Dan Kennedy’s First Rule of Marketing: Stop Copying Your Competition | pt. 1

Most lawyers do marketing the same way.

They look at what every other firm is doing, copy the message, copy the offer, copy the ads, and then wonder why nobody notices them.

Dan Kennedy would tell you that is exactly the problem.

We are bringing this episode back because it was one of the conversations listeners loved most. And honestly, it is not hard to see why.

This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation from the Great Legal Marketing Summit, where Ben Glass and Dan Kennedy unpack one of the simplest and most uncomfortable rules in marketing:

Stop copying your competition.

Ben starts with the story of how he went from being a good lawyer with no real business training to discovering Magnetic Marketing through a long sales letter he almost threw away. He tested the ideas anyway. That decision changed the way he built his firm, attracted clients, and created a business that did not depend on blending in.

From there, Dan does what Dan does best. He cuts through the noise.

He explains why “all digital everything” can turn law firms into commodities, why the biggest advertisers are not always your biggest threat, and why intake is not just an administrative function. It is a sales conversation with someone who is overwhelmed, skeptical, and probably wishes they did not need a lawyer at all.

You will hear practical ideas around lead magnets, follow-up, positioning, and the “invited guest” concept. In other words, how to stop chasing prospects and start building a marketing asset that brings the right people toward you over time.

If your marketing feels expensive, noisy, and too similar to everyone else’s, this episode is worth revisiting.

And this is only Part 1.

In Part 2, Dan and Ben go deeper into building a moat before consolidation changes the game.

Want the full summit notes? Grab them at glmsummitnotes.com

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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
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Transcript

Welcome And Series Setup

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello my friends and welcome into another episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build the kind of practices they actually like showing up to on Monday. Now, today's episode is a very special part one of a two-part series conversation between Ben and Dan Kennedy. As many of you know, Dan Kennedy spoke at our October 2025 Great Legal Marketing Summit in Washington, D.C. You know, Dan he doesn't speak publicly very often anymore. There was a time where he was uh he was about, I think he says a million dollar a week speaker on a on a nationwide tour, and and now it's like only for groups that he truly believes in the message of, and great legal marketing happens to be one of those groups. In this episode, we're gonna talk about unique marketing strategies and how to develop one for your law firm, even in the age of all digital everything and the commoditization of LSAs and PPC and click the call and uh AI results. We're also talking about how to create lead magnets to put yourselves in front of clients in a way that's different than everybody else in the market, and how by offering value up front, often for free, lawyers can distinguish themselves from the competition across town and drive down their costs to acquire a client. So this is part one. It's a 90-minute episode all in, or would have been a 90-minute episode all in. I decided to break it up into two pieces, make it a little bit more bite-sized for

Summit Context And Dan’s Role

SPEAKER_01 1:21

you. And as always, if you want the complete notes from this and every other session at our Great Legal Marketing Summit, you can go to glmsummitnotes.com, download a copy for yourself, and there's an opportunity to purchase all of the videos from all of the sessions if you'd like them. All right, on with the show.

SPEAKER_03 1:39

We know we're celebrating 20 years of great legal marketing, and I think I told you yesterday we're set we're uh celebrating really 30 years of Ben Glass Law. I got out of law school, and for 12 years I worked with some really good trial lawyers who were not great business guys, they're really good trial lawyers, and I got a ton of experience. I was blessed by being able to try cases all in the area, all with all really good experienced lawyers. And then one day I'm like, hmm, let's start my own law firm. And I had a great business plan. I had great reasons for starting my own law firm. Number one, I was coaching. I had four kids at the time. We have nine now, but four at the time, and I was coaching three soccer teams at once, and the commute was long. So that's a good reason to say I'm leaving one firm to go start my own gig. I said, Well, you know, I'm getting good results. I'm a good lawyer. I have a good reputation with judges, able to convince juries to give my clients money. Like, let's just all go and keep it all. How hard could it be to actually start and run a law firm? And so literally on a Friday, basically walked out. On the weekend, I'm at Office

