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
Strategy vs. Tactics: Brian’s SHOCKING Answer
This episode focuses on the return of the Great Legal Marketing Summit and how it empowers lawyers to overhaul their approach to marketing and practice management by emphasizing the importance of strategy. We discuss strategies for managing a law firm effectively, the significance of aligning professional ambitions with personal values, and how to create an engaging client experience.
• Introduction to the upcoming Great Legal Marketing Summit in 2025
• Importance of merging marketing tactics with long-term strategies
• Discussion of lawyer burnout and overwork
• Emphasis on knowledge-sharing in the legal community
• Understanding the concept of “zone of genius” for sustainable practices
• Need for timely responses in client intake processes
• Encouragement for lawyers to assess personal and professional goals
• Introduction to the mastermind group and its membership benefits
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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.
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What's up, my friends, and welcome back to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and create law firms and law practices that don't give them the Sunday scaries. This episode is for you if you've never been to a great legal marketing summit. I am so excited to announce that we are bringing back the summit in 2025. We almost killed it at the end of 2024 because putting it on in Phoenix, arizona, almost killed us, but we're bringing it back in 2025 and we are making it easier on ourselves by producing the event in Washington DC, in our hometown.
Speaker 1:This year's Great Legal Marketing Summit will be October 23rd through the 25th in Washington DC. You can get all of the details at glmsummitcom. That's glmsummitcom, and if you are in one of our in-person mastermind groups, you know that we'll be meeting for about a day and a half before that summit kicks off. So get it on your calendar. Get your tickets early. If you've ever been to one of our events or ever watched one of our events, you know that pricing starts out low it goes high. Bonuses start out high they go low, and so the earlier you can get your tickets to this event, the better deal you will get. Do not hold out for a better deal. The deal that's on right now is the best it's going to be, and it will get more expensive and there will be fewer bonuses as we get closer and closer and closer to the event. So what will you get at a great legal marketing conference? You will get all of the tactics that you need to drive your law firm to the next level. You will also get all of the strategy you need, and in this talk, I talk about the importance of mixing both strategy and tactics and knowing how to do both as you grow your law firm. So I hope you enjoy it's just great information across every breakout that I've been into and everyone's been sharing that for free. So just good stuff.
Speaker 1:So that really is the ethos of great legal marketing is that we share and we cross-pollinate information across practice areas and across states and across law firms, and that's one of the things that I think separates this group and this tribe from many of the other legal conferences that you have the ability to go to, and there are so many legal conferences out there now. Right, it used to be that we were the only player in town, but now it's like every other weekend there's somebody usually it's a software company that has more money and better speakers and a night party and a concert, and I've been to those and they're awesome. But what doesn't happen to those events is this sharing and is this ethos of let me help you get better. So if you felt like you got attacked by a fire hose this morning and you're wondering where to start, I'm going to take the next 24 minutes and go over where I think you should start, because for very few of you it's any of the tactical stuff that you heard this morning, and this is especially true if your firm is doing less than a million dollars annually, you have fewer than 10 employees and you've never really done any deep thought and put pen to paper about what it is that you actually want your firm to do for you. At Great League Marketing, we're in the business of helping you create a firm that serves your life, rather than the other way around. We are not in the business of selling the tactical, because I might be tactically really good at one thing, but I'm not tactically really good at all of the things it takes to run a law firm. That's why we have breakout sessions that are run by actual experts in those fields. What we are really good at is helping you craft the strategy that will help you win.
Speaker 1:There's a Sun Tzu quote that tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. And the great thing about Google's AI is, when I search this, I learn there's actually a line before that quote. Does anybody know the line before that quote? Strategy without tactics is the slowest road to victory. The other thing that I learned is Sun Tzu didn't actually write that. It's nowhere in Sun Tzu's writings and it started showing up somewhere around the year 2000,. Right, which is really scary if you're a lawyer and you trade on knowledge, because the computers and the bots are catching up. But the point is that you need both tactics and strategy. And you need to start with strategy Because the common constraint in your law firm, in all of our law firms, is that the lawyer is doing too much.
