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
The 4-Day Test: Can Your Business Run Without You? | Conrad Saam
If you have ever tried to take a long weekend and caught yourself “just checking Slack” from the hotel lobby… this one will feel personal.
In this episode, Brian sits down with Conrad Saam (Mockingbird Marketing) for a simple gut-check: The 4-Day Test. Can your business run without you? And if the honest answer is “not really,” Conrad doesn’t shame you. He just lays out what changed inside his own company so he could step away for a few days and not come back to chaos. Spoiler: it was not more hustle. It was better structure, real ownership, and getting comfortable with 80% done their way instead of 100% done your way.
You will also get a refreshingly grounded take on legal marketing right now. Conrad talks about why AI is still speculative, why most firms should not chase every new thing, and how he decides what is worth testing versus what is just shiny-object drama.
And yes, they go there on directories too. The conversation gets practical fast: what actually matters today, what Google “tells you” if you pay attention, and why citations and profiles can matter more than you think in an AI-shaped search world.
If you want a firm that supports your life instead of consuming it, hit play. Then ask yourself one question: would you pass the 4-day test?
Connect with Conrad:
Mockingbird Marketing: https://mockingbirdmarketing.com/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradsaam/
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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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And I'm at I uh from uh Myers Briggs, I'm ENFP, so very intuitive. You know when you're like, I'm not sure I should let Jeff do that on his own because I don't think it's really gonna like you know when it's it's a problem and when you would have done it differently. You know when that's something that's keeping you up at night where you're like, like, I'm not comfortable letting it go. Um and that so sorry, like that it's going to be done the the right way. Not necessarily the way you would do it, like exactly the way you do it, but like it's going to be done the right way. And that right way may be a little bit different, but you know it's into it and it will eat at you.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices that they actually enjoy showing up to. Today's guest is Conrad Salm of Mockingbird Marketing. Comrade and I are going to talk uh digital marketing as you might expect. He's also the host of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Ironically, the number one show for lawyers talking about marketing.
SPEAKER_01:I, you know, at least I'm not a lawyer and I can't do that. I can't do that. My mom thinks we are the number one podcast for digital legal marketing.
SPEAKER_02:You can do it critically. Was it either Hunter Garnett or Josh Hodges who bought a bought a Bill Ward that said, you know, my mom thinks I'm the best or my mom's number one lawyer or something like that?
SPEAKER_00:I think it was uh it was Hunter Garnett. That is correct. Yeah. It's funny.
SPEAKER_02:So we'll talk we'll talk digital marketing, we'll talk marketing, but it we're also talking business building, right? Because we we were talking before we hit record on like why are we doing any of this shit in the first place. You and I recorded an episode together about a year ago in my office in Fairfax. And by the time we went to play back the audio, we realized that unlike your professional recording crew, I had not plugged the microphones into the camera very well. And so It was great content, though, I'm sure. It was amazing. And it was an hour of lost footage that we'll never get back. You told me a story that I've I've heard you tell on your podcast, but I haven't heard you tell anywhere else about how you learned everything you needed to know about SEO, an ACE job interview over a six-pack of beer.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so this goes back to 2006. I got, I was working at a, frankly, a horrible business that I won't even name. I got hit up by Headhunter to interview at this company that at the time I think was called Legal Brain. Um, it turned into Avo, but it was, I think it was called, I think their original name was called like Legal Brain or something silly like that. Um and I found out that they were invested in by Rich Barton. Rich Barton started Expedia and he now runs and then started Zillow. So guys accomplished a lot of money and pretty smart and very, very nice guy. But my friend from business school, Mark Emer, was their CMO. And Barton had put the first tranche of money into Avo. And so there was a connection there. So I I asked Mark if I could come over and prep for this interview, and I brought a six-pack of beer, and literally over a six-pack of beer, Mark taught me everything there there was to know about SEO at the time. Like that was it. Like it was so simple, it was so basic, it was so straightforward. And so, like, we had this six-pack of beer, and literally the next day I went in and I interviewed at Avo, and I looked like a freaking genius because I had a six-pack of beer worth of knowledge of SEO. And so, you know, the in the in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man, the one-eyed man is a king. And I I just had this really, really good interview. And and I gotta be honest, had I not had I not done that, I I we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. It's just one of those turns of fate that was really, really lucky. But, you know, back in that day, there were there were there were two people in legal doing SEO. And that was Chris Silversmith, who was at uh Fine Law, and Tim Tim Stanley, who now runs Justia. And those guys, and both of them, super good guys, super smart. They knew their stuff inside out. And so it was very easy for me to come in and be number three. Um and we eventually became number one.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. I don't know if you know this, but at the time I was doing SEO. I was in law school and I was working for Tom Foster at Foster Web Mario. Oh, okay. Yeah, well, there you go. And I was I was keyword stuffing the shit out of lawyers' websites.
