This week on the show we have Nick Oritz, owner of Ortiz Law Firm, based out of Pensacola, Florida. Nick represents policyholders in individual disability, group disability, and ERISA long-term disability claims.
In today’s episode we’ll talk about ultimate goals, struggles with managing employees and marketing.
Hacking’s Hack:
Here’s a hack to make more connections. I take a photo of myself with the books that I order and tweet it out with references to the authors Twitter account. When I received Duct Tape Marketing and tweeted it, the author John Jantsch liked it and retweeted it.
Tyson’s Tip:
If you’ve been wanting to learn another language, check out the Duolingo app, it’s free! The app feels more like a game because it gives you points and challenges you. If you like to play games on your phone it might motivate you to learn a new language.
Nick’s Tip:
Don’t give up just because something doesn’t seem to be working. Too many lawyers try something once and say, “Oh, that doesn’t work”. Sometimes it requires refinement and tweaking.
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Transcripts: “Automating Systems and Processes to Grow Your Firm” with Nick Ortiz
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast. Your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up Jamie?
Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson just got back from a great weekend very relaxing, did a little bit of work. I’ve been starting to implement file line. So playing around with that sort of like a toy.
Tyson Mutrux
How excited isn’t a nice and if you have like that new thing, whatever it may be like, how exciting is it right now?
Jim Hacking
Well, you know, I’m the king of new things.
Tyson Mutrux
But yes, you are.
Jim Hacking
I’m really excited about implementing file vine into our practice.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I will tell you this. I’ve been using file on for about a year. I was skeptical whenever I first saw it. Like Ryan McKean is such a fanboy and loves it so much. Like there’s no way it’s that good. It. I think it’s that good. I think everyone really thinks like that. And I’m pretty sure our guest today use that you want to introduce our guests.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. So today we have one of our most prolific Facebook member posters. His name is Nick Ortiz. He’s a disability lawyer from Pensacola, Florida. Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick Ortiz
Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, next. So you know the routine by now you’re you’re very, I think you are a number one most active person in the Facebook groups. I’m assuming you listen to the podcast. So tell us about your background, how you got to where you are now?
Nick Ortiz
Sure, yeah, I do listen to the show quite a bit. I first came across it because I do a lot of Facebook. And I also have what I call a student of marketing, you know, pay attention to a lot of what’s happening in the world of marketing, especially with lawyers. And so that’s how I came across the podcast, after I’d say it had been live for about 20 episodes. A little bit about me, I want when I was in high school, I’d always wanted to be a lawyer. And the reason I wanted to be a lawyer was because I was looking around at some of the more successful people in my community. And they happen to be plaintiff’s lawyers. And so I thought this would be a really great occupation where you get to help people and make money. So I thought, this is this is a really good occupation to go into. So when I was in high school did really well in high school, I had always planned on going to the University of Florida. But based on the PISA scores, I started getting applications from Ivy League schools. And I went to school, went back to high school, and I was asking friends if they were getting applications from places like Yale, Harvard and Princeton, and they said, No, we’re not sending me applications. So at that point, I thought, well, what the heck, I’ll go ahead and apply these schools. So I applied to four schools, Florida, which I was had planned on going to Yale, Harvard and Princeton, lo and behold, I got into Yale. And so I couldn’t turn down that opportunity and decided to go there. MIT, a lot of great people, and then still had that plan to go to law school, in terms of law school I wanted to go to it was UVA, largely due to the fact that I had an in state tuition. And as a bit of pop culture reference, there was a movie at the time called True Colors with John Cusack. And I saw that saw the beautiful campus and decided that that was a good place to go. Unfortunately, I was late to my interview, and did not get into UVA. So one of my other schools was UCLA, we still had a really good estate program, where I could pay in state tuition after a year went to UCLA, cost of living was out of sight. So I decided to move back to where I grew up, which is in the panhandle of Florida, with our really great beautiful beaches, joined up with a small firm a disability and personal injury law firm, learn the disability side of things really liked it in terms of helping people with their disability claims, was an associate for several years. Then I got what I call the contract, I could refuse. He wanted me to sign a contract, but I just didn’t agree with the terms. And I went out on my own in 2012. And I’ve been out on my own ever since.
Jim Hacking
That’s a great Nick, thanks for sharing that story. I love the offer you could refuse. So I totally get that. Tell us about your setup and what your practice areas are and what you focus on.
