seeking out the experts, seeking out friends who were philosophically aligned to help me get back out of there. Again, default position. Might not, you know, again, what's good for me might not be good for you. The universe loves clarity. Universe can be substitute. Sammy's laughing. Spirit, God. When he and I first met many years ago and he's speaking on the stage about I can't do a Sammy imitation in your chinglish, but basically, you know, if you tell the universe something, it'll reflect, it'll come back to you, reflect back. That's bullshit. What are you talking about? Really? I mean, how's this crazy? It's true. It's true. I can't tell you how many times. So, so, so the behavior that comes from this principle is reflection, again, on what would be perfect for my life and getting it out of your head, as Charlie said, with pen and paper and starting to write things. So I've always had a list. Shit I don't like doing, shit. I like doing. All right. And I work on the list that has stuff I don't like doing. I work on eliminating that from life. How can I simplify my life to get this out? To get the Charlie came to me. We had a discussion. Are you still in the room? Yeah, you can see it. Charlie's, I said to Charlie, uh, you know, GLM thing where one day this will all be his. I'm like, dude, how much money do you want to make? He tells me a number. That's the second question that people usually don't ask. By when? He tells me another number. I'm like, bullshit. I'm like, it's way too far down here. Why do you want to, why do you want to put a flag in the ground way down here where there's probably a way that you and I, with co with coaching, can figure out how to get you to here now, right? Let's have some real clarity in Ben Glass Law. So we say to our practice area leaders, some are lawyers, some are not lawyers, how much money do you want to make? Like, what's your perfect? I'm I had a discussion with Ellen who's not a lawyer, former Navy intelligence officer. She does my ERISA, she's my ERISA appeals specialist, she is a wizard, right? How much money do you want to make? She tells me, okay, all right, model it. What do we need to do? Because we got to go tell Tiffany, who's running the running the first charge in the marketing, what number we need to get to in terms of leads and good leads and what region and stuff that we're gonna go and target in order to get there. But if you don't know, famous last words from Mr. Chung, if you don't know where you're going, you're never gonna get there. So all I can tell you is my own experience, and I think if you talk to a lot of people who have this self-belief that the more clear you get on where you want to go, the more likely it is you're gonna get there, I can tell you that it works. And I can sit down with you, or Sammy can sit down with you, and press you, because when you're kind of wishy-washy about that, like money's not a big deal to me.

SPEAKER_01: 7:25

He's like, bullshit.

SPEAKER_02: 7:26

I can I can do that imitation.

SPEAKER_01: 7:27

Bullshit! What are you talking about? You have a family. Your wife is, she wants you to not stress over bills, you have kids. That's stupid.