Today’s Focus: Lead Magnets And Differentiation

SPEAKER_03 2:42

Depot thinking, holy shit, like, why am I like I've actually done it? Like we've left and we're gonna start on Monday. And I took cases with me. And for a couple of years it was good. Now it was me and an assistant in 1,100 square feet in Fairfax City. We did the four and a half day work week because we didn't have enough work for five. And it was okay for a while. But then those cases ran out. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a better yellow page ad. And I figured out in the very short short period of time, I didn't know anything about running a business. I didn't really know about attracting clients, other than that I was good, but I didn't really know how to get that message out. I was a fan of the success literature. So I was a subscriber to Nightingale Conant. How many like got books and tapes from Nightingale Conant? Of course, right. And so one day I get this long-form sales letter in the mail about a product called magnetic marketing, written by a guy named Dan Kennedy. I had no frame of reference for this at all. But the letter spoke to me and it basically said, you know, one of the biggest mistakes that people that are running small businesses do is they look around at what everybody else is doing and they just say, well, that must be the way it's done. Let's just go do that. Whether it's marketing or building the practice or running the practice or the business or whatever. The letter said that was pretty stupid. And the author of the letter, so I've worked with people across all industries: chiropractors, plumbers, bagel bakery shop owners, restaurant owners. And I've got this system for getting people magnetically attracted to you. I'm sitting there, I'm running out of cases, get this letter. And 90L Conant sold books and tapes, and they were all priced like $59 or $79 for deluxe edition. And this was a $300 product. I didn't have a lot of $300, and I had never spent $300

Ben’s Origin Story And Early Struggles

SPEAKER_03 4:33

on any book in the legal business. And I had bought every book, like all three of them, that existed at the time about lawyer marketing. But it came with a big ass guarantee. So if you don't like it, you can send it back and I'll send your money back. So I wrote my check. I did not tell Sandy I was writing a check for $300 for a book. And then the thing came, and it's a three-ring binder, and it's all photocopied stuff. And the very first thing on the top is about chiropractors. I'm like, well, sure, I'm not a chiropractor. I'm a lawyer. Like this thing cannot apply to me at all. I'm going to keep it for a bit. I'll browse through it. Then I'm going to take it, I'll send it back and get my refund. But it came with six audio tapes, right? And if you're young, you may or may not have actually ever physically felt an audio tape, but I had a car that audio taped player. And so I put the thing in, listen to it. And the first time through six tapes, I'm like, uh, this is this is interesting. Let's listen to it again. Second time through. Oh, why he's telling stories about um a fire in his backyard and a guy's knocking at the front door, the annoying pest. But when he figured out it was because he was trying to warn him of the fire, he became an invited guest. And I'm like, huh, that's interesting. I don't know how to apply that to my business, but uh, that's interesting. And about a plumber who would come to fix the leak, but would show you a video while he's fixing the leak, and he's going around the house, like checking all the other things a plumber might work out and putting up his little stickers in the in the door and windows. I'm like, okay, so I'm not a plumber, but that's interesting. So I went through the whole thing the third time and I said, God, like, I don't understand half the words. Lead generation magnet, follow-up marketing, follow-up marketing sequence. I don't under these words were foreign to me. But I said to myself, hmm, I don't know. But if I think if I could figure this stuff out, that might actually help my business. And so I didn't return it. And I did. So one of the first things Dan said in magnetic marketing was this theme of everybody's saying the same thing. Just go to the library and prove it. So I went to the regional library near me. And back then, there were rows and rows and rows of the yellow pages. So I looked at the A section for attorney and the L section for lawyer across all of these yellow pages. I literally did, I swear to God, this is the truth. I sat down and I started writing down the headlines and the messages. And after about 10, I didn't have to, I just doing check marks because they were all saying exactly the same thing. I said, Oh, this guy's this guy's right. He doesn't know anything about lawyers, but he's right. I said, What can we do with that? And I created the very first for us, and I think probably the very first in the industry, in the personal injury space, lead generation magnet, and literally typed out, photocopied, and I got one of those binder ceiling things, and I looked in the dictionary to see, can I call it a book? And I called it a book. This is true. And I said, and we change it, started to change the message in the law for us. Like instead of if you've been injured, like call a lawyer, like I want to put a stop to this, and said, if you've been injured, before you hire a lawyer, sign any forms, or talk to the insurance company, like at least get our book. So our very first lead generation is very, very primitive by today's standards. Which allowed us at the very least, when someone called the office about an automobile accident case, to say, my assistant, to say, but you know, Mr. Glass wrote the book on car accident cases in Virginia. And that changed that letter and that product and not and listening to the product and reading it and not sending it back, changed my life. And I think that everybody, probably, if you think deeply, has someone or some people in your life who've absolutely changed the trajectory of your life. So outside of my family, I have three. Dan is one, Stephen Curtis Chapman, his concert that led us to our adoption journey, and my coach, Sammy Chong, who I've worked with for a decade

