This week on the show we have Kelsey Bratcher, owner of Hired Gun Solutions and automation/integration expert second to none. In this episode we’ll discuss the tools you can use to begin automating your firm and compare CRM and Automation technology.
https://www.hiredgunsolutions.com/about/
Hacking’s Hack:
I’ve been really enjoying this podcast called “Momentum” from Alex Charfen. Its about empowering both the entrepreneur and the implementors.
https://www.charfen.com/podcast/
Tyson’s Tip:
Sometimes its ok to hit the reset button and start everything over. It’s better to reset now than later on when you’re deeper into bad habits.
Kelsey’s Tip:
Look at Zapier and Google Docs. Law firm are document oriented and this is where you are going to save the most time and money.
Starting out? Get Pipedrive, Autopilot, and Zapier.
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Transcripts: Automating Your Firm with Kelsey Bratcher
Unknown Speaker
If I had to start a brand new business today, I would get Pipedrive. And that could probably be applied to any business that has a sales function. So pretty much any service business, my starter tech stack would be those two tools. And I would be paying less than $50 a month for that.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m tasting matrix. What’s up Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson. It’s been a fun Monday. I told you. I’ve been inside West all day actually doing legal research. It’s been quite some time since I did that. But I must say, I’m having fun sticking it to the government with some of my arguments.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. sounds horrible to me. And it does not sound like it’s anything that I would really want to do. But just I know that you’ll be audited pretty soon. So
Jim Hacking
congratulations. How you been?
Tyson Mutrux
Good, man. Nice and busy. Nice and busy. You want to introduce who we’re talking to?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, so we’re having a repeat guest. He’s the host of his own podcast called The get automated podcast. He’s a good friend of mine and he’s he spoke at max law calm this year. He was very happy to not have to wear a suit to the maximum lawyer conference. And he’s my brother in cargo shorts, the one and only Kelsey Bratcher what’s up. So Tyson I used to love Infusionsoft and attended the Infusionsoft conference every year. One year that I attended the conference. There was a fellow named Brian Young from Toronto painters, homes Toronto home painters who won Infusionsoft marketer of the year. And I remember that you and Brian Kelsey had developed quite a little campaign during the conference for follow up after Brian was on stage, talking about his nomination and then that little funnel lead into a sequence that got me onto a webinar with you. And you and I’ve been working together on automation stuff ever since. And so I know you were an early employee at Infusionsoft. And then I know that since then you’ve become quite an expert in all things automated and mostly with integration. I think your Zapier skills are second to none. And so I think the reason we wanted to have you on there was because our buddy Parker Larison, had asked, you know, he knew that I had moved off from Infusionsoft he knew that Tyson had talked about me moving off from Infusionsoft. So we wanted to get you back on, just sort of talk about the state of things, what your current mindset is, with automation and how you go, or if you are a lawyer, how you’d go about thinking about automation?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think probably the best place to start would be, as far as I’m observing, like, there’s going to be a significant shift in the next, you know, two to three years time period, as far as like the accessibility of stuff in relation to automation, or like automating a small business, in your guyses situations, law firms, specifically, and the different components that are that are taking place from the systems and processes side of things, right. It’s, I mean, I’ve had this discussion on my own podcast, but the accessibility of this type of technology is it’s very inexpensive. It’s, it’s becoming easier and easier to use. And it’s one of those things where, if you’re not thinking about how you can stop doing certain things that are terrible, especially in a small office or small business, you know, you don’t have time to be dicking around with unnecessary stuff. And so the automation can have an impact significantly in through automating processes. I like to talk about sales and marketing. Your sales and marketing process are generally the first thing is that people look to automate. Historically, a lot of those items have been I think, promoted and there’s a lot of resources for doing that type of stuff. And then that’s how Infusionsoft became a solution. Since if I take a step back, I mean, when we met Jim, and I was working with Brian from home painters, Toronto, the first thing that we fixed was his busted sales process. You know, he was neglecting leads. He didn’t have a reliable way of generating your business, other than going out and doing door knocking, which is terrible. So we addressed that aspect of his business because, you know, making tools to make it so that he could paint more houses on the back end. wasn’t going to change his business, you know, fundamentally. So we focused on those aspects. And that’s where, I mean, historically, Infusionsoft as a product has been focused on sales and marketing, it really starts to fall apart when you want to do things like, you know, build a process for fulfilling your services other than like communication email. It’s kind of lackluster. And I think that that’s I’m not saying that, from the perspective that Infusionsoft is a bad product, quote, unquote. But it wasn’t built to solve that problem. And so, in, I know that in a lot of law firms, you have tools like practice, Panther, Cleo, are very common for managing we’ll call it the operational aspects of a law firm, from, you know, managing your matters to the tasks and communications that happen related to those, the billing and those types of things. So oftentimes, especially in like industries, like legal, you have to bolt on multiple pieces of application, because if you’ve ever tried to use Clio to sell something, it doesn’t give you the tools, I think to do it correctly. If you were to compare it to another industry where sales is more prevalent or not thought of as a, you know, I don’t I don’t know, it seems to be like in the in the legal industry, it’s not really thought of as the sales job, or there’s not really a sales, quote unquote, job in there. But they’re very much is. And it doesn’t seem like a lot of the tools are built to support the type of selling that takes place in a law firm.
