Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
"Your Law Firm’s Best Marketing Strategy? Throw a Damn Party” | Jason Epstein
Think your next client is coming from a Google ad? Maybe. But what if they came from your backyard barbecue instead?
In this episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, I’m talking with Jason Epstein, a Seattle personal injury lawyer who’s built a thriving practice by doing something most lawyers would never even consider—throwing parties.
Jason isn’t chasing cases. He’s attracting them by building real connections, hosting community events, and giving people a reason to remember him before they ever need a lawyer.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
🔥 Why your brand should repel as much as it attracts—because trying to be for everyone means you’re for no one.
🔥 How a simple barbecue landed Jason real cases—without a single hard sell.
🔥 The secret to building a “tribe” of loyal clients—even when you don’t take their case.
But we’re not just talking business. Jason also shares how, at 51 years old, he got into the best shape of his life, why he cut out sugar, and how hormone therapy gave him the energy to run his practice and stay at the top of his game.
This episode is packed with game-changing strategies for lawyers who want to stop grinding and start attracting. Ready to make your firm unforgettable? Hit play now.
Want to connect with Jason?
📍 Website: www.premierlawgroup.com
🔗 LinkedIn: Jason Epstein
📱 TikTok: @PremierLawGroup
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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.
Want to connect with Brian?
Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn
We reached out to apartment buildings that were close to us, that were kind of like big apartment buildings, and said you know, look, we'll pay for everything.
Speaker 1:All you have to do is advertise it to your tenants that you know, on Saturday, whatever, premier Law Group is going to have a barbecue here from noon to three and everybody's invited and all the food is free and all the drinks are free and everything. And so we set up a booth where we give away some of our information products and also our VIP program, which we can talk about the zombie idea. And then we invited some other people who are kind of partners in other industries. So, hey, do you want to set up a booth? There's going to be these residents coming through and they would offset my cost for the barbecue for doing that. They'd have to go by me at the table collecting names and emails and giving you know tchotchis or some other sort of valuable thing away to get people to give me that information, and then they become part of our tribe and, interestingly, we had three direct cases that we signed up.
Speaker 2:Hey, what's up my friends? Welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the podcast for lawyers who refuse to live life on autopilot and are building a practice on their terms. Most lawyers spend thousands on marketing, seo, google ads, billboards Jason Epstein, he throws a barbecue. Yeah, you heard that right. While other law firms are chasing leads, jason is building a community, one burger at a time. And here's the kicker it's working. Clients come to him because they already trust him. Jason isn't your typical lawyer. He doesn't wear the three piece suit. He doesn't sugarcoat things. He's built his firm by being 100% himself and by making sure the people who need him know exactly where to find him. In this episode, jason shares how he turned his law firm into a referral machine, why authenticity wins over boring legal branding, how a simple party can bring in real cases and why treating everyone like a VIP, even if they don't hire you, will make you the lawyer. Forget chasing clients. It's time to attract them. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3:Hello everybody, welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live life of their own design. And the guy who I know, who is exceptional at this and exceptional, really, about not giving a shit what anybody else thinks or says uh, is jason epstein, my friend from seattle, washington.
Speaker 1:so, jason, welcome to the show thank you very much and uh, it is true that I try to not give much of a shit, but still, occasionally gifts are given.
Speaker 3:It's not that often, I'll tell you my my first memory of you, uh, and I met you at a Great League of Marketing mastermind in 2009 or 10, maybe because I was a recent law graduate and I sat next to you and you looked at me and you said you're not the owner, you're not the partner. Where the fuck is the guy whose business you're representing? Why are you here learning? And he is not? And that has stuck with me now for 15 years. So thank you for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, actually it's funny because I remember that really well. I remember I'll let you, you know, a peek behind the curtain 15 years later is my thought process at that time was I know that one day Brian is going to wind up being part of Ben's firm and take everything over at some point. And so, like I, you know, that was my thought process way back, before you were ready to be there and before Ben was ready to have you there and you needed to grow and do some stuff on your own. I get it, it made perfect sense. But you know. So I was just like, hey, let's just.