Discovering Magnetic Marketing

SPEAKER_03 8:11

to keep my mind straight, are three people who, had they not come into my life, like we would not be sitting here. And so uh when Brian and I were planning this event, I was like, Dan's got a condo in resting. I wonder, I wonder if he would come over and speak with us. And so, Dan only, another thing you'd be interested in, is um the prep for this event is I fax Dan, he faxes me back. We have one one-hour phone call, we exchange a few more faxes, and boom, which is the way Dan operates. You're talking about controlling your own environment. Dan has created many, many multimillionaires, guys and gals like me, who were got good at the marketing and the running of a business. And then Dan said, you know, there's a second business here because there's probably some other lawyers who could benefit from what you're teaching. And in the back of the room, at the very first Dan Renegade Millionaire Seminar, I drove up to Ohio. I actually penciled in as I was listening to the speakers and hearing the stories of similar stories to what I've just told of other individuals. Oh shit, like we can actually go do this. So please get on your feet and let's give a big, great legal marketing welcome to my friend and mentor Ann Kennedy. In the prep room, Dan just explained to me the whole uh NBA basketball gambling center, which I have not had a chance to pay much attention to since it broke like yesterday. Thank you for coming here.

SPEAKER_02 9:40

Thank you for having me. I know that I think, as I told you, I think with this group, it's a it's somewhere between courageous and reckless. For me to have you on stage. Yes. Um as you will recall, at one point in a mastermind group of mine, we had three of you all at the same time. And I always made the lawyers sit together. So if God sent a lightning bolt, the rest of us were safe.

SPEAKER_03 10:06

It was even worse than that because we had Nelson Searcy, who was me to the pastor world. Yes. And you would tell people, not only in the mastermind group, but also at large events like this, those three guys back there, the lawyers, the pastors over here in the whole room would start.

SPEAKER_02 10:21

Safe places over there by Nelson, because he's okay.

SPEAKER_03 10:25

You know, Dan and I also forgot to mention, I think most of you know, um, Dan allowed me in to co-author a no BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs with him. Again, the background on that was one fax from Dan. Would you like to play? A fax back from me saying, Yeah, sure, I'm really busy. How much time do we have? A fax back that said 30 days, one phone call where we kind of rift through the chapters and split them up. I submitted my stuff on time, one more fax for some revisions, and boom. And so that's one of the things we'll talk about, right? Is the the whole power of continuing uh to publish and to be relevant. One little housekeeping thing.

SPEAKER_02 11:02

Uh I'm blind in my right eye. So I don't see you guys when I'm here or here, and I'm mostly gonna be here. So I'm not being rude to you. Just, you know, I only know you're there if you laugh or applaud.

SPEAKER_03 11:18

That's it. There we go. And another interesting thing I learned in the green room. So those of you who know Dan's story know that for years and years and years, uh, is that harness racing, like basically taught himself harness racing, entered an occupation that they tried to keep him out because he wasn't really, I guess, one of them, a harness racer. And uh, according to the vision testing, like he would still be allowed to have a harness racing license. Very unwise. Talk to us a little bit, first of all, Dan, about your own backstory. I know you don't get all every time you speak, and many rooms know you because they're at a either a magnetic marketing event, now click funnels, or they come would come to one of your super conferences or info summits or day with Dan kind of events. But I'm really they're interested in like your credentials as a marketer.

SPEAKER_02 12:05

Well, none. Um, the the credentials are all experience driven and figuring out what to do by figuring out first what not to do, right? And when you talk about the influencers on you, and you mentioned Nightingale Conant, one of the big influences on me was Earl, because I those are the first success things I got. And that course at