Tyson Mutrux
I think most lawyers don’t view it viewed as a sales job. I think a lot of our listeners do. But you talked about bolting things on, lets you target we talked to you and I talked about a week ago about you know, having like a pipeline pipeline set up on all that. Can you talk about some of the tools you might recommend for that specifically, when it comes to having a pipeline? Because Because dashboard, or not dashboard, Infusionsoft dashboard doesn’t quite give you that you can’t move things. And if people think of like a Kanban board, you know, moving from things from one slot to the next to the next next. Can you talk about some of those tools that you might recommend for for that specifically?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, in my opinion, there’s, there’s really only there’s there’s two tools that I like. And then I’ll talk about Infusionsoft and what the direction of that product is going to accommodate what I hope will be a positive future. But in the meantime, right now, my favorite tools are Pipedrive, which is a pipeline focused activity focused CRM, where most of your your day to day operational operations from a sales perspective. But also it has a lot of capabilities beyond that. But because you can build multiple pipelines in your for your business. So you have your intake process, or where a new lead comes from, it goes into a pipeline as a new deal. And then you would build out your pipeline to work through, you know, this, this person get called three times before we abandon them. And then we have people that have booked or a meeting or to come in for an appointment, they have a pending agreement that they need to sign and then they sign in, they become a client will say is the overview of the sales pipeline that you can construct in Pipedrive. Well, that is extremely easy to do. I’ve seen people that struggled with getting classic Infusionsoft off the ground for two, three years, and never get anywhere have struggled with it the entire time. And get up and running and start closing deals in two weeks on pipe drive. And we’re talking about like the bottom of the barrel, technical person that doesn’t have any skills, was able to grasp the ideas that are there, because it’s activity driven more than it is like, you know, toggling fields and navigating between different screens and doing this type of stuff. It’s very focused for a sales type of function, which I think is appropriate for what we’re talking about. And then I’m also from legal for law. I’m also a fan of legal or lead docket. I’ve been using it with Jim, and Eric Kaufman has been extremely flexible. So we’ve had out of the ordinary requests, and he’s been able to accommodate us to make the product better, to be able to help us do some of the stuff that we were trying to get done. And it has been enjoyable for that purpose. With it, I would say the only constraint is that it is for managing lead flow and lead and taking that that alone. So don’t, I wouldn’t try to get it to do anything beyond that. Because it will do that very well. But it won’t do. Like what how are you going to fulfill on the service that you just sold? Right.