SPEAKER_02: 7:36

Here's my money for the for the hour, Sam. Thank you very much. Clarity. Sure. Change pains and stress are features, not bugs of life. Again, if you sat in our mastermind group, so we have members in our mastermind who've been with us for the whole time. Bob Battle, Brent Adams, Dave Freeze, and we have members who've been with us a shorter time. If you've been with us a whole time and you listen to all the conversations, you would know that every single person in that group, which is a high performers, right, have had these times of abject darkness that the group helps them get clarity about where they want to go and how to get back out of there. So it's a, what is it, in every pain there is learning. So I will say to Sammy, let me tell you about the discussion that Sandy and I had last night. And I'll tell him the discussion. He goes, Well, you're an idiot. You've been telling me that discussion for three years. You are a slow learner. What is the learning in this? And so that's the question. That's the question you always ask yourself when you're in hard times. What is the universe, God, the spirit? What am I being taught by this? Because everybody, everybody goes through it, and far too many people use it as an excuse to not move forward. Blame others, fail to accept responsibility, right? And that's just a I talked to a lady just yesterday who was a potential new client in our disability practice, and she was describing a work environment that was just god-awful toxic. I mean, I could not imagine working for the people as she described them. And when you as a leader not only have this person, these personal philosophies or philosophies like this, but you make it a point to teach your team not just how to get medical records or how to fill out proposed orders for judges, but how to live a life like this. Everything is better. Everything is not perfect, but everything is better. And it is, I can just tell you, it is so cool because now our hiring, our hiring is all around this too. It's so cool to work with people who, honest to God, on Sunday, they tell me they look forward to coming in Monday, right? It's a good place to be. Not perfect, but great, a great place to be. All right, uh, everything is in the now. So anything that happened to you like yesterday is only neurons running around in your brain right now. It's not real. Anything that you think is worrying, coming down the pike tomorrow or next week, right this present moment in this room, is only neurons running around in your room, in your head. The thing that you control right now is your response to adversity. Charlie showed the graphic early, and that's me and Charlie on that, Charlie and I on that thing. The communist adversity is opportunity poster. That's our internal joke. That's what you control. You control the space between the event that hits you and your response to what happens. Again, working with a personal coach, someone like Jay, someone like Sammy, in the world of major corporations, the number one perk that people ask for in terms of compensation is you get me a good executive coach, right? I often joke Sammy is my psychologist. I know my friend's Brian Mitman's over there smiling because he's worked for Sammy for many years. You probably had exactly these same conversations. Um, so now let's talk about the whole too many cases problem. Um, and I'm gonna give you, I think, three principles against which to measure the stuff that Charlie teaches, the stuff they sell out in the hallways and the stuff you're gonna hear about the rest of the time. It's number one. Marketing is job number one. Lawyers have a hard time getting over this. I will tell you that you are no different from the pastors. So when I tell the pastors that you think you shouldn't have to market because you have God on your side, and that is salvation, and people should just church, I've got bad news for you. That's the theme of every major religion in the world, right? So that's not very unique. So if you want people to get to your my daughter is a pastor, she's a Lutheran pastor in Pennsylvania, and she too, even though she heard all the breakfast table stories, she's like, oh dad, but I'm a pastor, you know? Like, no, no, Caitlin, you have a good message. You are a good person, you are influential, people benefit. Why would you let them wander into a church that's not your church? Okay. Marketing is job number one. And once we kind of unwind and get ourselves away from, but I'm a lawyer and I need to do this work, and people come to me because I'm a lawyer. I'll tell you that that problem, we can solve that problem, but we got to get this problem solved first. We have to get lead flow high, quality lead flow high, conversion of lead flow from the leads that are appropriate for us. They have to see you as wise man or woman at the top of the mountain, right? And be begging, right? So I had interesting, I had um lawyer, I won't name the firm, Big Law. Big Law, you'd recognize the name. This is the one who worked 40 hours, 40 straight days. And she has a claim, and they make it known to me in the meeting. We're interviewing four other people, and they're, you know, they're trying to talk about the fee structure and stuff. And I said, that's awesome. I said, but I don't, I don't pitch. I've got three more people coming in after you. I like I like your case. I think it's interesting. I think you've seen enough trust clues out there because they had all my books and stuff. I've I had answered all their questions. I said, it's your life. You need some things. Same thing. It's your life. You need to make the best decision that's available for you and your family right now. If it's me, perfect. But I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I'm better than anyone else, right? Because I'm busy and I have a fulfilled life. And I kind of do the drill. Like, my I got here's my kids, there's my CrossFit stuff. Okay, I'm good, right? So let me know when you're ready. That's because the marketing is really good. That's because we've worked long and hard in it, and I've got great people who help me get it done. And our biggest problem, and the biggest problem of many members of GLM, particularly who've been around for a while, is this problem of that works. Now what do I do with the business side, right? We don't have a problem getting. Now, that's not everybody here. And and if you're not there yet, we're glad that you're here because we can fix that. But recognize that marketing is job. Somebody has to be accountable for the marketing. Be interesting. It's the thing I told you, like the hundred words of what my life is. You want people to be able to tell your story, which is more than Ben Glass as a lawyer. Because a lot of times they don't even know, even if we've represented them, they don't know the whole scope of what we do, but they remember dad to nine. That's a if all of my dad to nine, dad to nine entrepreneur and attorney, right? That's my shorter version of the hundred words. And lawyers have sometimes have a hard time with this. Again, they don't know I don't want my personal stuff out there. I don't want to be seen as different or bragging about myself, or somebody was saying, you know, just sometimes sounds like I was telling someone to write the book about their story. It's not a lawyer. And I'm like, well, there's, I'm not sure that I want to brag about myself. I'm like, dude, you gotta realize that you have an influential story that needs to be told. All right. And there's not enough really good people like you who are telling that story. Um, and so you you gotta, you are interesting. Again, this is a principle. So Charlie will tell you exactly like all the details of how to do it. But everything you do from web to video to newsletter to books is make it rich. Don't make it all about legal services because that's commoditized. That's what everybody is saying. Most of the law websites in the country, they're all about how many verdicts and stars and how many groups you're the best lawyer. That's not that's not very interesting, okay? Dad tonight, an entrepreneur, CrossFitter, lawyer. That's interesting. And here's the thing: you have that story. You have some version of that story. But I ask you to kind of dig deep, get your white paper out and your pen and start to think about what your story is and how different parts of your story, as you'll see in my book, how different parts of your story then form kind of even teaching principle for these folks. These folks who come into our offices, they don't need our legal problem to be solved. We're really life coaches for them at my firm, anyway. I mean, we spend time, I can solve their legal problem or term that's not solvable, but they go out of there better prepared to deal with the adversity that they're facing, personal injury and disability stuff. So that their lives have sucky parts to it, right? We spend a lot of time, and it's because I've I've designed a way to take my true and authentic story and convert it into principles of living that I teach them when they're there, and they go out of there thinking, oh my God, this guy is interesting, he cares about me. They don't know anything about how good of a lawyer I am, really. I mean, how could you even ever tell that about anybody? So be interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 16:06

