The Sterling Family Law Show
The Sterling Family Law Show is where successful family law attorneys share the exact systems they used to build million-dollar practices.
Host Jeff Hughes scaled Sterling Lawyers from zero to $17M with 27 attorneys.
Co-host Tyler Dolph runs Rocket Clicks, the agency in charge of supercharging Sterling and other family law practices to success using revenue-first marketing strategies.
Together, they share the playbook for building the law firm of your dreams.
If you're looking to grow exponentially, generate revenue, and get good at business, this podcast is for you.
The Sterling Family Law Show
Building Your Marketing Before You Start a Law Firm - #155
Start a law firm without a referral network? We built our marketing engine first - here's how we calculated when to launch.
Most attorneys who start a law firm rely on reputation and referrals - we had neither. Instead, we used marketing waterfalls and legal business development to calculate exactly when we could hire our first attorney. This family law practice startup guide reveals the law firm business model that actually works.
Learn the exact marketing waterfall system that took us from no clients to $17M revenue using mathematical precision instead of reputation.
📲 Subscribe Now: https://www.youtube.com/@jsterlinghughes
📝 Get your FREE Law Firm Growth Guide: https://jsterlinghughes.com/
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📄 CHAPTERS
0:00 - Start a Law Firm: Building Marketing Before Opening Doors
8:21 - Family Law Practice Startup: The Denver Starbucks Decision
10:38 - Law Firm Marketing Funnel: The Roofing vs Law Analysis
12:47 - Attorney Client Acquisition: The 27-Call Formula
15:19 - Legal Marketing Strategy: Math vs Reputation Approach
17:03 - Law Firm Lead Generation: Growing Too Fast Mistake
20:33 - Legal Practice Growth: Bar Complaints Crisis Point
21:48 - Law Firm Business Model: Focus vs Multi-Practice Strategy
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2. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/
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4. TELL US WHAT YOU WANT:
Tell us in the comments if you liked this episode and what other kinds of episodes you would like to see.
We were so aggressive that every time we got ahead an inch, we would spend two inches worth of money to try to try new things. So we tested and tested, and tested and tested and tried new things, constantly to the point where it, I think, hurt our team ultimately. But we learned so much. We learned what worked and what didn't work, and that positioned us to scale Well. Hello and welcome to the Sterling Family Law Show.
Speaker 1:My name is Jeff Hughes, I'm your co-host, I'm also the CEO of Sterling Lawyers, and today we have my partner, tony Karls, back on the show with us to talk about our early years, like the pre-starting time period whenever we decided to start the law firm. What was the thought process that went into that? Why did we choose law versus roughing, let's say? And then how we went about building our marketing funnel prior to even opening the door. So Tony's going to unpack all of that. It's a fascinating story how we looked at it from a data perspective rather than relying on any other way to attract clients, because we had no other way to attract clients but through our internet marketing. So we're going to share that. There's something applicable to everybody, especially if you want to start your law firm, your family law firm. You're going to hear a formula, a pathway to do that, and I'm joined by my co-host, tyler Dolph, here, my partner at RocketClick. So, tyler, let's get going.
Speaker 2:What a special episode we have on the docket today. Our very own Tony Carls, who has worked alongside both of us, jeff, in building both of our businesses, is with us and we're going to have a little origin story day today.
Speaker 1:We love these, like comic books, that's right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you got to start at the beginning, and so I want to give Tony the opportunity to tell his side of the story, but I think there's going to be a lot of fun interaction with how he was involved with both of our businesses.