Speaker 1:I'm like, when we negotiate with insurance adjusters, like I know where this is going to end up and you know where this is going to end up, so why are we doing all this stuff in the meantime? Yeah, in your case, I mean, it made sense. You had some, you had some learning and growing to do and you found your way back, which is great, and that's one of the reasons I love the Ben and Brian glass story so much is because you kind of endeavor and I think it's.
Speaker 3:It's great. Plus, you're both such great guys Like you're two, two guys that I think are just solid, solid people out there doing right.
Speaker 1:So um well, that's the episode. Thank you very much. I'm going to get into the negatives in a second. Your bench press is weak. Your form on your cleans is bad but give me your origin story.
Speaker 3:So you're Seattle Washington car crash lawyer and what else man? Yeah, so you're a Seattle Washington car crash lawyer and what else man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, to kind of tell you why I'm so jealous of you and your dad in that way is because my dad was a surgeon and he was an OBGYN. And I remember, you know, in high school and early in college, you know, when I'm starting to make some decisions about what I'm going to do with my life, I was always pragmatic. It was never like what's my passion. I was. It was never kind of that conversation. It was like, hey, what can I do that's going to give me the lifestyle that I want to live in the way that I want to live and um, and kind of you know, reverse engineering it from that standpoint in retrospect, could I? If I could go back and do it all again, I would have gone to med school and become a surgeon and taken over my dad's practice Interesting Sorry, my light goes off, so yeah. So there's, there's some jealousy that you found your way to that in the law in a way that I didn't find my way to it in medicine. But you know, ultimately my find my way to it in medicine.
Speaker 1:But you know, ultimately my story is that I was an underachiever all throughout my education. You know my educational career through high school, college I didn't really try that hard, I didn't really care, I wasn't really motivated. And I got to a point where I was starting to be slowly introduced to the real world and going, getting jobs post having a bachelor's degree and didn't really like what was out there for me at that point. So I was like, well, I gotta do something else. And at that point my choices, uh uh, were pretty limited because I didn't have the prerequisites to, you know, try to get into medical school. My undergraduate degree was in philosophy. So I was like, well, I could go, try and get an MBA or I could go to law school. And at that point law school made more sense for me. And fortunately, in law school things kind of clicked and I got it and I did much better academically, kind of understood how it was supposed to go, and the rest is history.
Speaker 1:As far as becoming a lawyer, I did both while I was in law school and then after law school. My first two jobs were with personal injury attorneys, and so I knew very, very quickly that that was the only thing I wanted to do in the law, because I didn't want to trade my hours for money. I didn't want the two concepts to be bound like that, and so in a contingency world, you know, obviously our time isn't down to our income, so I like that a lot more than charging someone $300 an hour or $400 an hour or whatever. And yeah, I mean, I did kind of a who's who of playing with personal injury firms in the area and then, after being in practice for about seven, eight years, I joined up with Patrick Premier Law Group and we've been doing our best to grow, claw, fight and scratch in this competitive landscape to carve out a niche.
Speaker 3:I worked in a general practice firm for about six months and I could never wrap my head around the hourly billing thing, right, because if you have the great idea, that solves the case, but it only took you 15 minutes, it feels like you should be compensated more highly than you know. Dicking around in the file for 10 hours chasing loose ends that actually don't matter all that much. So I'm with you on the finding the practice area where the game becomes. How many can we do, how large can we make them and how quickly can we get them through our system? But what's interesting to me is you and your practice have not been chosen to kind of delegate and elevate out of the small or even no dollar things, because virtually like every new client who calls your office for almost any problem ends up speaking with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right. So we, you know, I kind of tried to look at the client experiences or like what are the really important touch points that somebody, a member of the public, is going to have when they're, you know, having a legal problem? And most of the people that wind up calling us for some reason we're not able to help for one reason or another. It's not the type of case we handle. You know, there's something about it that's not a good fit, but in all likelihood that's going to be one of the few opportunities that they're going to have to speak to somebody that you know maybe has an understanding of how to help them or how to solve their problem and can help point them in a better direction than they're pointed in now, and do it even if it doesn't benefit us at all. And so I have made the decision that every time somebody calls our office they're going to talk to a lawyer. Period, and the barrier to that is really low.