Again, we'll get back in just a second. If you're the kind of lawyer who believes your practice can be your platform, not just a paycheck, you need to check out my book, Renegade Lawyer Marketing. This isn't your average law firm marketing book. No theory, no fluff. Just the mindset and tools that helped us build a law firm that serves our family and still fights for our clients. Grab your copy at renegade lawyer marketing.com and start building a law practice that actually works for you. Now, back to the show.

SPEAKER_02: 16:35

You're gonna buy something, you're gonna send it out, you're gonna do a book. It can't just be about boring legal stuff. The role of any first level advertising from your website to any print, TV, radio ads, is just to is just to start a conversation, right? There's no buy now button. So we go on Amazon, we see the product, we read the reviews, we read the negative reviews first, right? And then you buy now. That's not how people buy lawyers, right? And it's important to remember because people try to stuff too much into their frontline advertising. I just want you to see enough to be interested in having the next conversation with our office. That next conversation is usually a live phone call. And so the folks in my team who are doing those live phone calls, they need to be really highly trained because they're speaking for me. Not just, again, not just the legal stuff, but the philosophy of living. So, you know, again, having a personal philosophy that's a corporate philosophy that you then teach to your team is so, so important. But that first line advertising doesn't have to make a sale, it has to start a conversation. And that's where you'll be really good at because 99% of lawyers don't think about what happens after that first conversation. They think the first conversation is the only opportunity they're ever going to have. They firmly believe that if if the people don't hire you now, that they're going to um hire some other lawyer. We we know that that is just not true. I guess our biggest case is six to twelve and fourteen months after initial contact, right? Um, even in the criminal law side, it's just not true. And if it is true for you, it's only because you have a commoditized business. It's only because you presented yourself as just like everybody else. So if I can have the, you know, the raisin brand or the cocoa puffs and I'm good with either one, I'm gonna make that quick decision. That's your fault. That's your responsibility. You've made yourself look like everybody else out there. So let's use advertising to start a conversation. Hold all of your marketing and your marketers accountable, right? It still shocks me all these years in how many how people will invest in a marketing thing, either again, time or money, and not be able to tell me with any degree of specificity how that dollar or hour I sent out is going to bring more dollars or more hours back. Now, yeah, there are things that you try and test that maybe won't work, but what was your plan? Like, do you just buy stuff? I mean, the worst thing is to buy stuff and let somebody else just run it and have no accountability back to you about whether that investment brought anything back. But most people, it's worse than that. They just the lawyer has no plan of how I think this dollar is supposed to go out and work. So again, Tiffany Swedensky, I mean, she's marvelous at, you know, making, helping make the website and working with Foster Web Marketing to make our website what we want. But what her real gift is, is I can say to her, you know, Tiff, it would be really cool if you could tell me for that thing we did three weeks ago, how many went out and what leads came in. Could you do that for me? And she goes, I got it right here, right? So she's a proactive thinker. She's aligned with the flaw. She knows what questions I'm going to ask. She knows that she is accountable and responsible for Ben's money that's going out to invest in marketing. And so you have to ask that question of anyone who is proposing to take your money and go invest it in pay-per-click, TV, even newsletter, whatever it is. What is your plan for telling me? And if they tell you, and I haven't insult anybody too greatly, but we're going to get you a lot of more likes and a lot of more friends. I'm like, what are you talking about? Have you ever been to the bank with a bag of likes and said, can I get money for this? I mean, and most and usually those people that are going after likes and friends, they don't have a newsletter. They don't know who their list is, they don't have a segregated upper list of mavens who are the people that are you know love you and refer cases, and you're taking care of your mavens, right, proactively during the year. No, no, no. We're gonna go invest in this thing over here that's gonna get me more likes and friends. All right. Well, that's a violation of a marketing principle. That's stupid. And and again, getting over the fact that being the best lawyer is not a marketing match. So it's a lot of folks in here who are really good lawyers because I know who you are. I think I'm a really good lawyer, right? Like the public, again, gets thrust into our world involuntarily, and now they're searching. All the websites say the same thing. Being the best, I used to get pissed off when the yellow pages and I would see like double truck ads of people who I knew like never even would know where the courthouse