Speaker 1:Tony's my partner If any of you listeners don't know that from the many times Tony's been on the show with me but he's my partner in Sterling Law. We started it together a long 12 years ago whenever the idea was germinated in our little fertile brains, and then we kicked it off about 11 years ago and Tony is not a lawyer. That's kind of a unique characteristic of our partnership and so forth. But it didn't begin, tony, with the law firm. It started years before that, when you were a young whippersnapper joining us as an intern. So maybe you can take us back to that part of the story.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean so thinking all the way back to 2010, you're kind of coming out of the 08, 09 recession I was still going to school. I was going to night school, I was studying to be a CPA and one of the things I needed to finish out my degree was an internship that had to do with data and, for whatever reason, the paid search internship that was offered at RocketClick slash Sterling Satellite qualified when I talked to my advisor and quickly fell in love with marketing, because it was like a combination of the second thing that I was interested in school, which is psychology. So the numbers and psychology kind of all came together into marketing. I didn't really know that was an opportunity and I think one of the reasons I actually got in is I really bullshitted my way through interview questions regarding Excel and then when I got the job offer, I literally got Excel for dummies and studied it before I started so that I knew Excel.
Speaker 1:With your level of following on Excel. I believe you didn't know. You weren't born knowing it.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, I didn't know anything about it. I think it was. Nicole Menakee asked me what's your favorite formula or function in Excel, and I'm like I don't know.
Speaker 2:They're all great.
Speaker 3:It sounded good enough. And then I went and I was like, okay, if I'm going to get this job, I better know how this thing works. So that's kind of how we got connected.
Speaker 2:And at the time. Tony, just give some perspective or context on what did the organization look like back then.
Speaker 3:I think, Jeff, you can correct me on the timeline, but I think you guys were just through shutting down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a business that we started in 08 that failed because it was in the housing sector. Of course, housing didn't do so well in 08. And then we closed it down in 09 and kept our marketing team from that business. We kept four people out of that team and formed RocketClicks as a digital agency. So, tony, I think you may have been our first intern to join us and we were a fledgling probably a seven, eight person team back then.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there was. I think there were six or six or seven people on the team. I was in an internship class. There was four of us. I like to say it's like one of the best internship classes that probably ever existed, because all four of us are now very successful in our own careers and somehow you guys hired all of us at the exact same time, so but yeah, so it was really cool class to come in on very smart people.
Speaker 3:I think the business was called consult sales at that point and I was working on uh, I think it was. It was with rocket clicks, but it was working on some kind of cell phone spoofing uh client that we had. That was like tracking software that track what spouses were texting uh other people so that they could catch their spouse cheating. It was just like bizarro keyword research that I was doing, but it was super interesting. So that was kind of the origin story where it started and the business was growing a ton at that point the dish business and that's kind of how I was able to get more involved and have a bigger impact at the firm.
Speaker 3:I was kind of raising my hand when you guys needed a second shift paid search analysts that wanted to work 2 to 10 pm and Saturdays and Sundays. That was kind of how I got. I was like, well, nobody wants this, I'll do that. That sounds great and, needless to say, it was like a little. It was probably the best opportunity you guys had offered, because I had the fewest amount of meetings and the most amount of time to research and test, because there was no one there after five, so I literally just had all the time in the world to not be distracted and go super deep on a lot of things and just for all of our listeners sake.
Speaker 1:we had a sister business called Sterling Satellite where we sold Dish Network, which is a competitor to cable and direct TV and so forth. And that was a large business, there was around 200 plus employees and really was the center of all of our attention. So RocketClicks was like a side hustle back in those days. And so, Tony, you ultimately got a job at RocketClicks and then you turned that into running our marketing team a few years later at Sterling, which was a team of eight back then.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I remember when, uh, you know that that opportunity presented itself. Uh, I very distinctly remember going into your office and telling you I'd like the like the opportunity. I know I'm probably doesn't, I don't have all the qualifications, but, uh, I'll work hard. And he took a chance on me. I think I was like the interim director or something. Yeah, non-definitive, non, like I'm not not all title, but I didn't, I didn't really care and it was just a great opportunity to continue to go and run and start adding value to the business.
Speaker 2:So it's funny to me as you're telling this part of the story is like if anyone that knows you today knows you is like you know, do whatever it takes, get anything that needs to be done done, and it feels like that mindset was cultivated early on in your career Do, you agree with that.