Speaker 1:What we do is we have them, we collect a teeny bit of information from our intake person that you know collects a name, address, phone number, that kind of stuff, and then, without knowing much else about what's going on, we get them straight through to an occurrence. Now, hopefully at that point, like our website and the way they found us has done a pretty good job of pre-qualifying them, but the reality is it probably hasn't. You know, like people call it weird stuff that we don't do a landlord-tenant issue. You know like, and I'm like, how did you get to us for that? But I want to make sure that everybody that calls, everybody that's taking the time out of their day to, you know, find my business and call us, is going to get world-class customer service.
Speaker 1:And so I try to. I try to take all those new client calls personally. I mean, if I don't, it's one of our other attorneys and the whole goal is put them in a better spot than they were in when they called us. Whether or not that's, you know us helping them or you know something else. And so I will give people, you know, 20, 30, 40 minutes of time when I know we're not going to take the case, because I want them to have a positive interaction with not just the legal profession but with us specifically, so that you know, when they do wind up with something that's in our wheelhouse, they're going to remember the interaction they had with us Like, oh, that guy spent all that time with me and couldn't even take my case and really help me out.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of the impetus for that model and then I know that you all do this well, or I'm hoping that you all do this well as I set this question up. But after somebody comes through your system and they're in your system and they've had a personal interaction with you, how do you make sure that they remember who they talked to three months, 12 months, two years later, when they actually have a problem that Premier Law Group can't solve?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we definitely have our. You know I'm going to steal your thing. We have our tribe and so you know we have our list and whether it's a physical mailing list or whether it's an email list or whether it's a text list, you know we have different kind of segmented lists that people will go into, and so we do try to, you know, continue to touch people that talk to us in some way, so that they'll remember what we do and and we'll be, we'll be present for them. We also, on those interactions where we have, like a good interaction with somebody that you know, even though it's a case we can't take, we do, you know, encourage them to leave reviews, and so a lot of times, you know, we'll still show up in their review feed because they've left us a review, and so you know that's helpful as well.
Speaker 3:I didn't think about it like that. About the review feed, I mean we'll do the same thing, right, can you? Even if we can't help you? If my Hintze team has been nice to you, can you leave a review mentioning how nice they were right? But I hadn't thought about it, as that still is in their feed and I'm sure there's still some Google pixel or tracking that the next time they go looking for an injury lawyer in the area, it's showing them the one that they've already five-star recommended.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I don't know if there's science behind that either, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Speaker 3:Let me talk to you also about herd building, because you guys, you know you do, I think, more neighborhood in the market outside of your office stuff than most lawyers, and most lawyers will rely on ranking highly on Google, lsas, ppc, that kind of stuff. But you started something recently where you're going out and grilling burgers for the apartment complexes near your office. Right, yeah, you're not actually doing that, somebody else is doing the grilling because you're not a very good cook.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of my other attorneys is doing that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so tell me about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a fun thing. We started last year. So you know, I've got a small local mastermind group that I put together and one of the other members that was in a completely unrelated business was talking about how this is something they do where they go to apartment complexes and they will offer to feed everybody at the apartment complex to put on like a barbecue. You know, feed everybody at the apartment complex to put on like a barbecue, and you know, it gives them a chance to, you know, meet people and they set up a little booth and they, you know, will offer some chaski or whatever. And so I was like that's a great idea. So we seamlessly co-opted it and we reached out to apartment buildings that were close to us, that were kind of like big apartment buildings where they had, you know, a number of residents and said, you know, look, we'll pay for everything. All you have to do is advertise it to your tenants that, you know, on Saturday, whatever, premier Law Group is going to have a barbecue here from noon to three and everybody's invited and all the food is free and all the drinks are free and everything.