Becoming The Invited Guest

SPEAKER_02 12:30

that time came in a briefcase with a cassette player and cassettes in the lid, and and it was like $600, I think, new. I bought it used from the family attorney who learned nothing from it, by the way. Uh and uh and I wore those things out. One of the things Earl said was that if you start out to go do something and you don't have a reliable model to follow, look at what everybody else is doing and start by not doing that. First of all, as a 16-year-old, you like that, right? I mean, because that's right about the age you kind of are deciding that everybody's an idiot, right? And now some authoritative paternal figure is telling me, son, you're right. Great. So really everything I've done in every niche, including yours, has really been based on that. The family business was sort of in the traditional advertising business, but I came up through sales. And the in every business there's a set of semi-religious dogma, right? There's a secular Ten Commandments of here's how we do things around here. And everybody repeats them down a hierarchical level of authority, including from the Trader Professional Association, for me, the sales manager, the suits back and back. And the dogma in sales was, and still to a great degree, is it's a numbers game. If you want to make more money, see more people. That's about it. Okay. And do a lot of cold prospects. And I have no comparison. I like my driver that brought me over here is an immigrant from Pakistan. And I said that one of the reasons that immigrants do so well here is they're more grateful for their opportunities because they have something to compare it to. A lot of Americans, you know, my grandkids have nothing to compare America to because they haven't lived anywhere else, and they certainly haven't lived in a cave, right? I mean, a crisis to them is I can't find my cell phone, you know, not I can't find water. This is not their problem. So the dogma for most people, you have nothing to compare it to. So even if you start to think, geez, this doesn't really make sense, you look around, but but everybody else is doing it this way. So the assumption now is it has to be right. Not that everybody's doing it that way because one person copied this person, copied this person. And so most industries, including yours, they have a few radicals in them, but mostly they're Amish, right? Everybody's wearing coveralls, so we were, you know, everybody's in a circle looking at each other because of the horse racing business. I have Amish friends and we deal with the Amish. And, you know, a big technological revolution, an Amish country, was two mules to one plow. This was somebody invented this, and there was a little worry that it might be satanic, but but but gradually everybody accepted it, right? So in selling, I'm failing. Now I find that in three different sales activities, starting at about 15 and going to 21, I could close a sale if I was in front of a correct and appropriate prospect. So I I knew like I understood the presentation part of this, and I was good at it. But I was still driving around in a bad car with those cassette tapes on the seat and a cassette player, because the car had an eight-track player in it, so a cassette player on the seat, and I'm listening to motivational tapes, and this is not helping. It turns out that you can have the best attitude in the world or the worst attitude in the world doesn't make any difference if you don't have the right person in front of you to apply it to. And the sales train the sales training dogma puts you in front of a lot of inappropriate people before you get to be

First Lead Magnet And Message Shift

SPEAKER_02 16:30

in front.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

Hey, did you miss this year's Great Leo Marketing Summit in DC? If so, shame on you. But I don't want the information to pass you by. We've put together 122 pages of notes. I got notes from every single speaker who we had on our stage, including all of the breakouts. And this notes packet includes many, many, many of their slides. And if you want that, the only thing I need from you is your email address. If you go to glmsummitnotes.com, that's www.glmsummitnotes.com and trade me your email address. I'll send you 122 pages of action-packed notes to help you build your law practice. And if you did attend this year's summit, you know you've already received the recordings of every session. But sometimes reading somebody else's notes helps the information hit the brain centers in a slightly different way. So even if you did attend the summit, you should check this out. It's glm summitnotes.com.

SPEAKER_02 17:28

Now back to the show of an appropriate person. So I figured out that this did not make sense. It made sense for like the big corporation because they didn't care who lived or died. They just churned and burned, right? You just recruit, hire, recruit, hire, recruit, hire, put them out there. The persistent ones survive, the rest of them quit. We don't care. That's so that's their business model. It's no good as your business model, right? So I started to get really interested in how can I be only in front of appropriate people for what it is that I'm selling? How can I, you briefly told the story, how can I be the invited guest instead of the annoying pest? Right. And so, like, if you're, I'll use estate planning, because so if you're an estate planning attorney and you're at a cocktail party at your country club, and you hear a conversation right behind you between two people about, let's say, their concern about leaving a lot of money to their adult kids and there being a divorce or them blowing it all and the grandkids being broke, and you hear this conversation. If you turn around and say, this may or may not interest you, but that's the profession I'm in, and I know exactly how to solve those problems. You're an annoying pest. They don't know you from Adam's house cat. You entered a conversation you weren't invited into, and you're trying to sell them something, and people love to buy, but they hate to be sold. Now, if they somehow know of you and they know somewhat what you do, even that incident would be different. But think how much different it is if they see you across the room and one says to the other, hey, we're talking about something that Charlie helps everybody with. And he did my plan to protect this. Let's go talk to Charlie. Whole different experience, right? This is gold. This is gold. So I started to figure that out. How can I use marketing instead of prospecting? How can I not chase people, but have them chase me? And that led me to developing the ugly notebook that finally arrived in your hands. Um, the question that it solves, of course, exists for everybody, right? Doesn't matter whether you're an attorney or whether you're a financial advisor, where I've done a lot of work and have two private clients there now. This will I'm I'm gonna tell it just for you, because I know some people are still trying to Google cassette player. By the way, if you own a cassette player, you have to own a pencil. Now, if you don't understand that, you are too young. So I have a client right now, a high net worth individual, fairly exotic financial planning, five-layer trusts in the MADEs, that stuff. Um, good guy, Fedani's been a client for 20 years. So he came back recently again and said, here, you know, I got now this thing, I got this presentation that works. If I get in front of a high net worth individual who is somewhat adventuresome, uh I can't deal with conservative people, I can't deal with scared people, I can't deal with people that just want to protect it all and get 3.9%. That's not for me. I need kind of an Indiana Jones guy. Um uh and I need him to have investable assets of at least $5 million that we can move from somewhere. So first of all, we conquered the lead generation part of this. Turns out they're a perfect list. So, like we are mailing um uh we we are mailing private plane owners, okay? Because they're flying around up there. Uh so we're mailing them.

