Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Could your daily coffee run be one of the most valuable networking opportunities you have? Tyson Mutrux explains why he has stopped looking at his regular coffee purchases only as an expense. By getting to know the people behind the counter, he has built relationships that have led to client referrals. He shares an example of a matter worth about $19,200 in fees and a referral partner whose Chipotle connections helped generate a case that settled for approximately $750,000.

The point is not to turn every conversation into a pitch. Tyson talks about the difference between genuine relationships and transactional networking, why measuring only the direct cost of an expense can miss its value, and how everyday interactions can create lasting connections. He also gives a quick look at Maximum Lawyer’s new AI library and reminds listeners to complete the State of the Firm Survey at maxlawsurvey.com.

What You'll Learn

• Why everyday routines can create unexpected referral opportunities
• How a coffee-shop relationship can generate meaningful case value
• What a $750K referral story teaches about consistency and trust
• Why networking is not the same as selling
• How to evaluate business expenses with indirect value
• What is available in the Maximum Lawyer AI library

Timestamps

• Opening: State of the Firm Survey and December results
• The coffee-shop referral that sparked the conversation
• The cost of daily coffee versus one valuable matter
• A referral partner’s $750,000 settlement story
• Building real relationships instead of transactional networks
• The difference between networking and selling
• Considering the indirect value of expenses
• Inside Maximum Lawyer’s new AI library

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Full Transcript: 

[00:00] Tyson Mutrux: Good morning, everybody. Got a really fun one today. Before I get into it, We do have maxlawsurvey.com, maxlawsurvey.com. The Max Law Survey is live, the State of the Firm Survey. And the whole idea of this is that we want to give you a report that shows you how much are law firm owners working?

[00:23] How much are they getting paid? How much are they paying their employees? How are they getting cases? All these things. We want to give you this report.

[00:34] That's the whole idea of this. We are not benefiting. We're not making money from this. We're actually giving away a five hundred dollar gift card. What we're doing is we're actually giving you this report.

[00:48] All you have to do is fill out the survey at the end of it. You will get the report. We'll give the live results in December. And so just make sure that you do that. maxlawsurvey.com. The more people that do this, the more we will all benefit from it.

[01:08] We want to be able to give you this data so that you can make better informed decisions. All right, let's get into today's topic. I may talk about a couple things depending on how much time. We have something cool that we're doing. We built an AI library for...

[01:27] Association members may get into that a little bit, but actually that's not like the topic of the conversation today. We'll talk about coffee. Okay. So yesterday my wife, Amy and I, we went to Starbucks as we regularly do. It was in the kind of that we took like a mid afternoon.

[01:48] We don't do that usually, but we did a little mid afternoon trip to Starbucks. Just, you know, kind of hung out a little bit. And right after that, while we actually got spoke to one of the employees and she wanted to shoot me a text about something. So right after I got a referral from it and it really got me thinking because I will, I'll admit that I do sometimes have a little bit of guilt about having the coffee at Starbucks because it is not cheap. It's, you know, even if you got like a basic coffee, it's a few bucks, you know, and if you get like something like, like yesterday, we kind of, kind of treated ourselves and got a brown sugar, brown sugar, oatmeal, shaken espresso is usually what we get with some non-dairy cold foam on top.

[02:44] Just to give you an idea as to what I get. And it's like seven bucks, like six and a half, seven bucks. So not cheap, not at all. And I will say, I'm usually like, man, this isn't really worth it. Is this worth the money to actually spend the money on this coffee?

[03:05] And I think if you listen to finance bros, in quotes, they're going to tell you, oh, you should make your coffee at home for thirty cents a cup and you should take that money and invest it and all that. And I think that the logic makes sense. I think it makes a lot of sense. number of referrals I've gotten from from those coffees that I get. And I kind of start doing the math. Right.

[03:35] So if you do six, let's say you get a six dollar coffee a day and that's the annual cost is roughly fifteen hundred dollars. That's that's a two hundred fifty visits. That's a lot of visits, in my opinion. Two hundred fifty visits is a lot. So if you now if you a three sixty five, it's a little different.