Nick Ortiz
Sure. So we have it’s a small firm, it’s me and an associate attorney. We have two paralegals an intake specialist, a receptionist and my wife helps out with the bookkeeping. Although I started off doing some personal injury. We do very little personal injury. We are like 98% disability. Within that we do social security disability law, and Long Term Disability Insurance slash ERISA cases. So people who have private policies or group plan policies through their employer, and they’re denied disability through the likes of Unum, Hartford, things like that, so we help those people I used to be predominate. At least Social Security. In fact, I’m board certified in the area of law. But I do see some writing on the wall, some major changes coming down the pike there. So we’ve shifted into doing long term disability cases. And that’s where the weight of our work is, is in long term disability cases.
Tyson Mutrux
So Nick, have you spent the majority of your time Are you are you more practicing law? Are you more running the firm?
Nick Ortiz
For me individually, I’d say I’m probably 5050 split, where 50% is managing and marketing and sales. And then 50% is actually still working on cases. I think I’m from listening to previous podcasts, pretty in line with gym vision, which is to do ultimately, a lot more marketing and sales, building the business and working on the business as opposed to working in it. Ultimately, I’d like to be I call it 9010, split 90 90% working on it and 10% in it. And in fact, you know, in terms of super long term, ultimately, I’d like to be doing 100% marketing and sales and then very little of the actual practice of law.
Jim Hacking
That’s great, Nick, we do share that in common and looking at your bio on your website and notice something else that we share in common, and that is that we both worked in between college and law school, and we both actually worked as paralegals at a law firm. What did you learn in your two year stint as a paralegal that impacts how you run your office today?
Nick Ortiz
Sure, I worked as a paralegal at a at a white shoe firm in Washington, DC, they had several 100 attorneys, and they had probably about 100, paralegals or so. And one thing that I learned was, it was good to have that experience of a break between law school or between college and law school, because about half the people that went to work there. And when you sign up, you sign up for about a two year stint. And almost everyone going in as a paralegal wanted to go to law school. But the super interesting thing was about half the people at the end of the two years were like, I don’t want to go into law, I’m going to go into something else. And then the half continued on into the law. So another interesting thing was at that law firm, I met my wife, and she wasn’t that half that decided she did not want to be a lawyer. And I was of that half that decided to continue on to be a lawyer. But yes, my my my wife at work at that law firm, said, Nick, where are you?
Tyson Mutrux
Where are you building this thing? That Where are you heading towards? I guess what do you want to do with your firm? Or do you want to become a larger firm? Do you want to keep it the way it is? Well, in 10 years, what’s your firm look like?
Nick Ortiz
That’s a really good question. And something that I think about all the time, we do well, I have zero complaints about the firm’s revenues, the firm’s income, and therefore, I’m constantly asking myself if we want to just stay where we are, or scale up. But to directly answer your question, I am interested in building and scaling up primarily because of the ultimate goals that I have my personal goals that I have. And that is to have that firm where I’m not doing as much in it, but also to, I have some really good ideas in terms of where I want things to go, and the life that I want to live. And I think that having that goal in mind that you’re pulling towards is important in terms of building a successful business. And what I mean by that is the ultimate life that I want to live is being able to go on multiple vacations a year, for example, I’d like to be able to take up to a month off at a time, not once but a couple of times a year, or two or three times a year where we just, I leave and I know that the system that the firm is set up in a way that it runs without me there. In order to do that you have to have the systems and processes and people in place to do that. So I would like to scale up in order to have that vision of the firm. Because where things are now, you know, still requires a lot of my direct involvement. And therefore that doesn’t meet the goal that I ultimately have of having a lot more personal time to myself and and to spend time with my family.
Jim Hacking
Certainly a worthwhile goal. Now, Nick, I have a question for you. Given that you’re doing social security, and disability, can you do that neck nationwide? Or are you limited in scope that you can only practice in Florida?
Nick Ortiz
So yes, I mean, given the fact that Social Security is a federal program, there are lots of lawyers who do social security cases nationwide or statewide or they have a large geo area. We only do cases in our immediate area. So we can do it nationwide. But I prefer to do cases just in the immediate Pensacola area. Now with long term disability cases, a lot of the cases there are governed by if it’s a group plan policy was the vast majority of our clients cases are that is governed by a complex federal regulation called ERISA. And because ERISA is a federal statute that has nationwide read We do accept clients cases from the entire country. So nationwide on that side of things.