Speaker 1:It's a nearly universal problem for us to solve and there's no singular tactic that's going to help you with this. And I am not here and Ben is not here to sell you the fantasy life that you can make twice as much money by working half as many hours if you only pay us $90,000 a year. I hours if you only pay us $90,000 a year. I was expecting one or two jokes by somebody who understood who I was talking about there, but I will tell you how to create a firm that you actually like going to on Monday.
Speaker 1:So earlier this year we held a boot camp event in our office targeted at lawyers who were doing less than a million dollars in revenue, trying to crest that million dollar mark. We had about 15 or 20 firms in, and one of the things that we did at that event that we don't do at this event is we took pre-data and post-data and so from the lawyers that were in that room, most of them had between one and six lawyers in their firm. Most of them had two lawyers. They were totally underutilizing offshore staff. They were doing about a half million dollars in revenue per year and they had either no support staff true solo or as many as seven. Most of them had your paralegal, your marketing assistant or director and your receptionist, and all of those people thought they were coming to learn marketing right, because that's what we sell on the front end. You need to learn how to market so that you can get out of doing some of the legal work, so you can hire people to do the legal work.
Speaker 1:And when lawyers come to great legal marketing, they come for the marketing. That's why we sometimes we just call it GLM, because they go like, where the hell is the marketing? In fact, somebody said that to us. A tribe member said it to us just a couple of weeks ago. He said is there ever going to be any marketing in this program? I said, dude, this year so far we've done authority building, we've done defining your client avatar, we've done newsletters, We've done e-newsletters. You have access to our entire vault of everything that we've ever written and every video that we ever created on marketing. But really, what he meant is are you going to give me any quick hitter digital marketing tips? And our response to that was, of course, like, of course we have already taught marketing, but I'm happy to get on a call with you, ben's happy to get on a call with you and figure out what would be the best thing for you to work on in your firm.
Speaker 1:Next, we didn't get any response to that email and when I forwarded it to Haley and said, has this guy responded to you. She said no. But he asked me the same question four months ago and I told him he could schedule a call and one of you would talk to him. And he didn't. Which is back to the thing that Ben said in his very opening presentation that at the end of the day, it's it's on you, like all of this information is out there, but you are the one who's responsible for your life. But because we tell lawyers that they should learn marketing, guess what ends up happening?
Speaker 1:This is from the survey of attendees at our boot camp the lawyers doing the marketing right. 40% of the lawyers were doing the marketing. Another one or two attendees were doing the marketing along with a vendor. A quarter of them had an in-house marketer and a quarter of them had outsourced everything. Here's what you need to know if you're operating a small law firm and you're relying on digital marketing. Is Jason in the room? No, so I've been using this slide a lot.
Speaker 1:This is Jason Hennessey's slide on lead form fill response times for law firms. His company went around and filled out 1,400 forms on law firm websites and just counted. How long does it take for somebody to respond to the form? And I'll tell you that on most days, my firm is somewhere in the red here one or two hours and, like on a good day, we're like good day in a big case. If Brian sees it, we get back in about 16 minutes.
Speaker 1:But the people that are coming to you from digital marketing you are a commodity for right. They don't know you from anybody else who's on Google. They just know that you showed up really high and so speed is really important, which is why there are things like Gabby AI and there's Intaker and there's a couple of other partners here who help with this speed to lead problem, because your marketing is only as good as your front desk, right? So this is our lead docket data showing you year over year how many cases we wanted that we actually lost, right, and you can see we sucked at answering the phone in February, but we're a little bit better this year and every single month than we were the year before. And people hear us talk about that and they said Brian says my marketing is only as good as my front desk and so I should really learn sales and persuasion. So what happens?
Speaker 1:Who's primarily responsible for this intake and screening in a small law firm? You or you. And then, of course, who does the lawyering? Right, you are doing all of the lawyering in most small law firms, which leads to this and this is from a Clio 2023 solo report, talking about the percentage of time that a solo or a small law firm employee or owner actually dedicates to working, to the thing that we are trading our time for dollars for, and in most firms solo firms 24, 23, 24, 25% of your day is those dollar productive activity hours where you're actually working on client files. Dollar productive activity hours where you're actually working on client files, which leads to this problem. When are you working in the solo law firm? So, like we, we go and we become entrepreneurs and we start law firms so that we can have more freedom. Right, that's entrepreneur freedom.