Why Not Following The Herd Works

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Most of them are high net worth individuals. We're crossing a list anyway, but most of them are high net worth individuals because that and a boat are the you know, and a wife half your age, those are the three fastest ways to to lose money. But at least show that you're a higher wealth engineer. I mean, my race horses, you know, they they eat while you sleep. And if you're in a partnership, you own the lame leg. I mean, it it's close to that. The way to make a million dollars as a racehorse owner is starting with 10 million. But so so we mailed, we figured that out. We've got five lists that work like there's no tomorrow. Now you get the Lead request in for the lead generation magnet. We're using the same system. Here's our story. We got this thing we'll send you that will enlighten you about why you shouldn't be letting Fisher manage your money, et cetera. Now, the shock and awe box, do they know that term?

SPEAKER_03 22:17

Many of them understand shock and awe box.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

So let's say we'll go back to his example.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Some of them, though, don't understand anything beyond email.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Okay. Okay. Feel free to We'll get there probably. But yeah, direct mail, it's an envelope, it's got a stamp. We're actually using FedEx when I say direct mail. But so the shock and all box is you promised them a free book, which in our case, by the way, is the same thing. We're promising them a free book. But we don't send them a free book. We send them the free book in a big box with a bunch of other stuff that is shock and awe. The term came from Norm Schwarzkopf, by the way, from the Iraq war. And Norm was the speaker before me on 27 big events a year for three years. So I got to Norm know pretty well. So so I took the term. The the shock and awe box, it's supposed to shock and awe. Gee, I just requested this book and look at they really invested in me. Look at all this cool stuff that they sent me. Right. And so our box to these mostly 60 plus, some 50 in there, no lower than 50. So 50 plus, 60 plus, and 70 plus males who, for example, are private plane owners. The box includes six audio cassettes with his radio shows on them and a cassette player. And a pencil. Which they're cheap. Well, it does include a pen. And it was just a test. Easy split test. Book other stuff, book other stuff, tapes, tape player, right? Half of them get A, half of them get B. Let's see what happens. Right? Well, it's almost a three-to-one difference. And they're amused, they're entertained, and they're they're all calling with a story, right? And here's the number one story. I had all these cassettes around here, and I didn't have anything to play them in anymore. I'm back to buy cassettes. And I listened to your interviews, and I want to ask you about that, right? So that's what we're doing with those leads. Now I derailed myself, but so I figured out how to replace my prospecting with marketing. And the overlay is another old term, mail order, which still exists, by the way. People don't think about it much, but there's uh there's more money, there's more Christmas sales, products sold for the holiday season by mail order catalogs than there is online. Amazon's catching up every year, but they're not there yet. And Amazon actually mails printed catalogs to some of their lists for some of their products. You may not be a catalog shopper, but there are other people, I promise you, who are avid catalog shoppers. And their mailbox every day is full of catalogs. But at one time, mail order was like the big deal, okay, because there were big distances between stores. Small towns only had one of anything. Um, you know, the the closest, well, this is still true, the closest Neiman

Replace Prospecting With Marketing

SPEAKER_02 25:16

Marcus to Oklahoma City is Dallas. But a catalog is right there in your mailbox. So I call it, and one of the books is titled Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses. So all I really did is I replaced prospecting with mail order. And in many cases, the order is not a purchase, it's the movement to a live human being interaction to finish the sale. That's really all I did. And and there are some industries where it's still weird, and it's an advantage because it's weird. There are some industries where it really did change the business. Dentistry, for example, probably one-third of the dental practices are using some version of my kind of marketing. And they learned it because they really got they moved from dentistry to the dental product business. So they got in the Invisalign business and they got in the implant business, and they so really they're they're selling products. They've productized their service, which by the way is a very smart thing to do, and you can do it with some of what you do. You can turn an intangible into a tangible.

