Your ideas are worth millions of dollars! You have so much that you could do! But is this true? Sure, maybe your ideas are WORTH millions … but they will never make you a cent if they are not executed. Execution is the key to any great idea. 

In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max Lock Con 2022 with Tyson speaking about the topic of “Why Your Ideas Don’t Matter”. Not only does he go over what to do with your ideas and the process you should put your ideas through in order to see if you should act on them – but he also gives you tips and tricks to work through the execution phase of your ideas … which is key to making you those millions. 

Grab your notepad and pen and get ready to be inspired. 

Resources:

01:00 Having an idea box that makes you millions? 

04:35 Lawrence Barnet is a great story of a great idea —That turned out to be a really bad idea that ended up causing deaths … similarly one of your GREAT ideas could cause the destruction of your law firm 

06:47 We spend all this time in the area of having ideas – we should take one or two ideas and focus on the execution stage 

07:23 What do you do when you have an idea? Create a battle plan 

08:19 Battle plan roadmap 

09:43 Put it on your calendar – instead of trying to fit it in here and there. 

11:43 Follow ideas that you have a passion for – make sure you are thinking them through 

13:55 Improve an existing idea – and focus on the execution of it 

15:09 Share your idea

16:46 Act now! 

🎧 Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes.

🎥 Watch the full video.

Resources:

Transcript: Your Ideas Don’t Matter with Tyson Mutrux

Becca Eberhart
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear Tyson nutrix as we share his talk, your ideas don’t matter. You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson Meatrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Tyson Mutrux
Well, Amy’s bring up the case, I do want to thank file vine, they’re our title sponsor. And this would not happen without them, I promise you. So I want to make sure that I think them if you don’t have filed by and if you do have five on make sure you go and visit them because it’s really, really important. What’s in that box is actually worth millions of dollars. Actually, what’s in that box could potentially be worth billions of dollars. You’ll see what’s in the box. Anyway, all right. I thought you might. So what’s in this box are maybe my best ideas. Not all my ideas. But I’ve been collecting ideas since the 90s. I was teenager at the time. But there’s a lot of great ideas in here that can make you millions of dollars, millions. I actually have only shown a few individuals ever what’s inside those books. It’s very personal to me. Do you all want to peek inside a couple pages? Yeah, okay, good. Well, this is one of my favorite ideas. Hover grips. Okay, there’s suction cups that whenever you go into the bathroom, I’m a germaphobe. So you have to sit on the toilet seat. You suction yourself the the handles to the stall walls, and you hovered over the toilet seats. If you think I’m nuts, these exist, okay. There are a lot of different variations. I had this idea in the 90s, though, I’m telling you, it’s a great idea. It’s a million dollar idea. Next thing is a window sill barbeque grill, okay? These are by me these I’m not making this up. These are real notes from a long time ago. As an injury lawyer, it makes me cringe when it comes to think about liability. And I actually didn’t think this thing would ever exist. I found so many windowsill barbecue drills on the internet, it shocked me. So you can get one for $185 If you want another million dollar idea. This next one. It’s a dog dryer. Okay, who here has a dog? Okay, so whenever you don’t ever do it, Amy does it. But whenever you shampoo the dog, they get all wet and they shake and it’s just a mess, and you’re gonna wait forever for them to dry off. Well, these, this is perforated on the bottom. And so the air blows up and it dries up the dog. It’s basically a cage is what it is. This is actually one that’s for about $3,000 really expensive. It’s another just great idea that’s in my books, right? This is one of my favorites, though it is the radio telephone. And this is whenever I used to work at State Farm. As an intern, I literally stuffed envelopes is what I did. And so what I would do is I would wear these headphones, and it would be attached to a radio and I’d actually listen to FM radio on it. But my note on this was really funny for people at work, who want to listen to radio but want to look like they’re working. So you can basically just sit on the phone and just listen to radio all day. The terrible idea, obviously, but all these ideas are terrible ideas. And over the next couple of days and even yesterday, probably you know you’re getting a lot of ideas, you’re going to hear about file VI, which is fantastic case status, fantastic. You’re going to hear people talking about you should hire this person or you should fire that person, or this is what you should do. You should do SEO because that’s gonna get you the most clients or you know, the best strategy is referrals. That’s how you build a practice is on referrals. Okay, you’re gonna get a lot of these ideas. None of those ideas matter, though. None of them do. None of the ideas in this box matter. Not a single one of them. But really, why is that? The little story about a dentist by the name of Lawrence Barnett. Lawrence had this idea. He’s sitting around and said, You know what, I want to create this yard game. What you do is it’s a metal object. It’s got a sharpened on it when you throw it up in the air, and it comes back down into a little circle. And as you can see, kids played with this story well This caused three deaths and children and 6000 injuries, very serious injuries, he was a very bad idea, okay. And part of the problem is that many of you will come up with these ideas, or you’ll hear these ideas, you will take them back to your firms. And you will, you’ll start the destruction process of your firm. And what you’ll do is, and I know this is gonna resonate with some of you, every year, you’re gonna change your systems, and you’re gonna change them again, and again, and something else is going to change. Okay? And it’s very, very costly to your firm’s these ideas are very, very bad. Okay? You need to think about these ideas before you take them back. And part of the problem is that you are trying to come up with an idea for a problem that does not exist in your firm. Today, you’re trying to come up with a solution to a problem that does not exist. Okay? It’s really, really important, because you’re gonna get a lot of great ideas, and many of them will be great for you. Maybe they won’t be great for you. And I wanted to get to this one a little bit later. Because the obvious answer as to why ideas don’t matter is it’s the execution that doesn’t matter. And this is a quote from Steve Jobs. To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They’re just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. So what if what’s in these books is worth millions. It’s the execution that really is worth the billions. It’s nothing else. It’s not the ideas. And what many of us do, and I’m including myself in this is that we spend all our time this little squiggly area, we just generate ideas, and we drive our people nuts. We just drive them absolutely batty. And I’m seeing heads nod, because you know, what I’m talking about. And the reality is, is that we should take one or two really, really good ideas, or even mediocre ideas, or even honestly, bad ideas, sometimes just focus on the execution stage. And that is where you’re going to make your money is executing. So and I’m not Pooh poohing ideas, I have ideas all the time I drive my people nuts. But what do you do whenever you have an idea, you need to focus on the execution. Focus on the execution. Take a couple of the ideas from the next couple of days and focus on executing one or two of those, you need to have a battle plan. And I chose battle plan intentionally because I don’t know if you know this, but tomorrow is the 80th anniversary of my math is right of the Battle of Midway. And it took a lot of planning to do. I love watching world war two documentaries. It’s fascinating that some of the things that they did, they took inflatable tanks and trucks and they took them to Midway. It was just an amazing plan. They had a plan. And it was actually a terrible idea what they were going to do. But they executed the plan brilliantly. They had a plan. So you need an idea battle plan. And I’m gonna give you some tips. First, the first thing you need to do when you hear an idea and you think you’re going to implement it, you need to define your goals. What do you want to accomplish with this? I do. Then research the idea. If you do these two things, just define your your goals, and then research it, you’re going to filter out about 99% of your bad ideas. You’re going to get rid of them. You get past that. Now you start outlining your tasks, you start assigning those to your team, then set aside the necessary resources for it. Okay, that’s the execution part of it. You’ll notice there’s only two of these that are actually the idea phase. The rest of it’s the actual execution phase of this. The most important part

Becca Eberhart
is that Python is back if you’re new around here this app Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event. We’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology so that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin. Join the guild today and grab your ticket at max slot events.com.

Tyson Mutrux
So the guild members hear me talk about this all the time. You should put it on your calendar. That’s right, you should put it on your calendar. I’m gonna show you this picture. I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I’m a pilot. Have I mentioned that before because I’m a pilot. This is the designated pilot examiner I felt like garbage that day, my allergies were awful. But I became a pilot that day. And I went back and looked because it took a little bit longer than I’d anticipated to actually get my pilot’s certificate. And if you look down here, this is for July and August of last year, I had put in 20 flight hours, and it’s based on harvest time, it’s not the actual time you spent out there at the airport, you only get credit for the time that the engine is on. And I was on a really good clip, I was on a pace of getting my certificate by last year’s conference in October. And if you look at my calendar, I was getting up at 530 and 6am, three days a week to knock it out. I’d set aside the time to do it. It was something I really wanted to do. And then around September, the firm got really, really busy. And if you look in October and November, I put in only 8.7 hours. And I was really curious because I wanted to see if I had it on my calendar. And I had three dates on my calendar. I had no dates in November, not one day, that does not mean I wasn’t flying, what I was doing was I was trying to fit it in here and there. It’s the things we do on a daily basis where I’m going to do that. I’m going to do that. While do it tomorrow. No, okay, I didn’t get it. I’ll do it on Friday. I know I’m promised, I promised myself on Friday, I’m going to set aside the time, I’m going to do it during my lunch break. And what happens you go to lunch with with some friends and you skip it again, right? It’s gotta go on your calendar. Another part of this when it comes to ideas, you need to follow the ideas that you have a passion for. This is another idea I had it was a dog hair floor vacuum, okay. And what it was is it was it would go on the floorboards are under a bed. And for those of you that dogs it essentially just suck all the the vacuum, so you wouldn’t have the vacuum every day. And he might have a golden retriever. They shed like crazy. And there’s a lot of here. So that’s where the idea came from. But as you can see, this is actually the start of a mindmap. Okay, there’s only one little thing on it. This is about 2006 or seven, whenever I decided I was going to going to be actually said I was gonna become a lawyer before that. But whenever I was starting to go to law school, oh seven, and this was the elements of a law firm. This is just one sheet. This one is on a website. Okay. I clearly had a passion for this. There’s a little section of my blog, the website that it was going to be local legal gossip was the idea. I had a lot of different ideas. And I’m only going to show you a few I get page after page after page of this, you think I was a maniac. Here’s another one on free upgrades for clients that I was going to give to people. That was just a bunch of crazy stuff. Here’s one when it comes to advertising. This is just one page on advertising a bunch of different ideas on that. But I clearly had a passion for it. I didn’t have a passion for hover grips, I didn’t have a passion for dog dryers just wasn’t for me. Another thing and this is a really interesting quote, and it’s something I just recently heard. Make sure you’re not selling trombone oil. This is from Michael Eiger, he had gotten this advice from a former boss of his. And he says avoid getting into the business of manufacturing trombone oil, you may become the greatest trombone oil manufacturer in the world. But in the end, the world only consumes a few quarts of trombone oil a year. So when you come up with these ideas, make sure you’re thinking them through, make sure that you’re solving a problem, because you might just be going down the trombone wheel route. And there’s really no benefit to it. Another thing is you can improve on existing ideas. So you may have had an idea that you started years ago in your firm, maybe it’s a software that you’ve been paying for for three years that you’ve done nothing with. Anybody know who this guy is, I will be really, really impressed if you do. This is Thomas Love user luck. Anybody know what he did? Now that you’ve heard the name, he invented the mp3 player. I bet you’ve heard of this guy, Steve Jobs. And what he took was he took an idea that someone else had, and he focused on the execution part of it. He did it really, really, really well. As you probably know what company invented this Outback Steakhouse, anybody else? Wrong. It was actually Russell’s Marina grill. But the founder of Outback he had worked there and said, I’m going to make this better. And I’m going to make a steakhouse around it. He took an existing idea and he executed it really, really, really, really well. steaks are not great, but bloomin onions amazing. Here’s the other thing too. And this is I don’t really want to talk about this whole lot. But there’s a whole scarcity mindset too with ideas. And I think part of our profession too, is we like to hold on to ideas, because we don’t want other people to use them, which I think is kind of sad. But if you don’t do something with your idea, people will actually eventually invent it. This is an idea that I had a long, I think it was like, this is probably like 98, like professional job finder, or maybe it is probably 2000. It was a professional job finder, it was a listing of jobs, you could list you know, your, what’s your licenses are your developments, there is a ranking system, which I don’t know if I’ve seen yet. But I’m sure you’ve heard of indeed, and LinkedIn and all that. I mean, this is that was the idea, right? And 2002, guess what happens? LinkedIn is created. So people will come up with the idea, if you don’t execute on it, you need to execute on the idea, if you’re really passionate about it, I started talking about a second ago, but talking about sharing your ideas, really, your great idea, it means absolutely nothing if no one knows about it, or if you don’t do anything with it, if you have a really good idea, like I think that the world would be a far better place, if you share that with someone that’s actually going to execute on it. Okay, don’t hold on to those I get so many ideas on here that are actually really are good ideas that I’ve done nothing with, that I really should tell people about. Because they really are some really good ideas in there that you could you could make millions of dollars on, but I haven’t executed on it. This now I will tell you, this is gonna be this next part will be really, really hard for me to get through. I’m gonna try to but it relates really, really well with what Jim was talking about. It’s really, really important to act now. This is and I’m going to not look at the screen because it probably made me cry. The this is my sergeant first sergeant in the Army rollin Thompson. In March he was

Tyson Mutrux
he was I don’t get emotional, as you’ll probably know, he was murdered by his actual his stepson. And rollin is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, just a genuine human being. And I know that he and his wife, Amy had lots of plans, they had so many plans for each other. If you read there’s a section in his in this Facebook post as well, I put it in there were, but we still needed you here. As they still needed each other. They had things they wanted to do with each other. And what I want for you. I’ll go back to that picture in a second. But what I wanted, I want your ideas to matter. I do want them to matter. A you have got so many great ideas, I want you to execute on those ideas. I don’t want them to sit in a box, I don’t want to sit on them to sit in a notepad with nothing going on with him, I want you to execute on those. Because I’m sure that if you were to think about you being on your deathbed, or if you open that card, and it tells you what your expiration date is. I’m sure there are ideas that in your head that you would have a lot of regret on not executing on them. And so please think about that. If you have something you want to do, please do it. Okay, please, please do it. I don’t want you to have that regret when you’re on your deathbed. Please, please, please make your ideas matter. Thank you.

Speaker 2
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase using these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

What are the challenges that lawyers are facing this year? What about the challenges that are the remnants of the pandemic?  What will the future of 2023 and beyond hold for law firm owners? These are some of the questions that Jim and Tyson answer as guest on Molly McGrath’s podcast Hire and Empower with Molly

Listen in! 

Episode Highlights: 

00:27 Where do you see an opportunity and best practices in the post pandemic world? 

04:04 What do you offer a team to grow themselves, and how to KEEP a team? 

09:25 What if you are afraid of the “virtual” team? You can’t see what they are doing!! 

12:49 When you can’t find an associate where you live, what do you do?

13:25 What happens when law firm owners don’t change their mindset 

15:37 What does it mean to be more effective as a law firm owner? Do this exercise… 

22:44 How do you get comfortable with letting go of tasks to a team – Tips from Jim and Tyson on how to let go. 

33:33 What does a successful lawyer look like?! 

Books Mentioned: 

Think and Grow Rich: The Original: An Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation https://amzn.to/3XXt5ND

Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People https://amzn.to/3YYuCEv

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders https://amzn.to/3EAkr0x

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube.

Connect with Molly:

Resources:

Transcript: What You Should Know About Creating Intentional Direction

Speaker 1
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.

Speaker 2
So yeah, what do you sing in 2023? Jim, and then I’ll go to you, Tyson. In regards to best practice approaches here in the post pandemic world, if

Jim Hacking
you will, we’re seeing a lot of opportunity. We are a growth mindset. Pair, we spend a lot of time thinking about the future. And I think that the future is bright for law firm owners, I think more and more people are venturing out on their own and trying to grow something that is bigger than themselves. I think that lawyers are starting to see that grind. And the way that they sort of soldiered through the pandemic is probably not how they want to live long term. And they’ve come to the realization that they need help they need community and they need to talk to other people who are like minded and growth oriented. And I think that the sky’s the limit.

Speaker 2
What do you see is like, I love that you said the grind the hustle, what have you and now it’s time for the power of the pause. People are saying, woof, I’m burned out, I’m exhausted. I can’t keep going at this pace, massive, massive growth in the legal space. And what are you seeing, you know, as the leveling out, so to speak, that you’re speaking about on your extraordinary podcast, your Facebook groups? What are you seeing, as, dare I say, the new normal?

Tyson Mutrux
I mean, I think that the the easy answer is that, you know, the pandemic changed the mindset of a lot of people. And they, they realized that whenever there was that pause, and there wasn’t a lot going on, they enjoyed that. And they didn’t like working for other people. So I think that that’s going to continue. But I mean, there were so many advances that had to happen for people to actually work and with being virtual, I mean, we’re like, I know that my office is that it’s a hybrid office, we’ve got two physical offices, but we’ve got the majority of our people are virtual, and people enjoy that. We give people that option. And most people choose the option to work from home. And so the workforce, for the most part wants to work from home, and you’re gonna have to see employer is going to have to actually abide by that otherwise, they’re not gonna be able to attract top talent. And that’s one of the things that Jim and I both are able to do is we’re able to attract top talent with by giving that as an option. So you’re gonna see a lot more of that. And I think that’s one of the the major drivers in that. But I mean, back to your original question, though, I think that it’s easy for a lot of people to say, okay, so what are we seeing in 2023? And we can talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, which at GPT, we can talk about that. Yeah, that’s a massive thing. And there’s a massive opportunity there. But the thing that wins, and this is boring, Jim and I were just talking about it, the thing that wins is consistency. Overall, it doesn’t matter if you get your clients by sending a physical newsletter in the mail, as long as you’re consistent with it. So consistency is what’s effective. People like to latch on to oh my gosh, what’s what’s gonna happen? 2023 2024 2025 If you go back to 2022, the thing that one was consistency, that’s what it was. It’s always it’s consistency is undefeated.

Speaker 2
I love that you talked about top talent, and people during the pandemic went ahead and hung their own shingle, what have you took stock, we all get forced to sit on our couch for a minute, and really take stock of our life or work or practice what we do where we work and serve our clients, the majority of our waking hours. And I for 26 years have served in the legal space and staffing and unemployment rate. We all know it I mean, especially with associated attorneys and paralegals under 2%. And what do you and I love it, use consistency. I love that you’re able to retain and maintain employees. I just want to hop on that one like what are you you’re offering virtual, you know, you’re having some fluidity and flexibility in your culture and your physical brick and mortar building, what have you. What else are y’all doing to to keep people because we need people, we need people to grow. We need people to be freed up to be the visionary as entrepreneur and grow the law firm and impact as many families as we can. What are you doing? Like I’m struggling I get my phone rings off the hook. I said another associate leave I just had another paralegal leave and in the struggles real right.

Jim Hacking
I want to get to that in just a second. First I want to talk about that time you mentioned on the couch and my therapist is a Buddhist and she’s very zen and very chill. And she when the pandemic first started during those first six weeks when we were all really at home, you know we were I mean? I was walking every day I was taking care of myself Life had slowed down and it was bad. Obviously, people were sick and dying. And there’s that whole piece of it. But for the people that weren’t affected in such a hard way, it was a great reset. And I’m reading right now thinking grow rich. And there’s a passage in there about how the depression in the 20s was a great reset. So I think we really did have sort of a once in a generation, opportunity for reset. And like with all things, it’s good and bad, it’s insightful, and it’s hard. It presents opportunities, and it presents difficulties. So I think as law firm owners, we really need to be cognizant of that we really need to see that, like you said, more people are willing to strike out on their own, where people are looking around and saying, why the heck am I staying here? What’s in it for me? What what where do I want to go? Why am I doing this a lot of self questioning and and that’s where my Buddhist therapists would be so happy that we’re actually having these conversations that we we didn’t have before because our routine got broken, right, our routine got broken. So that is, like I said, a good and a hard thing. Both things can be true. Now, what we’ve done when it comes to staffing is we’ve actually looked overseas. So right now our firm is sitting at around 53 People in St. Louis, which is where our headquarters are, we have about 18. So we have two attorneys in Ohio, and attorney in California Attorney in Virginia, we do immigration. So it’s federal, so it doesn’t really matter where people are. And it gives us flexibility to have an attorney in Oregon. And then we have a remote team in Argentina, which consists of our a lot of our call center team. We have paralegals down there who are actually lawyers in Argentina. So we’ve really had to be creative and think outside the box to try to find the talent and the people that we need to grow the firm, if I

Tyson Mutrux
can add on to that. Because it’s something that we’ve been using overseas talent for quite a while for the last 12 years, really. But I think that there’s a huge opportunity that you look remotely, not just overseas, but in the US. So we tested this out over the last now it’s been about a year, I think 11 months where we were testing out, same job ads, same everything same pay, but we made it more of a remote position across the country. And we’ve been able to attract talent for the same cost as what we’re paying people in St. Louis as sometimes cheaper. But they’re like top talent in different states. And because if you really look like for example, let’s say you’re a New York law firm, right, we’re not a New York law firm. But if you’re a New York law firm, you’re used to paying high high wages, right? But the reality is, if you look across the country, there’s a lot of sweet spots, for example, Alabama is one of those sweet spots where you can pick off top talent for a fraction of what you’re paying a New York person, right. It’s just that’s the reality of what it is. So I think looking at at home, or around the country, there’s a lot of opportunities, but you also have to be Jim is intentional with his hiring, we are intentional with our hiring, and you have to be intentional about it. Because what people do is they go, oh, I need a new person, let’s put up a job. And they give it no thought about who they’re bringing in, they give no thought they have no hiring process, you got to have a hiring process. So you’ve got to be deliberate with it. And don’t just put a person in a chair, you’ve got to think like, do they fit with the culture, culture is really, really important. And if you hire someone that that is really bad for your culture, it can be really toxic, and you’ve got to be in there is a chance for a reset at any time. I don’t know if you’ve read top grading, but we implemented top grading right around 10 months ago. And there you sort of have to kind of process people out and then so you can process people in. And that’s the nice way of putting it. But that’s when you start to implement things like that. And you get delivered with things. The dynamic of your firm is going to change but it’s you’re doing it deliberately.