Speaker 1:And so we set up a booth where we give away some of our information products and also our VIP program, which we can talk about, the zombie idea and then we invited some other people who are you know kind of partners in other industries so not other lawyers, but like I have, like a guy that sells mortgages and you know some other unrelated things said hey, do you want to set up a booth?
Speaker 1:There's going to be these residents coming through and they would offset my cost for for the barbecue for doing that. And then, yeah, we would go to Costco and stock up and then bring my staff it would take about four or five of us and we would set up and grill and assemble the plates and the stations and stuff for everybody. And in the meantime, while they're all shuffling through getting their food which is obviously what they're for and care about they'd have to go by me at the table collecting names and emails and giving you know tchotchkes or some other sort of valuable thing away to get the people to give me that information and then they become part of our tribe. And, interestingly, we actually through those things. Last summer we had three direct cases that we signed up. It was not my intent, but somebody coming through and being like, oh yeah, I was just in a whatever accident and I was like hey, we do that.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's very direct. So it's not even that somebody came and then called you later Like stop by my Ask Me Anything booth and tell me about your car crash case.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 3:Amazing.
Speaker 1:And actually it's funny. You say that because I Is there something you've always wanted to ask a lawyer but didn't want to pay $350 an hour to find out. You know I'm that guy, what's the question? And so that was my pitch and that's also my pitch for our Premier Law Group VIP program, which basically they give us their name and email I try to make it a very low barrier and phone number and we give them this entry into our VIP program, which comes with a card and essentially the tangible benefits are we'll do free notary services for them.
Speaker 1:It does come with a lost key tag which is uh, that's that zombie idea from DLM circuit. But you know, the other stuff that's in that thing is like look, I will give you a free consultation on any legal issue you've got for 30 minutes, Like it doesn't matter what it is. So if you've always wished that you had that lawyer in the family that you could just call and ask your stupid lawyer question to, now you do. I'm the guy and I'm happy to talk to you about anything at all for 30 minutes, and so people sign up for it.
Speaker 3:Have you ever gotten the call about the lost keys?
Speaker 1:we've had two sets of lost keys returned to us. Nobody has ever called saying I lost my keys, right, no, I guess that, yeah, yeah, that's backwards, but you've had.
Speaker 3:You've had them returned to you. And so for if you're not familiar, this is an old, I guess von the kirby out in san francisco who was running this first and then brought it to the Great Link Marketing Mastermind. We ripped it off, you ripped it off. It was a little plastic tag that went on your key chain with a serial number for your keys and then, if please call this, and then the idea was the law firm would track by serial number, like whose keys that were. So if you called me and you said I found key 189764C, I would know that it was Jason's set of keys and we could get them back to Jason.
Speaker 3:And in you know 20 years of running that program. I think we got one call about it, you've gotten two, but but what that does is it puts your phone number on the keys of the person who's walking around and might be in a car crash. So this this is like that was an old school one. The other old school client acquisition one was the the glove box, what to do after a car crash and disposable cameras. You ever do that one?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, we did that. So we actually just recently re-upped our glove box bag where it's an important document envelope basically, and so it's meant to put your registration and your proof of insurance and stuff in there. And then it does have some branded information on the back like here's what to do in case of an accident. Here's what to do in case of an accident. So we have to just do that again. I don't know. Six months ago printed a bunch of them Because people like them and it's valuable and you know, like not everybody knows what to do with their documents and it's kind of a I think that's a little bit of a sore spot everybody's got. It's like I have to put these things in my glove box, but you know it's just messy. We did experiment with the camera for a minute, you know, but again technology kind of overtook that one pretty quickly. Now we've all got better cameras on our phones than anything else.