Jim Hacking
So Kelsey, talk a little bit about that talk about how in the old days you and I were working really hard to use Infusionsoft as a fulfillment center for the before unit that during in the afternoon, we thought that one thing could sort of fix all those problems and sort of how our thinking has evolved over time. where we try to get the best in class for each thing, and then connect them with your favorite tools app. You’re
Unknown Speaker
right. So I know originally was Infusionsoft we had, for a long time, we were managing your business with Infusionsoft. And a couple of Infusionsoft related add ons, maybe a couple of Zapier tricks here and there. But it where we were really falling short is specifically in relation to accounting, and the kinds of stuff that have to happen with
Jim Hacking
the IOLTA account.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, where you have the pending money, that’s not yours yet, because you haven’t earned it, but you’re in, like pseudo possession of it. The accounting requirements for a law firm are a little bit out of the ordinary. So a product like Infusionsoft doesn’t accommodate for those types of things very well. And more importantly, it doesn’t have some of the project management types of components that I think products like Clio and PracticePanther do better. I know file vine has been mentioned. And so we kind of ran into some problems, especially when you were trying to automate some of your accounting stuff, or the make it less of a problem. So over the trust account, that was it. So we had we had decided to get into Clio. Well, now that we’re in Clio, for most of stuff, we don’t need Infusionsoft to do certain things. So what we were able to do is look at what is a better option. I know that you had talked to Eric, and folks over at lead docket, and we’re keen on trying it out, because one is the thing that I like about it is that they’ve already thought of a lot of the problems that a law firm is going to encounter for doing intake and managing lead flow. And that was appealing to us. And they had some flexibility that makes it so they don’t have a direct Zapier integration. But because Zapier is very flexible, we can make it work with tools like lead dockets. So we were able to transition you know information from lead docket, your your working a lead, putting them in the status that you want to send them a client or you need to generate a client agreement. And we use that to interact with Zapier, which then we can use handled doc to generate a legal document that they could sign like either in the office or after the meeting. They had to leave and think about it or whatever that looks like. And then if they do sign it now that that information is present in lead docket, so that when we transition the data into Clio, that it is there. Well, the one problem that we ran into with Clio was that the project management or the workflow stuff is kind of lackluster, in the sense that if you wanted to do some, some robust or complex automations, it really struggled with those things. So we started looking at tools like process street that we can bolt on to Clio. So when the matters created in Clio of a certain type, we can trigger a process street process. So just recently, Jim, you and I have finished a process street process that ties in with Google, Google Docs for generating the lawsuit document, it will then transition that same information to a tool called Web merge so that we can prepare the 10 summonses that you have to build to do the lawsuit. And we have to move all that information into a Google Drive folder. So that realistically, all you have to do is double check and make sure that those documents are correct. And, you know, you can, you know, to handle all that stuff without having to do it all manually. I think we had talked about last time, it saves you like 45 minutes or an hour if I’m not mistaken.
Jim Hacking
Eric clarified for me yesterday, and I forgotten that they do have a native Clio integration. You and I weren’t using it at first. But we’ve since shifted over to that native Clio integration for lead docket.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, it’s a it’s, I won’t say that it’s better than what we could have built. It’s more complete. Because there’s, there’s information that’s in Clio, or that’s in lead docket that we want to have in in Clio. And with Zapier, you have more flexibility as far as the way things happen, but you can’t get all the data like all the note history, all of the information that you have stored in the doc that gets sent to Clio, and stored in the matter, the contact, record the notes, etc. And so the lead docket Clio integration is better for that purpose. Even though it does require manual step. The data comes across cleaner and more complete.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, Kelsey, so Parker laypersons got a couple of questions, and I’m gonna ask them in one question. So what does Pipedrive do that lead docket does not. And then his other question is, please compare Pipedrive to Infusionsoft. So basically, what is Pipedrive? Do the essentially lead doc and Infusionsoft do not do?