was. I mean, they're advertising for PI cases and they don't haven't tried a case in years. They undersettled everything. I didn't realize that being the best lawyer is not important. All right, it's good, and you should be the best that you can be. You want to deliver good quality legal services, but don't expect that the universe will reward your lawyer expertise, just because you have lawyer expertise with clients and cases. It just doesn't work that way. It's not rational. All right, so quick summary and then we'll go deeper here in a sec. Why I don't worry about having where the next client is coming. And I really don't. I mean, our thing today is really getting is modeling for a future of a rocket ship that's taking off. My and and even though we've we've been good at this for a long time, I brought my son in in January. He'd worked for 11 years for another firm. He brought a practice area that we weren't going out to, which was the soft tissue, kind of a more of a mass car accident practice, and he's really, really good at it. And so my analogy is we're on this roller coaster. And the roller coaster, we know at the end of the ride, we're gonna be safe, right? There's not near 100% chance we're gonna come out intact. But it's really scary because you've got to ramp up, you got to get more people, you do you invest a lot of time and energy into the architecture, knowing that this is gonna be good and we're gonna land okay, but it is frightening at times. But it makes less frightening when you have people who are working on the numbers and really wrapping their arms around your current numbers and the predictability of future cash flow, which again, Sammy has helped me with a lot, and Jay can help you with. So we'll talk about having clarity about the business that we're actually in. My team, you must guess, and if you've ever visited our offices and trekked back like a Charlie's office, it's this guy's piles and piles and piles of books. We are forever learners. It's one of the core values at Benglas Law and Great Legal Marketing is that I you cannot be the same person that you are today that you were a year ago. That's just not good enough. So I expect you to be improving your life. And I will help you, I will direct you, I will coach you how to be better at the job you're doing, how to be better at living a life that's good for you, right? Because then that's good for me, right? Um, how you know, I'm their, I'm their life coach, and and being lifelong students of marketing and business building is important to me. And then we look to own and not rent our marketing, which is important. All right. So most, if I asked you right now to take out your blank piece of paper and to write down, like, why does your practice even exist? I'm not gonna have you do it now, but it's a thing you should at least write the question down. Why do we exist? I think most lawyers would have some version of, if you haven't thought about this a lot, is eh, we're we want to serve the client, right? We want to get justice, we want to fight for the underprivileged. All that stuff is good. It's what most lawyers say, which then is a clue about if most people are saying something, maybe you ought to think about a different way of looking at this. And so for for us at Benglas Law, we thought about this and we actually went there first. We're for empowering people and standing up against the insurance companies. But then we came back. We said, man, is that really why we're here? No, we're here to make money. We're here to build a great business where people can thrive. I'm 100% convinced that I could take my Bengal and GLM teams, we could go into a different industry altogether. And if I could buy the subject matter expertise of the industry, right, if I had experts of the doing of the thing, my teams would be successful. And I could build a successful business in that industry. Why? Because I have great people who are philosophically aligned and who are lifetime learners. All right. So we want people to thrive, and we have sort of several categories of that. So, number one, I want the partners, the lawyers, and the entire staff to believe and to find Ben Glaslaw is a place where they can thrive first. So that's like the 20th time I mentioned that just in this talk. Hopefully, if you never thought about that before, you give it some serious consideration. This is for my life and for their lives. And when you've got that, you've got something good. Second thing, their families. Their families, the families of the folks you employ, are relying on them to have a place to go to work that's financially and emotionally good for them. Because it doesn't do anybody any good if Sally comes home at the end of the day and says, God, that sucks. Susie was a bitch. And Ben is crazy, and the clients are awful, and Ben doesn't do anything about these awful clients, and it's just miserable. And what do you want for dinner? That's not helping anything, right? My team knows, by the way, that if if they're having a problem with a client who is not respectful of them, I will first I'll listen to the calls if they're if we if those calls have been recorded, and most of ours are. I'll read the email and we'll sit up. Okay, let's have Joe. Joe's the client. Let's set up a call. Let's have a call with Joe and I. And I get, I bring them in and they listen on the speakerphone, and I defend them because my team is good, right? And if my team has