SPEAKER_01:But like, if you remember, if you go back to those days, like you used to literally be able to like go in and change a title tag and then you would be ranking, right? Like lit like this is so old. This goes way back to when like there was this thing that was called the Google Dance, where like we expect right now all of the results to be customized and it changes every time. Like that's commonplace. It used to be with a Google Dance, they would change the algorithm and then the results were fixed until they changed the algorithm again. Right. And then the results will be fixed until they change like that's how it used to work. So it it just amazing how this industry has has adjusted and and evolved over time. But yeah, you super fascinating.
SPEAKER_02:You have um that's funny because I'm um thinking of how to phrase this question in a kind way. Um, Avo's still around. I know. And there's there's there's salespeople still once a month that tell me that my Avo pre premium profile has lapsed and that um for the low price of I don't know,$39 a month, I can have it back and all the traffic. And all the traffic, right?
SPEAKER_01:Which traffic? 50% of Avo's traffic. Well, but hold on. Here's the thing. In in Avo's defense, and not just Avo, but directories in general, AI is super important. Yes. And the directories, I I would, I would go back, and we do this for our clients for whom we do AI work. And and I say that very carefully because not all law firms should be investing in AI right now. But for those that we believe should be, a cornerstone of what we're working on is profiles, directory profiles. And I was a part of that. And so the other thing that we did learn is that people who go through the process, and this is specific to PI, but I my data, my experience is specific to PI, but I suspect it's it also exists under the practice areas. The people who go through the process of actually hiring a lawyer, their awareness of directories is much higher than those people who haven't done that, right? So if you just do that, if you if you split those populations out, the only explanation for that is that they're using directories more than we think they are. And by we, I mean me. Like I really push back and away from directories for a long time. I think there are those two things that that AI is really directory driven and that there's a brand awareness among people who have actually hired lawyers of directories. I don't think you should overlook directories.
SPEAKER_02:Now, they feel like a relic and a dinosaur to me, but well, and I I think you know it's a nice next step if you already have a good digital presence, right? But it's probably not maybe the first thing you should be going out and doing is claiming all your Justia and your fine law and your ALBO and Yelp, right? I get pitched by somebody about a Yelp brand building strategy. Because lawyers can can tend to get wrapped around the axle of this. I need to appear in the AI search results, even though AI is still only a fractional amount of the way that people are finding lawyers right now.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So yes, not the first thing that you should work on. The the real the real question is what you brought up earlier is like how much money do I spend on this stuff? Right. And I would want to find those directories and prioritize those directories that do two things. Number one, have an impact. And number two, have an impact without spending dollars, right? And it used to be, and I'll go play this game for a while in in a nuanced fashion. A directory could could bestow value upon you by giving you a link, and you could get that link by paying for the directory subscription. And the only way to get that link was to buy paying for the directory subscription. So you weren't buying links directly, but you were buying links directly. Sure. That is now much muddier, right? It used to be very direct and very obvious back in the day. That it that is just a much muddier situation at this point in time. So where do you get that where do you find those things that give value without costing you a ton of money, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, well, one of the ways to is to listen to the salespeople. The other way is to go and kind of reverse engineer what's showing up in the rankings, right? Like how how do you figure out how much time do you spend just playing around searching things and seeing what um what comes up? And then how do you keep that organized in your brain or on an Excel sheet or however you do it to figure out in the ever-changing landscape what is and is not important to Google or to a Chat GPT result or to a Grok result or to any of the other AI search engines.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:So let me use the term AI search engine. AI search engine, right?