Speaker 2
Wow. So I love that you put that comparison with putting remote and ads Jim goes overseas, you’re staying in the US may be a combo of two, this is what I’m hearing over and over again. So I tell lawyers when they call me there, maybe have old school rigid mindset that No, I want him in the office. I need them in the office and what’s followed after that statement. Because I don’t know what they’re doing. When if they’re not sitting in my office. Right? So I’d love to get your perspective. So you made a massive leap you 12 years in and going overseas staying in the US doesn’t matter regardless of it. How like how do you know what people are doing every day in that place and getting the KPIs is all the but buzzword in this day and age as well?

Jim Hacking
Well, KPIs as you know, Molly are obviously very different than what are they doing? I don’t give a fuck what they’re doing. I don’t give a I mean, I see these people talking in the big group about you know, where do I get software so that I can see whether my VAs overseas are billing me for playing on Facebook. Listen, listen, this is a results economy. And for law firms, it’s about the result, I don’t want to be in the business of micromanaging them, I don’t want to be in the business of having to spy on them with some nanny cam, to make sure that they’re not screwing around, I don’t care if they’re screwing around, if they’re getting my work done, and they’re hitting my KPIs all as well. But this 1950s mentality of the factory, where I’m the overseer at the top of the factory, and I’m watching everybody on the assembly line, making sure that nobody’s taking a smoke break or, or, you know, checking, checking on their kids. I mean, I don’t care, I literally don’t care. And in fact, I want them to be well rounded people, I want them to be balanced people, I want them to come to work and be ready to work. And if they’re working at two in the morning because their kids are asleep. Or if they’re, you know, doing stuff on the weekend to catch up. As long as the work that I expect them to do, and that we’ve agreed upon, they’re responsible for. That’s just babysitting. That’s just bad management. If they think that they need to be able to micromanage on that level. That’s because they suck as business owners and law firm owners.

Speaker 2
Oh, my God, mic drop, right. I love it. That is phenomenal. I love it. This is a results driven economy. Yeah. Very, very different. What are they doing and KPIs? I love that distinction Jim Tyson want to get?

Tyson Mutrux
I think that Jim just hit the nail on the head. I mean, it’s, I laugh when people say Oh, but I gotta know what they’re doing. I gotta, I gotta have him in that chair. I gotta have. What are you talking about? No, no, you don’t? What? So you can go into their office and bother them. So you can get your coffee and have a little nice chit chat with no, you’re bothering them. They don’t want to be in your office, because you’re interrupting their work. And Jim’s absolutely right. If you’re hitting all your key numbers, I care about what our average fee is. And I care about the number of cases we settle. That’s pretty much all they care about, right. And if you’re doing those things, then great. But here’s the here’s the other thing, the same people that say that they need to micromanage and see everything and put the software’s on their computers and all that are the same ones that will leave the office early, that they’re not the ones putting in the work themselves. And that this is the Hey, asshole moment where they see you doing those things, and they don’t want to do the work either. If you’re not going to do the work, they’re not going to do the work. And so it’s amazing to me, it’s always the same people too. It’s the same lawyers that want to micromanage that don’t want to put in the work. They just want to try to Yeah, Jim go with that. Because you play when Jim puts up his finger. He’s,

Jim Hacking
I know, we had a hot seat a couple quarters ago, and one of our favorite members was there. And he was complaining about how he can’t find associates where he lives and people. And so he so he presents this issue, this problem that he’s having, he talks for five or 10 minutes, and then everyone gets to chime in for like 20 minutes. And people would say, Well, have you thought about remote workers? Oh, that doesn’t work in our model. Have you thought about part time attorneys or out of state attorneys? Oh, that doesn’t work for our model. So everything was that doesn’t work in our model? Well, listen, brother, maybe your model is not working. That’s maybe, maybe we need a new model.

Speaker 2
Oh, my goodness. Is this really weird? Like, talk to me? I know you’re having amazing conversations and your conferences on your podcast and your Facebook group and the guild? Is this like where we’re at right now for those firms for that brother that’s sitting in the hot seat and said, that won’t work for my model for my firm? What have you, what do you see if they do not truly take a look at the model? Take a look at the way they’re doing what they’re doing in their mindset around this? What do you have to say, is this a wave of where we’re headed with law firms in 2023? If you do not pivot, and I know that word is so abused, but what do you guys seem for the law firms that are going to be like, stick their heels into that mindset?

Tyson Mutrux
Well, I don’t think it’s a pivot problem. I don’t think people need to think about pivoting. I think that they just need to stop and think because and I think it’s this is normal. I think it’s completely normal for people to like, I used to do criminal defense, right. And so it was very normal for me to have to get up in the morning, drive, you know, an hour to a court and then just drive around all frickin morning to different courthouses. And then in the afternoon, I’m meeting with clients, I’m going to do jail visits. And next thing you know, you’re on to the next day, and then the next day, the next day, and it’s easy to get stuck in that grind. And you’re sort of in this rut and you’re doing everyday and so the law firm owners, it’s a normal feeling to have that but the value comes whenever you kind of step back a little bit. You want to pivot in what you’re doing, but you do have to step back and think about where do I want this firm to go? Where’s my time best spent So I guess if there is a trend because there is what, right behind 2023 there’s private equity coming in to the legal space. Okay, it’s coming. It’s already in a few states. Yeah, it’s going to get more efficient, okay. And you’re gonna have a lot more competition over the next decade than what we add over the last decade. So you need to make your firms more efficient and get ready for it, because it’s coming. And people need to stop. And I think just having a pause, if the message is anything, it’s take a pause, and think about where you’re headed and with your firm. Another word you can use is be deliberate, right, be deliberate about what you’re doing.

Speaker 2
Efficiency. What did we talk about be more efficient? What does that mean for the two of you?

Jim Hacking
Well, Stephen Covey would say we begin with the end in mind, right? So what do we want? And what, you know, is there a difference between what we say what we want and what we’re actually working towards? Right? So I think if you want to talk about efficiency, you have to ask yourself, Okay, well, what is the final outcome? What, what’s the ideal experience for our team? How do we want to create our work product, and then look at all the ways that we can simplify it, that we can delegate it that we can have the person with the least amount of talent, doing the low level stuff, and the people with the higher talent doing the most important stuff. So many lawyers that we talked to spend their time doing $5 work, when they should be doing $50,000 work, right. And so I think that Tyson’s point that he just made about stopping and thinking is critical for law firm owners and 2023 and beyond, because we’re just so reactive, and so bouncy around, and so undisciplined that all that anger and vitriol we’re trying to impose on our staff, we should be focusing on ourselves and ask ourselves my favorite question from Jerry colonna, which is, how have we been complicit in creating the conditions that we say that we don’t want? And I think that’s just a really insightful question. Because it just forces you to take responsibility, everything at our firm is our fault. Anything that’s going wrong at our firm, it’s our fault. We are the only ones who have the power to change it. And so we can pitch all we want. But if we’re not doing the legwork, and like Tyson said, if our team doesn’t know that we’re in the trenches with them, they’re gonna be like, who’s had Asel? Who comes in every three days and yells at me? You know, I don’t have any loyalty to that person.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I’ll add to that, I mean, I think I think it’s simple exercise. I haven’t talked about this in a while. But a simple exercise that people can do that are sort of struggling is you just take, it’s really simple, right? you map out the case from start to finish. So if you do an injury case, from the moment that really the person gets in the crash, map out that experience for that client from start to the end of the case, and make it ideal, right, and you pick out all the benchmarks in there, and an injury case, its speed, and in most most practice areas, it’s speed, and you’re talking about efficiency. Okay, let’s get this thing fast. So like that, whatever that timeframe is, let’s try to shrink it down as much as possible. And it can be hard with injury cases, because it’s like you want to rush a case, but you can do things to make it more efficient. For example, medical records is a massive time suck for a lot of injury firms. And so what let’s let’s pick apart that part of the process, and how do we shrink that down and make it as fast as possible. So if you just go through the simple process of mapping out your case, like a timeline, start to finish and start to pick apart points where it’s slow, and you can, you can improve, and then you can’t, like make everything perfect, but over time, you can make it better. And just doing that little exercise will help you tremendously,

Speaker 2
as you said that I’m like, Wow, imagine doing that with your team and treating it like a mini workshop and having fun with it. And sitting down talking about being in the trenches with your team, talking about being deliberate talking about speed, talking about consistency, efficiency, and I love that efficiency, speed. I love this, especially with what is coming. I think a lot of attorneys don’t believe it. We’ve seen it in the dental space we’ve I mean, so I love that you said that of sitting down the pause, take a step back, take a case from cradle to grave. And as you’re saying that and bringing in your team, how about bringing your team to do that as well and for them to I hear from attorneys all the time you know, business will be great but for the employees nobody will step up and lead and Mike have you given them permission? Have you given them permission Have you enrolled them have you taken the pause and sat and taken a gaze from the beginning to the end for them to see Hey attorney Why are you doing that? Didn’t you hire me to do that? Can I step up and lead and a lot of times I think you know it’s it’s kind of a blessing and a curse if you will I hired these people and nobody you know will follow the process step up in all the complaints that they’re bitching about what have you but your employees our relationship? Have you given them any time attention feedback to even pour in them. Have you given them permission to lead? And or are you just white knuckling? Everything to Jim’s point? You know, the brain surgeon model that I’m the guru, I’m the guy is not scalable and sellable. Just real

Tyson Mutrux
quick, sorry. We’re both getting worked up over this one. If that’s your model, right, I always I always think back to this. And I don’t know if this is true. I’ve heard about the story about Donald Rumsfeld, right. And Donald Rumsfeld whenever he was, whenever George Bush was, when that White House, what happened is, every morning, they call them snowflakes, right. And he had a bit sticky notes. And this is the story. So I’m just repeating the story that I heard. So he had these sticky notes, and people would be in an align every single morning, and he would hand out sticky notes, and you’d see them leave the White House, and they would call them snowflakes as they were leaving the White House. That is not a very efficient leadership model. Okay? That is if everything’s at the top, if that’s your leadership model, you’ve not given all of your team members that that permission, that authority to make decisions. And if you’re struggling, read the book, turn your ship around, right, turn the ship around, I think he’s the name of it, it is a great book where you need to empower your people it because that is extremely inefficient. If everything’s come up to the top and a lot, that’s how a lot of law firm owners are, because they are the lawyer of the law firm, they’re running the law firm, everything sort of runs through them. And it’s extremely inefficient. And so you’ve got to empower your people to make those small decisions, from the small decisions to the big decisions, they’ve got to be empowered to make mistakes, they’ve got to otherwise you’re going to be stuck in that rut for the next 30 years of your career.

Unknown Speaker
If you’re still in business, that’s the

Jim Hacking
cost of delegation, the cost of delegation is whether or not you’re comfortable letting them make mistakes, and not going nuts, not losing your shit. If if you I mean, obviously want to have safeguards. So there’s no malpractice but short of that, you’ve got to be comfortable in letting go, because so many of the people that we see struggle with delegations are the control freaks, who won’t let things go and won’t let people make mistakes. Obviously, we all know it, mistakes are the best way to learn. And as long as you’re not harming your client, and as long as you’re not, you know, downgrading the reputation of the firm within those boundaries, you got to give your team a lot of leeway. And you can always have safety nets or safeguards like, like a safeguard would be before something goes out, it’s reviewed by you or another attorney. But that doesn’t mean you have to be the one to put the paper in the printer. That doesn’t mean that you know if you can get your team to get it 85 90% of the way done the way you want it. Now for Tyson would say you got to get the way you want it all into a system. So they can do it almost 99%. But if you if you want that catch all for the first six months, do it and then eventually just let it go.

Speaker 2
Jim, how do you get comfortable but letting go I hear this from material like Yeah, yeah, that one time, I did let go and I got a bar complaint that one time, they’re always picking from their past or past experience of that one time, then I did not go not doing that again, you just

Jim Hacking
have to ask yourself, Do I really want to delegate? Or do I want a one person show I mean, that’s the the cost of business, the cost of having something bigger than yourself, the cost of having a firm with 53 people is you got to let go of a whole lot of stuff. And that just start off by letting go the things you hate to do and that you’re not good at, then let go the things that you don’t like to do that you are good at, and then let go of the things that you’re good at, and you’d like to do. And that’s that’s really the right mindset. And if you don’t, it’s fine. But don’t say that you want something else? And then not do it. That’s the cost of admission. Yes,

Unknown Speaker
Tyson want to get?

Tyson Mutrux
No, I agree with that. That what Jim just said is really important. Because people will tell us all the time that they want one thing and they really don’t they’re saying that they want that one thing because it’s cool, right? It’s they want this whatever it is, right? They they want to run a 100 person law firm and they really don’t they say it because it sounds cool. And they see other people saying that they want it. And if they really were to step back and think about what their vision is for their career, then they would realize, okay, that’s not what I really want. But to address your question, though, right? Okay, you can still say yeah, I did that one time and then this happened. I got a bar complaint. Let’s say that’s what it is. Okay,

Jim Hacking
I had a I had a bad hire and then they don’t want to ever hire someone again.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s that’s like the number one right? Okay. Well, what did you learn from that? Right? Why did you have the bad hire? What could you have done differently to catch some of those things? You can’t catch everything. Okay. It may have been that one thing that slipped through it’s usually not though it’s usually you didn’t have a hiring process in place. And so you just hired whomever and then you put them in a seat and they were terrible. And you didn’t know that because you didn’t ask the right questions, but just step back and assess Okay, well, why did these things happen? Okay, now what fail safes can we put in place what bumpers can we put in place to prevent it from happening again? That will allow How you to sort of step back, for example, we have one of our checklist items that we have for case managers case comes through. If the statute of limitations after the case of sign is less than 90 days out, that’s a big red flag for us when it pops up a red flag, and we say, we need to alert an attorney right away and address the issue. So you can put in failsafes, like that, so that you’re alerted? Is it 100%? Could someone just check that box off and say, Oh, no big deal, and someone blows a statute, I guess that’s, that’s, that’s fine. But that’s probably a hiring problem. You’re, that’s probably a management problem. That’s probably something else to step back and ask yourself why they happen. Put in things in place to help correct it. So it doesn’t happen again, and you’re fine. Did you get the step back, and you have to, you have to sort of trust the process a little bit.

Speaker 2
And getting clear. I love that, um, what you really want your all time I’ll get calls from attorneys that are contacting us for hiring and we’re in a path of growth, we’re going to attend next this year, blah, blah, blah, and like, no, why do you want that? Talk to me a little bit about it, because you don’t want to spend the money for it. You don’t want to pay your people, right? But they’re comparing yourself to so and so that they saw on the Facebook group or saw at a conference or what have you been like, God, this guy or gal, this practice has it all. And I love that you said Get really clear with yourself if you’re not willing to fail fast, and you’re not willing to get into action and be able to let go, that maybe that’s not the model for you. And just really getting clear with yourself right,

Becca Eberhart
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Speaker 2
max law events.com. So you all get to a point, obviously, you let go, you built very, very successful law firms. Talk to me about this passion project that you have with maximum lawyer, I know you’re doing a lot of amazing stuff to support attorneys in the legal space to grow their practice, using your model. And as the lab you all have proof of concept, tried, tested, proven. Talk to us about what you’re up to in regards to supporting law firms and lawyers.

Jim Hacking
So I’ve come to the conclusion that my purpose in life is to try to ease people suffering. And I do that as an immigration lawyer by helping people stay in the United States come to United States be joined with their family be protected. And I think that transfers right over to maximum lawyer. I mean, the whole thing started because Tyson and I were trying to figure things out. And we’re talking things through and I thought these are good conversations. And we thought this would make a good podcasts. So it started with that. And so you know, that lots of growth, lots of new opportunities and new connections that we’ve made with people. But for the most part, I think most law firm owners are suffering and they’re suffering in silence. And I think that’s why the Facebook group really grew was because it was a place where it was okay to have a growth mindset where, you know, we don’t allow any negativity in there. Like if people are bitching out they go right. Or if they’re spammy or self promotional, or if they if they’re just negative or harsh, out they go. So we wanted to create a place where people could talk about the hardships related to owning a law firm. And I say all the time in the group and in the guild that this shit is hard, other than raising kids growing a law firm is the hardest thing we’ll ever do. And so I think that that’s really what you call it a passion project. And I think I think it’s grown into that. And I think that both of us are sort of serious, and we spend time talking to law firm owners every week about the struggles that they’re having. And, you know, we created the group that we needed, we created that that community that we needed, and we and we’ve taught ourselves the lessons that we learned, like one of the great things about the podcast, Tyson shared a tic tac with us yesterday, and he has a cool little message about fear of missing out and I said let’s even get him on the podcast. So we get information that helps our firm and it’s always easier to see problems and other people than than in your own.

Speaker 2
Yeah, and your podcast. My goodness, it comes to my inbox. That is one podcast I’ve listened to every single week. I absolutely love it Tyson how about for you?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I love it. I just love it kind of thinking about how the it’s all sort of progressed because it started just me and Jim you know a bunch of false starts with a podcast on camera. Well, we started on what was what did we start recording on Jim? It was the Skype Skype Yeah, we started recording on Skype we had there are so many episodes that we forgot to press record, you know? And then you kind of fast forward like yeah, okay, sorry than a Facebook Rupe and then you got the podcast, and then the conference and the guild. And it’s just kind of cool to think about how it’s progressed, it’s progressed with our law firms, too. It’s grown with our law firm law firms, which is a pretty cool part of it as well. And I think it’s cool to kind of listen to some of the old episodes, like some of the advice that we gave them versus what we what we’d give now we’ve, we’ve learned so much, it’s just as valuable to me and Jim as it as everyone else. Because we get to learn as we’re talking to all these amazing people, like, we had some amazing talents on the podcast, and there’s just really incredible to do. But then if you kind of go to like the Gil, like I kind of pinch myself every day, you know, but like, oh, it’s amazing being in such a wonderful group of human beings and attorneys and successful attorneys, and you kind of a spectrum of people that are sort of just starting out, and then people that are doing just truly amazing things in the legal space. And it’s so cool to be able to be around those people. It’s just, it’s incredible. Talk to us about the guild. Yeah. So the guild is what I say is on the podcast, you know, if you want a more high level conversation, join us in the guild, Max, I’ll go back out. And then that’s exactly what I say on the podcast. And it’s, it really is it’s a great community of I’d say, in the in the entire legal space, probably the top 5% of all attorneys, like they’re just really, really good people, great attorneys that really are about improvement and helping each other. And the great thing is, is most people they give more than they take which is which is a rare trait to have right? To find someone willing to give more than they are, then it’ll take but you know, we’ve got quarterly masterminds with training sessions as well that are mixing their their their two day events throughout the country. Like for example, we just got back from Scottsdale, then we’ve got Austin and then Boulder and then Miami to wrap up the year. So really cool things Jim just did an amazing workshop on on video and they can share because Jim’s got I don’t know how many freakin views on YouTube, ours. And it’s it’s it’s quite incredible. And then we’ve got hot seats we do. We’ve got training sessions that we do and weekly accountability calls. And it’s just the most important part of those is community and we had a gym mission earlier. But we had a member that was sort of struggling last week. And the rallying around him this week has been just incredible, just incredible. And they don’t even know who the person is, right? They don’t know what the person is, but they were the comments, the videos, the just the showing of like, Hey, we’ve got your back was was quite incredible. So it’s just it’s a great group of people.

Speaker 2
What I love about what you said successful attorneys successful lawyers in the definition of success is just not money in the bank. It’s just not bodies in the building, so to speak. And when I hear from you and Jim that I really think distinguishes your organization, the work that you all are doing, it’s not about the billable hour, it’s not about tracking time, it’s not about more money, and there’s so many organizations out there that yeah, they buy on paper, these law firms, I mean, so successful, more money than they ever could have imagined more impact than they ever could imagine. But they’re just so broken. They’re angry all the time. They hate their employees are constantly bitching about their employees, what have you, they have all this money, they have all this success, all the building satellite offices, all the things that are on paper, make your definition of success. But I would love for you all just to kind of tie a bow on this. What success mean for you when you talk about successful lawyers because there’s something different there is absolutely something different in in our listeners, I’m going to put all the links all the show notes at Facebook group and I’ll have you guys mentioned that there’s something different about what the two of you are, you know, before we started recording, I just like given your 75 part episode that the two of you did together the vulnerability there the transparency I mean, it’s it’s just a different vibe they the two of you, I’d love to hear what success truly what the definition of success means for each of you.

Jim Hacking
My son calls the guild AAA for lawyers. I’ve been told Tyson that but that’s you’re doing lawyer a again. You know, I have read the big book and I’m I’m in the 12 step world for a long time. So we definitely bring some of that vibe to it. But I really do think it’s about finding that connection and giving people permission to make mistakes to acknowledge the struggle to talk about the hard things. Success for me is having an impact. If it’s helping an immigrant if it’s helping a lawyer, if it’s helping people like when we do our hot seats will tell people well, you can come on and talk about whatever you want. And you know when people get on and talk about, you know how to become more efficient or how to run an SEO campaign. I’m like, boo boo hiss. I like it when we’re digging around in the dirt talking about the hard stuff. And that’s really where the connection rises. One time. We were doing a hot seat in some But he talked about their long history of problems with drinking and and that unlocked three other people to talk about things that they were struggling with just at that moment. And that to me, when that happens, that makes all this work that we’re doing for the maximum lawyer community worthwhile.

