Finding RICHES in Niches | Why Trying to do Everything Will Keep You Poor

Ever felt like a small fish in the vast ocean of legal marketing? We're here to reassure you that finding your unique niche is not only possible but exhilarating! Broadcasting from the sunny state of Florida and the energized atmosphere of the 10 Golden Rules live event, I share an honest confession about the allure of chasing the varied success strategies paraded at conferences. Instead, we'll celebrate what sets each of us apart, finding joy and strength in the practice areas we love. Listen closely as I recount the story of a cost-effective referral program that's punching well above its weight class in returns - and, as promised, I'll let you in on my top conference tip for lawyers before we wrap up.

Then, join Ben and me as we lift the curtain on an exclusive two-day affair at our Fairfax office, designed to supercharge our internal operations. Scheduled for the dog days of summer on August 1st and 2nd, we're on a mission to streamline our workflows and patch up any service leaks, ensuring every client receives nothing short of extraordinary care from first contact to case close. Before we pour more into outbound media marketing, we're tightening the bolts and greasing the gears. Take a peek behind the scenes and glean insights to revolutionize your firm's efficiency and marketing prowess.

Get your tickets to the Great Legal Marketing Summit.

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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everyone, welcome back in to another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs. This is a special travel edition. I am in Florida, fortunate enough to have been asked to speak at my friend Jay Berkowitz's 10 Golden Rules live event this week, and so hanging out here in Florida doing a report from day one of the 10 Golden Rules live event, today's episode is about knowing your lane and being comfortable in it, because one of the things that happens when you go to conferences like this is there are so many ideas and there are so many people executing very well on these ideas that it can be like I should do this and I should do this and I should do this and I suck because I'm not pursuing any of those things. And, oh my God, everybody else is doing something bigger, better, faster and stronger than I am. And the reality is that you are doing something bigger, better, faster and stronger than somebody else, and so if you always only focus on what other people are doing, you will always only be disappointed in yourself. Comparison is the thief of joy. If you stick around to the end of this episode, I'm going to give you my number one conference tip for lawyers. I don't actually get to go to a lot of conferences that I'm not putting on, at least not in the legal space. This has been a unique experience for me and I'm going to dive into what I learned on day one right after the break. The number one takeaway that I have from day one of this conference is really like a meta takeaway, and I don't mean meta in terms of Facebook.

Speaker 1: 1:42

The thing is that there are riches and niches, and that goes beyond picking your area of practice. It goes beyond becoming the subject matter expert in whatever your subject matter is right. It's not just like personal injury or criminal defense or family law, and it's not even hey, I do criminal defense for DUI or I do family law, but only for women. That's not really the kind of niches that I'm talking about. While that is important, the thing that I'm learning more and more is that there's also a niche in how do you acquire your clients. So you might be a big time TV advertiser and have an enormous monthly or annual TV spend. You might be the lawyer that started early on in TikTok making videos and you have a huge following because of that and you get some referral cases because of that. You might be the one who's got the great Instagram account or the great YouTube account, like my friend, adam Rawson, with all of these police officer acting bad videos, and Adam can attribute six figures of cases per year back to his YouTube channel, which is doing awesome, and it's easy to come to conferences like this and go.

Speaker 1: 2:46

I should do that. I should do that. I should do that. I should do that Because the people who are presenting on the stage are light years beyond where the people in the audience are, and that's for good reason. Right, you shouldn't be on the stage if you're presenting stuff that the audience already knows.

Speaker 1: 3:00

But the most important thing about picking the thing that it is that you're going to do next, when you're advertising your law firm or where you're creating your own personal brand, is, like what do I actually enjoy doing? Because you can have the greatest YouTube strategy in the world, but if you don't enjoy sitting down in front of a camera and shooting YouTube videos, you're not going to go anywhere with that strategy, because you will shoot six videos, they will all be bad, none of them will get any views and you will conclude that this doesn't work. Same thing is true of podcasting, same thing is true of having a one-on-one relationships and generating referrals from those things Like you are always bad at the beginning of whatever you start doing, and it's only through trial and error and going to conferences and learning the little hacks to get you ahead and make your trial and error a little bit better the next time. And it's through the survival bias of having the grit and the tenacity to produce the hundredth video that doesn't get any views because the hundred and fiftieth one might get some broad distribution as you learn. Okay, this hook is better, this storytelling is better.