Speaker 3:It didn't feel like work to me. It felt like a really interesting game that had a lot of you could see the scoreboard because it was all in the data, so it felt very fun to me. I've always worked a lot more than necessarily required to and that's would be of interest to our audiences, the our family law firm startup.
Speaker 1:So maybe we can kind of go to that point and and and in particular, September of 2004, when we made the decision to start the law firm from absolute scraps. Like I wasn't even practicing law at that point, I had my degree, I think it was on like hiatus or like some, yeah, some, and then. So what was the thought process on? How did you get rolling? Cause, there's a lot to apply here to someone looking to go off and start their own family law firm. So how did you go about doing it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know, I mean we when we kind of you know you, you, you definitely saw it, and kind of the leadership team agreed with you on kind of where the trajectory of pay TV was gone, like it was ending its life cycle. So before you know, before the business really got hit with that, we put together a small team to kind of figure out what we were going to do next and we did research on a bunch of different things. I think there was four of us at the time and I think within six months just about everybody quit except for me. So I get it, there was a lot of ambiguity there, not a lot of potential job security. The main business was continuing to shrink.
Speaker 2:Sorry, just so I'm clear, was the directive from Jeff? All right, tony and team go research potential ideas of a new business. We can start, because we know this other one's ending Like that was was that the clarity you were given?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I forget who we. We did it in the, the, the, the front fireplace office at the current Sterling Menominee Falls where we had a meeting. I think there was six or seven of us in that room. We were kind of just all sitting there talking about where we were and where we needed to go and we came to a decision that we need to put a small team together and then the next L10, we decided who that was going to be and we then set motion transitions for current roles and we all moved into like a back corner of the building and, yeah, started working on that project.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I don back corner of the building and, uh, yeah, started working on on that project. Um, so, yeah, I don't know if that, well, and so now, okay, you're doing the research. You've decided on a law firm, right, or were there two options?
Speaker 3:I seem to remember so, like we were, we researched a bunch of different things. The one we ended up liking the most before we were open to the law firm when we were on a business trip, was a roofing company and we had to go and present to our main client for Sterling Satellite Dish Network. Meeting didn't go that great. We kind of were licking our wounds at a Starbucks after and Jeff's like what if we did a law firm? And I think so. That was before everybody had left, and I think on the on the next day when we were flying back home, the last guy left, john. He decided he was no longer going to be part of the team.
Speaker 1:As I told you in the airport the very next day, he didn't love our vision.
Speaker 3:So yeah, but yeah, jeff, jeff pitched that at the Starbucks there in Denver and we came back and did some research and it looked really positive overall in terms of like what it. It looked a lot like roofing, except you lost the seasonality, and especially here in Wisconsin, you know you only have a couple, couple months to really run after that. So but the there's high transaction value, there was longer buying cycles, it was a serious business. There's serious purchase decision so, and a lot of purchase behavior emanated from local, local search and the competitive, competitive space there looked less mature than what we were dealing with in the affiliate space, which was basically extraordinarily competitive with a lot of smart marketers, versus kind of going into this local space where you have a lot of businesses that they don't necessarily focus super tremendously on their business or their processes or their marketing. They're just really good at their service.
Speaker 1:That was the clincher, tony, for me, and my analysis is that we felt like we had the marketing chops to go in and compete with a lot of folks who had jobs as lawyers. Right, they were not marketing people, they were really focused on building their firm out. So we knew we could compete with them and do well, and that proved out to be true. So, and even today still, if you know how to market, you can kill it in the family law space. And so that's what we did and we immediately started to grow. So, tony, you and you architect our complete marketing system. You put it all together and build it out over the ensuing 10 years. So kind of what was the mandate and how did you go about doing it relative to that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, at the beginning we had to figure out when we could open and hire our first person. And we struck a relationship with someone in your network that we were able to. They allowed us to send them phone calls and we were allowed to listen to them just so we could understand if they were quality or not. And then once we got I think it was 27 calls a week we knew we could hire our first attorney and that's kind of when we pulled the trigger.