Tyson Mutrux
I agree with all of that. I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done, the work that we’ve done to help other lawyers, and I mean, every podcasts been absolutely amazing. No, but that’s, that’s part of life. Right. But the, I think it’s amazing to kind of look back and see the effect that we’ve had on the profession, and I’m very proud of that. But definition of success. I mean, for me, it’s really simple. Like, whenever I’m like a grandpa, or my kids, are they kind of talking about the stories that they had as a kid? Are they happy about their childhoods? And are they are they happy to have me as their father and, and to be the grandfather of their children, because that is something that we lose sight of. And it’s very simple for me, like, I want to have that, right, I want to have those relationships with my kids or strong bonds. And I do that the vehicle for that’s the law firm, right, and I demonstrate for them the hard work that it takes, and the dedication to your profession and to your craft. And I I show that by by being a successful lawyer and showing that I really care about the thing, the work that I do, and that you need to find something that you’re proud of doing and something that you’re you’re happy with doing and that it’s okay that if you’re if you don’t like your profession, that you can switch professions, you know, passing on those life lessons to them. That’s success to me, and everyone’s got their own definition of success. You’re so right about that. Gemini, we have maximum Laura, minimum time, it’s a little course that we have that we put together for guild members and it we talked about you can be a stage 1234, law, lawyer, whatever you want to be if you want to be a one lawyer work, little shop, and just do trademarks. And that’s all you want to do. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If you want to be that big time lawyer that has you know, 1000s of cases and puts up bunch of billboards, there’s nothing wrong with that. Choose whatever you want to be and go after that and be be okay with that. And if and you get halfway through it, and you decide that’s not for me, it’s okay to change. It’s okay to change that. And change your vision, your vision over over the years is going to change. That’s fine. You don’t have to stick to it, you can always hit that reset button.

Speaker 2
I love that. And then love your definition of success Tyson bringing in your adult children and grandchildren When have you because at the end of the day, you’re modeling in at the law firm. And I always say this to my clients when they come, you know their definition of success. It’s great that you’re modeling a law firm, but when you bring it home and your kids get the stressed out crappy version of you, right? No, it’s not an either or conversation. It’s an and and wherever you go, there you are. So really bringing that doing great work in the legal space serving families, serving your clients serving, you know, being a phenomenal leader to your employees as well. And then your kids seeing that and bringing it home to your family as well. It’s great, because so many lawyers, you know, they’re resentful, they’re missing their kids soccer, they’re missing everything. And when they are home, they’re not present, thundering silence, the, you know, the anxiety just pulsing through their veins. I always say you’re responsible for the energy, you bring in the room and you leave in the room. And when your kids, they’re feeling it, they’re feeling it. They’re like, yeah, Dad’s driving a Lambo, Dad’s you know, got the big building or what have you, but boy, boy, I can feel it. Wow. So all right, tell us what you guys are up to tell our attorney listeners that we have here how they can stay connected with you all if they’re not already.

Tyson Mutrux
The easiest way they could stay in touch with us is listen to the podcast. But also if you go to Facebook, we have a 6000 member Facebook group that is phenomenon. Okay, just search maximum lawyer and you can join us there. There’s a few questions you’ll get you’ll answer but we don’t allow spammers. So if you if you’re a spammer dark complainers,

Speaker 2
pitchers know, pitchers punch in our bit.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, join us there. And then we always recommend that you start there, right. But if you are a member of that group, and you want to join us in the guild, Maxwell guild.com is also another place to join us.

Speaker 2
Is there an open enrollment time for The Guild application process?

Tyson Mutrux
It is I mean, it is open enrollment kind of thing. We’ve talked about capping and we’ve talked about putting it where we have certain times but we haven’t done that at this point. But it is open roll enrollment at this point.

Speaker 2
Great. Excellent. Well, I am so completely honored, completely honored, keep up the amazing work and being legal leaders, leading legal leaders, the work that you’re doing on your podcast, the guests that you all have the diverse conversations, the real raw, honest conversations that you’re having. They’re making a massive, massive difference I’ve been in Lagos space for 26 years and I’m really passionate on the employee side of creating intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs world and thank you for all the work you’re doing with the attorneys. Thanks, Molly. Yes.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer but stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum liar.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

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What if you knew the day that you were going to die? What if you gave your life your best shot because you knew that your time was limited? What would you do differently? What would you change in your law firm? Who would you call to make sure you talked to today? 

In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max Law Con 2022, where Jim gives his talk – “Why are you waiting?” Which encourages you to live today with the mindset of your finite time and asking the important question of how would you change what you do today? 

How would that encourage you to make decisions and say “No.” to certain things? How would it make you step up and say “Yes!” to other things a lot  quicker. What is important to you? 

Listen to this episode and be encouraged to move forward fearlessly. 

Episode Highlights:

2:00 Being present and in the moment

7:20 Let’s talk about saying yes and how every decisions is effected

9:30 We are a limited amount of time — Suppose this is the last year? the last day?  What would you do and who would you call? Why would you not do it today?

Remember that everything you are doing is important but remember that you only have one shot at your business, your life, your family  so give it your all and make it the best that you can. 

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

Jim’s Hack: Read Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Resources:

Transcript: Why Are You Waiting with Jim Hacking

Unknown Speaker
In today’s episode, we’re sharing a presentation from Max law con 2020. To keep listening to hear Jim hacking as we share his talk, why are you waiting, you can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now let’s get to it.

Jim Hacking
Start close in. Don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing close in the step you don’t want to take. Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question. Give up on other people’s questions. Don’t let them smother something simple.

Unknown Speaker
To hear another’s voice, follow your own

Jim Hacking
voice. To hear another’s voice. Follow your own voice. Wait until that voice becomes a private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now. Take a small step you can call your own. Don’t follow someone else’s heroics. Be humble and focused, start close in, don’t mistake that other for your own.

Unknown Speaker
Start close in, don’t take the second step, or the third, start with the first thing close in the step you don’t want to take. That’s a poem by David White. And I

Jim Hacking
share it with you today to encourage all of us for the next two days, to be present to be here in the moment, with your friends, with your colleagues, all yearning to improve, all wanting to get better. I love this picture of Tiger Woods. If you can see, everybody is filming with their phones, except for the one fellow with a beer in his hand. He’s in the moment. He’s enjoying it. So I just put my phone away, I would encourage you to the extent that you can to put your phone away as much as you can, during this conference, I want you to be right here.

Unknown Speaker
Right now.

Jim Hacking
This is really, really hard to do all the time. It’s especially hard to do in 2022. And we can spend a lot of our time reminiscing on the past, I heard once that people with depression are focused on the past, and people with anxiety are focused on the future. So I encourage you, not just today, but throughout the conference. And as you leave, too. Don’t be asking yourself remember that one time, or thinking about wait until I get over there. My daughter Nora is famous for saying what are we going to do tomorrow?

Unknown Speaker
What are we going to do tomorrow. And I have found myself

Jim Hacking
sometimes doing what I call pre emptive living like getting so ready for tomorrow. That’s good. It’s good to plan. But we lose sight of the fact of being in the moment of being where we are. And so I think we have to operate on two tracks. The first track is looking to the future, and doing all the things that you’re going to hear about for the next few days about trying to improve things. But there is a real place for space, and to be here. Now this is gonna be a theme you’re going to hear throughout the conference. For me, one of the things that have really helped me with that is meditation. So most days, I’ll wake up in the morning early, and I’ll meditate just for 10 or 12 minutes. There are apps for that headspace is great. There are other free you can do all the free meditation in the world. And it’s really, really helped me to stay in the moment and to be a lot more grounded. And a lot Schiller, when riding that roller coaster of owning a law firm. One of the people that I’ve learned from is a guy named Jack Kornfield. And during my meditation, one of the things that he encouraged us to do is to just listen to what comes into our brain. When you’re quiet. You have lots of thoughts. And instead of chasing after those thoughts, you can name it. You can just say, oh, that’s anxiety, or oh, that’s worry, or oh, that’s me thinking about what’s for dinner tomorrow night. Just name it and let it go and just sort of let there be a parade of thoughts as you go through Pema Chodron talks about how thoughts are really just opinions. You know that we are so convinced at times that our thoughts are real and that everything we’re saying is 100% gospel fact, when in reality most things are just an opinion, and things that we think in our lives that are the worst things ever turned out to be really great for us, and vice versa. So Jack Kornfield talks about naming those emotions as they come through. So let’s be present together, I’m going to ask everyone to stand up for just a minute.

Unknown Speaker
And we’re going to take three breaths,

Jim Hacking
three breaths. And so let me show you how we’re going to do it. So stand with your, your feet, sort of at shoulder width, and stand straight and tall as if there’s a string in the center of your head, pulling straight up. And we’re going to lace our fingers, I’m going to practice at once, I’ll show you, okay, so I’m going to breathe in, and then pause, and then breathe out. Okay, and we’re going to do this three times. And the first time that we do it, we’re going to be thinking about ourselves, right ourselves. So

Unknown Speaker
we’re going to lace our fingers. Breathe in all the

Jim Hacking
worries, all that stress, all the things that are keeping us up at night, all the things that are making us sad, breathe it in. And breathe out joy and peace and serenity.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, now, for the second time,

Jim Hacking
we’re gonna do this to everyone in the room. And I know that there are people in this room who are suffering, and are having a hard time, and are really trying to do better and be better. And there are people who are sad, we had our mastermind for The Guild yesterday, and there are people who are really struggling, and really sad. So for this breath, we’re going to breathe in for all the suffering in the room. And we’re going to breathe out peace and love and serenity to each of them ready.

Unknown Speaker
All right now, for the last one, we’re going to do it for the world, right. And

Jim Hacking
so we’re going to think of our minds and the space that we’re taking all this in. And we have unlimited capacity to take in all the pain and suffering for the whole world. We’re going to breathe it in here. And then we’re going to breathe it out. And we’re going to send love and peace to all the people in Texas who are suffering everyone across the world who’s sad, who are really having a hard time. Ready. Last one.

Unknown Speaker
In Oh, thank you, everybody. Thanks for indulging me on that. All right. Now, now we’re gonna talk about saying yes, saying yes. And

Jim Hacking
every decision that we make is a sacrifice. Every decision that we make as a sacrifice, when we decide something, we’re deciding against many other choices.

Unknown Speaker
And the word decide comes from the

Jim Hacking
Latin decider, A and side is the important part of that word. And that’s to cut off. So we have words like suicide, homicide, genocide decide. So I really want you to focus on making decisions this week. And it’s okay that every decision that we make, we’re cutting off other opportunities, perhaps forever, when we marry a spouse, we’re saying to the rest of the world, I don’t want to marry you, I want to marry this person. And that makes that relationship that much more important. As business owners and law firm owners, we have to understand that we have limits, we can’t do everything. I really started to love this word finitude, which is the state of having limits or bounds. And there’s a real freedom and power and just acknowledging that we can’t do everything. So you’re going to hear lots of ideas. Over the next few days, you’re going to make pages and pages of list of things to do. I’m going to encourage you to do less, to do less, and to make better decisions. And to spend more time in your thinking chair with your notebook. Figuring shit out, instead of just doing things

Unknown Speaker
is apathy on his back. If you’re new around here, this app Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event we’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher. To bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology so that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you before you even leave Austin. Join the guild today and grab your ticket at max slot events.com.

Jim Hacking
We have a limited amount of time we have a limited amount of time as family members,

Unknown Speaker
law firm owners, human beings. I read a great book

Jim Hacking
down in the Dominican Republic this holiday break called 4000 weeks by Oliver Berkman. And that’s about what we get. If you live on average, you get about 4000 weeks. So every week that goes by, you know I’m 52 So I’ve had 52 times 52 weeks. So I think if you read that book, that you’ll see that there’s some really great lessons in there about the power of acknowledging that we don’t have unlimited capacity. So when I grew up, I grew up Catholic. And we spent a lot of time talking about death, a lot of time talking about death. So this was the hallway of the church where I would serve mass. And that little door down there is where you would go in to get ready. And you would have to walk by Jesus every day. And he was like this with his bloody rib. And it was scary as hell. But we talked about death a lot, a lot about death. When I was in fifth grade, or so my father and I, on Easter weekend, we had to take a movie Back to Blockbuster Video. And we were going up the hill from our house. And I said, Dad, did we actually bring the tape I think we might have forgotten it. So he pulled over, we were digging around, it had fallen in the back of the of the back seat. And then we went back up the hill, we got to the hill, the light turned red. And right at this moment, this motorcycle comes flying up the hill. And it hits these two old guys car and it drives the motorcycle came out the trunk. And my dad and I jumped out. And I was like 11. And there’s this dead guy there. Right. So I’ve always been thinking about and close to death. A couple years later, my father was in Lake of the Ozarks at the age of 41. And he had a massive heart attack. He took five nitroglycerin, trying to get his heart rate back. They defy him on the outside of a helicopter up to St. Louis University Hospital. And he had a quintuple bypass back when bypasses like they just stopped using pig vessels. And they just started using his own right. So I saw my dad who was like strong and built decks with by himself and he was just all muscle, he was completely weak as his chest plate was cut open. And so we were always worried about my dad dying. So that was when he was 41. That was in September of 81. In April of, of 82, I started having seizures, my hand would lock and my knees would lock and I would fall down. And then eventually they got worse and worse. And my parents thought that I had a brain tumor. So I spent two weeks in children’s hospital. And nobody knew what was wrong with me. For those of you who’ve heard me speak before, I think it was related to that incident that happened to me when I was a child. And I think that was all sort of psychosomatic stuff, because eventually outgrew it. But for two weeks there, I was getting spinal taps and all kinds of tests. And I thought I was going to die. So that was when I was 12. Later on in life, I changed religions and it became a Muslim. And in the slum, when somebody dies, the family members bury the body, right. And they wrap them in a white shroud. And so when my wife’s father and brother passed away, I participated in that ceremony. And it’s very powerful. It’s very powerful. And in Islam, also you have to get the body in the ground

Unknown Speaker
within the next day. So again, death around

Jim Hacking
wonderful book by a guy named Steven Levine called a year to live he and his wife administered treatment and palliative care to AIDS patients throughout the 80s and 90s. And he wrote this book called a year to live and he asked, suppose this was the last week I suppose this was the last day. Who would you call? What would you say? Why are you waiting? So when I read this book, I thought to myself, Boy, wouldn’t it be interesting if we all came with an expiration date? If we all had on maybe on our heel? Our expiration date if we knew the day that we were going to expire? And then I thought or wouldn’t it be interesting if somebody in a science fictiony kind of way came up with a machine that would tell you when you were going to pass away? Like you would know the date and the one thought I had a result those people would get to go first in line at Disney World, right because they only had a couple of days left. This is my friend Paul pesante. He was a mentor of mine, a lawyer, a law firm owner, very successful gotten multimillion dollar verdicts. On December 8 2014. Paul took his own life. His expiration date was December 8 2014. My wife’s good friend Rhonda Williams was the Assistant General Counsel at a company called SAVVIS. She was on her way downtown. She went out to her car. She was 41 years old, and she dropped dead right in the parking lot. This is Tyson’s old boss at Brown. He also took his life in October of 2020. So Tyson and I both have bosses and mentors who ended up taking their own life. Molly Bowman was a classmate of my wife and mine. And on my birthday, my 40th birthday, she sent me a message on Facebook at around 415 In the afternoon, wishing me a happy birthday and she said I hope this is your best year yet. So for those of you who I’ve wished Happy Birthday to, I always say I hope this is your best year yet because of Molly. About an hour later she has a quick trip I’m filling up her car with gas and some guy hopped up on any freezer something ran her over, and she died on her way to go pick up her kids from daycare. This last fall, Randy Gauri was the year behind me in law school. He was a multi multimillionaire

Unknown Speaker
offense, bestest litigation.

Jim Hacking
They named the whole lobby of the law school after him, he was younger than me. And two years ago, right after New Year’s, some crazy guy came into his house and killed him in front of his kid.

Unknown Speaker
And this is my dad. So

Jim Hacking
I do think that sometimes I work out some of my issues on stage. So I apologize for that. But this is my dad. And I told you, my dad had that heart attack in 1981, he lived another 40 years. And when I gave his eulogy last year, I was really grateful for the fact that we had received another 40 years with my dad, I mean, to think that his bypass lasted 40 years is unbelievable. And my dad had been sick. He had turned 80 in June. And luckily, we all got to tell him how much we loved him. I had everyone in the family wrote him a poem or a story about him. And we all read it to him. And then, as he got closer to death, the day before he died, and all of his kids, all of his grandkids, except for two, who attended by FaceTime, we all got to talk to him throughout the day, he was awake and asleep, awake and asleep. And he passed away the next day,

Unknown Speaker
at the age of 80. And

Jim Hacking
that was a really beautiful thing. And I hope that we all get that opportunity. Which brings me to the fact that we all have our own expiration date. And I’m trying not to be too morbid, but I did do something. So my sister Omer and I randomly generated dates in the future. And you have a date in the future, you don’t have to open it. I suggest you might not want to open it. But there is a date in the envelope in front of you. You can choose to open it, you can choose not to open it, I’m pretty sure and hopeful that the dates aren’t correct, right. But we did some in the next 20 years, some of the next 30 years and some of the next 40 or 50 years. So I offer that to you as a simple thought experiment, to remember that everything we’re doing is important, but we only have one shot at this life. So I want you to do everything you can to build the best practice, build the best life, build the best family that you can, and love everyone that you come across. Thanks, everybody.

After handling his wife’s immigration papers, lawyer Erick Widman had a fire lit in himself to niche down to family and business immigration. His law firm is now 10 years old, with all the ups and downs that come from being an entrepreneur and owning your own firm. 

One of the biggest challenges Erick faced was being unprepared for how difficult it would be to handle employees. And all of the coaching you have to do for the employees – and so Erick became a high performance coach. 

How do you manage people all day? How do you manage all the different personalities you work with? How do you come to grips with that (especially if you are an entrepreneur)? That and more is what we are talking about today. Let’s listen in. 

Episode Highlights:

02:00 Meet Erick where he was a part of the minority group in school, was an exchange student in Japan, and taught law in Hungary where he met his now wife. 

4:25 Experiences from Japan helping Erick become a better business owner. 

5:19 What’s your favorite part of owning a law firm? And what’s the least favorite part of owning your own law firm?

8:00 Managing people on your team better even when you are an introvert …  

9:54 Becoming a high performance coach started when Erick realized I don’t need to play the same game that other people are.

12:15 Reading the happiness advantage — training yourself to find the positive – becoming the positive person in your life and making the positive things come out!

13:35 What has been the biggest challenge for you when running your own firm? 

15:28 What most immigration lawyers don’t know about marketing and being an entrepreneur. 

18:02 Talking about vision – have you done the vision work for your firm? Have you placed value on that? 

Jim’s Hack: Read the book by Napoleon Hill “Think and Grow Rich” https://amzn.to/3ItdiSb – it’s a little woo woo and a little outdated but the central message makes it worth it. — and that message is — That  anything that we want to have happened has to begin as a thought and that the only changes  that happened in the world happened as a thought and our job is to keep that thought alive until it manifests itself into an action. 

Erick’s Tip: Watch the documentary “All or Nothing Arsenal” which has a soccer coach rally the leadership of a failing team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta3CLkX-bzk

Tyson’s Tip: Use an app to place the text on the bottom of the marketing video you created for social media called CapCut with a free and paid version. https://www.capcut.com/

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube or read here.

Connect with Eric:

Resources:

Transcript: Cultivating a Positive Attitude to Manage a Law Firm with Erick Widman

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Well, Tyson, I just got out of one of those meetings that you have as a law firm owner, where you just want to like put your hands on both sides of your head and squeeze as hard as you can. Because people are driving you crazy.

Tyson Mutrux
You want to talk about it, you want to use this as like a session on the couch. And now

Jim Hacking
maybe on Saturday, we can but it’s just sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing to do is. Sometimes it’s things are very clear. But sometimes things are mushy. And it’s hard to figure out what the right thing to do is and different people are telling you different things. And they all are having good ideas. And you have to sort of, as George Bush said, be the decider. I’m the decider.

Tyson Mutrux
I’m gonna use an aviation analogy. It’s kind of like having like, you’ve got your your plane parked out on the tarmac, and you’re ready to go. But it’s tied down to get the wings tied down. So you can’t take off and you’re ready to take off I can, I can only just like see you being the plane wanting to go and take off, get on the runway and go. And there’s sort of the tie downs, not a negative way the tie downs serve a really, really good purpose. But it can sometimes hold you back a little bit.

Jim Hacking
I just want to get those big scissors and cut the tie downs. Yep, that’s exactly right. Well, let’s get to our guests today. It’s one of our all time favorite members of The Guild, he actually came up with the name of the guild, which is the guild ends. His name is Eric Woodman. He’s an immigration lawyer out of Oregon. Eric, welcome to the show.

Erick Widman
Thanks so much, guys. This is a real privilege to be here. And I love what you’re doing for the lawyer community.

Tyson Mutrux
I really want to come and see in Oregon, I’ve never been to Oregon. And I’ve wanted to go for a while. So I’ll come and see you sometime. But tell us about your journey and how you got to where you are now?

Erick Widman
Yes, yes, absolutely. I grew up in Northern California in Silicon Valley, and was in a pretty diverse environment. My high school, white kids were the minority. And some other formative events. For me, were going to Japan as an exchange student. So we’re connecting the dots here to me becoming an immigration lawyer eventually, but live as a family in Japan, went to UCLA was impacted by a number of things. They’re really diverse there, too. I didn’t like law school too much. But I loved realizing I didn’t have to do what everyone else was doing. And basically play a different game is what I realized. I went to Hungary, and met my wife there. I was teaching law at a college it was the best choice I ever made. So it was legit for my career. I met my wife. Now we live in Oregon and have three kids.

Jim Hacking
So tell us a little bit Eric, about your firm, the setup your team and sort of how things are going?

Erick Widman
Yes. So the firm has been in existence for 10 years. I started it after I was in house counsel for about five years at Philips electronics. So I’ve had some corporate experience, which which is good. I actually liked working there. So I could have seen myself as a in house counsel for the long term. But glad my wife and I wanted to be adventurous. We quit our corporate jobs in the Bay Area, super expensive. There. We moved to Hungary, again, where we lived for about two years. So from 2007 2009 or so. And then that’s when I started my firm, and just had clients that were finding me for both business immigration. And then more and more immigration clients kept coming. And it was a perfect fit, because I had handled my wife’s immigration paperwork. And I really enjoyed it. And I am fascinated by international relationships, in that you have one person from one country, someone else for another country and the cultural dynamics, the challenges and the richness that come so my firm for the last 10 years has focused mostly on family immigration, we’re doing more business immigration. Now I want to get to a point where about 5050 and we have a team of 10 people. I’m the only owner. We have two other attorneys, two remote staff and then but five legal assistants, Operations Director and paralegals.