Speaker 1: 4:05

And then, by the way, after you get 150 videos and you finally get some distribution, now you've got to figure out what's the right call to action to turn that distribution into money for my law firm, which is not to say that you shouldn't experiment with all of this stuff, because you should. If you're trying to figure out what you like doing and what actually works, you should have a TikTok account, you should have a YouTube channel, you should have an Instagram account. You should be populating those things and seeing if you get traction. Number one, see if you like producing it. Number two, and see if you can figure out how to do it a little bit better each and every time you produce something. But before you build out a massive protocol and a procedure for here's how we're going to do it in my firm, shoot a couple of videos. Just test before you start making the plan, because you have to figure out do I actually enjoy doing this?

Speaker 1: 4:53

And the reason I'm thinking about this and the reason I'm making this podcast about knowing your lane and being comfortable in it is because I'm presenting tomorrow on this referrals from medical doctors program that we've been running in our law firm and I'm sitting there today watching these people talk about. We spend $25,000 a month on OTT and we have a million dollar commercial budget annually going. Oh, I don't know, maybe my thing is a little bit small potatoes, but the average cost to acquire a case is $3,500. I've acquired three cases on a $600 marketing spend. Now I can't do that at scale, but I can slowly build the number of referrers that I have and end up with almost an infinite ROI. Right, if I spend $600 to acquire 10 referral sources and each of them sends me one case a month, at a certain point that becomes an almost infinite ROI. So I'm competing in this space. That is below the million dollar a year advertising budget space, but just above the people that are doing nothing.

Speaker 1: 6:00

And you probably are in a space in your own law firm where you are somewhere between the really big spenders who are not, by the way who are complaining about being outspent by Morgan and Morgan. Everybody in the entire legal practice everywhere is complaining about being outspent by Morgan and Morgan. Everybody in the entire legal practice everywhere is complaining about being outspent by Morgan Morgan. Why? Because they have more money than God and because they have the ability to come up with all of these creatives, to shoot everything that they want and to run all of the cases through the funnel that they want. Now, having taken at least three cases off of the Northern Virginia Morgan Morgan office this year, I can tell you their process for mid-size to small-size cases is not very good. They do not run these cases very well probably because they're operating with big Florida-based procedures for Virginia cases, and that's what happens when you get up to scale.

Speaker 1: 6:50

And so the lesson for the solo and the small law firm owner is we have these abilities, these places, to pick and choose our battles and to win fights on being the local resource, which is what I'm going to be talking about tomorrow. I know that in my firm because we don't spend a whole lot of money on digital. 60% of our cases and 80% of our money comes from referrals from real life human beings, and so the challenge for me, as I come to conferences like this, is to remember that and to remember that my next dollar and my next hour is probably not spent trying to learn that stuff, but trying to get a little bit better and take one more step forward with the things that I'm doing. And so I have a page of takeaways. Just from day one. I've got maybe eight to nine to 10 takeaways, and a number of those tools, or a number of those takeaways, are tools. They're AI tools that seem to be a little bit better than what we're using right now, and here's the thing is that I don't have to be the one that figures that out.