Speaker 3:And several months later we found our first person, um, because, for you know, when I was a paid search analyst I know I think it was um, I think it was Gerald, gerald Burke uh kind of showed me what a waterfall looked like from a paid search perspective. And that's really what we. It's how I really thought about everything, uh, moving forward, cause it's basically everything, almost almost everything, basically functions from a waterfall perspective. So we understood that if we got this number of users and that turned to the summer phone calls, it would turn into this number of scheduled consults. And then we made an assessment on all right, if we close at 30%, how many cases would we get a week? Does that, does that equate to being able to sustain a full-time attorney? And that's kind of the back-end math that we back into.
Speaker 1:On that you mentioned just a second ago I thought I heard you say once we got the 27 phone calls from prospective clients that's when you knew the waterfall told you that would render enough clients to start a firm with. Is that yeah?
Speaker 3:I don't remember that number.
Speaker 1:So that really, I I think tell us more about that, because the 27 calls would yield. What was the analysis on how many clients that would yield? At what dollar value? Do you recall?
Speaker 3:so at 27 or basically uh, for every 2.1 phone calls you get a lead, and then you have the throughputs from leads to consults and then consults to funded agreements, and that would equate to about three and a half funded agreements per month, which was enough to grow a caseload over the course of six months to about 35 to 40. And we thought that was sustainable for hiring our first attorney.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's kind of how we back. Was it 27 calls a week or 27 calls a month? Okay, that would be three and a half clients a week or a month.
Speaker 3:27 calls a month. Okay, that would be three and a half clients a week or a month, no, so that would be so that 27 would end up being about 12,. 12 leads, six consults and then 30% close rate is going to give you about a little more than a file a week.
Speaker 2:I think just just to take a pause here, because we talked to a lot of law firm owners who don't start their law firm, thinking about how many leads do I need and how many of those leads are going to turn to consults and consults cases. I think it's very interesting how you both went about starting this from a math and data perspective, as opposed to a lot of law firms who are relying on their name and their reputation and their network and going into the community. That, to me, feels totally different.
Speaker 1:That's a unique part of our story because I'm a lawyer, so that gave us the ability to start the law firm right and own it. But I had no reputation whatsoever. No one knew I hadn't been practicing in seven or eight years, so we were completely flat footed. We could rely on no referrals. I had very few relationships, even left from my days, so this was a complete math equation that we had to figure out from the get go to start it. So in that sense there's a lot of times not relatable to other people, but that was like anyone can do that you can. You can work with marketers that can start from help. You start from nothing to get going.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would say the mistake we made about in that that, um, I'm sure you talked a little bit about when you guys did your. Your origin story, jeff, was um, we saw how good the data looked, uh, in the waterfall, with a lot of different practice areas and we grew way too fast and we weren't very good. So, um, yeah, that was that was a. That was a big mistake. You know, I think I forget the exact saying. I know you've said it before, but I think it's like pigs get pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered or something like that. We were definitely I think that's a Marshall. You've been saying that.
Speaker 1:I've repeated many times because we love that. So, yeah, we. So what you built enabled us to just completely turn gas on a fire and we grew from zero attorneys when we started in June of what? Four or no, june of 05?, 04, right, 04, excuse me and we went to eight lawyers in the first 18 months and the phone was just ringing constantly and we were doing everything. It was chaos and we were doing everything. It was chaos and it it was. We were terrible. Frankly, we were only good in family law with a few attorneys.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean what showed up. What showed up for us, I think, was in the dish business we had very little to do after the sale with the client, like basically nothing, essentially so, like we didn't have to operationalize the service of, you know, Dish Network. Dish did that. We just did marketing. We answered the phone, did the sale, put it in their order entry system and somebody else dealt with the rest. And you know, when we started the law firm, we're like well, this is the same thing.
Speaker 3:We'll do the marketing, answer the phone, set a counsel and the attorneys will deal with the rest. And the reality is like that's not how you build a business. So we kind of quickly ran into that reality.