Tyson Mutrux
So Eric, I find Japanese business practices just fascinating. I really do. I think it’s it’s really cool. I wonder if any of your experience in Japan has formed any of your experiences as a business owner?

Erick Widman
Yes. Yeah. And you know, it was great. And I did some contract negotiations with some big names when I was in house counsel. So I was negotiating. It was it was amazing. These Japanese lawyers have passed the New York bar. It’s It’s hard enough Americans surpass it right. Super smart guys. And they were extremely impressive, but the formality of it all, and my boss hit me under the table when I didn’t call A guy Yamamoto son, I had, I had to make sure it was sawn. And so yeah, that was fascinating. And it was also also intriguing that when Japanese and Chinese negotiate contracts, they use English for their agreements. I thought that was amazing what a like privilege time in history the Americans have.

Jim Hacking
So, Eric, talk to us a little bit about, you know, one of my favorite questions I always ask people is, what’s your favorite part of owning a law firm? And what’s the part of being an immigration lawyer or owning an immigration firm that you would like to have someone else do or that might not be your favorite part? Yes.

Erick Widman
So I like I’ve alluded to before, I did not like the law school game, in a sense, where seemed like I was destined to just be a cog in a machine or a lackey to some partner. And rates of alcoholism are super high with lawyers and unhappiness. So I was even wondering, do I want to practice law after law school, but then I realized through a combination of reading and seeing other people start their own firms, and in the diversity in the law, I was able to carve out something that I really love. And so I like entrepreneurship. I like immigrants, I like being able to serve clients and build a business and, and basically, there’s no limit to what we can do. But I was unprepared for how difficult it is to manage employees. And, and also just not having the right training as a business person for several years. And I think I underestimated the responsibility of taking on employees and what that’s like, it’s like having starting a family, where kids, so your knowledge is not perfect, right. But the coaching that you have to do and the responsibility you have is crucial. So I’ll tie this in with my theme. But I became a high performance coach, in large part because I needed to be a better manager.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s interesting, I guess, when was it that it first hits you like, oh, my gosh, this is really hard. Like, do you remember that moment?

Erick Widman
Yes, yeah, it was, again, it was my first employee. And for months, it was going great. And hiring my first legal assistant paralegal like you guys always recommend. It was great for the firm. It was it was a exponential positive impact. But then she was unhappy about some things. And it was the kind of unhappiness that was understandable in some ways, and actually realized that I’m probably a better manager and a lot of people but if she if someone is not being, if we’re not aligning the goals of the firm with her career goals, then people will be unhappy. And I love it. Somebody said to maximal your conference, it might have get forget with speaker, but we’re building a business, but the workers are building a career. And so they don’t care too much about our business in that way, at what, you know, our main goals, we need to genuinely care about their career growth. So that was helpful for me to figure out.

Jim Hacking
Let’s talk about that and managing people peace. That’s something when I mentioned at the top of the show that I was squeezing my head and like a vise in my hands that was sort of leading to that. I mean, you know, I think I’m an introvert, a lot of lawyers are introverts and having to interact with employees are managed people all day can really be draining, especially if we like to think in our head and figure out cases. And then there’s all this personality that we have to manage. How have you sort of come to grips with that, Eric?

Erick Widman
Yeah, they, I remember getting great advice that if some of the things by building a law firm business, you can escape managing people or client or client interactions, you just have a different type of client or a different type of person problem or interaction. And so I basically embrace that if I’m not doing as much casework, like right now, I’ve still got to invest a huge amount of time and people relationships. And one of the toughest things is finding the balance between being the optimistic positive leader, but at the same time, keeping people in line having performance reviews where you’re tough on them. Hold holding people accountable. That’s, that’s a tough balance. And, and then, yeah, I hate getting the DM. About. I have a concern, right, or it’s the salary question or setting up the one on one meeting. But it’s mainly my fault, if I don’t proactively set up the one on one meetings to kind of preempt that. So that’s, that’s what I’m trying to get better at. I follow traction. It like, in large part, not as much as you guys you’ve probably released, Jim. But that’s been helpful structure.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things where like, just need people need a structure. It doesn’t matter. In most cases, what the structure is just a structure is pretty beneficial. But want to talk about the high performance coaching that you mentioned. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so

Erick Widman
so yeah. I realized that I don’t need to play the same game that other people are. So a key realization was I was always beating myself up comparing myself to all stars who have multimillion dollar firms faster than me, for example. And I realized that I was actually playing a different game intentionally when I first started my firm with little kids. And we invested into them. And I was not spending as much time on on marketing, I was doing more, spend more time with the family, and investing in them, which was great, but I didn’t connect the dots and realize that that’s a strategic choice. And it’s okay to have a different focus, play different game at different times of your life. And then I realized, because parenting is so hard, I’ve been reading coaching books here and there, and John Wooden, he was this famous UCLA coach, you’re familiar with him 10 championships. So I read his pyramid of success book, which is kind of simple. It was kind of trite, but super helpful for me when I realized like, I’m so demoralized, I don’t know what to do, I’ll go back to the foundation of this pyramid. And for me, you can write your own. I’ve had my team do this. What are those attributes that are most important for you for success in life. And for me, I realized it’s industriousness. I took that from John Wooden, it’s positivity and enthusiasm. So when I’m not sure of what to do, I just go alright, hardwork, positivity, enthusiasm, and we take it from there. And so it’s similar in some ways, my boys are in Boy Scouts. They define themselves with these words. So it’s a simple, but actually pretty effective coaching tool, high performance tool to look at that word, like if you were behaving brave or with courage, what would you do? And coaching is helping people step into that type of role, that type of thinking. And so the more I was learning about it, the more I liked it, and I was helping my kids and the team with that, too.

Jim Hacking
Thanks for the reminder, because my word this year is stretch. And I haven’t thought about the word stretch for a couple of days, even though I’ve been stretching at the gym, but I haven’t been putting it in my journal like I do. So I think that’s an interesting point about yourself that you made, Eric, because when I think of you, I certainly think of positivity, I think you’re a very optimistic fellow, you’re always very supportive of everyone else. And I’ve never really seen you get down or bummed out about stuff. And so where does that come from? For you?

Erick Widman
You know, my mom was a kind of a California hippie who was into positive psychology I and she always said, what, what was the positive thing to do, and we kind of made fun of her, it always sounded, she was also kindergarten teacher. So we were thinking like, Oh, this is just for little kids. But after reading The Happiness Advantage, highly recommend that to everyone read that. So it’s got the Harvard research backing it up, right and, and then when you’re able, just like a lawyer to to see two sides of the argument, recognize that our lizard brain is always focusing on the negative, but you can train yourself to find the positive and your life is way better as a result, not only personally, but then people follow you. And that’s, that’s what leadership is. So you could lawyers, in particular, we’re all smart enough to find out, you could focus on all that sucks. Or you could make a list of things that are bad, but you could also learn to make the positive things stand out. So yeah, with the ups and downs of entrepreneurship, that’s been crucial for me.

Tyson Mutrux
So other than hiring, let’s get away from that person or managing people what what would you say has been the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in growing your firm?

Erick Widman
I think for Yeah, this is a personal growth issue for me, is not marketing as I should. And and one of the reasons I joined the guild is to learn to not be self conscious, and just to get out of my own way, and not to worry about what people think on social media. And I could be much further along if I was more intentional about putting myself out there. And just sharing helpful things, immigration law, there’s an endless amount of helpful info to prepare to share with people. So if I did that more, and I didn’t care, what I thought people were even thinking about, and no one no one even cares, while people how often they show up or look goofy or whatever. So I think marketing is a key challenge for me finding the time to carve that out. And I’m glad that McGill we’re doing this 60 day challenge because I need to build that habit. So I’m on track guys that’s good,

Unknown Speaker
is that Python is back if you’re new around here. This app Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event. We’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology so that business process can happen without you Setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you. Before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max law events.com.

Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Our guest today is immigration lawyer extraordinaire and Gildan. Number one, Eric Whitman. Eric talked to us a little bit about what most immigration lawyers don’t know, like, what are blind spots that immigration lawyers have, in particular, when it comes to marketing or building, like you said, an entrepreneurial system?

Erick Widman
Yes. So I would start with a practical issue with accounting, where I know that a number of immigration lawyers in particular are so concerned with this nuts and bolts issue, take the money earned upon receipt and spend it and put themselves in kind of a Ponzi scheme scenario. And it’s not good. And and instead, it’s better and healthier, to earn that money through through milestones as you complete the work. So right now, Oregon still allows earned upon receipt, but that’s gonna be changing soon. Half the states roughly allow you to do that. So there can be a false sense of security, that, Oh, I’m I’m profitable, I’m really killing it. Look, I’ve got $80,000 in the bank. But that’s really not your your money, when even if it’s legally operating in your operating account. So on a practical level, by forcing yourself to earn it, and then transfer it to your operating account. That’s, that’s huge. That will also push you and your team to be more productive. And finding, finding those minimum targets. That’s something I’ve experimented with I also experimented with a and for several years use the commission system that could work. But overall, the entrepreneurial type of people who liked the commission, can leave start their own firms. Because I think only realized recently isn’t a book of business. Basically, taking from your existing firm, the existing clients.

Tyson Mutrux
We meet, I feel like I’m, you’ve caught me on that one. I will say what you mean on that?

Erick Widman
What when, when an attorney talks about yeah, I’ve got this book of business that’s transportable, and they’re not a partner. That typically means I think you’re an associate who’s able to leave with with clients and go to a new firm.

Tyson Mutrux
Gotcha. Okay. No question. I agree with that. Yeah, absolutely. If you, it makes you more powerful, it gives you more power. If you are an associate any of you have that book of business, I do get that. I think that that makes complete sense. And we got to Jim and I kind of talked about that earlier about if if one of your associates does have a big book of business, it gives them that mobility, which could cause a problem for you. But I want to ask you about something else, I want to shift gears a little bit, I want to talk about vision a little bit. And I just wonder, like someone like you, if you’ve done like the vision work to figure out where you are headed with your firm? And what value you place on that?

Erick Widman
Yeah. So I definitely think it’s crucial to figure out your Why think about longer term, what you want to do. And I think for the three of us who are more inclined this way, the visionary versus the the executor, the the the integrator, I’m more of the visionary. So but it’s important to do the work. And what I’ve done, I’ve looked ahead five or 10 years ago, the painted picture, from my corporate days, I’ve realized that I would love to build an international company. So if I kind of my life work where, you know, doesn’t doesn’t have to be huge multinational, that’s not realistic, but in a sense of having multiple offices, and focusing on global mobility, that would be really meaningful. So it’ll be both immigration, but it’s not so consumer focused. And we still need to get five star Google reviews. But right now, I feel like I want to be more like the company that kind of shrugs off the, again, not ignoring the bad feedback. But a lot of businesses don’t really care if if customer a B or C is really upset, but I’m I’m the vision that I’m excited about is helping people achieve their full potential by living globally. So that’s the statement I came up with for for myself. And for me, I’ve been able to live globally I’ve lived abroad, it’s enriched my life. Usually I found my love the love of my life, my life partner in another country. That happens a lot for for those. So my mission is to help people live globally in this way and it can be an Americans going abroad. So right now we’re mainly doing inbound immigration exclusively at this point, but we want to do outbound immigration to and help doctors without borders, get people into Nigeria, that type of thing.

Jim Hacking
So is that where the future lies for your firm is that I know that’s in the name of your firm? Is that sort of one of the long term goals? And what would that look like from a a role of the law firm? Like, what would your role be in a situation like that?

Erick Widman
Yeah, so I’m excited. I don’t know if I’ll remain or be a CEO. Longer term by I could, but I would love to do business development and build relationships, and set up another office in Europe live there. So a lot of relationship building, laying the structure, the foundation division for, for things, more marketing, to to make this happen to do business development with companies, and maybe secure an account, multiple accounts over time, that are great for recurring revenue. So I, I see that happening, in addition to growing the consumer focus business,

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. This is good stuff. I think I can probably pick your brain on a lot of things all day. But we do need to begin to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, let a great information being shared on a daily basis, sometimes hourly basis or more. And then if you want a more high level conversation with people like Eric, Eric is in the guild, he’s like Jim said guilty. And number one, he came over the name guilty, and which is pretty awesome. If you want more high level conversation, join us in the guild, go to max law guild.com. And while you’re listening the rest of this episode, if you don’t mind giving us a five star review. We would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week.

Jim Hacking
So this is probably a hack. That’s a long time coming. But I’ve actually been afraid to read this book. And when I say afraid, I mean, I wasn’t sure if I was ready for it. I’m still not sure if I’m ready for it. It’s one that many people have heard about. It’s by Napoleon Hill, it’s called Thinking grow rich. And when I say that I was worried about it or nervous about it as it’s a pretty intense book. And it’s a little bit woowoo. It’s a little bit out there. And it’s a little bit dated. But I honestly think that it came to me to read now at the right time, like I was ready to receive it. I think that if some people read it, if I’d read it 10 years ago, it would have gone way over my head, I was not ready for it. But I think that central message, which is that, that anything that we want to have happen has to begin as a thought, and that the only changes that happened in the world began as a thought. And that our job in part is to keep that thought alive until it becomes manifest in action. There’s so many great lessons in the book, I was looking up one. But there’s just so many great lessons in the book, that even if some of it goes over your head, or even if you find a chapter that you think is just way out there, at its core, it’s just a great roadmap for philosophy of life and for philosophy of growth, and a growth mindset. I mean, Napoleon Hill was talking about this stuff right after the depression. And there was a section in there today that I read where he was talking about the depression being a great reset. And of course, we were going through and on maybe on the back end of a great reset. So I think the book, although it’s almost 100 years old is timely. And I would say you can get a copy of it for free the copyright ran a long time ago. Just get it and just wait until it tells you to read it like get the book. Wait until the book tells you to read it and then just play around with it and see if it’s something that’s resonating if you start to read it and start to seem weird, close it and come back to it later.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s interesting advices it is good advice. I read it a long time ago and I should probably honestly come back to it. But that’s a good one Jimbo. Alright Eric, you know the routine we always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack of the week what you got for us.

Erick Widman
Yes, I highly recommend you watch the documentary all or nothing arsenal. I’m a soccer fan. Even if you’re not a soccer fan, you will be amazed at how to coach who I love. McHale Arteta has to overcome basically rally people. It’s a lesson in leadership behind the scenes, they’re losing game after game. And then how does he face them and rally them. So it was excellent.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s good. I’ll check that out. Mine is gonna be so different from the two of you. I don’t know if a lot of if you will have seen but like on Instagram and Tiktok. There’s, you see people with videos and to get the words go along the bottom of it. There’s a really easy app you can using there’s there’s a paid and a free version, but the free version will get you where you need to go and just uses AI I think, but it will just put those words in there for you. And it’s really, really easy. So if you’re struggling with doing that, and you don’t want to send it off to an editor and have them type it all out. You can just use something like cap cut, and it makes it really easy. Alright, Eric, thank you so much for coming on. We really, really appreciate it. It’s been a lot less. It’s been a blast and I like to hear your story.

Erick Widman
Thanks so much, guys. Definitely appreciate it. Thanks, man.


Marketing your own law firm is an ongoing job for us entrepreneurs. A job that RizeUp Media has taken off owners plates, as they offer marketing services. In this episode Travis and Vaidas deep dive into the do’s and don’ts for lawyer websites. As well as short term and long term marketing strategies according to your firm’s needs. Let’s dive in!

1:12 RizeUp Media’s sweetspot and how they help lawyers market themselves!

2:47 What does this “help” look like for lawyers? 

4:28 Step one: you need to know your marketing need …

9:20  Lawyer websites done INCORRECTLY! 🫣

15:22 How different is better than better —- but what about the things that are similar on lawyers websites!?

19:40 Tips for people who need to get cases in the door right NOW!

Jim’s Hack: Use the app Read Wise which takes all your Kindle reader highlights and it will email them! Which is great to retrigger some of the thoughts that you had about the book you read. 

Travis’s Tip: Make sure you are tracking all of your different campaigns separately. You need to KNOW where your people are coming from.

Vaidas’s Tip: Answer the phone when it rings with a human! After all the work and money you’ve put into marketing make sure this next step is in place. As well as, know how your staff is interacting with your potential clients.

Tyson’s Tip: Use the Google Chrome extension called Checker Plus for Gmail. It allows you a quick peek into your email. You can send out a quick email or check a top priority email without getting sucked into email. 

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube.

Connect with RizeUp Media:

Resources:

Resources: Helping Law Firms Scale Their Business with RizeUp Media

Speaker 1
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 isometrics What’s up Jimmy

Jim Hacking
Tyson, my friend, you know, the joys of running a law firm are eternal. It’s a series of ups and downs. You never know what’s going to happen. You try to plan you try to make things as good as they can be. But every now and then life throws you a curveball. It’s just an interesting, interesting ride.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, the I guess one of the things I like about is every day, it’s every day, every day is different for me every single day, I’ve got a very structured calendar, but still everything’s different. So you’re right, the ups and downs. But you know, what’s great about it is they’re great companies like rise of media that can make a big portion of our lives much easier. Ryza I just want to get off right off the bat, sorry about how appreciative we are Verizon media, they were our q1 mastermind sponsor, and people loved it. So thank you both Vitus and Travis, for that. It’s great. But I’ll let what whoever wants to take this first, but tell us about Ryza media and how it came to be.

Travis
Yeah, so my partners and I, we pretty much we have 23 full time employees. And basically, everybody here has at least 10 years of experience exclusively marketing with lawyers. And so we have about five years ago, I guess, like most folks thought, we can make the widget a little bit better than where we’re currently working. And so we we set off on a journey to hang your own shingle. And here we are to 300 clients later nationwide. And we set out to see if we could work with law firms and kind of roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches with them and help them scale their business. And everything we do is month a month. And we structured it that way. Because we figured number one, that’s how we want to be treated by our vendors. And number two, we figure if we’re competent at what we do, we don’t need long term contracts and knock on wood. Here we are four or five years later, and our retention rate is through the roof. And we like to think that we’re doing really good work and helping helping law firms really help scale the business, whether they’re a solo practitioner, just hanging a shingle themselves, or a bigger firm that has, you know, 2030 4050 years of combined experience. We like to think we’re a fit for them and anywhere in between.

Jim Hacking
That’s awesome. Tell us what it’s like, when you start working with a new client. What is the experience, like from the lawyer’s perspective,

Vaidas
you know, I tried to say, we’ve been doing this a long time, you’re 21 for me in helping law firms market themselves. So we tried to take a different approach of customizing solutions for each individual law firm and taking a look at you know, what their, what their goals are to accomplish, you know, where we came from, it was sort of almost Website in a Box, some little bit of customization, almost offering the same thing to everybody customize a little bit and then put it out there and hope it works. We look at it in a different way. And that’s why we we don’t do long term contracts, but it holds our feet to the fire to, to basically perform and, and get results for these clients. And the feedback that I’ve had since joining rise up is that they’ve been very impressed with our approach and how quickly we actually explain what we’re going to do for him also the trackability of the tool. So to answer your question, how do we begin, we do a lot of different things. We do everything from website design, social media, Google Local Service, ads, pay per click, all of those things, some of the clients we work with, we do everything for some of them only one piece of that, but we look at it as that kind of approach where depending on what your goals are, do you want more clients? Do you want to grow? Do you need a new website, a lot of firms actually they don’t even really know if what they’re doing is working or not. So when we dive into that analysis, that seems to be a really big help and even the firms that think they know a lot of times don’t so when we sort of exposed or maybe some weaknesses or some areas where they can actually go after new business that tends to move the needle a lot

Tyson Mutrux
you know whenever I first met both of you it was it was interesting because like you got a little swagger T I got I gotta admit Yeah little bit rise up Scott some swagger which I really like I liked that about you all, you all are confident about your business that I think it takes a lot of guts to say in this industry with a lot of picky clients. Let’s be honest, attorneys are really picky. Right? And they expect results which is which is reasonable, right? You spent a lot of money on digital marketing expect the return on your investment but I want to talk more about this month a month contract because no one else does that right there like yearly contract. If you’re locked in some of the companies, you don’t even own your own content, which is insane. So talk about, I guess the risk that you take with that, why why go month to month contract when no one no one else is doing it. Because that’s, that’s really interesting to me,

Travis
I didn’t really go back to when we, when we started launching this, we’re confident what we can do. And we weren’t trying to get firms to come on for a month, we want them on for years to come and grow with them. And, and what we’ve seen in what I think a lot of agencies don’t do is sit down with the firm’s that kind of piggyback on your question, Jim, is sit down with a firm and figure out what is it they’re trying to do. And as a business owner, myself, being in their shoes, make sure they’re utilizing the right tool, and utilize and make sure their expectations are set correctly. Like, you know, if you’re, when you’re doing a website, I don’t care what anybody tells you, that’s a long longer term approach, you got to be in. Even if you, you have a humongous budget, and you’re just starting out with a website, you’re not going to show up on the first page, 30 days, 60 days from now, there’s other tools like pay per click, or social media or local service ads and things of that nature, that will turn on like a light switch, that’s more of an instant gratification type of tool. And so sitting down with folks, and you know, depending on their practice area, like there’s a law firm, there’s a lawyer, they get through that, you know, if they do personal injury, for example, it’s a contingency based billing that they do, right. And so, you know, depending on the type of love that they do, like, for example, personal injury, you know, have they factored in? Have they thought it through that, how they get paid, it can with contingency, even if we were to, you know, I tell personal injury attorneys, even if I show up on the phone call with five car accident, clients over my shoulder, even if I handed it to him right there, right then in there, they’re still not seeing money on that for probably 612 months. So do they need or do they want a longer term strategy that’s going to take 612 months to build up, and then factor in clients are coming in. At that point, he may need to float your marketing first 1218 months, as opposed to using some of these other tools, where that gives them instant gratification, we get the phone ring in the next 3060 days, and get the cash flow going help them really scale the business. And I think we we take an approach of looking at it through their eyes and making sure they’ve thought this through and sharing what some experiences that we’ve had with some of the other firms that we work with, to make sure that they’re making the right decision. And what we found out is, if you’re doing that, and they have the right expectations, it doesn’t matter about the contract, you know, if we’re guiding them in the right way to where they’re able to, you know, get more clients, get more revenue, get more exposure, whatever their goals are, because we found that every firm between Vitus and I, we’ve worked with 1000s and 1000s of firms over the last couple of decades. And it doesn’t seem like I don’t know that we run into two firms that have the exact same goals. You know, they may have different types of cases, different geography, you know, how many cases they want to see come in the door. And so those are all factors that if you do if we do the right thing for the client on the front end, or you know, we’re in partnership with them, and the contracts don’t matter.