Speaker 3:But what I love about what you're doing with your little whiteboard sign and with the VIP program is you're lowering the barrier of emotional tax or difficulty of talking to a lawyer. You're making lawyers less scary, right, and what we don't appreciate as lawyers is how fearful somebody is when they have a legal problem to pick up the phone and call you, and so often they wait too late. Maybe not always the case in a car crash incident, but like estate planning and medical directives and all that stuff, you wait until it's too late because lawyers are scary and lawyers cost a lot of money. And by offering these kind of low barrier, easy trust building means that communicate with the general public you have, I'm sure, attracted more clients than a lawyer who's not doing this.
Speaker 1:I mean, ultimately, you know, I think, what, um, one of the things I learned uh, you know, know, early on in my in my marketing education journey and certainly it's something that, um, that you know is reiterated again and again and again when you're, when you're part of a group like glm is that you're not going to be the best fit for everyone all the time, and so you know it's more, it's just as important to find the people who love you and turn off the people that don't like you.
Speaker 1:You know, and so my message is always really clear Like you know, I'm I don't wear suits anymore, unless I the last time I wore a suit was at my mom's funeral. I mean so, like you know, and I'm not, you know, I'm not the super stodgy, serious lawyer, and if you call me for a consultation, you're probably going to hear the F-bomb three or four times in the course of normal conversations. It's the same way I talk at home. It's the same way I talk everywhere. So being myself and putting that out there and making that kind of the personality of the firm attracts the people that are going to respond well to that sort of messaging and positioning and repels the people that decided they want someone in a three-piece suit and to be serious and stodgy, and I wouldn't work well with those people anyway. So it all worked well together.
Speaker 3:Let me ask you, then, about the decision to put suit and tie Jason front and center on the website.
Speaker 1:Good question. It's not my struggle with, actually, because I think there is a minimum level of competency and professionalism that somebody like a lawyer or a doctor has to have. And so it shows you, based on the website, that I can clean up, Okay, and I can put on a suit. It's not my preference, but it kind of reminds me, you know, like if you had to have, like you know, some sort of surgery thing that you know wasn't critical Like my wife just had carpal tunnel surgery, you know and so when she goes in, you know we were to meet with the doctor and he was, like you know, unkempt and you know, like needed I was three months too late for a haircut and had you know crap under his fingernails you know there'd be like little cues where you'd be like, hey, I don't know if I want this guy to do this surgery.
Speaker 1:He might be the world's best surgeon, but there are just some visual cues that are amiss, and so I think you still have to show hey, I can be that guy and I can be. It's just not, it's a costume, it's not how I live every day.
Speaker 3:The people who are finding you on the website. It's a primary interaction with you, the people who have found you and who are on your list because they've been to one of your community events, because they were referred to somebody, referred to you by somebody who's in one of your local masterminds. They may only be coming to your website just kind of to check you and make sure that you are a normal human being, and then they find you in this suit. So, yeah, okay, now I can trust them and now I can give them a call. And then, once you've got them on the phone, you are great at building rapport and at moving people towards a sale. If there's somebody that you can help, yeah, I mean, I hope so.
Speaker 1:I think I'm good at that and I think a lot of the times, probably very similar to you and most of the people who are listening.
Speaker 1:I mean, although it is a sales process, it's like you know, I just want to help the people that we can help, you know. And so, yeah, there's certainly like look, I'm not doing this out of altruism, I like to make money, but you know, what we do is valuable and without us, people really do get taken advantage of. One of the things that that you know, Ben has always preached that I love about him is like, look, you shouldn't be a phone of wanting to do well, because you should know that you do a good job for people and you want people to have a good job for them, and so they could hire me, because if they don't hire me, they're going to hire somebody that might know what they're doing, and so I hung on intake and sales for a long time time and I do less of it now, but I will jump on in certain calls, and the ones that I'll jump on are the very large cases and the fringe ones.