SPEAKER_01:Right. So let me break those into two different things. On the Google front, like what actually has an impact. The good thing is Google will tell you. So you you run the queries that you want, you run them multiple times over multiple days, and you'll start to see patterns. I will use an example. Yelp tends to show up much more regularly on the West Coast, especially California than it does in, say, the South, right? And so I wouldn't lean into that all that hard. And this is just like having done this for way too many years, like I start to get to know what those things look like. But run run what you look for and find Google will show you. Look at the results, look at the top 20 results, then run that query again next week, run that query again next week, or or a similar query next week, and you'll start to pick up what actually shows up on the regular and pay attention to what's showing up on the regular. That's the Google answer. And it is really unique to each location and even practice area. So you will find local directories, so local better business bureau results or things like that. Like you will find stuff that Google thinks is important, and they show you it's important by actually showing it up in the results. On the AI front, I'll make a meta point and then I'll talk through how I think about this. Everything that we're doing in AI is speculative. All of the studies are speculative. Everything is changing, and no one has actual representative results other than what you are getting for yourself at that given time. And so I read an email this morning that literally said, and this is from someone that everyone listening to this will know the agency, we have backdoored and cracked Chat GPT. We know how it works. I don't believe that. And and and and and if you did nail that today, it's different tomorrow. And it's different for you than it is for me. So, like, there's there's so much nuance around this, and there's so much personalization, and there's so much randomization that like, and the tools, like the way the tools, so this is really dumb. So I'm gonna get to your answer. Sorry. You asked a good question, and yeah, you got mine in a rants. The way the tool, the tracking tools for AI work is like they try and guess what queries are, and then they run those queries, and then they see what the citations are. So are they actually representative of what's going on? Are they actually representative of what people are actually using in GPT or Claude or whatever it might be? No, they're not. They're trying to guess what those queries are because they don't know, they don't have the data to know what's actually being asked. Further, those results change every time. So, like what you get now and what you get next do the same thing. Like they they're going to be different as you do it, as well as as it gets to learn more about you. So the problem happens when we're like, oh, your AI results are improving because you're getting cited more frequently. Well, what if what if the tool that you're using to evaluate that is just running more queries and you're showing up more because they're just running more queries? So it's very, very misleading. So, how do we approach AI and directories, et cetera? I listen to all of that stuff. We look at all that stuff, we make lists of priorities, and we let our clients know that we're being speculative. Right? So I will use Reddit as an example. I didn't care about Reddit ever. I've never done anything tactically with Reddit before a year, uh before a year ago. I don't think I think that's true. I don't think we ever did anything with Reddit until 12 months ago. And now it has an impact, right? And now it's getting spammed to crap and like that's a problem. So like it's adjusting. But uh we for our clients who have a aggressive growth mindset and a long-term vision of the future, whose focus is not like keeping the lights on tomorrow, um, they should be playing in this game. They should be playing in the sandbox, we should be doing things that we believe are going to work, but we also need to recognize that it is entirely speculative.
SPEAKER_02:And that's like so just and I haven't played with Reddit at all, but and and I don't even as a reader forum, like but tactically, if you're a lawyer out there and you're listening, you're going, okay, maybe I want to do this, but uh like what are you even doing? You're responding to queries that are on Reddit and saying Brian is the greatest lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia, and hyperlinking back to my site, or like what does that even look like?
SPEAKER_01:So it's the hyperlink is not necessarily the key here, right? So the the the importance of citations, like you are referred regularly on on forums like that. But we did see in Reddit, and I know who the agency was, like the the study about Reddit having an oversized impact comes out, and the next thing you know, agencies are spamming the crap out of Reddit, doing exactly what you said, right? Does that continue? Does that work? Probably, maybe, somewhat. We don't really know because it's actually really difficult to actually see what the results are. My read on this is they are trying, ineffectively in many ways, but trying to identify engagement, authority, etc., that isn't just like Brian's the best, Brian's the best, Brian's the best, Brian's the best. And so my read is that you want to actually build genuine engagement, genuine community, have a genuine voice, all of those things. Does the spammy shit work? Yeah. It works in reviews, it works in the remote.
SPEAKER_02:It seems like a lot of work if you're a Seattle car crash lawyer.