Vaidas
Yeah, and let me just add to that for a second. You know, we come from organization that required annual contracts, and if not longer for some of the products that we sold, and on numerous occasions, it becomes an issue if if they’re not happy with the results they’re getting, if they’re not getting what what they believe that they’re paying for, you know, we’re pretty much stuck, like we can try to make things right or whatever. But every firm that I talked to now, when we tell them that we don’t do contracts, I mean, their jaws almost on the floor, because they’ve all had that experience with somebody that, hey, sounded great when we started and maybe even worked in the beginning, but now they feel they’re getting nothing. And then they’re still stuck in some kind of long term contract. And when we tell them that, like, Hey, you can leave at any time, you know, 30 days notice you’re out the door, and that holds our feet to the fire to basically perform because we like Travis said, We don’t want you for a month, we want you for years. And it is such a response. And the reaction that we get from attorneys when we say that is like pretty serious. Like no one’s ever offered that and, and we don’t do it as a gimmick, we do it because we truly believe in the results that we get

Jim Hacking
changing gears a little bit. One of the best episodes most fun Tyson and I ever had on the podcast was a show that we did we called Wall firm website roulette. And we would I would yell out of town Tyson would yell out a practice area and then we google that in that town. And then we sort of critiqued the website. I think that would be a great content play for you guys just generally to do a show you could do a show just about that to show your expertise. But when you guys come across websites that you’re not affiliated with, what are the things that you spot most often that lawyers are doing incorrectly?

Travis
Yeah, I think I think the very first thing that we Look for or what anybody should look for, is can you tell within 510 seconds what the lawyer does, I can’t tell you how many times I’m preparing for a meeting someone approaches us and want wants to inquire about our services, and I jump on their website. And it takes me five or 10 minutes to figure it out. I gotta read through all their content just to figure out what they’re doing and what they do for law, what type of blog do they practice, right? You got to remember most the average person doesn’t realize how specialized lawyers are. Right? That’s why you ask any lawyer, you know, a personal injury lawyer, I’m Why do your friends and family call you for DUIs and divorces and contracts and things of that nature? And they always need Yes, and I go, you tell them everything’s given what you do, what type of law you practice, but they still call you when they run into an issue. And they go yes. So the average person doesn’t realize, especially how specialized most attorneys are, especially in the bigger markets, right. And so when they come to your website, they got to know within a split second, because people’s attention span in this day, and age phones, beeping and social media and all this, you know, 24 hour news cycle and things of that, gotta capture your attention right away. Because the biggest enemy is the backbone. If they don’t understand or don’t know what they do, if you’re not talking to their issue or problem, they’re going to hit the back button and go pick somebody else. So that I would say number one, that’s and that’s not anything technical or anything of that nature. But just priority number one is tell somebody what you do and make sure somebody knows what they what you do within a few seconds of getting to your website, and make sure they can contact you, you have a contact form, because most people are doing searches on things like this, as opposed to a desktop. So make sure you have your phone numbers at the top right, make sure there’s a contact form, just basic stuff, you don’t once again, it’s too easy for them to hit the back button, and go even if it’s referrals, forget it right. Every attorney will tell you, they do family law and I say hey, where do you send your you get a DUI leave where you send them, they’ll rattle off two or three names, right. And stats show that most people look at five to seven websites before they pick an attorney to call. So all those types of things, make it easy on them. Make sure your website is mobile friendly. Because that’s where it’s been this way for a few years. Now more people do searches on a phone than they do a desktop. So make sure let people know what you do right off the bat. And make sure that make it easy on them to to contact you. They’ll make it a you know, they’ll make it a maze for them to try to they gotta navigate your site just to find your phone number. That’s a big, big issue.

Vaidas
Yeah, let me kind of chime in on top of that is that, you know, every lawyer thinks every referral that comes to them, they get hired? Well, I would argue referrals come in twos or threes. So you’re getting compared to somebody, right? And there’s, I would say almost 100% chance that before they walk into your office, they’re gonna go to your website. So do you feel Mr. Attorney that your website represents you and why they should hire you and your expertise and all those things? And I had reactions are like, Oh, I wouldn’t send anybody to my website, you know, it’s too basic, or my, my niece did it for me, it’s just a business. So it’s like, you need your website to represent the same experience they had this is if they’re walking into the front office of your of your lobby, and having that experience. And so that sort of, you know, creates a like, wow, that’s definitely not what’s going on. That’s not all of them. But that seems to be your reaction. And so, you know, your website is their first impression of you. What does that say? It’s really important, and things that people can do that, that sort of differentiate, because, like Travis said, most people, they only need an attorney, when they need an attorney. They’re not versed and know a bunch of things. How are you different from everybody else that does what you do. And one of the big things that can help with that is having videos where they’re actually talking, you know, they hear us talking about maybe what their problem is, so they feel there’s almost a connection, because they actually hear you speak, it’s just not your photo on a website. So, so something like that. And then really the most important thing is and It shocks me to this day, how few attorneys have any clue if their website’s actually working or not. While the phone’s ringing, so I guess it’s working, you know, you’re getting kind of reporting. Yeah, but I don’t look at it, you know, and it’s like, wow, I mean, you’re spending however much money on this. You want to know, what’s actually delivering results and what isn’t. And one of the things that we do and rise up is, we have analytics that track every single phone call where it comes from, does it come from a Google ad? Does it come from your website? Does it come from a direct directory, does it come from a referral? So we can actually analyze that data and say, Hey, you’re spending this much money 50% of your of your clients are coming from this. So maybe we put a little more emphasis on that. So the analysis of the ROI is really important. And, and that’s what we try to, you know, to make clear that that’s trackable through what we offer

Becca Eberhart
is that Python is back if you’re new around here, the ZAP Athan is the OG automation workshop at this next exclusive guild event. We’re partnering up with maximum lawyers good friend Kelsey Bratcher to bring you a day and a half automation workshop. The idea of Automation is simple, right? Identify a repeatable pattern of tasks and then use technology. So that business process can happen without you. But setting up that technology can be daunting, time consuming, and even have a steep learning curve. Join us in person and you’ll create automations on site that will start working for you. Before you even leave Austin, join the guild today and grab your ticket at max slot events.com.

Tyson Mutrux
So I want to ask you both. So the kind of want to juxtapose what Travis said about really getting the basics down, right, with something that always sticks with me with Sally Hogshead. She says, you know, different is better than better, right? And Vitus, he just kind of mentioned about like being different. But you go to some of these when you go to some websites, and it not necessarily attorney websites, but they are drastically different from what you’re used to see. So how much danger is there in having a very, very different website from what people are used to seeing. So if you go to like my website, you get the number, the top right corner. DMS is the same way. But it doesn’t really fit within that mold of different is better than better. So I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Vaidas
Let me chime in real quick trap, and then I’ll let you take it. So we are coming head to having done this for a long time. There are analytics that tell you like what people navigate to on a homepage, right? So like, Where’s the phone number? Where’s the contact form? Is it clear what you do? So, I mean, there’s all sorts of heat maps that show you where people eyes go, and where what needs to be where, right the the navigation and those sorts of things. So there’s an element to the structure of the site that needs to be there. Because if that information is not there, you’re gonna have a failure. However, a lot of law firm websites think they all look the same, they’ve got the same imagery, they got all this stuff, we know that the firms that provide professional photography, for example, have their office of the of the lawyers versus using stock imagery that makes it that differentiates it right, it makes it personal. We’ve got some websites that are you know, I would say almost artwork, I mean, they’re they’re, they’re so different than everybody else. And I think on some level, that’s, that’s a positive, because it does make you stand out, it might turn some people off. But you know, there’s the argument that all of all legal websites look exactly the same. And if that’s the product that you’re producing, I would say that’s a problem, I would say that we’ve got hundreds of websites, and most cases, they all look very different. Because we’ve got a great team of designers that do stuff for us. And the involvement that we have with the clients that we work with and having them have input to what they want, what they like what they don’t like, versus hey, here’s two choices, pick a or b, and we’ll slap your name on it makes a big difference.

Travis
Yeah, I agree being a little bit different, or a lot different, as long as the two buys this point, from a structure standpoint, and that some of the things that from a marketing standpoint, we want on their like contact form or phone numbers and make sure that they understand who you are, make sure they you know, in show your reviews and, and have locations and things of that nature is great. And I also think having something a little bit different to that doesn’t look like everybody else is helpful. I mean, you attract who you are, right? Have your personality on your website. And you know, you’re not going to you’re not going to win every client, but you’re going to attract kind of your tribe, if you will, as we say in the marketing world. And so have that stand out. And no doubt, no doubt. I think that’s a way to go.

Vaidas
Yeah. So let me kind of say where that as an example, if I’m a criminal defense attorney, you know, most people that are accused of a crime, they don’t care if they like the attorney, they just want to know he’s good in the courtroom. And he gets results, right. So pardon the French, but I want a total jerk or guidance, I he’s not going to be my friend, I just want him to get me out of jail or whatever I’m being charged with family law is a little different, right? People know that they’re going to have to sit down if it’s going to be a divorce or custody thing that you’re going to get asked a lot of personal questions about, you know, your relationships and that sort of thing. With family law, it seems like they’re gonna want to be someone that they may actually have more of a relation to, because they’re gonna have to share some intimate details, right? Personal Injury, again, like I just want to know you when I don’t, I don’t have to like you, I just want to know you get results. So depending on the practice area, how you present yourself on the website, some of these lawyers have these big powerful arms crossed images, like look at me on great, I would argue the website’s really never about the attorney, I just like that the person just wants to know whatever they’re actually looking for, that you can get them the result that they’re looking for, whether it’s getting me out of jail, getting me money for a car wreck, give me my kids back. And that’s that’s the websites job is to present that in a way that makes you an obvious alternative to the other people they may be considering

Jim Hacking
my last question, every now and then we hear from a law firm owner who’s like, I need to get cases in quickly, like right now, like, what are the and then you know, like, people will say, Well, you got a great podcast, and I’m like, Yeah, but a podcast is a long play long play. So what tips do you have for people that need to get in a case or two sooner rather than later? How

Travis
to get kids in the door right away I think really depends on practice area. But from a 50,000 foot view, I think every I think every attorney out there is absolutely nuts not to have if they’re looking for more cases it is have a line in the water with Google Local Service ads. And what happened is is Google came out about two years ago, they’ve been doing this for contractors.

Vaidas
Real quick, just to clarify, because we don’t have a shared screen here. If you were to Google injury attorney, Phoenix, what those local service ads are, for people that are listening to this are the three photos that show up at the top above everything. Okay? Those are guaranteed phone calls from Google. So

Travis
yeah, so those three pictures at the top, that’s Google, they they’ve been doing this for, like I was saying plumbers and contractors, and so forth for years and years and years, they rolled them out to attorneys about two years ago. And it’s their new pay per call program. And it’s for even for the attorneys that are maybe listening or I’m totally risk averse, and don’t want to take a chance in marketing, this would be the product for you as well. And because you’re only paying when it when your phone actually rings, and when the phone calls come in, if they’re in the wrong practice area, or the wrong geography or if it’s a sales guy, or a bot or a current client, or any of those types of things, you can dispute that call and get your money back. And some of the value add that we run here, when we’re managing those is we have staff internally that listens to all those calls and send it sends in those disputes for you. But that is in many, many markets. Sometimes the ads don’t even show up. Because until you until three firms are signed up, you don’t even see those ads, when two firms show up or signed up, they show up on a cell phone. But if we’ve running into markets hack in Arizona and Phoenix right now there’s, there’s one or comp attorney signed up for this thing. And were just talking to a firm yesterday. And we’re like, you could be the king of the castle here and for the foreseeable future until other firms sign up. And so those right now, in my 15 years doing this, it’s the best piece of marketing I’ve seen in quite some time. Because Google, they run the world at this point, right? They took their new product, and they stuck to it at the very, very top and everything else when it’s pushed down. And and you’re able to see clients come in the door right away. And it’s not an even for another cool thing. For the smaller firms. It’s not like Pay Per Click where it’s just who has the deepest pockets who can bid the biggest bid per click with local service ads, it’s determined on location, it’s a turnaround reviews, so you got to do some legwork and get your clients to review you. And budget is certainly a consideration. But it’s not the only thing, you know that you can’t just throw 100 grand a week at this and think you’re gonna dominate like you can with PPC, this is a little bit more this a lot and that that frustrates the firms with huge war chest certainly. But it definitely gives the chance to everybody else that doesn’t have to compete dollar for dollar. If you need to do good work, you need to get good reviews. And so anyway, that would be no doubt that would be I would tell every law firm out there to at least get signed up. You can always pause it, things of that nature. But yeah, no doubt that would be the move that every attorney needs to do. Like yesterday, no question.

Vaidas
And to top off what Travis said, It’s shocking to me how many people I point those out to and I know what those are, that’s their pay per click thing. And it’s like actually, it’s not it’s not pay per click Pay Per Click has been around for a very long time, they just assume that it’s exactly the same thing. And it takes this big war chest of money to compete. Like Travis said, Google has put this above everything. It’s the top of the page on a cell phone, it’s the first thing that you see with two images versus three. And unlike everything else that you spend money on that is there to drive traffic to your website, or clicks or this sort of thing. This is guaranteed phone calls, the phone doesn’t ring. Google doesn’t charge anything. And if the if the wrong person calls you, it’s now your practice here is to get a refund. There’s not a better cost per client acquisition. that’s out there right now. We were actually talking to one of your members right now. And he’s like, I would take every dime I have and put it into that local service, local service ad program, because it’s the cheapest way I’m getting clients and he’s doing all these other things as well. So my tribe said, You need to at least sign up for it. It’s the best thing that’s out there right now. And it guarantees phone calls.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. I think that that that by itself. It’s worth the price of admission to listen to this podcast. So very good. We do need to wrap things up though. Before I do. I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. Get involved there a lot of great information being shared. If you want a more high level conversation. Join us in the guild go to max law guild.com And you can come to one of our quarterly masterminds if that’s something you’d want you are interested in. And while you’re listening the rest of this episode if you get anything from these episodes if you will leave us a five star review help us spread the love to others. attorneys I need some help. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
My hack of the week is a great little app. It’s called Read wise and what it does, I’m a big Kindle reader. And it’ll go through and it’ll find your highlights, and it’ll email you random highlights from books that you’ve read. And it’s great to retrigger some of the thoughts that you had about it. So I think it’s free or might be four bucks, but it’s super easy. And I get a little reminder of things that I thought before things that I wanted to follow up on and with undiagnosed ADHD, it’s really great for me. So that’s my hack of the week. Fellas, I gotta, I gotta run to my next meeting. I’m gonna let Tyson wrap up the show. Thanks so much for sponsoring the conference and for being on the show with us. Really appreciate it.

Vaidas
Thank you. Absolutely.

Tyson Mutrux
I see Joe. Hi, Travis, and Vitus, we always ask our guests to give us a tip or hack the week, it could be a bug, it could be a podcast, it could be a quote that you heard could be a business tip, whatever it might be, is Oh, girl, Travis first and invite a second. Give us a tip or a hack of the week,

Travis
track your marketing. If you don’t know where it’s coming from, how are you going to scale your business and make sure all the different campaigns if you’re not, if you don’t have a tracking number on all of your different campaigns, you don’t know where it’s coming from. And you don’t don’t know where when you should unplug something because it’s not working. And you don’t know where you should throw an extra dollar to and help yourself scale. So that is between tracking it and make sure you’re answering your phone, the average law firm answers about 60% of the phone calls that are coming into the firm. So if you can’t do it, hire somebody to do it. Or there’s very low cost cost answering services out there. That’ll that’ll plug that hole. But you can’t imagine how many calls that we hear from people on the internet are absolutely not leaving a voicemail. So make sure you do that. But I tell people if you do that, you’ll spend half the money on marketing get twice the result if you just do that,

Tyson Mutrux
but I said don’t have voicemail. Make sure it goes to a live person no matter what. So get rid of your voicemail. Amen. Crazy that you spent all that money on marketing, and then it just goes right in the trash. But anyways, Vitesse, you are up next. Yeah, I’m

Vaidas
gonna kind of piggyback on that a little bit. So whether it’s like you said voicemail is the death note, I mean, I get someone’s voicemail, I never leave a message, I would say on the same element, if someone calls your office and they get that Robo, hey, you’ve reached such and such law firm for such and such Donald What immediate hang up, like you have to have somebody answering the phone. So they’re talking to the human being, on that point, never leave a voicemail, and no one’s actually going to call you as a law firm if you get voicemails they’ve moved on. Okay, I can’t tell you how many examples I have of law firms that got a call on Friday night, they call them back Monday. And they just lost out on a huge case, because they’re not waiting two days, they want an immediate result there. And the other thing that you can do, and this is part of what we do with these local service ads, such as know what your staff is, how they’re interacting with your potential clients, you spent all this money on this marketing, and they call your law firm, what is what is their conversation, like? We use it as a as a training tool, a lot of times where we can listen to these phone calls. And we’ve, we’ve actually dialed up some law firms and said, Hey, I want you to listen to this phone call. Because I think you should probably know that this is how it’s being reacted to as far as when some people call it and it’s everything from me, this is an extreme example. But we literally had somebody that was in the ICU, after being hit by a drunk driver in a car wreck calling on their cell phone for the attorney. And the receptionist basically put them on hold and then said, hey, no one’s here. We’ll call you back. And we played that for the law firm. And Travis and I were both on this. So he’s laughing. And the guy basically was like, hang on a second. He called you know, it wasn’t to get her in trouble. But it was like, You can’t do that, you have to know that that kind of call requires immediate interaction with an attorney. Right? So simple things like that. It’s also a training tool where I’ve had people say, Oh, the attorney doesn’t have any time until March for her first appointment. And they’re like, I’m done. I’m going to, I can’t wait that long. So make sure that the person that is the first contact, or the first person they’re talking to law firm,

Tyson Mutrux
is a good one. Did that case sign up right away, and then you can get rid of it later if you don’t want it. So both those are great advice. My tip of the week, it’s the bane of my existence is email, not a fan of email at the end sucks. And one of that one of the hardest things about emails, once you open your email inbox, you’re kind of sucked into it. And there’s a tool of use Google Chrome, it’s called checker plus for Gmail. And I think that checker plus does it for Outlook too, if you want to use it, but it allows me to just kind of click on it, click on it right now and kind of see what’s in there really quick. But I need to address something or if I need to send a quick email without going into my email. I can do it because I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’ll need to send an email or go into my email to send it and then I get sucked into something else and I can’t stay In that, but check your plus for email here for Gmail is my tip of the week, Vitesse and Travis, thank you so much for Come on. Really, really appreciate it. Thank you for being sponsors. It allows us to put on events that are productive that are really good for our members. So thank you so much. Absolutely.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum liar.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.


Taking the leap into running your own law firm is scary. We know it! In today’s episode Jim and Tyson chat about the top six things they love about being a law firm owner and why they would never go back. 

If you are thinking of going off on your own and starting your own firm, or maybe you just need a pep talk to keep going the entrepreneur lawyer course — this episode is for you. It’s okay to be afraid of failing, but don’t let that stop you.

Listen in!

Episode Highlights:

1:55 – Number One: Autonomy & freedom! This is the top reason Jim and Tyson love being their own boss. To be able to leave the office at any time for any reason is the best part of owning a law firm. 

4:06 – Number Two:  Not having a boss! There is no one telling you what to do and we think this is a priceless reason to own a law firm. Add the joy back into your life by being your boss.

7:56 – Number Three: Knowing how much you make is directly tied to your work! This involves your ideas, your strategy, and how you implement them. NOT about working harder and faster. It’s a powerful mindset and energy that sets in after you get the first few clients, that it’s up to you to make happen.  

11:03 – Number Four: The creative and problem solving aspect of owning your own firm! You are the one that gets to spot issues (and have other people fix them) and this exercises a creative part of your brain and spirit. This freedom also comes with the caveat that you also get to make the decision to change your mind! 

13:56 – Number Five: We are building! Everyday that goes by we are building a business that we can watch shift and grow and evolve. 

16:53 – Number Six: Competing with yourself and always trying to up your game! You are always trying to improve all aspects of your law firm. Doing better than we did before, which is a huge motivation for continuing on. 

Jim’s Hack: Find yourself a good friend! It’s invaluable. 🎥 Watch the full video of Jim’s transformation and encouragement here.

Tyson’s Tip: Take the time to survey clients via a call or email. The data is invaluable. 

With these questions: 

  1. On average how do our clients feel about our communion. 
  2. On average, how do our clients feel about how we respond to their questions? 
  3. On average, how do our clients feel about the trustworthiness of the firm? 
  4. On average, how do our clients feel about the professionalism of the firm?

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

🎧 Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. https://maximumlawyer.com/jimhackingtysonmutrux489

Podcast mentioned: Hidden Brain Podcast 

Resources:

Transcript: 6 Things We Love About Owning A Law Firm with Jim and Tyson

Speaker 1
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 Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Happy Valentine’s Day Tyson with a few weeks before but we’re recording now. And this episode’s coming out on the 14th of February. So we are talking about the things that we love as law firm owners.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I thought you’re really gonna pretend like it was Valentine’s Day. So I know we talked about this. And you You came up with a great topic for today because it is Valentine’s Day. But yeah, so you and I have not chatted on the podcast in a while you and I talk a lot outside of the podcast. But how have you been otherwise?