[03:59] I mean, it's still the cost. I mean, you increase it by about, let's say by about a thousand. So, twenty five hundred bucks. OK, so let's say you spend twenty five hundred bucks a month or a year at Starbucks. It's really not bad if you start to factor in like here's a part of this.

[04:21] You have to really you have to understand that with this, though, is when it comes to my position on this, you have to get to know the people there. Right. You can't just go like that. Those of you that know me, I'm a talker and I will talk to you. And so I will I'm the type of person that when I'm there waiting, I will strike up a conversation with someone there while I'm standing there or I will talk to the people that are working there.

[04:56] I'm very respectful of the time. I'm not the type of person that's like, oh, they're in the middle of a rush. Let me strike up a conversation with them. I don't do that. but I do get to know the people there. It doesn't matter what Starbucks I ever go to.

[05:16] I get to know the people that are there and it would, would not matter what coffee shop it can be. You can replace Starbucks with Dunkin’ or whatever, McDonald's, whatever you want to replace it with, wherever you get your morning coffee, if you get one or your morning tea or wherever, get to know the people because you start to do the math and Like one case, like one of our cases is worth about nineteen thousand two hundred dollars. OK, just one case. So if I get one case from on average, I get one case from that morning coffee. OK, in a year, I've paid for all my coffees for multiple years.

[06:01] And so I'm starting to give myself a little bit of grace when it comes to this morning coffee because I don't treat it as just a transaction anymore. I actually will go in, get to know the people, learn their names. We've actually had people, had them over to our house before, had them for dinner. And I wouldn't invite all of them. There are just certain few that when I get to know them, I would invite them.

[06:32] But we've had them over for dinner before, actually gotten to know them. And when you build these deeper, richer relationships, it leads to more than just a transactional coffee. Um, and I think that that's really the important lesson here. Like, let me give you another example. This isn't just like a one-off Tyson special.

[06:54] Okay. One of our biggest referral partners, and I need to go do the math on this because I need to, we have our list of referral partners and I've not looked at it in a while, but I need to look and see, cause he's top three. He's, he's either one, two or three. He, he has been some years, number one, some years, three, he's in there somewhere. he gets the vast majority of his leads from Chipotle employees because he goes to a Chipotle every single day. Okay.

[07:29] And we've had some whoppers of cases from him that like we settled one last year. It was, it was about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars from an, from a Chipotle employee. Okay. And we give him a, we have, he actually gets a very favorable referral fee. So he gives kids more than normal because we actually do some work together too.

[07:54] So yeah, That being said, he, he gets those referrals because he goes to Chipotle every single day, every single day. And he gets to know the employees. He asks questions. Okay. He asks about their families.

[08:08] You know, he gets to know their names. It's, it's really kind of interesting. He is very, he's a very interesting specimen because he's, he's, he's mastered this far better than I have. And it's, I didn't even set out like this wasn't a part of my strategy, but it is something I've started to think about. Okay.

[08:31] When you do these things, when you go to these places, like actually get to know these people and develop relationships with them, especially places like a Starbucks where you you have a lot of employees and you have a lot of volume. So you have these people that are getting to know all these people. So let's say that someone comes in and they're in a cast. I guarantee those people, they're going to say, hey. I got the attorney for you.

[09:03] Were you in a car crash? Okay, give Tyson a call. I've got his cell phone number. Let's give him a call. That is a legitimate strategy.

[09:13] It is one of those things that actually is effective if you do make it, if you really kind of think about it as part of a strategy. Now, I feel like it kind of cheapens it too if you do that, though. I do think that you should go into these where you – you actually do intend to have relationships with these people and get to know these people and actually care. Because there is, and we've all had these conversations with people where you're having these conversations they're asking all the right questions, but they're, you can tell they don't give a care. They don't really care.

[09:56] They just want to, um, it's a, that is a transaction to them. And so it is part of their, their whole strategy. So I, you really do want to go into it with the right intentions because, um, otherwise people are going to kind of, they're going to kind of see right through it. You know, like it's, you have to really, um, understand. And I guess another thing too is, um, Like there there's a difference between like I think we've confused networking selling.