SPEAKER_01:It is. It is a lot of work. Yeah. It is a lot of work. And so that's why like we try and so the other way to think about AI is it's looking for citations and references to your business or yourself across this whole universe. And so there's value in generally, I don't like dipping my toe in the water, but there's actually value in having a large constellation for LLMs to actually reference who you are and what you do. And so building out that constellation is part of the game. And Reddit's one of the stars in the constellation to extend the metaphor way too far.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. But but it seems to me that there's at the end of the day, value in doing all of the things that we've ever done that go back to building authority and authenticity and um and community, right? And so not necessarily just going and creating some spam bot that puts your name everywhere and but like giving uh speeches and talking at conferences and writing books and speaking on podcasts and and doing all of the uh the Google authority building things that we've been telling lawyers to get off their ass and do for years and years and years, and not just relying on the agency to go out and write articles for you.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, but the focus actually shifts a little bit. Right? Like you mentioned Yelp, right? For better or worse. For the first time in years. Yelp hasn't has an impact on AI, right? An oversized impact in some LLMs. So like I think it's been okay to ignore Yelp for the last 20 years. If you're thinking about AI, I would want so I'm extending this metaphor too far again. Make sure that constellation of Yelp put a little bit of time into making sure that that star is there, right? And that's where the directories in AI and SEO and like it's been a shift in priority. It's been a shift in some of the things that we focus on. The citations, and and this came out in the local rankings factor survey. Citations are increasingly as important, if not more important, than links, right? So like it's not necessarily about links. The value of a directory where you have a good citation that doesn't link back to you is more real than it was five years ago, ten years ago, right? And so it's it's like it's morphing a little bit. It's a it's a it's a bit of a shift.
SPEAKER_02:How do you think about implementing and rolling out to the rest of your organization new strategies and tactics like this? I mean, there's some some news snippet or something that comes out almost every week, right? And I know because I I hear this on your podcast. But how how do you pick and choose, because you can't do everything. What are the things that we should be implementing and then test? And we only test on a certain subset of the client base, probably. And then like and then how do you know when to roll it out to everybody else? What how do you think about that?
SPEAKER_01:So I this is we have we have these 10 commandments that we have lived by uh in the at the agency for a very, very long time. Number nine says cutting edge, not bleeding edge. Okay. Do you remember Meerkat? I bet you don't. It's good. I'm glad you I'm glad you're looking at this. This is not this is just a meme where the cat is uh No, no, this was a a social media thing that everyone was really excited about for like three months. Yeah. And I went to conferences and everyone was I can't even remember. It doesn't matter, right? Like everyone is Meerkat this and Meerkat that. And like remember what was the Google, the Google Facebook competitor, I can't even remember what they called it anymore. Google Plus. Clubhouse Google Plus, Google Plus, there's Meerkat, there's all sorts of these things that people get really, really excited about and then that they fade away. So what what uh my I'm gonna answer you twice, both of which are are roughly accurate. We need to know what's on the bleeding edge, right? But we need to wait until it becomes cutting edge before we actually do it. So that's kind of philosophically what we look what we do. With AI, it is the same thing. I was really excited when SGE was announced. And I actually I I can't remember what conference I was at. I was supposed to talk about something. SGE comes out like three days before the conference. I scrapped my talk and I talked about everything I knew about SGE, which was close to nothing at the time, which they've now rebranded. But like I was really excited about it. But I did not commit my clients' money to that until Q2 of 2020 because I we didn't know enough about how it was going to work. What were these things? How like what's actually we didn't there was nothing there was nothing for us to actually put our money into with a level of confidence that would actually do anything. So that was us watching the bleeding edge and waiting it till it till it became on the cutting edge. The other thing that I do is I have a very small mastermind group. It is nothing like what you guys do, but it is a small group of lawyers. We get together every Thursday. I'm gonna do it right after we have this call. We have Scotch, right? And we and they share problems and solutions and vendors and all this kind of stuff. I get some stuff out of that meeting that we we implement quickly to all of our clients, right? Um and it'll it'll be like it's I mean you probably see this in the way you run masterminds as well, but like it'll be like, hey, I'm trying this or I'm working with this vendor, or I came up with this problem, or we've got this or that. Like, and then and then the next week you report back and like it's working or it's not working, or it's a disaster, or this is amazing. I I wish we had done it before. I have I I we created that mastermind to try and like survive through COVID, and it's honestly be become one of the best things for me to listen in and and and see things that other people are doing in in creative ways.