SPEAKER_03 26:31

But anyway, that's the background. Let's, yeah, so let's so that was that was a lot. Let's unpack that a bit because there's folks in the audience now who are saying, well, that's interesting. But I go to all these legal marketing conferences and I'm taught like fastest to return the call. The uh the prospect is visiting 10 lawyer websites. It doesn't matter the practice area all at once. Break mail sounds interesting, but quaint. And oh, by the way, I'm running mom paw firm. And over here, I'm hearing about firms that are spending $800 million a year on advertising, on digital advertising. I can never or not, they don't they don't come here and say I can never compete. They come here and say, what can we do? Because for Brian and I, like those firms are irrelevant. We don't even, they're in our market, but we don't see them at all. It doesn't change our numbers at all. But you've worked with any number of dental practices, similar, estate planning practices, sort of similar, other lawyer gurus. So what can we be thinking about to survive and thrive in a world where some of these big players, and now with PE money, and you know, non-lawyer capital coming to the market, like, are we even going to exist in 10 years?

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Well, so everybody has thought that every time a niche has gone from only small businesses to big business. So it wasn't all that long ago that there was a big consulting industry based around what the hell do we do when Walmart comes to town? We're good, they're gonna kill us. We're dead. And one-third of the people, business owners, surrendered before they even got there. Walmart stuck a sign up in the dirt. Here's where we're gonna be. And they tried to get out of their lease for their hardware store or their clothing store or their, you know, so they just surrendered. Oh my God, Walmart's coming in town. We'll never be able to compete with Walmart. And then another third died because they tried to be almost Walmart, right? And compete by trying to do the same thing Walmart does.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:34

Well, this is stupid, stupid, right? So, you know, Walmart for 20 years was lowest prices every day. What are you gonna be? Almost lowest some days? I mean, what? Right? So, so this is dumb. One third, though, almost every place Walmart opened. One third of the small businesses did better. First of all, some of their competition quit. Okay, so the Darwinian effect. Like when borders went out of business, they saved Barnes and Noble. And they gave Barnes and Noble a new life and a new opportunity, and they're actually doing a good job with it, right? Because they orphaned all these customers. And they didn't

Lists, Targeting, And Shock-And-Awe

SPEAKER_02 29:11

all go to Walmart. First of all, there's some people who wouldn't set foot in a Walmart on a bet. I had a client, I've had a client for many, many years, Guthy Ranker in the infomercial business. You might know them for proactive glop or crepe erase glop now for your old neck. Um, so I was having lunch with Greg one time in Palm Springs, and and he liked to go to the big Marriott for lunch. I said, Greg, we don't have three hours, you know, for lunch. I got a four o'clock plane. We got stuff we got to do. There's a subway in the Walmart over there. Let's just run over to the Walmart. We pass it on the way to the Marriott. He says, You know, I've never been in a Marriott in a Walmart. I said, Greg, the people who are buying your stuff at three o'clock in the morning, bleary-eyed after a second beer, they're they're in Walmart. Therefore, you need to be in Walmart, like every Saturday, dressed down, although you can wear those $800 jeans you got with the rips in them because you'll see Walmart's full of them. And let's go look at Walmart. And he's like astounded. But anyway, so Walmart made small business owners rich because they figured out how not to be Walmart for the people who didn't want to go to war by doing things that the big entity really can't do. They're not organized to do it. They don't want to do it. They want to throw mud against the wall, right? And they do so much volume that a little bit of net is good. So I ran an experiment. I did actually prepare for this a little. I know you did. So we have a big PI guy in Cleveland. I love seeing his ads. It's kind of funny. He's a big anybody know what I'm dying about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He's a big, bald-headed guy. And he's he's everywhere, of course. And his tagline is, don't make them pay. And he's mastered lifting one eyebrow up.

SPEAKER_03 31:11

I'm serious.

SPEAKER_02 31:12

But he says it. It's really cool. And he is so well known. Every once in a while he runs some ads or he puts billboards up that say, You know what I do. That's it. That's the whole ad of a phone number. Right? Well, so I called, like I had had an accident. Thank you for the research. Okay, you're welcome. So I called two weeks ago, and I had a conversation with a person, and I drugged the conversation out, and I got some information that shouldn't have even been given to me. Uh so a lot of offices think an inbound call is an operational scheduling issue. It's actually a sales call, right? Because nine out of ten who call haven't decided they're not like ready yet. They're like when when when I was a little kid, I had a playground at a clubhouse my grandfather built for me, and I was kind of a loner, and we had squirrels. And it took me a year and a half that I got them. They would come up to me and let me put a peanut on the ground right in front of them, and they would eat it. But it took forever to get them that far, right? And so a lot of people who call about anything, they're back there where the squirrel is. They're scared of the whole, you know, you know, so thinking that that's a scheduling call. Gee, would Tuesday or Wednesday be better for you? They don't understand what they're doing.