Unknown Speaker
That’s a good question. So I would say that it’s when you compare a lead docket to a Pipedrive. It would be more like comparing I want to say, like, comparison isn’t necessarily a fair thing, because we dock it was built for a specific purpose and it to accommodate a specific type of business. And it is only that, right? So it does its one thing very well, the benefit of having a tool that’s built for a specific purpose is that you’re, instead of making the tool adapt to your stuff more, it’s better to look at the tool and say, Okay, I want to change my business so that I can leverage the bucket to do more stuff, or could benefit from some of the features that it has. While like if you wanted to build your own solution, meaning like, lead doc, it’s great. But I really need the capabilities of building my own pipeline, because I don’t want to do it exactly like where we lead DACA does it or maybe you have more than one type of, I don’t want to say type of business. But like more than one way of selling certain things, I guess would be the one to say, or maybe you’re selling certain types of products that don’t require they’re not legal products or services. They’re more like, I know, Joe Vitale has courses and things like that. You could have multiple pipelines to deal with the different panels of your business, if that makes sense. So from handling lead flow from one source, or from one location, maybe you have a referral only pipeline, and that referral pipeline has certain components that you want to be able to do that are unique. Where lead docket would maybe be able to help you get referrals and have them in there and be able to track who referred and so forth, but you’re not gonna be able to customize that very heavily. So that’s a big difference between will say Pipedrive and lead docket. Now, if you were to compare Pipedrive to Infusionsoft, you have to think of it as the CRM side of Infusionsoft. So the contacts, the opportunities, the notes, your tasks, your calendar, appointment management, those aspects, because the marketing automation side or campaign builder, Infusionsoft is not present in Pipedrive. So you need something to serve that purpose if you still want those things. Now, with that said, there are still automation, CRM automation related stuff like tasks, how notes are logged, what happens when you move a deal from one stage to the next, and so forth, you can build that type of automation built into Pipedrive. But it’s very specific to the CRM functionality. So if you want that marketing automation stuff, you need to look at other solutions. And I’ll get into that more in a minute. But but when you’re comparing the CRM of Infusionsoft to Pipedrive, it’s, it’s a night and day difference, like you look at Infusionsoft classic interface, or like navigating between, you know, your contact record to look at the note history and things like that. It is built on a infrastructure that was, you know, let’s say last updated significantly, in 2009. And that’s not being harsh. That’s the truth. It has had mild updates since then. But for the most part, the way that Infusionsoft is today is the what it was 10 years ago. Well, Pipedrive is more modern, it’s built on a more modern infrastructure. So the amount of times that you need to refresh your page don’t aren’t as much. You can move around without having to have constant refresh refreshes. It’s laid out more simply for like a layman to understand and be able to use it effectively. And Infusionsoft does not have those qualities. Well, I’ll say that to keep product. The new will say it’s an it’s a reskin of Infusionsoft. It does have a lot of these features that Pipedrive has, but it’s just not quite there yet for me to speak as highly of it as I would Pipedrive today.
Jim Hacking
Alright, Kelsey, so one of the things that I enjoy working on with you is that we keep moving up the chain of tasks in automation. In other words, we automate one thing, and then we move on to the next step. And we move on to the next step. And we just keep finding ways to streamline and automate talk, talk to us a little bit about your philosophy when it comes to that, and maybe what lawyers should be thinking about when they’re thinking about how to automate a particular task?
Unknown Speaker
That’s a good question. I know I also I’ll just go off of kind of where we were out on Friday when we talk last. So we were we sat down and Mona had created. Basically, accumulated your caseload for the for the past, up to year to date of like what types of matters made up for the most largest percentages of your, your day, right or your your workload in your in your practice? Now we’re looking at a lot of them were visa delay lawsuits, right, like a large percentage, like a third of your caseload is having to deal with these lawsuits. And I hope that I’m not revealing too much are things that they shouldn’t? Well, one of the things that we’ve been focusing on is creating a process across the street to make it so that we can automate these lawsuits. So we took one lawsuit type that was the most common. And we’ve we went down the path of okay, how do we get the information from Clio in the process Street. And to make it so that process street can determine whether or not we have all the information because sometimes, not everybody gets their billing address correct or not everyone gets all the details we need. So the first thing we did was we built a universal, like, new client process. And all the whole purpose of that thing is just to make sure that we have all the necessary information, like the general, new matter, data is present. If it’s already there, it’ll be prefilled. And they just have to go next. If something’s missing, now, they know that they need to go get it. And that’s the first process piece. So that enables us to bolt on all the other matter types that we might go into later. And so then we use that to parlay into the lawsuit, process street process that we talked that I mentioned earlier. And we had, we had wanted to stick around in this particular situation, but I felt like, if we could really nail down one of these really solidly, then we could duplicate a lot of the work that we just did, so that we don’t have to redo it over and over and over again, especially when we’re trying to when you and I get into experimental mode, the worst thing that we could do is start doing two things at once. That we’re if we discover, oh, this is super awesome. Now we have to go back and do it again, on the on the thing we just finished or you know what I mean? And so, and this time around, we’re being a lot more disciplined in really taking it, we’re taking it past that 85% mark, we’re going to you know, we’re up to like 90 91%, automated lawsuit tool. And it’s taken a lot of effort, you know, instead of a week, it’s a three week project. But now we’re at a position where we could clone it, and adopt it for other lawsuits of the same variation, bus automating a larger percentage of your caseload, and I think we did the math. If we were to just do lawsuits, it’d be a third of your caseload. And then if we had to take the other top five matter types, it would be a significant workload reduction for over 50% of your matter types.