SPEAKER_02:So those are kind of my and our and I've been on that call.
SPEAKER_01:You have been on that call, yeah. You know what I'm talking about.
SPEAKER_02:Are are most of the people on that call clients of yours? No. Yeah. No, so this is like a really good meta meta business building point, right? Is if you can put yourself as the agency or as the as a law firm owner at the center of your ideal clients, yeah, then you probably don't have to prepare very much or teach almost anything on those calls. You direct the traffic and listen to the problems that everybody else is having, some of whom were Clients of yours and some of whom are are not, right? But I mean what what authority building for you? And then now you don't have to go and do um um 10 account management calls with clients to hear about problems. You hear all of them in one hour every Thursday.
SPEAKER_01:It's it has been the amazingly effective. And and I think that the mindset that I had to get into was like, I'm not a contributor there. I am a facilitator. And it's it's you guys as lawyers, you know this better asking follow-up questions, peeling back the onion, going deeper, learning more, what like asking why multiple times, like a really and I'm a good-ish facilitator, but like that it just keeps the conversation going and people learn and like it is it is it's been it's been the best thing that I did. I thought, and and we've been doing this since I think we're six years in now. And it's it's been a really solid group.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And so if you're out there and you're listening and you're like, how do I how do I even think about that in my practice? I don't know, if you're like if you're an estate planning lawyer, you could do CPAs and accountants and tax advisors, and who are who are the other people that are are speaking maybe to your client base that you can just get and and and you know, host a dinner once a month or once even once a quarter with the recurring group, and that's kind of how these start.
SPEAKER_01:So, so effective. I'll give you another way to do this. Um if if you are working on, we call these micro influencers, but if you're working locally on building out relationships with big voices in the social media world who are local, they don't have to have a massive following nationwide, but you want people in, you know, Virginia uh or or wherever you may be. Um bring those people together. Go find, go find uh something to celebrate that's local and bring those people together, buy them fucking dinner, right? And get like it's it's the social media amplification that you get out of that. Like it's the same theory, but super, super effective. I we've we've got a couple of clients who who do an amazing job with this becoming that nexus and and the reason like if you're the guy who buys beer for the the seven social media voices in your little town, you just you just won the game, right? And they show up every week and they you you've won the game.
SPEAKER_02:All right, let's talk. Um, let's see, where are we going next? You guys you put on an event uh last year, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit? Is that what Yeah. The Summit, right? Summit for want of a better name. Everybody calls the Summit National Trilore Summit, Great Legal Marketing Summit, Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit. And uh and you're doing it again this year. Yeah. In Nashville. Nashville, August 11th through 13th.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Who's this for? So we we we wanted to do something different. Because as you know, Ryan, there are nothing but legal marketing conferences, legal technology conferences. I mean, they're everywhere. And we wanted to do something for the in-house marketer. And so what we've we and for two reasons. One, it's a completely ignored audience. Yeah. Um, and they actually, it's a lonely place to be. You're the marketing person in a law firm in Fairfax, Virginia. You don't have a support network, you don't have a bunch of other data to learn from, you don't have a mastermind, you don't have people like trying to teach you anything. Like you are, you're in a silo, and that's a very, very kind of sad place to be. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And your lawyer is always yelling at you about things that they heard at a conference that they didn't bring to you.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. That's right. So, like, yeah, that's right. The worst thing is you get the lawyer comes back and like, oh, I was at Pelma and we should be implementing, you know, helicopter rides for drunk, drunk people or whatever. Like you're like, come on. So, so we wanted to reach that group. The other thing I wanted to do is I wanted to get, if you go to these conference, you've been to them, it is the same 12 speakers every freaking time. Sure. It's the same, and I'm one of them. Like, I so I like guilty as charged, but like, and congratulations to Seth for his sale to Herringbone, but it's Seth Price, Melini, Jason, like it is the same people. Connor or Tanner, sorry. Um, like it is the same people. And it's me, right? Like, so we wanted to bring people out who had not really gotten the stage. And so we we at the last one, we had a bunch of in-house marketing people. Um, we had a bunch of leaders who have not really had the stage. We had some COOs who had not had the stage. So we were able to bring in a completely different speaking set than what all the other pieces are. And they bring with them a different perspective and a different value and a different story, and it was really, really cool. And the other thing we did, this is my favorite, maybe not my favorite part of the conference, probably. We hosted those talks, the five minute talks were time blanking on the name of you.