Speaker 2:I think it's really important that we stay in this kind of like first-year fire fighting, because I think a lot of attorneys find themselves there when they start their own firm or they leave a big firm and then they go to, you know, a smaller firm. There's a lot of chaos that happens in those early days. And, tony, you were kind of handling marketing and operations, is that right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I was. I answered the phones when we first started. That's kind of what. What happened? It was me and, like we hired, jody and Kelly and us three answered the phones. So we also, you know, I remember, I distinctly remember when we got our first consult, one of us knew what to do. So cause we never had a person come into our office before for a consultation it was we all just kind of looked at each other so, and then we escorted them in and asked them if they wanted coffee, and Dan went in and executed the consult. We were all super excited. I don't think the client hired us. So opportunity for improvement.
Speaker 2:And you were just there in the trenches, right. Every new issue meant a new process, yes, or meant hey, we got to learn from this, or whatever it was, and like that's startup mentality.
Speaker 3:Yeah, 100%. It was a lot of unknown, unknown and we just kept encountering that over and over again. And you know we, you know we paid the penalty for that in, you know not being super profitable for many years and like that's, that's the reality. We were built, we were building a big, big engine and we had so much unknown, unknown in our you know Johari window and you know, every month or two months we like I'm like, oh look, here's another thing we had no clue about. How do we deal with this problem? So you know, that's why you know it's exciting what we're doing over here at RocketClicks and there's like a lot of lessons that we can help people avoid, in kind of just learning from what we've already paid the price to learn.
Speaker 2:So you have this period of absolute growth zero to eight attorneys and Jeff did touch on this, his origin story, but you had this moment of like we can't do this anymore Was that you and Jeff sit in a room and just have this like what are we doing here, guys, and what like tell us about that kind of that little window of time?
Speaker 3:I think it was. I think it was our third OLR complaint that we got all three. I think all three of them were in criminal, I think it was. I actually think it was all the same person, but we didn't really know how to manage uh attorney, so like there may be issues with that individual, but it was more of the issue was on our ability to manage and identify that we had problems in the first place, um, and we just hated the fact that we felt super average Like. We felt like uh I don't know, I always describe it as I felt like a Walmart was like just super average, not great products, they're okay, they're, they do the job, but no one's like run into the hills and saying you know, I bought my, bought my new kicks at Walmart. So that's kind of how it felt to me. I don't know if that's how you remember it.
Speaker 1:Embarrassing Cause we were getting not only the the bar complaints with the state. That's kind of how it felt to me, I don't know if that's how you remember it embarrassing because we were getting not only the the bar complaints with the state regulators, but we're getting tons of client complaints that didn't escalate to that. So we're just constantly dealing with the sloppy work and we didn't know what we were doing, how to manage them, we didn't know how to build out a process for that stuff, and so we decided that we're gonna cut it way down and do just family, where we can focus on one area and become great at that, and so that was the sacrifice we had to make. It was tough.
Speaker 2:You flew across country.
Speaker 1:Right, we rose them down in Miami and came back in the next week. So we're going to do this, we're going to rip the bandaid and we're going to literally cut half our firm out. Let them go and refund clients and shrink down to four attorneys from eight and start over.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I mean that was. It was a. It was a hard, it was a hard moment, but it was also a. Really looking back it was it was definitely the right decision because that year we, we, our revenue was flat. We did that in Februarybruary. We, we cut up about 40 of our business and by the end of the year we had the same revenue as we had the prior year, because we really focused and then we really started to see our growth happen. Because we were just implementing systems for the same product line over and over and over again, instead of, you know, creating a system for criminal and for personal injury and for family and for estate planning and every other thing that we were trying to do didn't work. We just had like a real general system, not a whole lot of opportunities for our intake team to be good or attorneys to have good sales materials in the consultation room.
Speaker 3:Like there was just a lot of opportunity that was missed on the front end.
Speaker 2:Tony, what did you learn about yourself during those days and how did you have to grow as a leader? Have you grown as a leader because of those?