Tyson Mutrux
I got a double whammy with questions. So I think at least for me, I was always trying to look for something that was a all in one sort of a thing that can do everything for us. And I don’t think that really exists. And so we kind of addressed that do. Do you think that more this is what we should be looking at as more multiple products to bolt together to create what we want? And so are we looking for too much when we’re looking for these things? And in relation to that? I think a lot of people want to know what your thoughts are on autopilot versus Infusionsoft versus campaign. Because I think, what we look at when we look at those three products, specifically, we think they’re going to do everything for us. And that’s not quite true. So will you address that for me?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m, I know, don’t get me wrong, I like it when a lot of stuff is in one place. Because then I don’t have to do a lot of effort to benefit from these features. The main problem that I encounter, especially with Infusionsoft is that while it does a lot of stuff, it doesn’t do everything. And more importantly, it doesn’t do any of the things that it does world class. So instead, I like to use world class tools that are flexible enough to work with other other products and other other world class items, right. And so when I start looking at, you know, CRMs, I want a CRM that’s easy for salespeople to use. I don’t need it to be easy for me, because I’m good at this stuff, right? I need it to be easy for the people that are gonna be using it day to day to do business. Not setups here, IPS. So when I look at Infusionsoft that does a lot of the I can use it’s complex, quote unquote. I don’t care about those things being hard. It could be harder and I would still be okay with it. The thing that I hate about classic Infusionsoft is that terrible interface that people struggle with, and have to wait for reloads and they get logged out and there’s all kinds of weird problems that it has that have never been addressed. Now, if we were to look at other products now if we’re gonna say, Okay, well, if we’re looking at you mentioned autopilot versus Infusionsoft. So if you were to take campaign builder, and just remove it from Infusionsoft that is more like what autopilot is. So it’s like campaign builder that you can bolt onto anything. It happens to bolt on to some things a lot easier than others. For example, Pipedrive it has a native integration, where a lot of the activities and actions You would take as the Pipedrive user can be triggers or updated as a result of autopilot. You can also use, the happier to bolt on. So in the lead docket situation, you have to use a middleman to synchronize the data from lead docket to autopilot. Or if you want it to use HubSpot CRM, or if you’re using Salesforce, you could both autopilot onto it. And that’s why I’m a big fan of it. Now, it’s also relatively inexpensive, it used to be cheaper, they kind of had a lot of tension recently, because they raised their prices on their customers, some people went from paying like $200 a month to $500 a month. But it’s still a value at $500 a month. So the way that they charge is based off of the total number of contacts inside the tool. So over 10,000, you’re paying a good amount of money. So with that said, if you were to compare Infusionsoft to autopilot, the biggest differences are the way that like, you can still do all the email marketing stuff, you can do all the back and forth updating of your Pipedrive account or different things like that. Instead of tags, they’re called lists. You can create these different segments and do all kinds of fancy stuff with that. There’s a lot more triggers and data variations that you have the ability to do. They also have a lot of built in functionality that Infusionsoft doesn’t. So for example, if you wanted to send postcards, as marketing pieces, they have a built in integration with a tool called blob, which is a postcard on demand service, where you can use it to send like dynamic postcards. Back into that, you can also bolt on your Twilio account. To send automated SMS is you can also not only send them but when they’re when those messages are received. Like if some response back to a message that you send that that is not a two way situation, you can have a conversation. But you can at least take it so Oh, this is an inbound message, I need to route it to the Pipedrive account and add an activity for the sales guy to call them. Right or something like that. That’s built in, you don’t have to pay extra and Infusionsoft plan you’re buying a $70 add on, you’re paying four cents text message, and it gets expensive really quick, because you’re already paying for Infusionsoft. Two of the other features that I really like that are extremely powerful, has to do with Google AdWords and Facebook audiences. So for retargeting purposes, getting you’re like it like think about it. Like if you were to have every person that ever came into your office, when they come into your office, and they leave without signing with you. That person is now a probably a qualified principal, say 50% of the people that went into your office that didn’t sign you. They’re qualified, but they didn’t sign with you for one reason or another. There’s a certain period of time that they’re going to be still in the market for the service, or maybe later on for something else. So you could add them to a retargeting audience based on your CRM interactions, not just on your web base, you know, they went to my landing page and download my ebook, so I’m gonna follow up with them. That’s normal shut that Facebook and Google will do. I’m talking about the very specific people that matched that are highly qualified, getting those people’s information to be in those retargeting campaigns. That is also a built in feature of autopilot, which is I think seldom used because I know you and I, Jim, we haven’t set that up yet.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, so we’re talking today with Kelsey Bratcher of the get automated podcast and Kelsey, I was listening to your most recent episode with Nathan Hirsch the other day. And one of the things that occurred to me and listening to it, is the fact that automation can cut down on mistakes. And when my lawsuit generator was broken a couple of weeks ago, I had to do them by hand, and I had a couple of mistakes that wouldn’t have been in there if the generator was working. Can you talk a little bit about that as automation as a mistake prevention tool?