Speaker 1:I left my big firm freedom Bullshit. You're all working on Saturday and Sunday, right, when this purple one is when we prefer working like. 10% want to work Saturday, 5% want to work Sunday. More than 50% are working Saturday, 40% are working Sunday. What hours do you want to work? Right, lawyers are working. 11, 12, 1, 2, 3 am. Solos, entrepreneurs freedom, because the biggest problem the lawyers have is time. There's only one of us. We're hammered with casework, we're wearing too many hats, we're burned out.
Speaker 1:I didn't make this up. This is responses that people sent us in for our boot camp event in August. Okay, and I'll give you a confession Like I am deeply feeling this one right now. I hired an EA. For the first time I've had a dedicated 40-hour week EA. He came in and he looked at my calendar, like six months ago, and he's like this is going to be easy because my calendar is empty. Right, because I never scheduled anything. You look at my calendar now it's chock full. Right, I'm making decisions faster and faster than ever because I now have help to go and research projects.
Speaker 1:But the problem is he goes and researches it and now the thing that I would have decided on in about three weeks is back on my desk for a decision in two or three days. Right, he's booked me speaking gigs, he's booked me lunches with referral sources. All of that is good things. But now I have this problem where I have only so many hours in a day and I've got to get back from this event and go.
Speaker 1:What can I cut out? Because it's the lowest leverage use of my time? How can I eliminate that 80% of the work that's only delivering me 20% of the value, because, at the end of the day, just like you, I'm the bottleneck on a lot of our stuff and time, and the arbitrage of your time is the greatest tool that you have and for most lawyers, it's our greatest weakness. Right, michael Scott? What is your greatest strength? Well, let me tell you about my greatest weakness. Okay, tell me about your greatest weakness. My greatest weakness is that I care too much, I work too hard, and that's also my strength.
Speaker 1:All right, here's what I want you to know is you are the hero. The fact that you are here in Phoenix and that very few of you are from Phoenix and there is no CLE credit, and that you're dedicating an entire day on Friday and half a day on Saturday to being here and you're not out playing golf, which is what people do at most events, and we're not serving mimosas at 11 o'clock, which is what happens at some big events, makes you a hero to you and to your employees and to your family. And, at the end of the day, what you need to become an elite lawyer and run an elite law firm isn't more marketing or more sales or even more lawyering. It's strategy and the master strategist does four things in their law firm they set the direction of the firm, they get the right people on the bus, they put those people in the right seats and they provide support for those people. And strategy really is just moving the right pieces in the right order in order to achieve your goal. But to answer this, the first thing that you have to know is what is your goal?
Speaker 1:So I got a thought experiment for you. If you don't have a pen and paper out, take one out and write this down what would you do if you had $10 million? I picked this number because there's somebody, a couple of years ago, obsessed completely obsessed with financial independence Like $10 million. You could put it into T-bills $400,000 a year. That's more than I spend. Great, now I can do whatever I want. If you could do whatever you want, what would you do? When I did this experiment, the things that I came up with was more time with family and more travel. If one of those two things is on your list, raise your hand. All right, cool. When I did it, my answer was too generic. Your answers are too generic. If you had more time with your family, what would you do? If you had more travel, where would you go? Write that down. All right, we're going to come back to that. I asked Len Spada this question when I ran into him in Utah at FileVine's conference just a couple of weeks ago and Len thought for a minute. He said you know, I don't know that I really would do all that much differently, because Len is doing a lot of the things right now that the lawyers at our boot camp aspire to be doing being the lawyer who's there to evaluate and guide the case without doing the actual legwork, focus only on the top 20% of cases, work exclusively on strategy. And be the brand the bald biker guy with the cut the spade of log rope who doesn't even bike. It's awesome, and Len is living in his zone of genius.