Speaker 3:right, because in the fringe ones there's so much like if I could just ask the right question either make this a case or not make this a case or if I could figure out whether the other thing that I think about those fringe cases is either this is the most interesting problem in the world or you're nuts and most of what you've told my team is a lie. Right, and I think I'm really good and I suspect you think you're really good at figuring out which of those things is true, at figuring out which of those things is true. So for a long time I was taking almost every new client call because I think I'm really really good at moving you up, moving you out or helping you make a decision about whether we're right for you or not.
Speaker 1:I think when you're BGL or when you're're pld. I think that there's a level of that that you can have and that you can do and you know you can find that makes you comfortable. I'm thinking just with it. I know I told you um off the podcast. I went to the um to the last crisp event. According to them, it's going to be the last one I go to because I'm not going to be a member and, as I said, the last time they're inviting non-members I thought this one was only from okay, they said that last year also, right, but um, but then he invited me anyways and I was like sure, yeah, I'll see what he's doing.
Speaker 1:So I went um and they had, uh, gary falkowitz on stage, for actually, and I know gary and them partnered on some sort of ai product where it answered, um the stuff. It was not a hard pitch for their product, but what it was. He was saying like kind of the laws of intake, and his thing was like look, you have to get somebody to sign the retainer agreement within like X minutes of the first call, and if they don't do it, then you fail, you've lost, and then sort all that shit out later. You know like, whether or not it's the case you want sort it out later. And I agree with where I think you're saying. I think that's a really bad way to go, unless you're doing so much volume that you just have to do it that way, which I don't love either, because I think that nothing makes someone more angry than when you say you can help them and then you withdraw from representing them, and so I will go to great lengths to avoid that.
Speaker 3:I just had somebody tell me you know. So I've expressed a lot of learning, I guess. Or, surprise, expressed a lot of surprise in the evolution of the car crash victim mentality when they're hiring a lawyer. Right, I used to think that if you wouldn't come into the office and meet with me, there was no way you were going to listen to me at the end of the case when I was telling you your case is worth, you know, $90,000 or $100,000, right, covid proved that to be a lie. Like I can conduct that conversation over the phone. I offered Zoom for a long time. Turned out nobody wanted to Zoom, they just wanted to do phone calls.
Speaker 3:And then we started sending digital retainers and it's really really, really sped up because, you know, gajillum was kind of built on let's educate people and let's send them stuff before they talk to an adjuster and before they call any lawyer, like with a really long tail between that request and signing and that is compressed. And so I was talking to somebody recently and he's like, well, imagine what would happen to your conversion ratio if you sent people the retainer agreement by text while they were still on the phone. I got them to sign while you're still on the phone, like as a consumer. There's no way I would be signing anything while I'm still on the phone, but I'm sure there are classes of people that do that. It must be working.
Speaker 3:But I'm with you on you know you can't take every case and then decide what you need to dump four days later because you've robbed that person of an opportunity to work with a lawyer who actually wanted to solve their problem. And the way that most law firms dump clients is not actually telling them why their case isn't a case. It's just saying it's not for us and you haven't helped that person. But I have identified for our team. You know the 80% like this is the 80% that you are empowered to sign because we know we can help them right 10% on either side. You come and ask the questions about it, but this is the box that I know you can take and run with, and so I think that philosophy of intake is one that, for me, has really evolved from. Everybody needs to talk to a lawyer and hear all about the process and get educated on what we can do for them and how we can help them. To like no, most people who are calling your law firm. They just want a lawyer to solve for them.
Speaker 1:I don't disagree. I mean, I don't think that there's anything like uniquely special about me and that I'm somehow, you know, going to be able to soothe somebody that you know is unsoothable or something like that. I mean, I think most people do just want their problem solved. So I completely agree with you. I just think that you know, kind of getting back to you know another one of the things I know you're really good at what do you want your life to be like? You're designing your perfect life, your perfect law firm job. What are you going to do when you're in the firm? Okay, so we both know that our goal is not to work in our office a lot Like you know, if we could design our perfect lives, we would have enough money that we didn't have to come into work every day, and it was something we could do if we wanted to.