Tyson Mutrux
So Nick, tell me this, you seem like you’re very, very successful. I mean, you you’ve gone to amazing law school or I undergrad, I guess you went to Yale amazing education. You’ve done really well with your firm. And so I think, just from the outside looking in somebody that might be intimidated, you know, then they’re like, Well, I can’t do that, you know, like, this guy’s got this amazing education. He’s done all these great things. He’s got a great firm. So tell people like, what is it that you struggle with? Because it can’t be like, it’s just easy. It’s definitely it’s just easy to miss me. So what like, what is it that you struggle with?
Nick Ortiz
You know, Tyson? That’s a really good question. Thanks for asking it. In essence, I think the biggest thing that I struggle with is that distinction between being an owner and entrepreneur, and one’s relationship with one’s employees. And what I mean by that is, I have very high expectations and everyone that I work with. And sometimes I come to recognize that not everyone puts in the amount of time or effort that I do and or want them to do. And I think it took a coach to point out to me that you really have to work on getting enrollment from people in your firm. So you have to work on your relationship with your employees and your firm. And you have to come up with ideas, like a mission and vision statement in order to get enrollment from your employees. And the other thing is that not everyone wants to be an owner, or an entrepreneur. You know, in the in the law, we have this concept and a law firm, especially of associates where there’s there’s Finders, Minders and Grinders, and some people just want to come in, obtain that that paycheck, and have the steady income, but they don’t want the responsibilities of being a finder. And that’s okay, at the end of the day, if someone wants that, that it’s okay for them to want that. And me coming to understand and come to grips with that. I think that’s been a big development in my my law firm, and in my career is coming to the understanding that not everyone wants to be entrepreneur and or owner of a firm.
Jim Hacking
So Nick, once you make that realization, how do you act on that? How do you How does that then frame how you interact with each of your team members.
Nick Ortiz
So what I’ve been doing lately is the one of the big books that’s come up more recently is traction, and in part of traction is coming up with your firm’s vision and mission statement. And it and I think the reason why I really like it is it ties in really well to the concept of Gary Vaynerchuk. And I think that’s something we have a common, Jim is, is that we both like Gary Vaynerchuk, or at least listen to him. And one of his big things, if you listened to enough of them is you know, that he wants to ultimately buy the Jets. And I think part of that is and you even hear him say, look, a large part of this is the process of going through everything it takes to buy the Jets. In fact, he said it’ll be disappointed or it’ll, he’ll have less interest in doing things when he does ultimately buy the Jets, because that’s really his goal that he’s pulling himself towards. So my point of bringing that up is that when you have a combined vision and mission statement for the firm, which in our case is helping people obtain the benefits that they need and deserve. You can get enrollment from people on your firm to work towards that goal of helping people and helping people help themselves.
Tyson Mutrux
So Nick, let’s talk a little bit more about that process. Because I’ve talked to several people. They’re like, wow, Eli, how do I come up with that? So we talked about the the process of actually going through coming up with your mission statement, your vision, things like that?
Nick Ortiz
Certainly. So another thing that I’ve been involved with is listening a little bit to Melissa Shanahan, I really like her. She’s I think she’s a member of the group. But she has a podcast as well, where she talks about the different concepts. And one of the biggest things that I’ve come to realize that I like in building a practice, and have ignored for a while is the mindset component of it. So I do believe it’s important to pay attention to your to your health into your mind. But as part of that, what you want to do is really sit down and what I did was involve the team. So what I did literally did was take some chapters from traction and gave it to each employee, like the first chapter that talked about vision. It may not have been the first chapter but the chapter that talks about vision, I sent it out to everyone. I said, I want you to go through this and I want you to come up with several ideas for our firm in terms of vision. And then there was a section on mission so I asked everyone to come up with their ideas. And what we did was we put them all together and then we picked out the ones that that we felt most represented the firm. So it was a team Mefferd a collaborative effort in terms of trying to involve everyone again, part of getting that enrollment was involving everyone in this I didn’t want to just be the only one involved in in deciding what our firm’s mission and vision is. We’ll take a break for
Unknown Speaker
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Jim Hacking
talking today with Nick Ortiz, Disability lawyer and great Facebook friend of the show. Nick, talk to us. I know you’re big on marketing. Talk to us about some of your marketing heroes or that you talked about Gary Vee, what what books when it comes to marketing have been instructive in your path?