SPEAKER_02:Basically have the Ignite Talks, the uh the shuffle up the slides and read yellow the deck talks.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. We've bungled that, the delivery of that we bungled. But the uh Ignite talks are terrifying. They're basically 20 slides that auto-advance, and you have five minutes to talk, and that's it. And so it's a it's a it's actually a really stressful presentation to give. But they were super, super fun. So we were able to bring out all sorts of kind of crazy zany content through that as well.
SPEAKER_02:So yeah, you did you didn't bungle it, but somebody on the A B team.
SPEAKER_01:Someone bungled it.
SPEAKER_02:If you weren't at the event, what was happening? Your comrade's right, every five five seconds. Every 20 seconds. Every 20 seconds, there's your slide auto-advances, whether you're at where you want to be in your speech or not. But by the second speaker, people were it was like your words on the page, but it was somebody else's image. Or it was it was your image, but somebody else's words. I don't know how how that happened. But it made really interesting, interesting happy hour talks.
SPEAKER_01:And the poor lady, so there was there was one lady who came in, she did a talk called In Defense of Scorpion, and her s it looked like I had personally sabotaged her slide.
SPEAKER_02:Um you know what uh so I I love that your event is uh is different speakers, and we've tried to put on events that have kind of a different bent than SEO. Yeah. I don't know what your experience has been in the ticket sales department, but the market has not been super friendly to us when we've tried to do something different than what everybody wants.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so uh the the answer to that question is to slap AI on front of every single talk and that's how make tickets sell, which we're not going to do. Right? Uh AI is important, it is a part of the future, it is very speculative, and I will tell you if you put all of your focus on AI today, you are missing a lot of the market. And so I do not want to do that. The other thing is there are just too many conferences, man.
SPEAKER_02:There are too many conferences.
SPEAKER_00:There are too many conferences.
SPEAKER_02:From somebody who spoke at I think six last year, there are too many conferences. It's madness. I mean, it is it's madness, it's it's aided by all this money that has come into the software space. Because now every every software company, case management company has their own user conference, which which, by the way, much nicer dinners and happy hours than the ones that we're able to put on at my conference.
SPEAKER_01:But but so what's the influx of money into legal has created more conferences, it's created more opulent conferences, it's created better dinners, it's created ridiculous, you know, nights out and you know, celebrities at speaking at conferences. I've seen Nick Saban more times than I care to admit, right? Like so that has happened. The other thing that I is has quietly happened is the speaking fees that they are charging vendors are insane. So it used to be I go back in the day. I I used to like feel like I would go to a conference and I made a conference better by being there and delivering great content. I now go to a conference and I make the conference better by paying a whole bunch of money to the conference so I can be there. This will shock you, maybe not, but I'll share it. 15 minute speaking spot,$30,000. That's mad. And that's because there's a lot of money, deep pockets, private equity coming in, funding a lot of these agencies who beforehand, you you 30, 30 grand to talk for 15 minutes to 25 people, right? Like you made me do the ROI calculation. Yeah, it's this is not this is not these are not massive, like it's it is madness, Brian.
SPEAKER_02:I gotta revise the speaker fees for the Great Link Marketing Summit before that.
SPEAKER_01:You probably should have just signed our contract for that uh yesterday. But no, it's madness, right? And so what's happening is is people are spending a whole bunch of money. When you spend 30 grand to talk for 15 minutes, you're going up and pitching. And so the the quality of what we're getting out of conferences, my opinion, has really, really dropped. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and and I think you can tell by the attendance, right? So when I go to a mega conference, it does seem now to be less than 50% actually lawyers in the room attending the conference, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And the last mega event that I went to, you know, I don't I'm not sure that I talked to a single lawyer at any of the happy hour things, right? Right. I'm going to But I don't I don't mind talking to vendors, but I don't want to talk to vendors in disguise, right? And so many of them have are not like at the table in the vendor hall. Yeah they're anyway. Yeah, I go, I go to learn a couple of things to to see people that I know, and then really to meet new lawyers. And that has become harder and harder to do. I don't know. Maybe, maybe this whole money into the space will blow up or slow down. It's not not really a good reason for it to, I guess. Now that there's proof of concept with Herringbone purchasing first uh Jason Hennessy's company and now Seth's.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And CJ. It's quiet, but it's public. If they've made three purchases, there's a so there's a lot of money coming in, right? And it changes that I don't see that slowing down.