[10:29] That's another thing that's part of this, too, where we we a lot of times enter. Like networking situations like this, like about like try to figure out like what we can get out of the situation. And it can really make those interactions feel transactional. Like if you think about like those Starbucks and Chipotle examples, like those works because like we actually develop those relationships and they develop naturally. We weren't forcing it.

[10:58] Like I was genuinely curious about these people and started asking questions. Some of them genuinely asked or were curious about me. So for example, Amy and I share an app. Okay. The Starbucks app.

[11:12] And it always says Amy. So for when we first started going to the Starbucks for a couple of months, my name was Amy and they all started calling me Amy. It was a funny joke. We had a little inside joke, you know, Amy, I'd walk in and say, Amy, you know, funny, hilarious. And then at some point they're like, Hey, Okay, this is kind of embarrassing, but what's your actual name?

[11:41] And so I told him my name. And at this point, it was embarrassing because we had had a lot of conversations at this point. But it's one of those things that was fun to kind of break the ice. And now, like, they all know me as Tyson. And so they know Amy.

[12:02] And it's funny because for the longest time, Amy didn't go in. I would usually go in. And they would be like, oh, you're Amy. So she'd come in with me. Oh, my gosh, you're Amy.

[12:16] And it was kind of a fun thing. We actually naturally develop these relationships. I didn't go into it trying to seek something out of it. And so it's one of the things you have to make sure that you are not confusing the networking with selling. You're not trying to sell them anything.

[12:37] You develop these things naturally. I think that that part is really important. And another point I want to make is what really was... causing me to beat myself up a little over this is that I was measuring the costs. And so what you want to do is, is stop measuring everything, but what it costs. And I think that we're, what we're, we're trained to do is sort of monitor spending, calculate ROI, at least, you know, maximum lawyer.

[13:08] That's a big thing is like, you know, calculating roi and what you're getting your return on investment but we're also like sort of trained like okay eliminate unnecessary expenses right like and i think that that discipline is really really important i preach it all the time i talk about make sure you go through look through all your expenses and then cut out any expenses every year like that's a really important But it can also be a blind spot when an expense actually has indirect value. And I would say that a coffee, when done right, it definitely has an indirect value to it. And so really kind of think, calculate what you're spending. Don't beat yourself up so much about it. Calculate what you're spending and then figure out what is your average matter value or average case value.

[14:03] And if you figure that out... kind of maybe start asking some more questions and getting to know people at your local coffee shop because you could actually lead into a lot more money to you and your firm than you might actually think about. Um, so that's, that's really, um, all I have for today when it comes to that topic, I will talk, I guess, just briefly, um, about something that we built inside of the, the, uh, I guess it's really not even the association it's inside of maximum lawyer. And we built, so we built this, um, prompts library or not really prompts library. It's a AI library. So I'm going to share this.

[14:49] For those of you that are actually watching, you'll be able to see this on my screen. If you're listening to it, I'll be very descriptive so you can understand what we're looking at. But what we got here is on our main website now, we've got this AI library that we have built out. And it's got skills, prompts, and bots that you can download. If you are not a member, then they do have a cost.

[15:19] So if you're looking at the screen, this is from a member's view and you see what's included. Right. And then you can see what's added to the library. So once you download it, it's added to your library. And then what's pretty cool is I can go to my library and I can see what I've downloaded.

[15:41] And it doesn't none of this matters if you don't actually add it to your cloud or your rock bot or your codecs for open AI. None of that really matters, but you've got to make sure you use it. So different prompts that you can use. We have 323 skills so far, 59 prompts and 60 bots. And the idea is that we roll it out to the association and members can actually add their own and actually get paid for it.

[16:13] So and here's some of the bots. So there's a firm command center. case chronology clerk a pleading builder an attorney executive assistant so these are all bots that we've we've built out and some of them are free uh you'll kind of go through and see which ones are free and the others are either included with the association or if you're outside the association you can you can buy those but i just want to share that with people that's something that new that we're working on i think it's pretty cool so check that out um But as a reminder, make sure you check out the survey, maxlawsurvey.com. Fill it out because it really is to benefit you. So make sure you fill it out. But that's all we have this week.

[17:05] Have a wonderful week, everybody, and we will be seeing you.