Jim Hacking
Good. We just spent two days in our annual planning meeting with our coach. And it has to have been the most comprehensive, well done two days that we’ve ever done. We had probably 20 of those big white sticky sheets with ideas and thoughts and SWOT analysis and rocks. And it was just fantastic. When we’re done. I mean, it’s a total roadmap for the year. So it was, it was our best one yet.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s incredible. We do a day we don’t do two days, someday we’ll talk about what you do during yours and what I do during my because I’m really curious to hear what you do for two days we and we get we have our jam sessions. But I do feel like ours are sort of crammed into one day. So I think we could probably easily do two days. But anyways, let’s get into our topic of the day. I think it’s a fun one. This is a Jim hacking specialists the six things I love about owning a law firm, that is such a great title. And number one, I get to go with number one mind. And we both have this, by the way, in fairness, I got my list together, he had a he came with the topic and I had to list before he did. And so but we both had this as number one. And that’s just the autonomy, that freedom that you get from owning a law firm. Like I’m at the point where I cannot imagine going and working for another person, another company, I just I don’t know how I would do it. I don’t know how I did it before to be completely honest with you. But to be able to leave the office at any time, for any reason, at any point is that is priceless. In my opinion, I could make substantially less and still be able to do that. And I’d be happy. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that, Jim. But it’s that piece alone. If you’re considering starting your own law firm, it’s worth the pay cut. If you do take a pay cut. Now I’ll talk about financial, a little bit of financial stuff later. Because I think it’s more fun and financially more rewarding. But the autonomy is the part that’s just for me the priceless part.

Jim Hacking
And of course, that’s the big allure of going out on your own is the freedom and a lot of times people just trade a job for another person for a job for themselves. So they don’t really even have that freedom because they haven’t done enough work to give themselves the freedom by having other people do a lot of the work. But yeah, for sure the freedom. When you think about all the taekwondo events, you get to go to all the school concerts all the time with your family, all the setting the time that you’re on vacation, there’s just the freedom is obviously I think the number one thing that most law firm owners love about having a firm.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and there are a you sort of hinted at this too. I mean, there’s freedom. But there’s also the parts where you’re not as free, where you don’t have one boss, you’ve got, you know, in some firms, hundreds of bosses where you get several clients that are an employees that are sort of breathing down your neck. And so with that freedom comes a lot of responsibility, so you got to balance the two.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, and you know, there’s obviously times where you do don’t get to set the entire agenda, but you’re gonna get so much more overall freedom by being out on your own than you would have otherwise. And that sort of gets me to my first one, Topic number two. And that’s a little bit different than what you put for Topic number one, and that is not having a boss, not having a boss. Now I’ve had really, really good bosses in my career. I’ve had really, really crappy bosses in my career. But the idea that I get to walk into this place to know that it’s mine, and that I set the agenda, and that there’s no one telling me what to do with the independent streak that I have and sort of the rebellious nature that I have. To me, there’s no substitute to not having a boss. You know, I’ve told you this before, but I’ve been approached several times by large law firms in St. Louis about bringing my immigration practice into their firm, and I don’t give it a moment’s thought because I don’t want to have to go to a committee To get my YouTube video approved, I don’t want to have to, you know, wait for three weeks for something to go by if I need something, I want to be able to move quickly. And not having a boss, I think, to me is even better than the lifestyle freedom that we get. It’s even better than that. For me. That’s such a

Tyson Mutrux
great point. Yeah. So Jim, I had, you know, this one of my first legal bosses, it was, if I brought in a case, right, I’d bring in a case and I would print a letter, and we had this process where you print the letter and stick it on top of this counter. And then one of the paralegals would put an envelope and send it out, right? Well, he would go and he would replace my letter with his letter, because my letter had my name on it, and his letter had his name on it. And it was like, so stupid, right? Like, like, I don’t have to deal with that anymore. Right? Like, cuz you’re right. You have good bosses, you have bad bosses, but the fact that I do not have one is so fantastic. Now, so it is good point. It’s not a freedom thing. It’s a would you say? Well, it’s, it’s almost like more like a mindset thing that you don’t have a boss.

Jim Hacking
Yeah. So for me, it’s actually that absence of actually feeling like somebody’s pushing on the back of my head, like, I honestly felt that way. Sometimes, my independent streak has grown as I’ve exercised that muscle. So what might have been a little bit of a spark of wanting to be independent and do my own thing, after I had what I thought was proper training, as a lawyer has really turned into something that I can’t imagine ever going back on,

Tyson Mutrux
you know, so this is somewhat related. I listen to this podcast, the hidden brain over the weekend, and they’re talking about how paying when you get paid to do something, it takes the joy out of it. And I wonder if part of what you’re talking about is like, you do this exact same work. But you just add the fact that let’s say you had 100% autonomy, but you add just the fact that you have boss, it removes the joy from it. I wonder if there’s any tie in there just by that one little thing, the concept, the whole idea in that podcast was about how you shouldn’t pay your children to do certain things. Like one of the easiest ways of removing joy from like athletes is like whenever they go in, they start getting paid to do it, if you’re an artist once you start getting paid for your art. So it’s a really interesting thing. But I do think if Well, I wonder if part of what you’re talking about is like just the you add that just the the title of someone above you, and boom, the joy is removed from it. I just wonder how much of that as part of it.

Jim Hacking
And you might have multiple people above you. Right. So when I first started in the mailroom at grain Ritter, you know, the thing I hated the most was when I would walk down the hall and somebody would say, oh, Jim, Hey, come here, I need you to do something like the randomness of it, the unpredictability of it. And you know, that’s part of what happens in a big firm is that things have to get fixed. And getting to be the one to say what you want to happen versus the one to be told what needs to happen by you is just invaluable.

Tyson Mutrux
I agree. Alright, let’s get on to number three. And I like the fact that I know that how much I make is directly tied to my work, right? And I want to make sure I’m very clear, I chose my wording carefully here. It’s not by how much I work, right. It’s it’s I said, I know that how much I make is directly tied to my work, not to how much I work. So that involves, right, my ideas, the strategies I implement. Part of it is yeah, how much I work. But I like the idea that how much I get paid is directly tied to me.

Jim Hacking
Do you mean you love the idea? Because it’s Valentine’s

Tyson Mutrux
Day? I love the idea. Yes. I love the idea that how much I make is it’s directly tied back to my work, right? The things that I do, the strategies that I implement the work that I do, and I I like that idea. And again, it’s not how much I work to get how much I paid, I get paid. It’s my work is tied to what I get paid. And I really liked that.

Jim Hacking
I think it’s a powerful mindset. And when do you think you’ve started to notice it?

Tyson Mutrux
Oh, that’s a good I’d say probably pretty early on, I think once you start to get paid real money, and that’s the thing. It’s like, once you once you get that those first few clients, you you’re like, Oh, this is this is nice, right? I’m doing this work, and I’m getting this mate, there’s money for it. So pretty early on, I’d say what about you?

Jim Hacking
Well, yeah, I mean, I there’s just no substitute for when it’s on you. You know, so your back is up against the wall pretty much as soon as you start you have to make the phone ring you have to make production wheels turn and I mean, I trust myself better than I trust other people so yeah, there’s an energy that comes out of that that just isn’t there when you aren’t the owner I think

Tyson Mutrux
yeah, I and this is interesting because you didn’t present this idea until today and last night though I had this really is this is awesome feeling because I was talking to our buddy Mark hammer cuz I was I was on the phone with him and I had to go to the ATM to deposit some checks. He’s like checks, like, who writes checks these days like, well, we all get paid by insurance companies. And I had to write myself a check. But anyways, but it was really cool because I deposited the most checks I’ve ever deposited ever, in the history of the firm. Last night, it was so cool. It was just a cool feeling to be able to take that money to the bank, and deposit it. And there’s just a cool feeling. It’s just a fact that the work that we did as a firm in the firm is something that I’ve been building for over a decade now. And all just sort of ties together. And it’s such a cool feeling.

Jim Hacking
Of course, Mark’s a criminal defense lawyer, so he’s used to getting paid in big bags, oh, cash, that in

Tyson Mutrux
credit cards, he’s a big credit card person. And that’s that’s the way to go. Get that guaranteed money that they get the cash can be dangerous for a criminal defense attorney because it could be drug money. So you got to be a little bit careful. But little sidebar here. There isn’t a well known attorney over on the Illinois side, they got disbarred about a decade ago because he took a big bag of cash. And he knew his drug money. So you gotta be careful. But anyways, back on track to number four, Jimbo.

Jim Hacking
Alright, so number four, to me, it’s the creativity and problem solving aspect of owning your own firm. We touched on it just a little bit right there. But I am a creative person, I think of myself more as an artist than a laborer. And, you know, there’s a never ending font of things that need to be fixed when you own your own law firm, right. And so, I love the problem solving aspect of it, I love spotting issues, I’m really enjoying now spotting the issues and having other people fix them, right. But to me, I never would have exercised this part of my brain and my spirit, if I had stayed working for somebody else, because when it’s up to you, it’s up to you. And so that part of it, I really, really enjoy.

Tyson Mutrux
I do too. I like that creative process, as well. I liked what you put there, what you call it, the font, the font of it, that is such a, and I know exactly what you mean by the font of it, like the look the feel the energy from it, and that that is a really cool thing, and you get to shape it. And here’s the other part of it, you get to change it. If you want to change it, guess what, you get to change it. You don’t have to keep the same font that you had 12 years ago, and I’m not talking about the font of your letterhead, I’m talking about the font of your firm. I love that so much, Jim, I don’t know if you just came up with that. But that is amazing. Yeah, the fact that you’re able to shape that and mold it. It’s all you it’s just you can’t do that other firms. I trust me, I tried. Did you get a lot of pushback, right? You get a lot of pushback now? No, no, no, that’s we don’t do it that way. We do it this other way. But you get to make those decisions. And it’s nice bill to make those decisions. And you

Jim Hacking
get to make the tough calls. You know, there’s a lot of times where you’re trying to decide between two things, and you might be in unchartered territory. And I sort of liked that high wire act, I sort of liked that having maybe not necessarily a big net and not playing it safe. So it sort of feeds that part of me that likes a little bit of chaos.

Tyson Mutrux
So you shared that app with me this morning. And I listened to a Joe Rogan speech. And he talked about the importance of doing hard things. And he was talking about doing physically challenging things. But when he first started talking about I was thinking about how important it is to do difficult things in general. And there is another one of them was about, you should not be afraid to do great things and you should not be afraid to fail. And I really liked that too. And that’s there’s a by starting your own firm, you’re going out on a big high wire, and you’re really going big and you’re risking a lot of things, you’re risking your finances, you’re risking your time, you’re risking your career, you’re doing a lot, there’s a lot of risk, but you’re doing all of it for the massive amount of rewards that come with it. And that feeling is hard to shake.

Jim Hacking
For sure you want to go on to number five,

Tyson Mutrux
yet, let’s get on number five. For me, I’ve told this. So this before, if I weren’t an attorney, I think I’d probably be like an engineer because I like to build things. And I like to build, I get to build something when it comes to the firm. And many times we don’t think of firms as being something like building blocks, like you build. But every day that goes by every week that goes by every month, every year, every decade, you can see how your firm has changed and you can build it and it’s it’s kind of like a building or a house or whatever you want to call it. But you are building something. And it’s cool to see the things that we’ve built. And I was having this conversation earlier this week about an attorney are starting to they’re asking me, like, Why do you have a full time CTO? And I said, we’re doing cool shit, man. We’re doing some really cool shit. And we need someone that’s full time that can run those systems. And so it’s cool to be able to build things and I love the idea that I’m able to build them.

Jim Hacking
We started the podcast a little late today because my daughter overslept, and I had to drive her to school and When I was in the car, I was thinking about the six things that we love about owning a law firm. And when I thought about the three for you, the first one I came to was how much he liked building the systems. And you know how much better you are at it than I am. And I knew that that would be one that you picked, because I have seen you get really, really good and improve at that. So I think that that’s, if that’s something that you’re inclined to do. If you find yourself sort of drawn to tinkering, legal tinkering, or law, firm owning, tinkering, I think that that ownership of the firm might be for you. And I think it’s interesting that we’re having this conversation, because I think this episode is hopefully going to resonate with people that are thinking about going up on that tightrope.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I do think that this is definitely for those people that are on the fence about it, or they’ve been thinking about it for a while. And I often think about this prosecutor whenever I was, I did an externship in the prosecutor’s office. And I remember him talking to me about how he wanted to start his law firm. And he’s still there. He’s still in the prosecutor’s office. And it really saddens me, right, because he had all these really cool ideas that he wanted to implement. And he never took the leap. And I’m hoping that some of the things that we talk about encourages them to take that leap. You should send this kind of i should i part of me. Yeah, maybe I should they I think it’s because it’s never too late. Right. It’s not too late. But it would I think it would be hard for me to convince someone like that that’s been there now for probably 15. I don’t know if he’s been there 20 years, but 15 years that it, I think it’d be hard to convince someone like that, because they’re so entrenched. And they’re probably thinking about retirement and what they would lose and all that. But even with all that, I think that it’s the all of the benefits of starting a law firm. All of those outweigh, you know, being entrenched in that law firm and, and sucking it up for another two decades. I think it’s worth going out on your own. But Hi, Jimmy, let’s get to number six.

Jim Hacking
So that is competing with myself. So, you know, we just had our annual review, as I mentioned, and you know, we have our goals for next year. And we’re always trying to up our game. And I really appreciate that about owning the law firm is that we’re always trying to improve in all aspects of the firm. And, you know, back 1015 years ago, before Mike Tomlin was the coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, their coach was named Bill Cowher. And I remember it was either ESPN, the magazine, or Sports Illustrated had this cover story with Bill Cowher. And on the cover was two half pictures of his face. And he talked about in the interview about how he’s always thinking that there’s anti Bill Cowher out there somewhere competing with him, right. And so he’s got to do everything he can every day, to beat himself. And so I really liked that aspect of it. I really like the idea of, you know, doing better than we did before making things even more awesome, or all that kind of stuff, I really, really get that out of owning a law firm.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s interesting that really drives you you like having a boogie man to like force you. And here’s the thing, like, I don’t talk about as much, but I have so many chips on my shoulder. That really motivate me and I don’t talk about as I’m not as vocal about it as you but you are right. But here’s the thing, like you are more motivated, I think, internally by internal forces, not necessarily external forces. I think I’m more motivated by external forces than by internal forces. So you, you have to tell yourself that there isn’t a gym out there. But it’s really just gym, right? The anti gym. But I I tell myself about other people, like the doubters, right? That the real people. So I do think it’s interesting how you are motivated by those internal pressures that are more of the external type.

Jim Hacking
That’s an observation. I hadn’t thought about that.

Tyson Mutrux
And you, but it’s it is Buddy, I you, you do have the boogie man’s for sure. I do. All right. Well, let’s wrap things up. Unless you have anything else to say.

Jim Hacking
No, no, this was fun. I mean, you and I both know, the phone call. The phone call is, hey, Tyson. This is from somebody who works at a law firm. Hey, Tyson. Hey, Jim. I’m thinking about some things. And I was wondering if we could get lunch. And so you go to lunch. And you talk about a lot of these issues, you answer a lot of their questions about owning a law firm, you address sort of all the fears and those kinds of things. And then like that prosecutor buddy of yours, not much happens. And back, nothing happens. And there’s an attorney in Webster Groves, where our office used to be that I’m thinking of in particular, and I know that it’s scary, it’s scary. But this idea that anybody is safe from getting laid off, I think we’re going to see in the next six months is is really going to be put to the wayside. And I guess the last thing I would end this with is, I’d rather trust me or trust you to control our fates, then to leave that up to shitheads who don’t know anything more than I do or anything more than you do.

Tyson Mutrux
I like that. I do want to say this. It’s okay to be afraid of failing. But don’t let that stop you. Don’t let that stop you. It’s okay to be afraid. But But don’t let that stop you. All right, let’s wrap things up. Before I do. Before we get to our tip and our hack of the week. Let’s I want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, just search maximum lawyer, you’ll be able to find us there’s a maximum lawyer page and Max Miller group actually joined the group. And then there’s also the maximum lawyer guild if you want to join us there, it’s more high level conversation, go to max law guild.com. And then while you’re listening to the rest of this episode, if you don’t mind spreading the love by giving us a five star review, we would greatly appreciate it. Jimbo, what’s your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
So for my hack of the week, it’s pretty simple. This morning, I texted you to thank you for supporting me in 75 hard and then my weight loss journey and for being such a good friend. And so my hack of the week is to find yourself a friend as good as Tyson is that the episode that we did with Charles and Angelo, my coach aired this week. And I’ll never forget how, at the end of the episode, you thanked him for helping me and helping your friend and how your voice choked up. And so I’m just grateful on this day of love for your friendship and the people. If you’re on your own, you need a sounding board, you need multiple sounding boards, and you can’t find one better than Tyson. So

Tyson Mutrux
that’s it. That’s very sweet of you. Jimbo, that’s awesome. Thank you. Mine is not as good as that. So we should have ended with that one. But mine is about serving clients. And we’ve been collecting data for now about three years Jimmy, and we do survey we survey our clients, we actually call the clients, we don’t send them a survey, we call the clients we have someone that’s not on their team call and serve the clients. And we ask these five questions. All right, actually, this is the we have them overall rate the firm. So that’s in the the question that we put in here is what is our average client satisfaction score? This is on our dashboard. I’m actually looking at our firm Dashboard right now. And then it’s on average, how do our clients feel about our communication? On average? How do our clients feel about how we respond to their questions? On average? How do our clients feel about the trustworthiness of the firm than on average? How do our clients feel about the professionalism of the firm? So we don’t ask them that way to the client, but we ask them those questions and our scores. And we wouldn’t know this. And we didn’t collect the data on the client satisfaction score. 9.47 I’m proud to say, client communication. Yeah. 8.89. So we got some work to do when it comes to client communication with 8.89. How do we respond to clients questions 9.2 for the trustworthiness of the firm, 9.46, and then the professionalism of the firm 9.72. And so that’s all it’s, it’s, it’s glad I’m glad we have this data, because now we can look at the trends over time to see are we trending upwards? Are we trending downwards? And I need to get that communication number into the nines? Because I mean, they it’s means that there’s that’s weighted against like, there’s a bunch of 10s. But there’s also that means there’s some lower numbers in there. And the reason why we are doing the surveys before we’re that is to identify from clients, like what are some issues like with that particular case, this gives us more that big picture data that we can look at, okay, we know when it comes to communication, we need to improve. And so gives us that bigger picture view. And so my advice to people is survey your clients, whether you do it with a phone call, I know it’s it’s very time intensive. We have a team that does it. It’s hard. It’s costly for us because we have to pay people to do it. But whether you do it that way or you send out a survey either way, you need to survey your clients, you know that information because it’s really important, and they’ll tell you how to improve. All right, Jimmy, that is my tip of the week. It was great talking to you as always, and I will talk to you in a couple hours.

Jim Hacking
Awesome, buddy. See ya see you.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content content, go to maximum liar.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.

This post may contain affiliate links, which means that I may receive a commission if you make a purchase using these links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Ready to get control of your demands and distractions? Then you need to meet today’s guest, Mridu Parikh. The founder of Life Is Organized, Mridu is a time management guru passionate about teaching business owners how to focus, get out of the weeds, and take back control of their day.

Her best-selling book, Accomplish It, and Productivity On Purpose podcast share simple strategies to ditch mental drama – from procrastination to perfectionism. Mridu’s teachings on mastering tasks and habits have been featured in The Huffington Post, Forbes, US News & World Report, and Real Simple.

When she’s not wrangling a list or schedule, you can usually find this former professional organizer turned productivity pro with her two teens and one husband in Nashville enjoying a Malbec

2:24 How Mridu started productivity and time management 

4:25 When you are ready to go for the week and you’re feeling super motivated but get hit with a problem in the office first thing Monday morning — What do you do?! 

6:05 How do you move into a more mindful morning routine? 

7:20 How much of the “ideal” morning routine is total nonsense? 

11:11 The top productivity tip to change someone from a super procrastinator to someone very efficient is … 

14:56 All about people being control freaks! And tips for letting go of the perfectionism 

17:15 Recommended productivity tools to help other people!  

19:07 Tips for the end of the day work routine

23:23 Managing the things that are out of your control and frustrating because it throws everything off 

Jim’s Hack: Set Loom at 1.7X for listening speed.

Mridu’s Tip: “What will make me feel most successful when my head hits the pillow tonight?” ask yourself this question everyday. And use a Timecube like this one to help you stay focused. 

Tyson’s Tip: Have an agenda for each meeting you have in the calendar invite. 

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

Connect with Mridu:

Resources:

Transcript: Productivity & Time Management For High Achievers With Mridu Parikh 488

Speaker 1
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 metrics. What’s up Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson, you know, I have a funny story for you, you know, I keep throwing out these measurements of weight loss and stuff. But money reminded me I thought that I lost my wedding ring. But it actually I was too fat to wear it. So now it finally fit. So now I have our original wedding band on it has a manies name written on it on the inside. So I’m pretty excited about that.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s really cool. Because I thought you were going to tell me that you’d lost so much weight that it fell off your hand and you’d lost it that way. But you actually it’s the reverse. You lost so much weight that you’re able to wear it again. That’s pretty darn cool. Yeah. Very cool. Well, congratulations, you’ve Alright, is it 70 pounds? Is that what it stereo? Or is it more than that? Now? It’s 70. Yep. That is incredible. It’s really interesting. The number of people and I’m sure you’ve gotten this because your results have been way, way better than my results since day. 175. Hard. But I have people reaching out to me, I’d say three, four times a week about it. I bet you’ve gotten a lot of people say hey, do what you think about 75 hard and I just say, Listen, if you’re thinking about it, you’re prepared to do it, do it.