Speaker 1:If I, if I, want to come to work, what? What is it that I would want to do? And what I would want to do is bullshit with people, answer their stupid questions, deal with the incoming phone calls. I don't want to work on cases Like that's not where I get my energy anymore. That's that's you know I don't like I, after litigating for as long as I have, I hate the process. I think it's broken. I don't like the adversarial nature of what we do, and I'm more than happy to let people who in my office, who have a better temperament to do that, do it, because I take it all too personally, and so that is actually the part of the job I still like doing is fielding these calls from people that don't know what they need or don't know what they don't need, and get them, you know, strategize with them and get them pointed in the right direction. Hopefully at my firm, you know that's the idea, but if it's not.
Speaker 1:I still feel good at the end of the day when I'm talking to my you know my kids, like, hey, I helped this person today. Right, you know, I helped that other person today. So I still feel good about what I do, what I'm putting back out into the world, and it's not something I dread doing every day as a core component of my job.
Speaker 3:So I like that and I like you know. The overarching theme there is you can construct the law firm in any way that you want to construct it. You can be the firm that generates tons and tons of internet leads and you sign everybody and you figure out what's on the other end of the rainbow when you get there. Or you can be the firm like yours and like ours, which is like hey, we only want to be for a select group of people. What we want to offer is an elite customer service experience where everybody who comes into contact with us is better off. For that, I do think that it's harder to launch that second firm from scratch, right, because you have. There has to be money coming in, and, and, and I think I certainly have felt more like oh, here's the things that I would like to be able to do now that I have more financial security than I did 10 years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're not wrong. But the other side of that is that that other type of firm where you know like hey look, I'm just signing everybody up and let God sort it out later, that's a, you know, a lead generation based firm which requires the most capital, because either you're paying for leads on, you're paying for TV advertising, you're paying for billboards, you know. So I would argue actually that that's a more costly endeavor to be the guys that sign everybody up. Sure, now, you know, when you're running that kind of volume, having the efficiency of scale of like, does it make sense for John Morgan to be screening personal injury calls? You know, intake? No, because he's doing other stuff. But I'm not John Morgan, I'm not there.
Speaker 1:So it's fine, it makes sense for me and I and I like doing it. All right. What else do you want to talk about? I'll tell you. I'll get. I'll get personal with you. This is. I don't think I've talked about this publicly, but because of DLM I am actually in the best state I've been in, probably ever in my life, at 51 years old.
Speaker 1:So there are a number of people in our core group who are fitness enthusiasts and I don't think there's anything unique about high performing individuals caring about the fitness. I think you know people that I you know are my peers, that I that I look up to or that I admire in some ways, and so you know I was always in a position where I've always been very physically active and so you know I was always in a position where I've always been very physically active but really didn't get the last kind of 15 or 20 pounds to go away. And I was walking around at like maybe 590 pounds and I'm like 5'6" right and so, like when you do my BMI 5'6", 5'7" you do my BMI I would come back as obese but meanwhile, like I had muscle. So I wasn't you know like, but I had visceral fat where it was kind of pushing my gut out from behind a little bit and, you know, didn't have the best body. But two things happened Somebody I think it was Scott Snelling pointed me to a book called the Obesity Code, which was about, and the Di diabetes code. It's two books that this doctor in Canada wrote, jason Fung, and they pointed me to a type of intermittent fasting where you essentially cut out processed refined carbohydrates, and I did it for a while, lost 20 pounds and was able to stop the intermittent fasting and maintain the weight loss, all essentially by cutting out bread and rice. Like I got rid of flour, I got rid of rice, I got rid of, you know, any refined carbohydrates. I just I don't eat anymore and I'm, you know, hovering right around 170 pounds and, you know, lower body fat percentage at 51 years old than I've ever had, ever had.