Speaker 1:If you haven't read the Big Leap, this is a book that you should read. It talks about the four zones that we have in our, and there's a bunch of different ways that this is expressed. Eos calls this a delegate and elevate chart, but there's really two axes here. One of them is are you good at it or not? If you're not, it's on the bottom. If you are, it's on the top. Do you like doing it. Do you like doing it or not, right?
Speaker 1:So, things that you are not good at and you don't like doing, your zone of incompetence typically, this is your zone of competence You're okay at doing it, but you don't really like it. Zone of excellence things you excel at and you can add a lot of value, but it doesn't really light you up, and that's where most of us get stuck. And then the zone of genius the things that you're uniquely suited to do that fit your strengths, talents and your passions and give you your ultimate success and fulfillment. And I bet if you had gotten to the part of the exercise where you're writing down the thing that you would do in your law firm if you had $10 million, you would have only listed things that are in your zone of genius. But we end up outside of our zone of genius when we're stressed either about money or about time or about people. And so those things that you would do if you had the $10 million, like why would you do that? And this becomes your why. So think for a moment and write it down, if you want. Why would you do those things that are on your list? What feelings would you receive if you were focused exclusively on those things. And then this pick one of those things, one of those things that's on your list, and write down the three things that are preventing you from doing that thing and only that thing right now, because I have a secret for you we do not have to solve for you having $10 million. We only have to solve for those three problems, because we can solve for your three constraints and you can go and do whatever the hell it is that you want to do all the time.
Speaker 1:So I had the hero group do this exercise at the beginning of our mastermind session on Wednesday. I've forgotten what day it is, and I'd like you to do it now too. Hi, my name is Brian. On Wednesday. I've forgotten what day it is, and I'd like you to do it now too. Hi, my name is Brian. I practice personal injury and auto accident law in Virginia. I'm in this group so that my firm can work on interesting cases for good. People, take money from insurance companies so that in my life I can spend more time with my kids, coach their sports and travel, and I'd like you to write down the bottom half of this for you, because that's actually the problem that you're really solving for. And it's easy to come to conferences like this and get the next marketing tactic or the AI tool or the next way to generate AI tool or the next way to generate leads or the next way to hire, fire and attract talent to your core values. But if it doesn't serve one of these two things, if that tool doesn't help your firm do what you say you want to do and help your life become what you say you want to do and help your life become what you say it wants you want to become, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:And this, I think is is a frame. I stole this framework from um, from a mastermind that I'm in. We talk every tuesday night and we have for the last three years and um, and we went away. We all went away to cancun, uh, in January, and we started our retreat with this. So we go through all of our goals, all of our metrics net worth, how much money you make, what do you weigh? How happy are you with your marriage? All that stuff, right, but we start with this Like reintroduce yourself so that we can figure out whether your goals and the stuff that you're working on is in alignment with what you say, and if it's not, then none of it matters.
Speaker 1:I asked the group. One of the things we've been doing this year in our mastermind groups is we record all of the conversations. Now we have these two owls that sit in the middle of the room records a transcript of everybody's sessions so that you don't have to take notes, because it's really hard to get feedback and take notes and then implement and and be present for the conversation, but also take, like good notes on what you're doing and um, and the benefit of that is, at the end of that, the member gets a one pager print out of their problem, their solutions that were offered and then their commitments and we get a list of their wins. So here's the wins from the 2024 Hero Group. This year I hit my 2023 revenue number by May of 2024. I was able to increase my flat pricing with no pushback. My EA, who prepares my slides I don't think he knew what this meant with this little that face and I didn't look at it until this morning we're looking at 100% year-over-year revenue growth.
Speaker 1:I was able to spend two weeks in Greece. I read Buy Back my Time while I was sitting on a beach in Greece, and now I'm trying to figure out how I can make this trip and do it regularly. We're on track for our best year ever and we had our highest monthly expenses ever. My team is overwhelmed and my systems are starting to fail, and what I want you to know is these two slides are the same law, firm Right? Because, as you level up, this is a Matt Davis-ism. If you haven't met Matt Davis, he's got the best expressions of anybody I know. I think it's from Oklahoma. The new level, new devil.