made a mistake, we're coached on that first, but I don't let you disrespect my team, right? So they don't go home saying, well, this is God, I'm so glad it's five o'clock. It's miserable. Now what does the family want me to do? All right. We exist to have a great place where people will thrive. The next one is, but third on the list. So it's us, it's the families, and the clients. And it's in that order, right? Clients do not run our lives. The client is not the master. I know that's what everybody says the client is the master. Not in my practice. We are the experts. We're good at what we do. We have confidence in what we do. Sure, we want to get be aligned with the client, but we'll figure out early if we're not having on where you want to go or and that you're not respectful to us, and that your expectations are so far out of line that no matter what I do and how good my team is, we're not going to make you happy. You're gone. Here's a list of the other lawyers, and we're really good at that. And the last is a community. Everybody here will have a different way and a different interest and a different comfort level with interacting with the community. Again, so one of the ways we have done that is building our training center and opening it up and saying, our place is cool. You got a meeting with 50 people or less. Talk to us. We want you to come in. We want them to experience Benglas Law. We'd like to do something in that event that helps get names. Like here's our VIP program for all of your people who came to your meeting. Sign this card here. You'll be on our VIP. We're going to talk about what a VIP is if you don't know that already. But we're we're tribal building there. Um, in again, in the refereeing in the CrossFit. That's how I'm comfortable. That's how my team is comfortable. There's other folks who, you know, like going to do events and having tents and stuff. We actually ordered our first tent. It's coming soon. But but Ben's not actually going to be at a tent. I mean, other young ones who like being at a tent, they'll go at a tent. Um, but but finding the thing, my point is this finding the thing that's comfortable for you, that brings out your best you or brings out your team's best them, that's how you can interact, I think, really well with the community and have the community recognize. So again, where people can thrive. We have real clarity. So when you're like Tim Summeroth and you're really good at your marketing, and people start coming to you and going, I'm gonna come under your umbrella. Well, we've had that happen to us too, and some we have accepted. And we so we have deals and workers' compensation and social security where we're working with other lawyers. We're not the subject matter experts. Michelle Louane and Bob Bush. I saw Bob, I don't know if Michelle is here. So we have that relationship, we've got a relationship with a Social Security disability attorney. But we're also good at examining when those opportunities come, is is this the right fit for us now? Because our instinct is, hell yeah, we could do that because we're really good at marketing, right? But we're good at then looking at the numbers, looking at logistics space, looking at does the philosophy of the lawyer who's bringing the opportunity to us match our philosophy? And again, when you have clarity about why you exist and what you're good at, it helps make those decisions, which can be big decisions, can be huge opportunities, it could also be a huge hassle, right? Helps make those decisions easier. And we have real clarity about the major functions of the office. And we'll talk it's later on today. I'll talk about being the CEO of your business and what that means and what how we have done that. But gone are the days when I started my practice after working for another firm for 12 years. Simple. I'm a lawyer, I'm a good lawyer, I get results. How hard could this be? Right. And it was hard then. It's almost impossible, I think, now, to not to have a practice that is going to at least stay even with the world, if not grow and thrive. It's almost impossible to do that with having a really now firm basis and understanding about business. The one thing that's I write in my book, which is an attack on the establishment, the whole book is an attack on the establishment. It's the one thing that they don't teach you. And not only do they not teach it to you, but they don't want you to learn it. They won't give you CLE credit for. And yet today, it's so, so important. And the clearer you get about the major functions, the accounting, the HR, the staffing, sales, and figuring out how you make people accountable and responsible for that and how you move that forward every week, the better off you'll be. Now, again, I don't want to make so lassing. So I'm really good at complicating people's lives, giving you a whole bunch of stuff to do. If you're not there, if you're still in there, I need more leads, then focus on that. But understand that this business expertise is coming in your life. You cannot escape it, right? And so, and and we're working on this and we're we're again we're getting better at it. And then planting the flags in the ground. Where will we be in 10 years, five years, three years, and one year? Knowing that, not just making wild ass predictions, but really modeling first what it is you'd like, and second, how we're gonna get there, really now forces you to change behavior. What are the