SPEAKER_02:Perfect segue into business building. So you you told me recently you took off and at 11 o'clock, I think on a Sunday night, told your team, hey, I'm going skiing for four days. Have fun. Uh which really is the dream of most small law firm lawyers, is to have a team that's able to independently operate, you know, for four days or or for longer, and not only sustain the company, but but grow in the meantime. And four days is not enough time to grow. But the goal is that the owner, uh the CEO, can step back and that the company has the right people in place that it continues to grow and continues to thrive even while you're away. So can you talk a little bit about the work that you did? Um, and I know you you guys were on EOS and you had a uh fractional uh CEO or COO, I think, who you've been working with for a while. But to get the company into a space where you have leaders of of of leaders and it doesn't rely so goddamn always on you.
SPEAKER_01:So I wish I could make this sound like it was calculated and deliberate and I'm brilliant. It's not the case. For me, the answer to that is really having a we're a small company, but having a small leadership team that you have complete faith in, right? And that you don't think things are gonna go off the rails when you step out. Um and then you need to stress test that, right? And I didn't do it like this, wasn't a calculated thing, but um I was pretty sure I I've gone on a vacation, you've probably done this too. I've come back from vacations, and I don't take a lot of vacations because I'm a business owner, right? And so we always shortcharge shortchange ourselves on taking time off, and it's really important to take time off. I have come back from vacations and had to work my ass off to catch up for like two or three weeks. And I've also come back from vacations and been like, what do I do here? Like, what like what there's nothing on my calendar, nothing's changed, and like we're fine. And I think the difference between those two experiences is making sure that every critical function of the business, not every issue, but every critical function, operations, sales, finance, it doesn't need you to be there to function. And you have great people who, when something stupid happens, because it's always something stupid is always gonna happen, but they can actually step in and know what to do. And even if they don't do exactly what you would have done, it's gonna be 80% fine anyway. And so you have to let that final 20% go. That's so that part's on you. But getting those people where you're like confident that like like they're gonna get to 80% of my solution anyway, and that's that's fine, and maybe even better, that's the key for me.
SPEAKER_02:Um that 80-20 is so hard because you're absolutely right, that is the goal, right? But during the um the training and the management and the leadership, like when they're coming to you and they say, What do you think about this? And for lawyers, it's a brief or a motion or a demand letter or whatever, right? What do you think about this? And there's always something that you you would have done differently, uh, but if you're always making changes, then they're always gonna come to you and ask what else you would have done differently. And so I struggle personally with the the difference between that and then just burying my head in the sand when I've given a project away, right? Because I I really have a have a hard time finding that happy medium. It's like, you know what, this isn't the way I would have done it, but it's good to go. And I don't I don't need to make any changes because I don't want you coming back necessarily. And like, you know what, screw it. If I never look at that case, it's gonna get resolved. And um, and it probably probably will not be fatal to the business or the client.
SPEAKER_01:So I think of it, and this is purely personal anecdotal. And I'm it I uh from uh Myers Briggs, I'm ENFP, so very intuitive. You know when you're like, oh, I'm not sure I should let Jeff do that on his own because I don't think it's really gonna like you know when it's it's a problem and when you would have done it differently. You know when that's something that's keeping you up at night where you're like, like, I'm not comfortable letting it go. Um and so sorry, like that it's going to be done the the right way. Not necessarily the way you would do it, like exactly the way you do it, but like it's going to be done the right way. And that right way may be a little bit different, but you know it's into it and it it will eat at you. And I think the the my kind of business experience has been the the people who I have kind of let them continue going while I had that pit in my stomach where I'm like, I'm like, I'm sure it's okay, I'm sure it's okay, but like you, you're you it's actually not, and you know it. You know it, you're lying to yourself. I was lying to myself that like it's gonna be okay, that like you know, Murphy's gonna be, he's he's and you're like, I'm just not dealing with it. There's a difference between not dealing with it and realizing it's being done good enough for to to move things forward. And and it and it's it's intuitive, right? And and and at this point in time, I can say this. I have not lost sleep over how we operate the business since I've made some significant changes. And the person who's running how we operate the business, she could tell me to put on a tutu and a unicorn hat, and I would do it tomorrow, right? Like she just knows how to. She's so there's an 80-20, and then you've got like, then you realize you're at the 80, and the 20 that she's bringing to the table is so much better, right? And so, like, like that's where you talk about like the people better than you, smarter than you, blah, blah, blah. Like that's where the real magic starts to happen.