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that’s oftentimes for me personally, if I have to copy and paste something into from one tool into another, it’s, it’s a sign that I could fuck it up. Excuse my language. But it’s an important factor in why I choose to automate things because I make mistakes me personally. And I know that other people do too. So if you can automate something, there’s a high likelihood that it won’t cause it won’t be a mistake. I mean, if you’ve got bad data and bad data out, but if you can take the steps to prepare the information correctly, like some of the stuff that we go through, making sure that certain things certain like plaintiff defendant is properly case meaning all caps or whatever it has to be. Dates are formatted a very specific way. Certain data points are captured in one way, but then we transform the data to be reflected differently at different points in say, your lawsuit template, or if it needs to be used differently. And so It takes a little bit more to troubleshoot something that you could easily just, you know, Backspace a couple times and type in a new value. But do that a couple 100,000 times over the course of five years. And that’s a lot of time. One of my favorite things about automation isn’t so much that the work is just done is that it’s less error prone.
Tyson Mutrux
So Kelsey, you’ve mentioned at least at least eight products. There’s a lot more than you, I’m sure you know about. Where should people start when it comes to building out their processes? Because I mean, do they start with something like Infusionsoft or lead docket or Pipedrive? Process? Really? Where would they begin, like, what’s the first product they should get?
Unknown Speaker
If I had to start a brand new business today, I would get Pipedrive, and autopilot. And that could probably be applied to any business that has a sales function. So pretty much any service business, my starter tech stack would be those two tools, and I would be paying less than $50 a month for them. I would also get Zapier because it’s a no brainer to regain time. I think last time I checked there saved over 14 million minutes using Zapier close to 20 years. And I mean, that’s almost my whole lifetime of time that I’ve created saved using these tools. So those were the three that I would start at up under 70 bucks a month, a be in good shape. Now if you don’t want to do that, you could look at another tool, it’s called Air table, which is really flexible as well, it does require, I think, if you were to take the time to learn how to use it correctly, it’s like if you were to take a spreadsheet and make it on steroids, because it’s a database application, it’s a visual database tool. And it’s it’s low cost, meaning you can try it out for free. And you can do a lot of really custom stuff with it. It’s not an end game solution, in my opinion, like if you want to grow a business from zero to 10 million, it will probably only serve you well up to a million dollars, in my opinion. Not to say that you’d stop using it after that point. But it would become like an ancillary thing, like maybe you would store certain types of things in it. But you wouldn’t be using it as your main sales tool. But for a very small office, a single person, if you were to invest the time to learn how to use it, it would make it very easy to transition into other tools later. And it’s like I said, it’s free up to a certain point. So those are the two tool, three tools that I liked the most, I wouldn’t go with airtable. Like if I had to start a business today, I would get Pipedrive. There’s no doubt about it. That’s the tool that I would go with. And that’s that’s just a generic, generic thing to say, if I was an attorney, I probably would look at Pipedrive very seriously, especially if I was looking to because I think that if you’re on Pipedrive, you could go from zero to maybe three to 5 million. And before you really start having some more serious challenges that you could, you could make it stretch beyond that. And when I say 5 million in revenue, that’s 5 million in services that have been built, right, that has to be fulfilled, managing the deals and managing the pipelines that that generate 5 million in revenue. That’s what Pipedrive is going to be very good at, especially if you have to have more than one person selling. And I would say that it’d be very hard for one person sell $5 million with the services. You’ll see
Jim Hacking
know that a lot of the automation discussions usually focus on client acquisition. But talk to us a little bit about automation. And in the fulfillment stage like what are some things some some sort of easy wins in automation land when it comes to the during unit?