Speaker 1:As you level up as a business owner, this is what you signed up for. You signed up for the constant pursuit of a better set of problems. I do CrossFit not as religiously as Ben does these days, but this summer we had a new guy in the gym and we finished this 30-minute workout. My gym likes to do these really long workouts Finished this 30-minute workout and he's dying on the floor and he looks over me and he says how long have you been doing this? I said four or five years. Does it ever get any easier? No, it never gets any easier. You get stronger, you get faster, so you put on more weights, so you do a different exercise. So you move from I don't know banded pull-ups to real pull-ups, to muscle-ups, which I still can't do after five years.
Speaker 1:But as you hit new levels there's always something else to be achieved, because your biggest problem is your biggest problem, whether you're running a $100,000 law firm or a $10 million law firm. And I think if you'd taken a shot every time Ben or I said the word mastermind from the stage, you'd probably be drunk right now. But a mastermind is right for you if these things apply to you, right, if you feel like you've been doing a lot and you tried a whole bunch of different things and you're just not moving the needle. Or if you want to skip a few levels. Right, because there's a couple ways to learn. Number one you could do it all yourself for five years and you could try to get better on your own. Or you can be in a room that has the benefit of people that have solved problems, like I'm having my best year ever, but we also spent $170,000 a month last year and that's a lot If you've done the same revenue for two or three years in a row and you're trying to break free. Or you just want the accountability of having somebody else in the room telling you dude, you've complained about the same shit for nine months in a row and you either need to shut up or change it, and it needs to be you.
Speaker 1:The format for our mastermind groups is we have four quarterly in-person meetings, so two days a two days a session, most of them in our office in Fairfax, virginia. In between those sessions, we have monthly Zoom calls with the members. You have access to Ben and I for problem-solving calls. We have the Slack channel access and new for 2025, we're going to be putting on smaller events, like that bootcamp event, that are really targeted at specific problems. So this event is great if you want a taste of GLM, but if you want to solve for how do I sell my law firm or what's the best methods of financial accounting and cash flow in my law firm, we're going to be putting on things like that in 2025 and mastermind members will get free admission to all of those events. You also, if you're a member of the tribe, you're going to continue to get all of that access included in Mastermind price.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about price. Price versus value. So everybody sees price is really hard to gauge value In marketing. It's like what's the ROI right? If I give you $1 to deploy into PPC, how many dollars can I expect to come back to me? And at the end of a year, at the end of two years, you can really clearly define that in a mastermind. It's much harder and we've struggled with how do I tell this story and how do I tell you what without showing you people's numbers. And people in our groups are very transparent and put their numbers on the board revenue numbers on the board and most of them are growing at a pretty good clip and I could sit here and I could show you their numbers or anonymize their numbers or whatever. But at the end of the day, all of that is susceptible to like if I get one big, really big PI case, then it spikes it. If I have one really bad year, then it doesn't.
Speaker 1:So we're trying to think about this in a different way. I'll tell you what the cost of our mastermind memberships is. The hero membership in 2025 would be $20,000 a year or $2,000 a month. Once you are in, your pricing is locked in. So we have members who are in our icon, our highest level group, who are paying less than half of that because they've been members for 15 years. Once you're in, that's locked in.
Speaker 1:But I thought, how do I communicate value without tying it to an ROI?
Speaker 1:And I thought, how do I communicate value without tying it to an ROI? And I thought, well, let's make an insane offer and I'm going to cut the audio there and tell you that this really is the value of being in the room. I made an insane offer to join our Hero Mastermind group in the Great Legal Marketing 2024 Summit and that offer expired when people walked out of the room that afternoon. And if you are interested in being in the room when we make the insane offer to join our mastermind groups at the 2025 summit, which is going to be in Washington DC over 23rd to the 25th of 2025, you need to go to glmsummitcom grab your ticket Now. I don't know what ticket pricing is going to be at the time that you listen to this episode, but I promise you that the pricing at the time that you listen to this episode is the best that it's going to be before the summit, because we have a whole summer's worth of escalating pricing, de-escalating bonuses, and so if you get your ticket now, no-transcript.