Speaker 3:experiences. I guess the thing I learned, the lesson I probably took away the most, was how important focus was. Because of the outcome within that same year that was. I doubted that we were going to be able to go that fast and we went a lot faster than I think we both thought was possible. So it was. It was also humbling, um, just knowing how much we didn't know Um, and that's been like a. I'm really good, you know there's a, there's an acronym F, afo, really good at that. But that doesn't necessarily mean just because I'm a step ahead of the team doesn't mean I know, I actually know where we're going, um, and like that's been, you know, over the years that's been something that I've been kind of focused on getting out of the way, cause there's opportunities to do things differently and better with a lot more strategic insight than just muscle around trying to figure it out and hoping it works.
Speaker 2:Jeff, you know being the attorney and the owner of this firm and, you know, co-founder with Tony. How did you navigate and watch, tony? You know navigate these waters and build the firm.
Speaker 1:Well, we did it shoulder to shoulder. I mean, we were making the same mistakes. We agreed on all the mistakes that we made, so it wasn't like he was alone in making those screw ups. We both kind of shared in the in the carnage a little bit there. And I would agree with you, tony, that focus was probably the dominant lesson we learned pulling coming out of that year, yeah, and the other one was that we were so aggressive that every time we got ahead an inch we would spend two inches worth of money to try to try new things. So we we tested and tested and tested and tested and tried new things constantly to the point where it, I think, hurt our team ultimately because they couldn't. It was like whiplash city, but we learned so much. We learned what worked and what didn't work, and that positioned us to scale. So I don't know how much of I could go back and say I would change right, but maybe the communication around it we would have got better at rather than just jamming things through. We just so similar experience.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think like on that. I think, looking back to how we communicate and kind of get the team behind initiatives and ideas, it's more collaborative at least for me than it was in the past, cause you can, I can get a lot more done when the team's bought in and they feel like it's part of their idea. I'm just like I'm going to run and around this to the finish line myself and I'll pull you along.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things I, I quote, would regret I don't regret a whole lot, but I no-transcript. We can think through decisions rather than just make them quick. That took us years to work out of those bad habits in those areas.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, I don't think it was until at least for me. I don't think I truly had an appreciation for what the timeline it took to build the team up so that we could actually grow, until we got involved with Jeff Curlin and, like that was years later just kept getting frustrated. Why can't we do this, getting mad about the realities of where the team was and we're. We're trying to run fast and the team's trying to walk and that's like let's just walk first. It's like, yeah, that fast. And the team's trying to walk and that's like let's just walk first. It's like, yeah, that probably would have been better, they would have been more motivated, probably could learn faster. Um, so you know, it's just that's a different, you know that's an art that's.
Speaker 2:That was not understood, at least on my end, or very well at the beginning so, as I'm listening to this and and I'm assuming you know our listeners they they may be thinking like, hey, this focus thing sounds good. Maybe I want to transition my firm from multi-practice to single practice and I want to double down on this. What advice or lessons can you give our listeners as it relates to making that transition? Maybe some lessons learned from your experience.
Speaker 3:Making that transition, maybe some lessons learned from your experience. I think it's important for there to be like a reason why, like a belief on why you want to go in a certain direction. I think focus is important, but I don't think I think it's meaningless if there's not. Like you can't connect it emotionally to a why because there's no story to tell them. And like people will justify hiring an attorney logically, but it's an extraordinarily emotional decision. If you don't have like a a good story on why you're doing what you're doing and connecting that to your mission and then living that out through everything you do, it's hard to uh, it's hard to make that focus authentic would be kind of what I'd say, um, be kind of what I'd say. So you know, I think I think the focus is important, but starting from a point of like what am I really passionate about? And building around, building around that and getting focused around that, like coupling those two things, is really powerful.
Speaker 2:You guys didn't pick family bias.
Speaker 1:Our best talent was in family law Holly Tricia and yeah, our best talent was in family law.