Speaker 1:The kicker was, uh, another member who we had a meeting and everybody was like we don't see him that that often. You know who it is and like, bro, you look great, like you physically look great. And and he said at one of our dinners, like yeah, I've been doing testosterone replacement therapy for like a year and I feel great. I'm like, well, if it's okay for him and he's smart and I like him, I'm like give it a shot. So I think it's been about maybe nine months or a year. I can't speak enough to how young I feel when I'm doing physical activity. So, like when I'm in the gym lifting, I feel like I'm 30 years old, I still get sore and, you know, I still have the you know, but, like, while I'm doing the thing, I feel really able to do the thing in a way that I hadn't for a long time. So you know, that's at 51 years old. I don't know what that's going to look like into my 70s.
Speaker 3:Well, I think those things speak to the importance of hanging out with people that are always trying new things, things trying to learn new things and be better versions of themselves. Right, I mean, it could be any number of groups that you were hanging out in and that, because fitness certainly isn't a focus of glm, but you find in these circles of high achievers this drive to learn more and to do more and to be more, and so good for you for figuring that I. I remember you were. You were eating like every other day at one point, weren't you?
Speaker 1:yeah, so what? No, no, that was not one but I was.
Speaker 1:I was getting near, like near, type 2 diabetes, like you know, borderline. My blood sugar numbers were weird, and so I just needed to do something to get that under control. And I did a lot of research and like, yeah, I could go on you know medication and stuff. But yeah, there's just fancy to reset your body, like you know, because I've got this unhealthy american diet that you know I've been eating for, you know, 50 years, and so like, how do we, how do we, you know, kind of reset our bodies, and so that the diabetes code was a great book and it really helped with that and my blood work looks great and stuff.
Speaker 1:But here's my challenge for you, brian I have a, I have this kid that works for me. That's in the national guard. He's a second lieutenant in the in the army national guard and he's talking to me about, like, his fitness stuff. He's like, oh, I do this and I do this and you couldn't keep up with me, old man. And so I challenge him. I'm like, look, come do my workout with me one day. Just come do it and see if you can do what I do.
Speaker 1:And so I do as part of my strength training I do five sets of five pull-ups wearing a 50-pound weight vest. Oh, I can do that, yeah, so I'm pretty proud of that, that I can do that. And actually on the fifth set I actually do six reps just to really burn it out, and I can't figure out a way to get a heavier weight vest than 50. Nobody makes it because they're like what are you an idiot? Yeah, like, hold the weight between your feet. Yeah, you got to like Velcro, some stuff on, but yeah so. So I do a number of my exercises with it and I do farmer carries, like you know, weighted farmer carries with also wearing a 50 pound weight vest and stuff like that. So 51 years old and I'm still I'm still kicking ass.
Speaker 3:Amazing. All right, and if people want to check out your beach body, they can find you on TikTok.
Speaker 1:All the yeah, all my shirt OnlyFans is where I sell my shirtless and deep pictures. You know we do a lot of TikTok, though, but it's all me with a shirt on.
Speaker 3:I know it's all you, well, and somebody's. Somebody's eaten a advent calendar candies that you guys are pulling out of that.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's not you, it's not me, I'm not, I'm not eating this figure, but uh, yeah, those are fun and I and I like to do goofy stuff on the tiktok, mostly to amuse my kids friends, they're the only ones that comment on it and stuff, but they always are like so your dad did whatever, and so it gives them topics of conversation amazing man.
Speaker 3:Well, this has been a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to seeing you in January at the next Mastermind meeting. Where can people other than TikTok, or maybe also TikTok, where do you want to direct people?
Speaker 1:Marielawgroupcom is where you'll find me. You can find me on LinkedIn and invite me to connect. I'm happy to do it. I try and put a lot of stuff on LinkedIn to keep up with Brian because he's pushing the envelope.
Speaker 3:Thanks brother.