SPEAKER_02:So there's kind of those bases. Is that your fractional implementer or COO that you're doing?
SPEAKER_01:No, so we had this great. So this is another really interesting business building thing. And I just built this this graph or picture, this, this set. This has happened over three years. We had uh integrator, fractional integrator, fractional COO to whatever you want to call her. She started in 2023. We spent a ton of money with her. She brought EOS, accountability, she made some really big changes in who who we had here, but that was a that was a massive shift. And then finally, I was like, Lisa, so at the end of these meetings, right? You you rate the meeting and it's supposed to be between an eight and a 10. And I was giving them like sixes and sevens. And when you give below an eight, you have to explain why. And I'm like, well, these are boring. We're not really doing anything, we're not making any big changes. We're not and she's like, well, it's like when Mary Poppins has to move on. Like, I've done my like, it's boring because it's working and you don't need me anymore. And I was like, no, don't leave me. And she's like, no, you don't leave me anymore. Like you can fly by your own little birdie. And so, like, we had that experience. And there was an overlap with the next person that we brought in. And this, this again, I never, so I never thought the COO, integrator person, would have the big impact that she did, and she did. And then I brought in an HR person almost by accident. And what we now have is I have a third party as the business owner giving me kind of validation feedback on my people, alignment to core values. She calls bullshit on me when people aren't really hitting our core values, like in a way that no one else can. She's also an amazing recruiter. So, like, we've solved the people thing. And that was like a whole other phase where, like, from a people perspective, I feel like we are, we've we've got it nailed. And then at the last year, and then maybe I put these in the wrong order, but the last year I brought in a talented CFO, and she has changed our financials. Like, like the business has changed a little bit. Our financials have changed dramatically. Having, and and and I think one of the things that, and I'm very guilty of this as an arrogant MBA holding small business owner. You feel like you can walk in and you can teach people how to be like great business people, and like I can, I've got an MBA, so I can run most of the accounting and finances, and that'll be fine. It's so obviously stupid, but you bring people in who are better at you on the operation side. I brought someone who's better at me on the people side. I brought someone who's crushes me on financial, and like it's changed everything. And it's a no-brainer to hear the story, but like there's there was a level of arrogance and and like I can I don't need anyone's help that I was just completely wrong on. And it's changed everything. Are they both full-time for you? They're all so all three of those were fractional. So the COO person, like she now runs our quarterlies, and that's it. My HR person is fractional and I meet with her once a week, and my CFO is fractional, and I she's still new-ish and she's still doing amazing work. So I spend I I monopolize too much of her time. But, you know, I probably talk to her once a week as well. But all fractional. And, you know, I'm running a you know, seven million dollar business with high-end executives at a fractional level, and it's amazing.
SPEAKER_02:Right. You are two years ahead of me, so I'm glad to talk to you about where where you found those people. This is great, man. You know, it always starts out talking about the um actually the what it is that you do, but I'm always so much more interested in the meta of like how did you grow to where you are. So thank you for coming on here. You guys have a have a website live for LHLM Summit 20.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's live. It's launchhourlegalmarketing.com. The registration, depending on when you launch this, should be up by next Wednesday, which is the twenty eighth. All right, cool. So then maybe tomorrow or maybe last week, depending on when this comes out. Okay, all good. Yeah, we'd love to have you. It's close close enough to you that you can come on down. Yeah, awesome. All right, comrade solm, thank you very much, man. Brian, thanks.