behaviors I need to do this week, this quarter, this year, in order to get to the flag that I've planted and I've already declared I want to be in 10 years and in five years and in three years. And so, and I'll talk later on this afternoon about you know what our meeting meetings look like, but every single meeting, this information is in front of us. And we're not just solving like the paper towels are out and how do we order more paper towels, right? The flags we have planted are in front of my leadership team every single time we get together. We are students. So when I first started to go to events like Dan Kennedy's events and get my brain exploded, I was the only one there. I mean, I was the only one from my firm there. And I'd come back and try to explain direct response marketing, philosophy of life, lead flow, follow-up marketing, writing books to my team. And that's really hard. I mean, I did it. Some of you have done it, some of you are doing it here. Your life will be made better when you bring team members to events like this, as I started to take Charlie and drag him to Cleveland to Dan stuff many years ago. And then when you start sending them on their own to events. So we send Tiffany out to things like MozCon out in the the uh Pacific Northwest. And the point is, the principle is invest in your people. Some lawyers and many business people have the idea that if I invest in someone and teach them to grow and think for themselves and become a really good whatever marketer in our case, that they're gonna up and leave. That happens. When that happens, that's awesome, right? I've created an entrepreneur, I've made somebody's life better. My view is if that's your default position and that's really where you want to be, yes, it's a risk. The other side of the coin, though, is they stay with you for one, two, three years and they never grow. You got to keep telling them everything. They never think about things on their own. I mean, Charlie and Colin and Tiff, they come to me and go, they don't come to me today and go, this is what we want to do. They come to me and go, let me show you what we've been doing for the last six weeks. We took your money, we spent it over for the last six weeks, here's the results. That's where you want to get to. So, yes, you should be a student, but it's no longer good enough for you to be the only one who's thinking like this. And in fact, if you go back home and you've got a law partner who either doesn't get it or is resistant to this, I can almost guarantee you that in a couple of years you'll be calling me and saying, I'm leaving, I'm starting my own practice. Remind me again of what you would do if you're in my position, because I get those calls, you know, every quarter. This is important. And I just sort of describe this. You need to own but and not rent your marketing. When there's a lot of service providers who will write content for you, who will manage social media marketing, who will, you know, create things for you, have outsourced everything. When you get to the point where you're spending four, five, six, seven thousand dollars a month to other people to do specific parts of your marketing, you need to seriously consider hiring somebody in your practice and making them into a Charlie and into a Colin and into a Tiffany and into a Maria. That's what we do over and over again. Because when I have someone in the office who's a forever learner, who hears the philosophy of Ben like almost every day, um, and who can now come to me and go, this is what we've been doing the last six weeks, and let me show you the results. That's just an awesome place to be. Uh, and I think too many lawyers are slow to move from outsourcing everything. When you start to look at what you're spending for this stuff, you can get good people. And we have a product, right? The uh elite marketing director boot camp that will get them up to speed. It's what I did to Charlie when he first joined me. I gave him a stack of my books, my DVDs, Kennedy stuff, Jay Abraham stuff. Go read this. Get yourself, get yourself educated about it. Um, so that's just that's just uh a way of building your practice that I want you to start thinking about. Because then when you have that person in there full time working for you, what will happen is now here's here's what goes to your head first. Can I afford them? Will I have enough for them to do? And I have a fear, it's a little bit of a scarcity mentality. We've all been there and I've been there. Here's what actually happens: they start to explode if you do this right. Your head starts to explode with more things they do, and six months you're finding an assistant for them. I've seen this happen over and over again. There's a lot of really smart people coming out of school, going into a corporate world that's kind of ugly, I think. You're entrepreneurs, you are philosopher kings, you're living life big, your inspirations to your community. I mean, you ought to get these people in there because you will benefit both your business will run better, but you'll feel good about growing these folks, and they'll benefit. So that's just a great, great place to be. All right, here's my marketing assets. Again, mine are not all yours, but it's instructional. So tribes. So we do we have a lot of people who know me, like me, and can tell that story. Not just like the consumer tribe, right? Our list, our newsletter list. We have our mavens, the folks