Jim Hacking
I needed it for sure I needed it. It was a good wake up call. And it got me reset. And I’m really grateful that you suggested that I do it.

Tyson Mutrux
Well, it was suggested by Christopher Nikolay Santa Paula, goodbye, this. But yeah, a lot of other people that encouraged us. But let’s go ahead and get to our guest this week. It’s really Pareek and she is the founder of Life Is Organized. Marie Lu is a time management guru, passionate about teaching business owners how to focus, get out of the weeds and take back control of their day, or bestselling book accomplish it and productivity on purpose. Podcast shares, simple strategies to ditch mental drama from procrastination to perfectionism. Reduce teaching on mastering tasks and habits have been featured in the Huffington Post, Forbes US News, and World Report. And real simple radio. Welcome to the show.

Mridu Parikh
Thank you. And you nailed my name, Tyson. That was awesome. I appreciate that. And thanks for having me.

Jim Hacking
Matthew, we’re really glad to have you on how did you get started in this line of work of productivity? And maybe tell us a little bit about what led you to be here with us today?

Mridu Parikh
Yeah, well, many years ago, a lifetime ago, it seems like I had left the corporate world and my husband, I made a big move from New York City to Nashville, back when it was not the it city was not cool. And I had an opportunity to basically stay home for the first couple of years with my kids, which was great. But it wasn’t too long when I realized I’m losing my mind. And I just needed to do something else. So I went down this entrepreneurial path, and tried a few things and landed on Home Organizing at the time professional home organizing. So like a lot of business owners, I was working my tail off was spread too thin, just ended up feeling very scattered, exhausted, feeling like a failure a lot of times even resentful, because I was working really hard, but not getting the results that I was hoping that this great this business was going to bring me. And I would regularly think how is it possible that I am working this hard, putting in this many hours and still not getting what I want. So I just went down a personal like development path and started just learning all things productivity and time management. And after a lot of hits and misses, I discovered what worked for me, especially when I was really overloaded was like with the kids and building this business. And I pretty much just thought to myself, I can either go back to constantly being reactive and feeling behind or I could embrace these like new shifts and these structures that I started doing. And that’s what I did, but I really just went from feeling really defeated to completely on top of all my demands and distractions. And that’s when I also transitioned my business. So now I teach those skills to other time strapped top producers, business owners who want to take back control of their day to so they feel really good about what they get done and have the self worth that they deserve.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. I’m gonna hit you with a hypothetical right off the bat. Yeah, let’s say it’s Monday morning, you had a wonderful weekend, you are pumped for the week, you are ready to go. You have all your goals set out for the week, you are ready to go and hit it and the first thing you walk into the office and you are hit with clients such and such as on the phone, she’s really really mad because of XY and Z and it derails your entire day. How do you deal with that? How do you get out of that rut?

Mridu Parikh
Alright, great question. And I so first of all I’d say before you even get to that office and deal with that client thing, what have you done to set up your morning, because if you have a good foundation, if you’re just like in a good mindset, and you’re feeling more calm and more relaxed, and on top of things, nothing’s going to change, like the client, right? They’re gonna be pissed off and things are gonna happen. But your reaction and the way you respond is really what’s going to change the entire situation. So prior to a video, when it’s it’s 8am, or 9am, looking at that email, what have you done that morning? Did you wake up? Was it was the first thing you do? Did you turn over and press snooze on the alarm clock? And just get on your phone and get on social media and start looking at the news and getting depressed and comparing yourself to everyone? Or did you maybe get up? Give yourself 20 minutes to go through your goals? Think about your calendar, have your coffee in peace? Maybe stretch, you know, like what is that look like? And that is 100% going to change the way that you react. So, you know, we can only change what’s in our control. And that’s what’s in our control. So I hope that answered that. But I would say first start with before that, because that’s what’s going to help you more than anything else.

Jim Hacking
So let’s say you’re not one of those people today. And you’d like to be one of those people, how do you move into a more mindful morning routine?

Mridu Parikh
Pick one thing, like one, the worst thing you could do is say, I’m going to change my entire routine was start waking up at 5am. And I’m going to get to the gym and I’m going to meditate and I’m going to journal them and my green juice like never gonna happen. In fact, I would say, pick a habit versus a routine, there’s a really big difference between a habit routine, I think a lot of a lot of us think oh, if I could just get into, you know, the morning, like I said, the exercise and the meditation all would be great. Well, that’s like six different habits you’re trying to put together, like, oh, I have to get into the habit of waking up earlier, to get in the habit of getting on my workout clothes, get into the habit of getting to the gym getting to you know, it’s all these habits to just pick one. So maybe the first one is, I’m gonna try to get into the habit of waking up 30 minutes earlier than I do today. And that’s the only thing when no matter I don’t even have to worry about what I do at that time. Just get into that, kind of feel good about it, master it, then add on another habit like okay, now I’m going to stretch in the morning and work it up that way. So that would be it, pick one, have your have your grand vision of what it wants to be. But don’t go for that right off the back. So I

Tyson Mutrux
love that answer. And I’ll tell you what. So I see all these Instagram posts and all these Tech Tech posts about how this is how you got to have this perfect morning and you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to meditate, and you’ve got to work out and you’ve got to read and you got to do all these different things. And then this morning, I see this post from Alex for Mozi. And he’s kind of this guy like, he’s pretty extreme. But he’s like, all of that is nonsense. Like what you need to do is like, like, who cares if you make your bed right, you start your morning off by focusing on the most important things. And that’s how you’re productive. So I wonder like, how much of this stuff is just nonsense in the mornings? Like what are the things that actually work? And what are the things that don’t work, you can just throw out the window.

Mridu Parikh
One of the biggest myths, I think, when you think of productivity is I think our initial reaction to it is that it’s doing more and doing it more efficiently and doing it faster. And the way that I’ve now that I’ve taught this for so long, I’ve taken so many clients to it and really the way I got myself out of the ruts and I was in was to throw that out the window and focus on productivity from an emotion. So to me productivity is an emotion you feel when you get the results you want. And if you get to do it in a way that’s more time efficient and more energy efficient. Fantastic. That’s like icing on the cake. But let’s just first start with how you feel. So you’re right if your morning if it feels completely stressful for you to have your green juice and meditate and journal you’re like that’s just not even making me feel great. Like I’m just all it’s doing is stressing me out. Don’t do it. Right feel what makes you feel really good is yeah, what I would if I had what would give me some control over my day today you mentioned Yeah, maybe I just pick up my top priority. Maybe I just plan out my morning the bed get the kids out the door without yelling at them. Like what is the emotion you want to feel and then start creating your day from there? Because I think that ultimately, we all everybody’s goal is to feel good. When it feels successful. You want to feel inspired, you want to wake up motivated, right? Instead of defeated, I failed again I have then you start going down all these self sabotaging thoughts about you’re not good enough. I’ll never catch up does she or he always does it better. So what are those feelings that want to feel and then how do you take one step that makes you that gets you towards that? And I can tell you usually 99% of the time it’s the thing you don’t do it is a thing you procrastinating it’s not jumping on social media. It’s not jumping into your email or your text. You’re doing that anyway. It’s not making you feel great, right? It’s usually that thing. So for me it is literally days just sitting by myself and having coffee in the morning and thinking through my day is like the number one gift that I can give myself. And the number one productivity tool for me because it’s gonna make me feel really good.

Jim Hacking
I’m holding my hand a supercomputer, also known as an iPhone, right? And I’m wondering, how would your message or tips be different if we were having this conversation 30 years ago?

Mridu Parikh
Oh, well, I think the strategy is exactly the same, right? I think that same kind of focusing on on your what’s going to make me feel really good, what can make me feel really accomplish using that as your guide post on your roadmap for the day, the difference is just the level of distractions we have right now. So it’s more than the tactical approach versus the strategy, right. So the tactically, turn those notifications off, just damn, just put your phone in another room. Like, it’s just, you know, we can’t focus, we can’t rely on willpower all the time. So that’s more tactical, but strategically, it’s, you know, maintaining focus, feeling really accomplished prioritizing your day that honestly doesn’t change. It’s more of the tactical things.

Tyson Mutrux
So that’s great. I want to ask you, and I don’t know how to ask this question, but hopefully, I can struggle through it. And you can give me an answer. But yeah, like, if there’s like one thing that you could tell people like, hey, you need to do this one thing like what would like it? It would like give you superpowers, almost like literally like, like, if you were to do this when because like I see these people pitching this crap all the time, right? But I’m talking about like, something that’s actually effective. That works like what would it be, that can change someone from like being like a super procrastinator, or someone who is not very efficient to like something like that? turns them into a rockstar?

Mridu Parikh
Yeah. Okay. So it’s essentially sort of what I was saying, but let’s just take it a step further. So go back to that. So here’s the question. I tell all my clients, I tell everyone, ask yourself, what action what one thing right will make me feel most successful when my head hits the pillow tonight? If you use that quest, if you ask yourself that question, put on a sticky note, answer that every day. And I would say the double whammy is one thing personally. And one thing professionally. Alright, so here’s the trick. It’s not what makes me feel really good, right? This minutes, because what might make you feel really good, right? This minute is getting on tick tock or getting on Instagram or something, right? What makes you feel really good when your head hits the pillow means at the end of the day today? What is that thing? And again, it’s typically something you procrastinate. So for me personally, when I had this goal was the thing I’m procrastinating I want to write a book for like, literally three years want to write a book, when I finally dedicated and said, I’ll do 30 minutes every day, no matter what. And for me first thing in the morning, who works best, whether I get five words down to 500 words down, that’s what’s going to make me feel best at the end of the day for me personally. So that’s what I committed to, right. So what happens nine months later, you have a book in your hand. And then professionally, for me, it will always I think will be like sales, networking, those kinds of things to build my business. And that always takes a backseat. It’s like the last thing that ever frickin happens. But now if it’s like, okay, 30 minutes a day. Can I do that first? Just that what does that mean? Turn? Not my phone, not my email and do that. What does that look like? Over a month? Right? That’s 25 days a week, 20 hours? Let’s say if you do put an hour to it a day, 20 hours a month? What can you what can anybody accomplish with a goal when you put in 20 deliberate, focused hours? It’s incredible. So if I do can live by that, if you can answer that question every day, and say, Can I just put an EP in our total maybe it’s 30 minutes personal, 30 minutes professional, you will honestly your life will change, you will skyrocket that gave

Tyson Mutrux
me goosebumps because I have my one thing for the day. But I don’t ask it that way. And it just like, I’m gonna change that. Because that’s fantastic. It just makes me feel good.

Mridu Parikh
Right? Right. And it taps into that emotional thing. So then when you go to bed, because what typically happens is we have whatever 2040 things on our to do list and you look at it and you’re like, Oh, I got easily I can get I can get these 10 or 20 done today, no problem, even though your schedule is packed, and you have appointments, and it’s you know, you have to run around and get your kids all the things are happening. But still, in your mind. There’s this gap and you believe I can get this all done. This is belief bias. So let’s say you have your 10 things on your list, you only get six done over the day, which is still pretty good because you have a million other things going on. What do you focus on when you’re in bed at night? Before you didn’t? That’s like all you can think about right? You just beat yourself up over it. So instead I’m saying just just forget that forget the 10 focus on the one yeah, you’re still gonna get to a whole bunch. Obviously, we’re all high achievers, you’re gonna get to some things. But if you have that one and you achieve that one, now you go to bed feeling like I’m a winner. I do what I say I’m gonna do right now. It’s like a confidence level and now you wake up in the morning, feeling much more inspired for that next day.

Jim Hacking
One of the topics that you write about and talk about often is people being control freaks. And with our audience being law firm owners, you know, lawyers like to try to control outcomes. Absolutely. Can you talk about any tips for letting go because we think it’s one of the things that holds our members back the most of wanting to micromanage and control every aspect of the firm’s operations.

Mridu Parikh
Absolutely work with a lot of lawyers, I got it, I feel like I should have been one sometimes in my life, because I am also a complete control freak, I would say, start with the lowest hanging fruit, there’s always low hanging fruit, there’s always simple ways to let go of things. Don’t start with the big, I’m going to let go of this, you know, this big process or this big system or handover all my billing or just whatever it is that’s holding you back to something as simple as possible. So it might be, you know, filing some of your paperwork. I know I’ve had I work with lawyers who that even that is like, I just nobody else can file the way I do, really, because probably, there’s a good chance they can or they’ll think of a better way, right? I also think we get so caught up in the way that we do it. Not only is it a democratic control, but it’s perfect. It’s the only way. And it’s amazing when somebody else brings their skills to the table, how much more ingenuity or creativity they can bring, or just a different perspective, and you’re like, oh, yeah, I’d never thought of doing it that way, that’s so much easier, it’s so much simpler, you know, and so start with that, and it’s like a muscle, right, you just got to do it over and over and over and over, until you get to something a little bit harder and a little bit harder and a little bit more. And there will be bumps in the way of course, people everything’s not gonna go exactly to how you want it. But you’ll also realize that even when things don’t go exactly how you want it, the whole world isn’t going to fall apart, your entire firm isn’t gonna, like you know, fall to pieces, you’re not all your clients aren’t going to leave, like, we tend to catastrophize a lot as control freaks, we can catastrophize to the enth degree because we’re like, always be our mind goes to worst case scenario. And that worst case, almost never happens. So, you know, slowly start giving up that control with the lowest hanging fruit, and then work your way up.

Tyson Mutrux
Are there any productivity tools that you might recommend? That might help people? I mean, maybe it’s I don’t know, an app or a website, whatever it may be. I mean, maybe a maybe a non technology tool, but something you might recommend to help boost productivity.

Mridu Parikh
Yeah. So when I think of productivity, again, time management, to me, it’s really less about managing all your time. But in this day and age, you mentioned, Jim, how is it different from 30 years ago, at this point, it’s distraction management. So it’s attention management. So if you can manage your attention better, you’re going to be more productive, like, it’s just going to be the simple byproduct without you having to worry about anything else. Don’t worry about all the apps don’t worry about all your project management tools, let’s just focus on our attention. So Oh, I’m so bummed I don’t have this here. I just left it downstairs. But I have this little cube. So talk about something non technology, it’s this cube. And obviously, it’s a cube is six sides. And you can just get them off Amazon, it literally is called I think it’s called a timer cube. And one side is 510 15 3060. And so for however long, you want to stay in focus, you just hit you just put down that side, you’re like, I just need to focus for 15 minutes, okay, that means I’m going to turn off my phone or just put it in my desk, I’m going to like, tell my assistant or you know, I’m not taking any calls, I’m gonna put a sign on the door, like, do those things be like, my thoughts cannot get in the way for 15 minutes, I was gonna do that. And you put the 15 minute thing and you work on that or you were like, I wanna do 20 Min. Or like, I just want to do five minutes, right? Again, you’re building it up, you’re building that muscle. I use this with my teenagers, I use it for me, I have, like I said, I always have one of my office. I was working downstairs today. I use it all the time. So don’t worry about all the apps and all those things. Start with the basics. We’re speaking

Jim Hacking
with Mary Sue Parakh today, and we’re really glad to have her, you know, I’m a morning person. I was texting Tyson at 430 this morning on my way to the gym. And I have a ton of energy in the morning. Any tips for the end of the day now, before I got on 75 hard and do my exercise and stuff that was when I would eat and sort of relax or reward myself. Any good tips for end of the day routines, like maybe before you go home from work

Mridu Parikh
before you go home from work. Okay, so yeah, well, it sounds like first of all, I want to commend you on your mornings, I don’t get up and I always like to say this because I am a productivity person, right, a pro whatever. And I do not get up at four or five in the morning. But I can tell we’ll still have a really productive day. So just want to let everyone know that for who doesn’t do that. You can set a really productive day not getting up super early, but I’m so glad that you do and that you make your morning so valuable and it sounds like you’re doing some of those really hard things in the morning. I know for me exercise would be the hardest thing. So one, just start there, like don’t leave those really, really, really hard things for you the things you always procrastinate the things that ever happened to the end of the day. So that’s the number one thing, just don’t. So if that’s what you’re doing right now figure out how can I switch that and work with my energy instead of against it? Like we’re fighting our energy and our willpower all day, right? Whether it’s like not picking up our phones, or dealing with our clients, like you don’t need to add another level of fighting that so first of all work with your energy and say, like, what do I need to get done in the morning. And then as far as the end of the day, I believe the best days, the most productive mornings, and most productive days, start the night before. So it’s the thinking that goes into the evening before. So let’s say you’re you’re about to leave work, I would just close up some loose ends in terms of, I mean, physically, maybe just clear off the papers on your desk. Some of the things you know, maybe it’s like, just plan your day. What is my top goal for tomorrow? What are my top three things I’ve got to get done? Jot it down on a on a sticky, don’t overcomplicate this, just think it through, right, when you’re at home at night, where if I have a meeting in the morning, what are the directions? Can I get it on ways? Do you know what am I going to wear? Do I need to pack up stuff for lunch? Like what is it that will help those few things that will make you successful for the next day is how I would think about the night. So when I think about my day, I have different kind of, I think of it in quarters almost or thirds at least. So maybe the morning is like like we were saying maybe for those activities that I don’t get to that I really need the energy and brain work for midday is generally for some more kind of creative work. For me, that’s just how my energy level works later in the afternoon is more mundane things, and in the evening is for prep and planning. So when I start thinking about my days and like a little bit more organized like this, it again kind of just gives me like a guidepost at night, like what are those things I can do to prep and plan for tomorrow? And by the way, put a little checklist of five things, just having a little checklist put on your phone, or put on your fridge? Or put your bedside table? You’re like, oh, wait, did I pick out my clothes? Did I do I know where I’m going in the morning? Did I check my calendar to see, do I have a meeting at 7am? Or drive at 9am? Like when’s my first you know, my first responsibility in the morning, did I pick you know, and it just like look at my calendar for the day. So I have this little checklist. And a really easy way that I do it is I put it on my phone, and it like pops up at 1030. And it’s so it’s a reminder, it’s like an event on my phone and in that in the description are my five things for my checklist. And so it’s just a little reminder to me before I go to bed Wait, did I just look at all these things because even though I’ve been doing this for a dozen years, I forget to do these basic things I forget to do them, I just another one I have is I like to put my skin a little bit personal here. But I like to put my workout clothes, like my yoga pants at the foot of my bed. So when I wake up, I put them on. And that just kind of gets me even if I don’t work out, it gets me in a more active kind of mindset in the morning. So but I forget there are so many nights, I forgot to go get them from my closet and put them there. But then I see it on my checklist and events there. So it just doesn’t matter how often you’re doing these things you could always use I think everyone can use that reinforcement.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s that’s really good. I have a must steal the one about work putting in my workout clothes. I’m not gonna put them on the on the end of my bed because I got OCD, but I’ll put them like on my dresser or something. So I can see. Here’s a question I have for you where, like I have a very structured week, like Jim can tell you like my week is extremely structured. But what happens especially with federal cases, because judges, federal judges like to just like, you know, say we’re having court on this day and not really ask you about it. Yeah. And so there’s some times where I don’t have an option as to when I can have court, we’re told when we kind of coordinate, it’s really frustrating to me. So do you have any tips on managing things like that? Because it’s it’s an annoying part of my week to be completely honest with you know, it doesn’t happen as often settle handles many cases. But it does happen. It’s frustrating. So getting tip sores.

Mridu Parikh
Yeah, no, it’s totally frustrated. Yeah, things pop up in the calendar, right, you’re like my caseload is it’s some it is just out of your control many times, right? Or even something personally, someone’s sick in the house or something happened, and you know, and that and that throws everything off. So I think the way to manage it, is to actually manage it and not deflect it and not pretend it’s not happening. I think that there’s a lot of us who be like, this thing popped up. So now it’s out of my control. So now my whole week has gone awry. So now I’ll just like you know, I’ll just be reacting all day and my week has blown up and I’ll just let things I’ll just deal with them as they come. I know for some reason. It’s like, yes, that happens. I got it like that day happens, but it seems to shut a lot of us down completely. Like there’s just a sense of I’ve given up everything’s out of my control. We’re actually yeah, that day came up. It wasn’t on your radar. It wasn’t you know, wasn’t in the plan. But if we get back to managing it and saying Okay, well, now this happened. And I take 10 minutes, five minutes to just just assess to be like, well, how does this impact everything else? Well, then maybe I have to switch everything I was gonna do today to tomorrow. And that has to push back other things. Or maybe I need to put up some different boundaries with my clients, or maybe I need to, you know, let my colleagues know that things are some changes are like, How can I react in a way that’s intentional and more deliberate? Versus this? Like, oh, my gosh, it’s all out of my control. There’s no way I’m all behind. On I understand that, because I’ve done it too. But it’s not helping. So actually does deal with it. And the second one, I don’t mean deal with it. When I say do that mean, look at your calendar, move things take that time, but it’s always going to come down to like, taking a little bit of time to think it through. And I’ll say the biggest thing I know, gosh, I definitely, you know, in any high achieving industry, especially, I mean, for lawyers are, you know, any high achievers, when you’re in the midst of chaos, when you’re in overwhelm, when everything’s being thrown at you, the most counterintuitive thing is to step back and be like, I just really liked to put some time to think about this right now. Like that’s completely opposite of what your brain is telling you what you’re like, and your neurology is telling you, it is telling you to it’s like the fight or flight like just get in there, put your head down, deal with it and do the staff. So where the practice comes in is having that awareness to pull yourself back and replan and reprioritize and rejigger things, because that investment of time will always give you more time. Always, always. But it’s so counterintuitive. So that’s what I will leave you with is like just remind ourselves that this investment of my time, although it seems like the worst plan right now is always going to give me more time and more clarity and more focus back.

Jim Hacking
That’s awesome. Me too. My favorite word that came out of today’s podcast. It’s a word that some people in my office like to do. It’s catastrophize. So I’m really excited about Castro position. And the Castro Pfizer’s in my office. So anyway, for our listeners who want to get a hold of you, what are all the best ways to contact you and your company?