Speaker 1: 7:44

So I sent it to the people on our team who are responsible for using those tools and said, hey, is this thing that I heard about at a conference any better than the one that we're using right now? Because here's what happens with a lot of conferences when lawyers don't bring their staff or don't bring their number two and I didn't bring any staff or number two or any teammates to this conference is that we can come back with ideas and give our team whiplash, because we hear an idea in a area where we are not maybe subject matter experts, and we go this would be a really cool marketing idea. So we give it to our marketing director, who's highly paid, who we've trusted to run the marketing, and we say run with this, without ever asking, hey, is this actually a better widget than the one that we're using right now? Is this a better tool? Will this get us better results than the one that we are using right now? And often without having a real conversation about what the better widgets and tools and results. What does that even mean? Because that's how you can get down the rabbit hole of shit. We didn't get very many visitors to our website last month, or we got a ton of visitors to our website, but we didn't track the thing that really matters, which is how many cases did we sign up? And so maintaining those conversations with your team and trusting your team with what's the tool that's going to get us to the next level based on here's the next level that I want to get to is just so critically important and it's a piece as I was talking to a couple of the marketing directors who were here without lawyers. It's a piece that I think is missing in many law firms they don't get direction from us.

Speaker 1: 9:12

One of the things that we were observing just at our table is that a lot of lawyers there's a lot of lawyers like me, we have a side hustle, you got a virtual staffing company somewhere, you have a mastermind group like we do. You have a digital production marketing group somewhere, and somebody made the comment at our table they're like most of these lawyers that aren't practicing law anymore, and I think that's true to a large extent. And again, as you are, you know the quote average lawyer running a practice like the great legal marketing avatar, right, solo small law firm owner somewhere between three and 10 employees at least when you're coming into the great Legal Marketing channel. So we're between three and 10 employees, usually doing less than a million dollars in revenue with a family at home and trying to solve for how do I support all these people, how do I make more money than I did last year and how do I still get home to coach my kids' baseball teams on time, and it's easy to get distracted and I do it too by the people who are in the front of the room and just how large of a scale they seem to be playing on.

Speaker 1: 10:19

And this is back to compare yourself to yourself two years ago and the you that you want to be two years from now. And this is one of the things that we are excellent at at Great Legal Marketing is having a conversation with you about where are you right now, where do you want to be, and what is the best tool or resource or person to connect you with that's going to get you one step closer to that, rather than chasing down a rabbit hole of getting a whole bunch of website visitors, but it doesn't convert into clients. Rather of getting a whole bunch of website visitors, but it doesn't convert into clients. Rather than having a whole bunch of qualified leads coming through the funnel, but you have a shitty intake team and all of those leads drop out the bottom half of the bucket. And this is why I think it's so critically important for lawyers to even if it's not great legal marketing to have your own community of people where you can bring these problems. You can show them your numbers, as many of the hero and icon members were doing in our April mastermind. Like here's the numbers Does this look right? Does this profit margin look okay? Am I spending too much money on rent?

Speaker 1: 11:23

It is so important that you be able to share that with the community and not just watch the superstars who are presenting from stage, and get honest feedback on where you are, where you're going, and whether the next thing you're considering doing whether it's an AI subscription, dancing on TikTok, youtube shorts or paid advertising somewhere whether that's actually going to get you any closer to where you want to go. So, along those lines, I want to put another plug in here for the Great Legal Marketing Summit, which is coming up in October in Arizona. We will have all-stars talking to you from stage, but we, I think, do a very good job of facilitating group discussions at your table and we will do a good job of finding somebody who's a little bit ahead of you and a little bit behind you if it's your first time there that you can talk to, so that you do not walk out feeling completely overwhelmed and do not walk home giving your team whiplash. Encourage you, if you are coming to the Great Legal Marketing Summit to bring your team, bring a team member, bring somebody else who can listen to and translate some of the ideas back to all of the other people in the office.

Speaker 1: 12:34

The other thing to be on the lookout for Ben and I are going to put together a two-day event in our office in Fairfax, virginia, in August. It's going to be August 1st and 2nd. The focus of that event is coming into shape now is like how can we fix all of the leaky holes in our bucket right Before we spend any more money on outbound media marketing? How can we make sure that we are doing absolutely everything right when somebody picks up the phone and calls us with their problem? To make sure that they sign with us and make sure that we are taking care of them through the rest of their case. So that's it for today's episode. Guys. I'm gonna put the links to the Greatly