who we know love us and like us. We have our VIP members who get some free stuff that we would be giving them anyway. But they're VIP, we had a VIP member call yesterday. I've moved, I lost my VIP card. Can you send me another one? Like, awesome. Yes. But not just those tribes. So we have tribes of other tribal leaders, right? So the pastors and the church leaders who came to my place, market, we are constantly in contact with them. We bring insurance sales agents in. By the way, they're clueless about automobile coverage that they're selling. They have no idea what this is. They have no idea what happens on our side of the claim. We have lawyers, so we're huge fans of direct, and we'll talk about this, direct marketing and mail marketing. So every month we're mailing to lawyers about Arista practice, we're mailing about our PI practice to non-PI lawyers. So having different tribes, again, the simple thing is you have them, they're in a CRM for us, it's Infusion Soft, there's a lot of good products out there. Um, and constantly nurturing and feeding the tribe. It's a thing that lives, right? It's a it's an asset of the firm. We have our in-house experts, our my Tiffany, Charlie, Colin, Maria, Joe. The quicker you can get this done, the better you will be. Charlie talked about, and I used to talk about, you know, writing your first book. I said, Colin, go how many do we have? We have at least 10. Many of them practice books, but now some books like carry your own leash. So I have a conversation with someone, they're a business owner. Again, I represent a lot of doctors and lawyers. Here's this other book that I have. So again, ask this. Once you write a book, it lives. You may need to edit it and revise it from time to time, but it lives and doesn't cost much to print the next one. We're huge fans of the mailman, right? And we're good at it. We email a lot of stuff. Kia Ariane is here. Kia is doing a session uh tomorrow morning about this, and she's going to show you a lot of the things that we use in Ben Glass Law. Again, mailings to different parts of our tribes. Um, online reviews are big. Still, we don't use we don't use any software to get them. All of ours are driven by personal emails and a philosophy inside the firm that says this is important, that says I don't wait to the end of the case to ask somebody for them to go post something about me at social media. And this is here's exactly the conversation I have. So, Kellen, um, you come to the end of the meeting, you know, would you do me a favor? Yeah. I said the thing I want people to know is that that we're easy to talk to, we'll answer your questions, and we'll set a strategy for you. Would you, if I sent you a link to Avo or Google, would you just write something like that? Absolutely. And they go and they usually write something that's much, much richer. So again, it's not because we've automated that, but it's because we've made it authentic. And, you know, our goal is to have so many up there that it just intimidates our local competition from even trying. Uh, the CRM, having a software for us, it's InfusionSoft, that helps to manage this. Again, Colin will be doing a session on this tomorrow, but that's important. It's really hard to do this on Excel spreadsheets. It's really hard to do this from inside any practice management tool. And we produce content and we produce all of our content in-house. So when we get a case result or even hear an interesting story and an initial conversation, we'll run it down to the marketing team and go, here's the story I just heard. Here's what we want to tell. So you've got some big institution taking a really crazy position on something. We don't have to identify the client or even the specifics, but this is a story we want to tell because we want to get more people, maybe, who are involved with this being institution or having the same problem. Having marketing assets in-house who I can run down the hall to discuss this with, just like a newspaper. Like, what are we doing tomorrow? What's the newspaper going to look like tomorrow? That's what we do every day. And we are in the community. Our last thing is sales processes and languages. We listen, Tiffany listens to not all the calls, but a lot of the calls. Um, and we had a bad call the other day. She was, she told me about it after she's already had some counseling, done some counseling and coaching of the folks who were involved. We had three folks on the same, serially on the same call, and none of it was very good. It was really messy. And so I said to Tiff, okay, do you need me to come in and to do the lecture on empathy and how we do this? And they said, Yeah. One of the things I do is I get people to come in to listen to my calls with people. I don't do initial calls, but having discussions. And there's a real art to listening, honoring what someone is saying to you, um, and if and and then responding and making them feel good. If you're not listening to your calls, there's bad stuff happening. So we coach and train on language, on scripts. But if my team doesn't know philosophically what we're trying to get into the office, then it's really hard for them to do that. So those are our assets. What I would challenge you to do, again, is at the end of three days is not necessarily to come up. I like it, I like it. You show me your 15 pages of notes. That's cool, right? But I'd like you to ask yourselves in like in April, what behaviors have I