Speaker 3:I know I have a I have a super broken family. So it connected specifically with my my history, history and past and, like I can see how you know an attorney that had more empowerment oriented mission in their service delivery would have had a different impact on how my situation was. So like there was for me, that's kind of where it was real easy to connect with with it because I experienced it on my own and then we had really good assets there. It was clear they were good because that was the feedback they were getting from clients and they were actually making a difference for the client. So it was like it was easy to be more passionate and authentically real with that I can add something to that strategically about focus.
Speaker 1:I'm obviously a big proponent of focusing. I think you do better when you do that, but I will acknowledge that there's a lot of ways to win. You can have a multi-practice and multidisciplinary practice and win. I would contend and argue and I think I could show you this from data that if you focus your firm it's less stressful, with better margins ultimately, and I think the growth is the same. And the age-old argument among lawyers is well, I want to add PI onto that, I want to bolt PI on in case that big once in a lifetime case comes through. And I think that I get the argument. I just don't know if it really plays out over a lifetime.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wouldn't disagree with that. I 100% agree with that. So I think there's as we've seen that in our own firm and as we've helped clients with that, they grow faster. That's just what happens. So I think they grow with more quality. It's easier, more predictable. You're not experiencing new problems all the time. You're experiencing the same issue and now you have more nuance on the solution every single time.
Speaker 2:So, tony, you were able to assist in the growth of Sterling and obviously, the tremendous results that they have today, and ultimately, I was able to convince you to come over and help us do the same thing at Rocket Clicks for family law firms all over the country. So tell us a little bit about transitioning out of the law firm, maybe thinking, oh, I don't have to work with attorneys anymore, to now work with attorneys every day, get to work with attorneys, that's right Hurt my feelings.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I mean, after we pivoted, our growth was pretty fast and like I really start, I started feeling out of my element, I think about the third year that we grew, because I think we had almost almost three straight years of 60 to 100 percent growth and we got.
Speaker 3:We went from like 1.7 to three and a half to six to nine and I'm like holy smokes, this business is way bigger than I have any experience doing.
Speaker 3:And that's that's right around the same timeline when we got connected with Jeff Curlin and that's when I could see like how far off, from an experiential perspective, I was from being able to lead, lead the team and he was he coaches for I forget how long we were engaged with him. I think you started with him, jeff, and then I got involved with them and then we were able to bring him on to the firm and that kind of created the opportunity for us to connect. So I'm kind of seeing how he's continued to lead the firm and build a leadership team has been a really good model for me in terms of how we're building and growing Rocket Clicks and all the technical knowledge that we learned over at the law firm. That's easily transferable. It's like it's the building of the company thing that I think is harder. Because it's easy to do things with a couple of people. It's really hard to do it with a large group.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the non-attorney leader is something that you guys have obviously subscribed to, both in Tony and now in Jeff Kerlin. Jeff Hughes, do you see that as a unique differentiator? I certainly don't talk to a lot of law firm owners that have a non-attorney leader, a differentiator in a sense, of the clients don't care about that.
Speaker 1:So in that sense I don't see it as a marketing advantage. It certainly has given us a business advantage. I mean, just the law of numbers are going to tell you that there are more astute business people in the general market than among lawyers. Just because of the nature of you know the percentage of lawyers in the market versus people that are really good in business. So I would say that the majority of firms would benefit from having a non-lawyer leader of the firm. From a business team building standpoint, if they want to grow beyond a couple lawyers, I think they would benefit from having a non-lawyer involved.
Speaker 1:Generally, there's always a unicorn among the lawyers who's great at both, outside of those few, certainly. That's true in our case and I think I would have probably fancied myself, as you know, more business experience than most lawyers because of my experience, right, but I still had a. I still there's a big gap between me and Jeff when it comes to scaling and building out teams and culture and so forth. So we've benefited enormously from that and we were super open to it, obviously because my partner here, tony, is a non-lawyer. So we already predisposed to what's the best solution in that way.
Speaker 2:There's a little teaser for our next episode. Jeff Curlin is going to join us. We're going to talk all about the non-attorney leadership kind of lifestyle that we've built over here. But Tony appreciate obviously your time and insights and experience and everything you've given to both of us across the firms.