Unknown Speaker
I would say I mean this is there’s a lot of that’s a loaded question because there’s a lot of different parameters that are present. Right. So I know that the Tyson you mentioned using file name, and Jim use Cleo. And I’ve worked with Josh Goldstein, he’s his practice Panther. Some people don’t want anything. And some people there the requirements from state to state to law practice to law practice based on the type of law that they’re practicing is very open ended, meaning that there’s other parameters that have to influence my ultimate recommendation in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ve only gone off of what I’ve seen from you guys. I would say that probably the number one tool that I like is G Suite. Hands down Zapier because you can do a lot with just G Suite and Zapier right like if you had a new person sign up well, you could just add them to a spreadsheet. And when that when a new row is added to a client spreadsheet that triggers it creates a Google Drive folder for them and bring it to Google Doc for them, that is prefilled with all their information that you can print it out and have them sign in. You can have it generate with Zapier and G Suite automatically generating power or Google slides to do you know, presentations, if you have to do that. You have Hangouts, you have a built in phone. There’s all kinds of tools just to within G Suite to save time. I mean, I was talking with his Marisa Risa. Eve’s asked me questions about Google Drive, because she has been a big Dropbox user for a long time. And like, I know, why is Dropbox had a viral campaign, they had a bunch of people signing up for it, and so forth. And it’s a great way to store information, and to interact with people that are not you, you know, they can upload files, you can edit files, share documents, but I mean, I’ve always used Google Drive, because I have way more storage. And especially as a G Suite user, you pay like $3 more a month per user, and you got unlimited storage. So unlimited storage, is better than you know, 500 gigabytes or whatever. I don’t even know what you can buy now with Dropbox, but I haven’t worried about storage in five years. So I see, I would say G Suite.
Tyson Mutrux
We, I think GE so it’s amazing. So Nick Ortiz had the question, I think this one may be an easy one. So may have a follow up after this. But he sounds like he wants to know a little bit more about active campaign. And he says isn’t active campaign a good cheap start?
Unknown Speaker
I mean, Active Campaign is great, but it has a lot of problems that Infusionsoft has, in my opinion. So like their pipeline management is weak, compared to Pipedrive, which is the number one thing that I can I’m concerned about. Because if you’re using a CRM to sell shit, you want a strong pipelines tool. So like, in order to get the type of functionality that Pipedrive offers, you generally have to spend more money, but you’re looking at Zoho Salesforce tools like this, that not only cost more, but they also cost more in time to set up and payment to the person you’re going to pay to help you set it up because they’re complex. And you don’t have unless you want to get in the business of doing Salesforce implementations, pay someone to do that shit for you. But for Pipedrive, it’s a lot more accessible and easy and less expensive, normally timewise, but also the monthly subscription. So I would say the pipeline is the main reason why I like it better than I like Active Campaign that said, Active Campaign is a bad product. It just hasn’t, it hasn’t stood out enough to me to catch my attention is as to like, Oh, I’m gonna build my business on this.
Jim Hacking
A lot of our listeners and members, you know, they really want to do a good job, they really want to provide the best value for their clients. And they really want to do a good job. How can they go about if they if a lot of them are very busy? How should they go about trying to find the time or the people to help them with automation?