SPEAKER_03 32:35

We say they've been thrust into our world involuntarily. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 32:39

Well, and it's far worse than that. Okay. The two people nobody wants to go see. I'm serious. I mean, are a dentist and a lawyer. Those are the two people they don't want to go see. So they've been forced, they've been thrust in involuntarily, and now I gotta find one. And I don't want to go to any, and I don't know how to figure out who I should go to, right? So they're smart enough to know what they don't know. Now I know what questions to ask when I called in for the test. Most people, they don't know what they're lost, right? And the same thing is in every niche, by the way. You have to understand. Real estate agents will tell you that the bane of the top producer in the market is they now have five people come out and do listing presentations. And Susie, who sold one house in the last three years, but has a has has a picture of a dog that's just like their dog, she gets the listing. Well, because nobody knows how to determine who they should list their house with. They don't know, right? So Susie wins. So I called and I asked my questions, and I got some information I shouldn't have got. And I made it pretty clear that, you know, I was in agony and pain. What do you mean when you say you got information you shouldn't have got? Price. Okay. That the big bald-headed guy was probably never going to see me, which there's ways to handle that question, but pure naked honesty is probably not

Mail Order Mindset For Service Firms

SPEAKER_02 34:01

one of them. Team approach.

unknown 34:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 34:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 34:03

I built the team.

SPEAKER_02 34:04

Um uh so I got some information I shouldn't have got. I gave all my information, now, which of course does not include any mail address because I don't use it. And you can't text me because I don't have a cell phone. Okay, but you got my phone number, which I rarely give out, but you got my phone number, you got my fax number, and you got my address.

SPEAKER_03 34:23

They probably have no fax machine. I do have a fax machine with your phone number over the top.

SPEAKER_02 34:27

I I I can tell you right now, for example, over half of all dental offices have fax machines. They do. Okay. So these things are dying. Media and technology dies really slow. Really slow. People think it dies fast, but it dies really slow. And sometimes it's circuitous. You know, there were more landlines installed this year than last year. Parents are putting landlines to make the kid use the landline at home and take the cell phone away from them.

SPEAKER_03 34:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:56

Okay. More landlines sold. Record players and vinyl are coming back with a vengeance. We had a speaker, you may remember five, six years ago, David Sachs, wrote the book Revenge of the Analog. Barnes and Noble has a whole record department. If you haven't been to a Barnes Noble. So anyway, so they got three ways they can communicate with me.

SPEAKER_03 35:17

Bad injury.

SPEAKER_02 35:18

Right? Bad injury, right? You got my address, you got my phone number, and you got a fax number. So there's three choices of ways you could communicate with me. You don't have to use them all. You could, but you don't have to use them all. But it would be nice if you used one of them. Two weeks, I haven't heard of fucking compete. How did that call end? That call ended with me. I'm just not sure. I don't know if I'm ready to come in yet. I I really appreciate the information you gave me. I'm going to talk to my wife and I'll get back to you. That's how the call in. But think about their side. If they ever do get a $100 fund to my favorite charity, which is the Kennedy Retirement Fund. See, it's only funny if you get it turned off right away. Then it's just annoying. There should have been, right? Immediate, immediate, if there could be, email follow-up. And that you're going to see because they're going to do it with AI. Okay. So they're going to compound this mistake by extracting all humanity out of it. So for a variety of reasons, a few weeks ago, I had to start with a new dentist. Dentist sold as practice, disappeared, et cetera. So brand new. So I go for hygiene. I go for hygiene, which I needed. And then the dentist comes in, new X-rays, pokes around. There's a couple of pockets. You got a crown that's probably going to break sooner than later. And you got this thing over here. We should probably. And I I know what all that is. It's probably like five G's, right? That wouldn't stop me. But but so essentially she convinces me, you know, like my mouth could blow up tomorrow, which is what she should. Well, that's what she shouldn't do. She even prescribes antibiotics in case I need them. Carry these with you, like wherever you go, because it could explode at a moment's notice. So now let's get go out to the desk and let's get you scheduled. So first mistake is she doesn't walk me out to the desk and say, Tammy, Mr. Kennedy here has this, this, this, this, and we need to get him scheduled as soon as we have an old. Okay, she doesn't do that. She turns me loose, which I ain't going to the desk. And I got an excuse because my schedule's complicated, and I don't have, and Carla doesn't have the book with her, and I don't have the book with her. So we uh we actually are gonna need to call in. But I ain't going anyway,