Nick Ortiz
Yeah, so I love marketing. And so I think my introduction to marketing really came from a direct mailer from Penn class and really good marketing back in I think 2008. And that’s when I My eyes were first open to it. So I started listening to some some some of the best in class products, and came to realize that he was a student of Dan Kennedy. And so I decided to go directly to the source and start listening to a lot of Dan Kennedy stuff. So I would say that magnetic marketing, one of the seminal pieces available on eBay, pretty cheap these days, but I think magnetic marketing was my first real introduction to this concept of direct marketing. And since that time, I think books like thinking Grow Rich, seminal books like influence, there’s a book called triggers by Sugarman. I think some of those books are the keys that I’ve followed in terms of coming to understand the psychology of sales, the psychology of copy, and how to communicate with people. I think those have been some pretty influential books on me,
Tyson Mutrux
Nick, I sort of skipped over something and I want to, I want to ask you about it. And we told him, talk a little bit about your systems, because it seems like you’d have, you’re pretty good about getting clients. And so we talked a bit about your systems by handling your clients and making sure you’re doing an amazing job.
Nick Ortiz
Sure, you mean like the like, once they become clients?
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. Like just basically, once you get them into your system, how do you normally what’s the workflow? Like?
Nick Ortiz
Yeah, so I’m a huge believer in automation. A lot of especially let’s take security cases, for example. And so security law, it’s what I believe that there’s a width of knowledge, not necessarily a depth of knowledge. So there’s a lot of different topics that could come up. And there’s a lot of different things that can happen during a case. But I don’t think any one individual thing is, is terribly complicated. But there’s some, there tends to be a lot of the same issues that come up and the same types of communications that you need to have with your client. And therefore, when I opened my own firm, one of the biggest things that I did, and was different than my previous firm was to have a lot more touches a lot more communication with the clients. And so what I did was, for example, when one file was the last appeal, asking for hearing before a judge, there was about a year to year and a half gap where there’s not a whole lot happening on the case, you’re just literally waiting in line to have your hearing. And we used to get calls after about six months saying, Hey, I know you said it would be a long time but it’s want to make sure my case is active and want to make sure my case is still going and we would we would reassure them yes, you’re you’re now you know 50% closer to the hearing, but you’re but you’re still in line. And there’s a long way in our area. For example, there’s an 11,000 person wait line for the Mobile Alabama hearing office. So when you start like your when you file your appeal, your number 11,001. After about six months to eight months, you’re about number 5000 And you’re working your way to number one, but one of the things that I realized was we need to we need to communicate more with our clients. So we came up with a series of letters that go out to our clients, and they go they go out once a month. And they range from being informational. So telling them a little bit about the process, some are responsive, so asking for an update on them and their status for them to reach back. And that creates some self involvement. And some are just educational about about the process and things that they can do to help themselves. So there’s this series of things that go out. And we found that the check ins went down. And the frustration went down significantly after we implemented that. So I believe a lot can be automated. Another thing that we’ve done is, because when we prepare a client for a hearing, you know, I’ve done perhaps, are handled, perhaps my current estimate is three to 4000. So security cases, and you tend to have the same conversation, preparing clients for hearing. So what I ultimately did was, I literally sat down with a videographer. And I recorded, I think it was about 120, videos, 120 topics to prepare clients for hearings. So now we’ve shortened our pre hearing prep quite a bit. And now we give them access to those online videos in a closed platform, where they can access these videos to get prepped for the hearing, and that they add up to about five or six hours of prep time and really get them prepared for hearing. So just automating that process of as opposed to giving the same speech to each and every client individually, opening it up and creating a video course for them to go through. So just those kinds of things, I think is super important to because I believe in in efficiencies and running the firm and in handling your caseload.
Jim Hacking
That is great stuff. Great stuff. So getting back to the marketing for just a minute. I know on your website, you have a referring attorney program. I know also that you have Google ads that you run, talk to us about where your cases come from, where your best cases come from, and what your thoughts are on marketing the firm itself.