actually changed? What are we actually what am I either doing internally or what are we doing as a team that we weren't doing in early October in 2019? We have that list that we did at the beginning. So this is all important, right? And I want you to work on that. But at the end of the day, if behavior doesn't change, it's all for naught because you just have knowledge, and knowledge is worthless if it's not being put into action into the world. Let me let me tell you about my new book, and I mean I am gonna ask for a favor, the first sale of the weekend. I wrote play left fullback as a response to the lawyer wellness initiatives around the country that I believe are the responses to the fact that the establishment has discovered that lawyers are depressed and not happy. The responses are inadequate. And the response should be you build a better, particularly for solo and small firm lawyers, you build a better business. And so it's a broadsided attack on the establishment, unabashedly, right? In fact, in our mediation today, one of the lawyers who was on some of these committees in Virginia, he picked it up and looked at it and he started to read it, and he goes, Whoa. And then he said, I think you're right. So the book is filled with it's more autobiography uh biographical than anything I've written before. It's a model maybe for your book into your tribe. And it has some answers to it. And the answers are really an expound of what I've talked about here. So here's the deal the book is now available on Amazon. It's become available. And what I would really like is a rush of purchases. So it goes right to the top of the lawyer marketing index. You don't have to do it right here today. Now, when you go to Amazon later on today or on a break, uh, you'll see it says the book will be available in March. Now, I've been promised it's a lot earlier tonight. I'm like, well, shit, I'm gonna pay 22 bucks and get a book available in March. Well, we solve that problem because we asked the publisher, and the publisher has mascot books and they're right right out here. And we have uh today, this is rare, right? The uncorrected proof, not for sale, author's edition of this. There's only, I don't know, 180, 200 that have ever been published in the world. I've given some out. And so if you come to one of my team, or these will be at the front desk that we checked in, say, show us your electronic receipt and say, Hey, I went to Boost Ben's book on Amazon and did a pre-order. Um, we'll give you one of these, and if you track me down with a pen, I'll be happy to sign it for you. Um, and so that's my ask. That's just a little. I think this book is is going to be really, really important. My uh 20-year-old daughter Leah, who is one of the ones who she's graduated high school, really tough life, is learning to be a dog groomer. She read it. And I was surprised. She picked it up and she came back to me. She goes, Daddy, she says, I'm so proud of you. She says, You're really, and you have to, you have to kind of know Leah to understand how big this is, because you are really trying to help these people, lawyers writ large, with their lives. So I think this book is so interesting. And that's not something that would, I would have expected to come from Leah, right? That she doesn't actually read at that level most of the time, anyway. So that was cool. So that would be a big up. If we could get that book to like number one and the lawyer marketing thing today, tomorrow, that's awesome. And we'll have a copy of it for you. So I hope this has been helpful. It is warm. I see you all doing this. So we're gonna, we gotta bang on these books because it's really hot up here under the lights. Don't go away from this without with any of your questions unanswered. We've got a really good assembly. There's a whole, there's a three-ring circus tomorrow. Again, if uh for Diamond and uh mastermind members, I'll be doing the thing. I'll show you some inside baseball on some of the events that we're running at the training center and how we market for the law firm, both how we have used all of these events to help build the tribe and to keep the law firm interesting. So I think that will be cool for you. We're now on a X-minute, how big break, Charlie's high?

SPEAKER_03: 45:22

Yes. So is this okay, yes. So we're gonna hit a 30-minute break. If I can have the four marketer of the year contestants come up here. But please do. So I've had an opportunity to read this book. Obviously, I've read a lot of Ben's writing over the years, and I I know other team members have read this book. I legitimately learned things about Ben that even I didn't know. You're gonna read his full story. He's not one to really brag about this type of stuff, but this is the book. This really is the one that you've got to read. I enjoyed this more than anything that he's ever written. Get this book. We'll get you one of those advanced reader copies, which when you get to see part of the process of publishing a book and everything, just take that to the reception table. But 30-minute break, but most importantly, big round of applause for Ben.

SPEAKER_02: 46:02

Thank you all very much.

SPEAKER_04: 46:04

That's it for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger. Want more tools, strategies, and stories from the trenches? Visit GreatLegalMarketing.com or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn. Keep building boldly. We'll see you next time.