Competing With Big Spenders

SPEAKER_02 37:35

right? Because I don't want to do this. And so left turn out the door. Okay. Now I don't, I don't get a concern call that night. Somebody was just in there yanking around, poking, scaling, and whatever the hell they were doing. Does somebody call? How are you doing? No, of course not. And if they did it, they would text it. Of course, you can't text me, but they would text it. And pretty soon they're gonna be AI. The AI is gonna call, not a human. But see, I don't want to talk to AI. I want to talk to a human. And I'm hoping to form a real new relationship with the new person who replaced the person I had. Okay, so that's bad enough. So it's now been, gee, I don't know, two weeks or so. Have I gotten an appointment no sale letter? Hey, you had all these problems. I'm very concerned. We really should take care of them sooner than later. If you have unanswered questions, and we screwed that up, we apologize, but we want to fix it. I don't get an appointment, no sale letter, let alone a sequence. You know, friendly, concerned first notice, sterner second notice, stern but loving parent notice. Right? No, I don't get any of that in the mail. God forbid, we should do that, let alone a FedEx, let alone a FedEx with a shock and awe package. No, none of it. Okay. So the same thing with Ms. Okay, they're handling God knows how many calls, right? They're they're a big, dumb company. That's what they are. And the bigger a company gets, the dumber it gets. Every once in a while, evidence of that breaks out. Cracker Barrel, Bud Light. Bud Light has spent a billion dollars trying to repair their relationship with guy guys, guy guys, you know, plaid shirt, basketball hoop in the driveway, one big boxer dog that slobbers like that guy. They blew their relationship with them all at one time overnight. Why? Because they turned a 26-year-old female marketing director loose with no adult supervision. I mean, but see, it happens a lot. It just doesn't always explode in a way that we see it. But even down to the small practice, they do it. I have 12 private clients I speak to every month, one-on-one. I'm not going to name them. You would know them, of course, but probably nobody else would. But they use Facebook a lot. And they use Facebook to promote a webinar that is scheduled at a certain date and time. And they rotate subjects. And the ad, the person running the ads, she's pretty good. And they get live time data from which ad is working, driving more registrations, et cetera. They get live time data for that uh from ClickFiles. Okay. So they have this, they've had this planted on ClickFiles. And Facebook for them takes the data and chases cold leads that match the profile of the people who are registering. And they chase them right now to try and get them to register too. So he is 26-year-old. It's the exact number. 26-year-old son is being brought into the business. And of course, A, he's got to change a bunch of stuff just to justify his existence to some of what they're doing that works, he's going to eliminate entirely because, you know, like nobody reads mail anymore. You know, that sort of thing. But so here's what he did. He moved that along with everything else they do online to one place. Partive, you'll appreciate this, uh, because you use all of them for your client. He moved them to HubSpot. But HubSpot is a connector. It's not built to do that, and it can't do that, and it didn't do that. So a campaign that was supposed to put 600 people on a webinar, and almost always does, put 60 because they moved it to a software that doesn't do what's needed to do to get the six. Yeah, it's more convenient. We

Walmart Effect And Small Firm Advantage

SPEAKER_02 41:36

only have to deal with one vendor. All of our data is crisscrossed. Yeah, but what good is it if it's not getting used to produce results? Suffer a little inconvenience, right? So, you know, I'm getting paid a lot to talk on the phone and give advice. And he tells he spends a third of the call telling me this sad story. And then he says, What do you think I should do? I said, Take your son out in the backyard. And after you're done with that, put that system back where you had it, right? So this happens a lot. And the bigger the company, the worse it gets. My Guthrie Wanker client, I've been with them since their first infomercial, 1987. They've grown from a small company to they sold 80% of proactive to Nestle for a billion dollars. They're two very rich guys, and they've become a big company. Now they're entirely a direct response advertising and direct marketing company. That's all they are. Okay. The product is incidental. And by the way, you need to understand that that's that's the most unwelcome piece of information I can give you. If you insist on thinking that you're in the law practice business, you'll never hit a seven-figure number. Ever. Okay. Because the law that you practice is just the auntie to be at the poker table.

SPEAKER_00 42:59

If you like Brian, he gives value. Did you hit the like button? Did you say thank you? Because that's how you say thank you. Did you share it with another attorney who you're like, dude, you gotta figure this stuff out. Listen to Brian. Brian will help you. Be nice. Share. Hit the thing. Give a little love.

SPEAKER_01 43:15

I'm clipping that and I'm putting that at the end of every episode. So thank you for that.