Nick Ortiz
When I went to max law 2019, actually the 2018 John Fisher, during his presentation, he asked a series of questions of where do you get your biggest and best cases from? And he started off with traditional media with billboards, Yellow Pages, things like that. Very few people raise their hand. And then he asked Internet, and very few, like a few people raise their hands. And then he asked referrals, and the vast majority of people raised their hands. And then his comment was something along the lines of that’s true. It’s true for me, like your biggest and best case is always have and always will come from your referrals. I’ll admit, I was in that extreme minority where the vast majority of my cases come from online marketing through largely through organic, and then we are layering in digital paid ads like Google Pay Per Click and Facebook paid ads. So to answer your question, the vast majority come from organic searches online, through content on the website, a lot of content on the website. And then the next layers is Google paid ads. And as you said, we are working on that referral. After that I did decide, well, if we’re doing really well on digital, it’d be really nice to layer in this referral program as well. And I do believe in having multiple channels available just in case one channel goes down like Google organic, that we have these other channels in place to try to continue to generate leads and clients. And so that’s that’s where the referral program came from. Thank you, John Fisher. Thank you, Max law. And I do believe in trying to diversify where the leads are coming from. Another thing that we’re going to try to do is Facebook groups and participation in Facebook groups and generating leads in that way.
Tyson Mutrux
Nick, this has been awesome. But I do need to wrap things up before we do want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group. His people like Nick are in the group and giving a lot of great Jim’s out. So that’s great. Also reminder, register for the ZAP Athan in on January 23 and 24th in Phoenix, Arizona, Jim just posted the information for the hotels. Also, this is a reminder to register for Maxwell con 2020. Make sure you get your hotel rooms quickly because they will fill up. Jimmy What’s your Hagley
Jim Hacking
so as you know, I like to buy marketing books and business books. And when I do I started taking a picture of myself when the book comes in the mail and then I tweet it out with references to the author’s Twitter account. And so you know, Tyson we’ve been talking to John James, the author of the great book, duct tape marketing about coming on to the show. And knowing that we’re having that conversation, his new book came yesterday. It’s it’s an interesting little book, it’d be good to get for next year. It’s a deal The meditation for the self reliant entrepreneur, but got the book took my picture, put it out on the Twitterverse. And John Jantsch, liked it retweeted it. And then Bob Byrd liked it and retweeted that and made a comment. So there’s now a dialogue going on between two of our, our big heroes and gurus because of a little tweet that I sent just with a picture of me in the book.
Tyson Mutrux
Very cool. I like it, I guess I’ll need to do the same thing. Very cool. All right next to you know, the routine, what is your tip or hack of the week?
Nick Ortiz
Sure. So my tip or hack the week is, and I’m not sure if this has come up before, but don’t give up just because something doesn’t seem to be working. So this is another Gary Vee type of concept. And that is, I followed him back to the days of Wine Library where he had over 1000 YouTube videos about drinking wine and, and critiquing wine. And I do believe in keeping going a lot of too many lawyers will try something once and say, Oh, it doesn’t work like let’s, let’s say one month of Facebook ads, and then they stop. Just because it didn’t work for a few weeks doesn’t necessarily mean that the platform doesn’t work. Sometimes it requires refinement and tweaking and things like that. So I say keep at it. For example, what I’m doing right now is my goal is to do a Facebook Live every weekday for the next 30 days and see where that’s at. And continue on for the next three days. My goal is ultimately to do a Facebook Live every weekday for an entire year and see where that takes us. So keep going with it, then you can evaluate it periodically, like every month, every quarter every year.
Tyson Mutrux
Man, that is amazing. And that’s quite the challenge. It reminds me of Jim’s challenge of blogging once a day for I think a year I can’t remember if it was what Jim was at a year.
Jim Hacking
Anyone for like a year and three months. Yeah. Alright, so
Tyson Mutrux
you’ll might want to talk offline, just maybe make sure you get it done. So that’s awesome. Good luck to you. So my tip is, I think I don’t know, Jim, if you’ve mentioned this on the podcast before or not, because you said you’ve used it before. But I’ve got a couple of Spanish speaking clients. And so I’d like to, I took I took Spanish in high school, that’s the last time I took it. So I was like, Okay, I want to I want to, you know, get better at it. And so there’s that Duolingo app, and it’s actually free, I had been playing around with some other ones like Rosetta Stone, they’ve got a pretty good app. But then I heard an advertisement for Duolingo. It’s free. So they go check it out. It is really, really cool. And it really motivates you because it gamified it for you, which is really neat. So if you want to learn a language they’ve got I don’t know the number of languages that they have on there. But they have quite a few they have all the main ones. For the most part. It’s a it’s a really good app and it gamify it so you it gives you points and it challenges you. And so if you’re someone that likes to play games on your phone or something like that, it may actually motivate you to learn a new language. So that’s much of the week. Next. Thanks so much, man. This is a really good episode. It’s been way too long to get you on here. But thanks so much for coming on.