Unknown Speaker
I would say I mean, like the number one thing that I think most people get wrong, is writing down what it is that has to be done to do certain things. Right. And you’re I mean, especially with the different legal matters, there’s kind of it’s complex. I mean, that’s why you guys had to go to school forever and get licensed and all this other shit. And there’s also your own spin our unique flavor on how to do some of this stuff. So by getting it out of your head, and onto a document that can be reworked, updated, a standard operating procedure, if you will, for how certain stuff I mean, we’ve been through this with a lawsuit templates of all the stuff that has to happen to make that work, right. Because now you have a document that you don’t have to pay someone to help you make. Right, because there’s people that will consult you on business processes, you probably hired coaches, attorneys, other attorneys that are further along with you mentorships, things like that. But a lot of that is they’re just going to work with you to figure out what those things are. Now, once you have that now you can go on Upwork and find someone to build it on the tool that you like, or maybe you need some of the recommended tools to you that you could help you accomplish those goals. And understanding what that looks like. I mean, I’ve me personally. I mean, that’s the business I was in was helping people do that. So that’s how you and I have worked together for so long, Jim. But I don’t, I wouldn’t say I’m not available in the same way that I was when we started working together, if that makes sense. So like if I was looking for help, I would generate my document, I might need to change it. Someone that knows more about certain stuff might have some advice or helpful tips or things that I should be looking at differently. Because I may not be aware of all the cool shit that exists. But when you work with somebody you go on find you can find people to help you as apps. There’s a Zapier Certified Expert page for that you can go on Zapier gonna say, Okay, I’m using, I got Clio, I got Google Sheets or G Suite with Google Sheets and Google Drive. And I want to be able to use this landing page builder to make it so that all my new leads will go into this spreadsheet so that I can work them. And then when I, when I’m finished with that, I want them to go into Clio. So you lay out something like that. You don’t necessarily have to be the one that knows how to do all this stuff, you can find people to do it, I would start with the Zapier Certified Experts place. But you can also find these folks on Upwork. I’ve personally done gigs off Upwork a few years, over the past few years, and oftentimes are very quick money for me, because I can bang them out. While at the same time the person is getting what they need done for a reasonable price, because it’s not so much a how many hours it takes to do something, it’s this thing is worth, you know, say 300 bucks, I’m going to bang it out, make make it work good. They’re happy, and they’re on their own. So you can look at things as like flat rate gigs or projects. Don’t worry about how much time it takes them to do it. Unless it’s like the kind of thing where you need consulting to some extent, I guess would be the way to say it.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, Kelsey, I’m gonna begin to wrap things up before I do want to remind everyone go to the Facebook group. If you’re not listening right now, in the Facebook group, join the maximum lawyer face group Facebook group, people like Kelsey are in that group. So get involved there. Also, if you don’t mind going to Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five star review. Jimmy, what is your hack of the
Jim Hacking
week? So there’s a new podcast that I’ve been listening to, I’m going to look it up right now while we’re sitting here. And I’ve enjoyed it a lot. It’s a guy named Alex scharffen. And the podcast is called momentum. And it’s all about it’s interesting, because it’s not just about the entrepreneur, but it’s also about empowering the number to the implementer. And that’s always good for me to listen to because I’m so far down. I’m so far. I’m like 10 Quickstart. And I’m so far on the entrepreneurial side that sometimes I forget about the support that the implementers in our office need.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, Kelsey, so you’ve been on before? What tip or hack of the week do you have for us?
Unknown Speaker
I would say that because of how document oriented law firms are that you should look at Zapier and Google Docs. And like how to use those tools together to build some automation. That would be the hack of the week because it’s extremely, extremely accessible.
Tyson Mutrux
Good stuff. Alright, so my, my head tip coincides with a video I shot this morning for our YouTube pay or YouTube channel. And that if you need it, and this is actually pretty good with who we’re talking to today with the automation and work with all the different tools and everything else and processes, sometimes it’s okay to hit the reset button. And so if you need to hit the reset button on your firm, and redo everything, do it. It’s better to do it now and then get deeper down into the hole that you’re in. So my tip of the week is if you need to, if you need to hit the reset button, it’s okay. It’s okay to restart things. You can redo things. There’s no law that says you got to keep doing what you’re doing if it’s networking, so hit the reset button. Kelsey, we’ve gotten a lot of great comments about you already. Thank you so much for coming on. Lot of great information. I’m sure some people’s heads are about to explode. So maybe when you’re listening to this, take notes and go back and re listen to it. But Kelsey, thanks so much for coming on.