Mridu Parikh
Yeah, well, I’m in all places Life Is Organized. Come on over to my website, I feel like that’s, you’ll get to know me really well. I’m on Instagram and Facebook Life Is Organized. But also it should since you’re listening to this, you’re probably a fan of podcasts. So come on over to the productivity on purpose podcast, it is geared towards women, business owners, but we can all take these tips are all universal. So come join me there. And I also have a book and you can find that over on my website as well.

Tyson Mutrux
Good stuff. All right, we are going to wrap things up before I do want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group, just go to Facebook and search maximum lawyer, you’ll be able to find us. If you want a more high level conversation, go to max law guild.com. We hope you’ll join us there. And while you’re listening to the rest of this episode, if you don’t mind giving us a five star review. Wherever you get your podcasts, we will greatly appreciate it. It really does help spread the love. And he gives this information to lawyers that really need it. So we hope you’ll help share that and tell a friend about us. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
Well, you know, we spent a lot of time on here talking about loom and the value of asynchronous communication. I have a couple service providers who don’t really do phone calls, they just communicate to us with loom recordings, which I appreciate. And I came upon a little hack that helps with those. And that is loom allows you to set the speed that you’re listening to the Luma on. And if you set it at like 1.7 or 2.0, you can also turn on the transcript and you can read it while they’re talking. And you can get through it twice as fast.

Tyson Mutrux
I liked it a lot. I liked that whenever it comes out of your books too. Because you can just you can get a book that’s like 12 hours you can read it like six or seven or listen to in six or seven. So it’s good stuff. All right, Maria, I think I might have I feel like I’ve gotten your name right the entire time. Except for I tend to one time I got to run but and redo. We always ask our guests to give a tip or a hack of the week, do you and it could be a podcast, it could be a book, it could be a quote could be whatever. So do you have a tip or a heck for our listeners?

Mridu Parikh
Wow. Okay, so I’m actually going to I thought about this, I’m going to just reinforce what I said primarily because I think the things we need to hear need to be reinforced over and over and over again. And that’s how they they finally stick. So I’m gonna leave you with the question that question that you said, Tyson you’re gonna start using you know what will make me feel most successful when my head hits the pillow tonight. If you if you ask yourself that question every day, if you lead your day with that, if you commit to that, there’s no doubt in my mind, you will be more successful. You’ll get your results quicker sooner, and you will feel more productive.

Tyson Mutrux
I wrote it down twice because I didn’t get 100% right the first time so I’m glad you said it again. because it’s I was gonna ask you about it. So I’m glad you did. Because that’s, that’s great. It’s I’m changing what the question I asked myself. So that’s, that’s really, really good. I love it. That’s great. And this is in addition to the tip you gave about the timer, because I already have pulled up on Amazon over here. So I’m gonna get that as soon as we’re done. There’s some really cool ones on here too. And just people No, so really cool. I’m gonna spend like the next 30 minutes, like binging about timers, until I find the perfect one. But my tip of the week, it’s pretty simple. It’s good. It kind of goes with our episode when it comes to time management is have an agenda for your meetings, we have all of our meetings have agendas, like in the calendar invite. So when it comes to our our pod review meetings, when it comes to our leadership meetings, when it comes to our we have what we call it an administrative review meeting, we have agendas for all of them. And it really helps streamline things. So you don’t just show up, oh, what are we talking about today? It’s very, very structured. And it saves us a ton of time. So I really, really recommend agendas for your meetings, because especially for meetings, you’re not there. Because if you have these meetings and you don’t have an agenda, people are just going to waste time. They’re not because they’re meeting to waste time just because they don’t know what to do. So give them an agenda, have them follow it and it’ll help streamline things. But redo. Thank you so much for joining us. I really enjoyed this podcast as someone that likes to have a structured week and organize things. I really, really appreciate it. So thank you so much.

Mridu Parikh
Thanks for having this. This was a great questions. And I really, really appreciate you sharing me with your audience. I hope everyone walks away with some value.

Jim Hacking
I think they will. Thanks so much. I

Tyson Mutrux
had no doubt in my mind. Thank you, Marie. They’ll appreciate it.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content content, go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.


Where is your best dollar spent in marketing your law firm? What do you need to have in place before you get started? What are the biggest marketing mistakes lawyers need to be aware of? This and more is what our guest, Chris Casseday gives advice about on today’s podcast episode. 

Chris is the director of operations at GNGF. He specializes in creating strategic marketing plans for law firms across the country. Over the past decade, Chris has helped drive millions of dollars of revenue for clients and is a strategic marketing leader over 15 years of SEO and is Google ad certified. Seeing his client’s online presence and revenue growth motivates Chris to work with energy and passion every single day. 

Episode Highlights:

2:45 Meet Chris 

4:27 Where is the best dollar spent for the next 5 to 10 years? 

6:36 What are some of the things structurally that people need to be thinking about before marketing?

8:33 What is a marketing funnel with strategies and tactics that need to be thought through? 

10:32 How do you move the wrong people out of the funnel and why is this important?

11:37 Web 2.0? Is it a thing?

12:29 Let talk about the mindset of leading with value first …

15:00 What to use as a lead magnet? Is there something working now?

18:03 2 to 3 biggest mistakes that lawyers make in marketing …

20:06 Is Google getting worse?

22:16 The importance of small victories when marketing 

Jim’s Hack: So for my hack of the week, I want you to think like an Eagle Scout. They have to do a project. A project they can not do all by themselves.They have to get help. So ask yourself — Who can I get to help with this? What can I delegate and how can I get different people involved in the project? 

Chris’s Hack: Schedule your 2023 and beyond, from goals to marketing meeting, Then pull in help when you need to, but if you don’t schedule that meeting, it’s gonna be March before you know it, and you’re gonna be behind the eight ball and not reach your goals for 2023. Get it done! 

Tyson’s Tip:  Audit the potential new client experience from the leads perspective. How easy or difficult is it for them to reach out to you? I would assume that all of us will probably find that it’s not nearly as good as what we would hope. 

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

Connect with Chris:

Resources:

Transcript: How To Market Your Law Firm to Grow Your Revenue with Chris Casseday

Speaker 1
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. My name is Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And my name is Tyson nutrix. What’s up Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Oh, just being a little silly. I was just sitting in the lunchroom with some of our team members. And I was telling them, we’re getting ready to move out of our space. And I was showing them how little space we had when we first moved in and how much we’ve expanded over the last five years. So it was I had them all surprised and laughing.

Tyson Mutrux
Pretty cool. How is the move coming along?

Jim Hacking
Oh, we’re just getting started. So we’re recording this right before Thanksgiving. And we’ll be moving December 16. So a couple of weeks, and we’re only moving 1.1 miles away. But you think it was like moving to Alaska or something,

Tyson Mutrux
I am watching your move with great interest, because my goal is to wait for some of these prices to go way down. I’m hoping to take advantage of the recession. I know that’s not a fantastic thing to say. But I’m hoping that some of the prices go down. And I because I’d like to see mo see how it goes with you and how smoothly it goes with you. And that’s something that maybe for 2023 or 2024. That may be one of our goals where we try to buy ourselves a building. So I think it’s a I think it’s a smart investment on your part. So I’m really curious to see how it goes.

Jim Hacking
Awesome. Well, you want to go ahead and introduce our guest today?

Tyson Mutrux
I absolutely do. Chris is the director of operations at GN GFE specializes in creating strategic marketing plans for law firms across the country. Over the past decade, Chris has helped drive millions of dollars of revenue for clients of GE mgf. Chris is a strategic marketing leader. And he has over 15 years of SEO and SEM experience. And is Google Ads certified. By the way, I’m reading this it is so far away from me on my screen. So it’s hard for me to read, but I’m getting through it seeing his clients online presence and revenue grow motivates Chris to working with energy and passion every single day. Chris Cassidy, welcome to the show. And you’ve been a friend of the show. You’ve been in the Facebook group for many, many years. It’s taken way too long to get you on. But welcome.

Chris Casseday
Thank you. Yeah, what an intro. Love it. Yeah, I have been I don’t know the exact number. But I know I’m sub 100 in the Facebook group, which is pretty cool.

Tyson Mutrux
I didn’t even know that. That’s impressive. That is very cool. Nice. Yeah,

Chris Casseday
I believed in the vision and I’ve stuck around. So love it.

Jim Hacking
Well, big points to you for that. So Chris, tell us a little bit about what g&g F is what your role is there and sort of how you’ve come to be in the sphere that you’re in?

Chris Casseday
Yeah. So I mean, G and Jeff has a marketing agency only for law firms, right? There’s plenty of us out there. We’re, you know, friendly competitors with a bunch of the ones that we all know, which is great, because, you know, we want lawyers to put money into marketing but not get, you know, that bad SEO stigma, you know, that is out there. Right. Sometimes people think lawyers have a bad stigma around them, SEO people do as well, for sure. So we’re trying to course correct that a little bit, you know, one client at a time, if you will. And my claim to fame is I was G and Jeff’s first employee 11 years ago. So I’ve seen a lot. You know, Jim, you’re talking with your team about how things are growing and moving. I’ve seen everything right, since day one. So it’s really cool to see. And it’s really cool to work with great clients. Right? So I’m the Director of Operations, I run all of our client operations team, which is not sales and marketing, but everything else pretty much. So once your g&g F client, my team is leading that strategy with you. And we do website design development, SEO, paid ads, Ott, you know, just anything digital is in our sweet spot, for sure. And we have clients all across the country and some in Canada.

Tyson Mutrux
So what I like about g&g F is you will kind of do a little bit of everything in a really, really good way of an effective way. And because there’s a lot of companies that just do SEO, or they just do paid ads. And so I do think it’s cool. It’s sort of an all in one solution. But I want to talk about all that stuff. I want to jump right in, I want to I want to hit you with some challenging questions, because I kind of want to know where we are headed in the next five to 10 years. I want to know if you if you will have an idea if you’ve got your thumb on the polls to kind of figure out where is the best dollar spent right now for the next five to 10 years?

Chris Casseday
Yeah, I mean, I think that we need to really look at the idea of funnel and branding and you know diversifying right which is the easy answer but some people miss it. Some people are like I need leads tomorrow I’m gonna put a bunch of money into Google ads. which will get you leads, right. But as soon as you stop the lead stop. So I think being balanced and really looking at what are your goals? And how are you going to get there, right. And not just having that quick Lightning in a Bottle approach. Anytime we come across a client that has that mindset, it’s usually set up for failure, right expectations aren’t going to get met, or random expectations are set or moved without you knowing, right? So the clients that are most successful today will probably still be successful in five to 10 years, if they have this mindset of building a brand, owning what you can, you know, which would be like not relying on paid directories or not relying on things that can change and the rug gets pulled out from under you, right? build that brand be diversified, in this case, do some paid ads, do some SEO, do podcast, write a book, you know, and figure out how that aligns? You know, Jimmy has a great presence on YouTube, right? Which drives, I don’t know, you put in the group like 40 something percent of leads or something, which is insane. That’s awesome. It’s not by accident, though. So I think really looking at the big picture. And doing these plans, right? Like, my big thing is like, what’s the next year gonna look like? But what’s the next three years kind of look like? What’s the next five years going to look like? What are our goals? Are we doing the right strategies to help get us there? Sometimes the stuff you’re doing today might not be the things you’re gonna be doing in five years? Probably not.

Jim Hacking
I love that idea, Chris, of figuring out, you know, building something substantive, that’s going to have value. And it’s gonna give you a good ROI, not in the next three weeks, but in 369 years, what are some of the things structurally that people need to be thinking about if they do want to, but let’s say I’m a relatively new, let’s say, I don’t know, estate planning lawyer in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I, I’ve been out on my own for two years, and I want to build a firm that has three lawyers, seven paralegals, a support staff system of another five or six, a little marketing team. If you’re that young lady or that young man, and you’re in that spot, what are the kinds of conversations that you’re having with those kinds of clients?

Chris Casseday
Yeah, I mean, we often have those type of conversations, which is deeper than marketing, right? Marketing can help support that and push that and expedite that. But those are conversations we have with our business. So naturally, we almost whether, you know, we should or not push that on to our clients that we work with, right? Like, what’s your goal? What’s it look like? And like, I feel like a typical marketing agency is probably not approaching it that way. They’re like, you’re paying for six blog posts, and we’re gonna do SEO and paid ads, hope you like it, you know, if our clients goal is I want to hire two attorneys. So I don’t do as much work and I want to be more of the visionary, how do we help get you there, right. And some of that is not going to be like, Oh, paigey, and Jeff to do more things. It’s like, let us use our expertise or our experience to help get you there, whatever that might be. So I feel like goals are important, but how you have those conversations with external vendors, if you will, I feel like doesn’t happen a lot. So I feel like sometimes the attorney or the firm might need to push that, you know, envelope a little bit like, here’s my goal, what are we gonna do to help get me there versus the reverse, right, like, Here, here’s the package you’re buying, you know, I don’t like when agencies or SEO providers sell the package, without that back and forth have that dialogue to say, like, Is this even what is going to help move you forward? You know, sometimes it’s not.

Tyson Mutrux
You used a word before that. Jim and I were talking about a few weeks ago, and it’s the word funnel. And Jim asked me, he said, What do you have? Like, what percentage of lawyers do you think actually know what a funnel is? And I I don’t remember what my response was, it’s pretty damn low. Jim’s guess was pretty damn low. Tell people what a funnel is, but what percentage you talk to lawyers all the time. So what percentage of lawyers actually know what a funnel is?

Chris Casseday
I mean, they know the concept of a funnel but not applied to marketing for sure. I would say it’s very low. You guys are spot on. Simply put, you know, there’s different stages of the funnel, right? You know, there’s going to be like a, at the top of the funnel, it’s wider awareness and people that are probably, in this case, not ready to hire you, you know, but you’re building familiarity. You’re building awareness, it’s top of mind awareness. As we get further and further down. In theory, those people are more ready to buy or more ready to become a client. It’s not an accident, though, that they just magically fall down. You know, so, once people are in your funnel, how are you moving the right people down? And how are you moving the right people out, you know, or the wrong people in this case out because it’s not the right time, or they’re going to be a bad client, whatever it might be. So there’s different strategies and tactics throughout the way you know of each stage of the funnel. Easy example is like a pay per click advertising bottom of the funnel right? Someone has a need, they don’t really care about your brand, you know, they are clicking, they did a search, if they see enough good things, they’re gonna hire you, you know, more top end thing is going to be, we want a lot of visibility, like we’re going to put a lot of educational content out there on YouTube. And some people are going to follow us and watch and then some of those people are going to come down the funnel, if they have, you know, a need to hire a lawyer, you know, so it’s visibility. And then knowing like, where people fall on what strategies fit within the funnel, primarily,

Jim Hacking
you mentioned something that I really struggled with, as related to my funnel, and that was moving people out of the funnel, I thought that I needed to keep everybody in the funnel, and that I needed to be paying attention to every single lead equally, as opposed. I know that sounds dumb, but as opposed to focusing on those that are serious about buying serious about hiring, serious about hiring, maybe now or in the next six months, I just thought that I needed to keep everyone there just on the off chance that they reached out. And when we started focusing on, you know, really following up with those that seem pretty interested. As simple as that sounds, that was a huge shift.

Chris Casseday
Yep, that’s a valid point. 100%, and you’re spot on with the assumption and most people have it have, I’ve gathered these people’s contact information in whatever way I don’t want to lose them, right, because there’s that off chance that it might turn into something. But that effort, whether it’s a little bit or a lot can probably be applied to the people that are closer, you know, to driving revenue for the firm, you know, at the bottom towards the bottom of the funnel. So, great awareness.

Tyson Mutrux
I want to shift gears a little bit because I’ve been hearing about Web 2.0. I think it frankly, is a bunch of hogwash. But I’m sure history will prove me wrong, which is fine. But I don’t get it. I don’t think that people are going to go on web 2.0 to get clients. But I wonder if that’s on your radar. And some of the you will are looking at monitoring and kind of what your thoughts are,

Chris Casseday
I mean, on the radar, but I think I’m skewing more towards where you’re at Tyson versus some of the, you know, the others that are all bought in, you know, who knows something could happen and mature and turn into something. But right now there’s so much going on, where we’re at, and so many clients that can be had and so much business that can be grown like an untapped resources and opportunities and this fear, that’s like, Let’s Let’s dominate this while we can, you know, because there’s so much opportunity. There really is.

Jim Hacking
Chris, one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on the show was, I mean, like you said, You’ve been in the group for a long time, you’re always adding a lot of value. There was a particular post by my friend Dan Schnur Bush about some struggles he was having with Google and you jumped right in and very kindly walked him through what the problem was that he’s having. Talk to us a little bit about that mindset, the mindset of, you know, I don’t know, if you’ve ever gotten any clients out of maximum lawyer, I hope you have. But, you know, that concept of leading with value, I think so many lawyers, like spend so much time thinking about how important they are and how great they are in talking about that, as opposed to, like answering people’s questions, or helping people out, or, you know, moving people along their journey. Talk to us a little bit about that. Well, yeah,

Chris Casseday
yeah, I mean, the example that Dan is a great one, you know, and he’s not a client, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just in that instance, I saw a someone in need and was freaking out. And for those that don’t know, as a website, DNS issue, email not working, just like put yourself in those shoes for a second, like, I don’t know what to do, you know, I’ve put that fire out 100 times over the past decade. So it was a three minute thing for me. And whether it’s three minutes or 30 minutes, I would have done it, you know, like because then that on the other side of the coin, I would want someone to do the same thing for me. So you know that old adage of you know, treat people the way you want to be treated? Yes, so true. But leading with value is huge and trying to help out and that’s why I love the maximum lawyer group, right? Like yes, we have gotten clients from it 100% But whenever I’m engaged with that in the group, that’s not my goal. And I feel like that’s the goal in general what the group is like we’re not selling like don’t sell if you’re selling like delete that post you know, you might be kicked out you guys probably kicked out some people in the day because that’s just not what it’s about. It’s a safe spot for marketers a smaller piece but then lawyers that like marketing to come together awesome, like the best group on Facebook that I’m in I think so. You know, I this is how I’ve always operated I’m a serial like entrepreneur I’ve built separate businesses I’ve helped build this business I’ve helped friends build businesses not related to legal like you name it like if I can help for five minutes and save someone hours a headache like that’s what gets me going you know?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, we’ve we’ve kicked out hundreds of people and spent a lot of effort keeping out people that are you know, the marketing vultures the world but with led, let’s start with leading with value when it comes to attorneys, and let’s say websites, let’s do a website. Obviously, a lot of the information on there is leading with value. You’re providing that information. But it used to be that you would offer a lead magnet, like let’s say it was a book or something like that, you know. So when it comes to leading with value when it comes to lead magnets and all that, is there, is there something that’s working better over other things right now? Like whenever it used to be like a free book, I don’t think that’s a thing anymore. Like what’s working? Now?

Chris Casseday
It varies, but honestly, it comes down to like getting people where they want to go faster. If for this state planning example, it might literally be a webinar, right? There’s so much I can’t digest it all. I’m not gonna read your whole website, and even then, how does that apply to me? Hey, join this webinar, you can ask questions, q&a, whatever, it’s an hour of time, you know, webinar conversion rates super high, you know, 20 people attend, signed six people up whatever it might be, when we’re not thinking about that, or not thinking about like a lead magnet or something, just the way that the website is built and structured. Think about if someone you know, is in a car accident, if they come here, to your homepage, what’s the next step? You want them to take? You know, put yourself in their shoes? What’s the journey? Is it just call you? Or is it like, what obstacles do we need to overcome? Right? Are you the right law firm for the job? Do you have reviews? You know, do you have content that talks right about my specific situation? Are you you know, do I talk to the insurance company or not, you know, those those type of things, it really comes down to knowing the path that your prospective clients are going down and meeting them there and holding their hand right? Like, don’t just have a page one page on your site that says, Yeah, we do car accidents, you know, if you’re in one call us, it’s like, how can we meet them closer to where they’re at? You know, what questions do they have those type of things, you know, but easy, right? Like downloading, you know, a guide or a lead magnet or getting our free book, like, that’s great, great for branding, great for expertise, you know, credibility building, but how can you help them right now is I think the gap that we don’t want to lose. You know,

Jim Hacking
you’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast, our guest today, Chris Cassidy. He’s the director of operations for g&g F marketing. He’s an OG maximum lawyer member. And we’re glad to have him on the show today. Chris, if I were to ask you, what are the two or three biggest mistakes when it comes to marketing that you see lawyers make a while and law firms like ones that want to grow? What are some common mistakes? Or what I’d really like to know? What are some common mindset problems that people have?

Chris Casseday
Great question, I think they’re very intertwined. You know, like, I was just had another meeting right before this. And one theme that is consistent, that always pops up, you know, when we look at our clients, and I think it’s not just obviously unique to GGF, but unique to lawyers that are investing in marketing is, you make that decision at some point to say, I’m ready to invest in marketing, you know, I have my firm, I have a website that I’ve built myself or whatever it is, but I need help, you know, which is a smart decision, right? Just like, Hey, you can’t do this case, by yourself, you should hire an attorney, which is true, we all relate to that. I think the issue that some firms fall into is, this is a lot of money that I’m spending on marketing, say in the first year, and then if they don’t see the direct ROI, return on on that investment. Some are saying, This isn’t for me, you know, I gotta stop. And as a lot of people listening, and you guys probably know, you’re not gonna get that direct, you know, ROI, in this short time period, sometimes depending on what it is. So like website, content, SEO, some things take time. And it’s not like, you know, me as an SEO expert, saying that to like, Pat our numbers or say, we need more time to figure this out. Sometimes it’s just what it is, you know, you went to from nothing to whatever, 10 million views on YouTube over what series of years, right? It’s not like overnight. So what I don’t like to see is when lawyers jump off the ship too soon, and then get that bad taste in their mouth about marketing. And then never go back to it, you know, in that capacity. And it’s just like, what happens if you wouldn’t have jumped off, and you would have kept your foot on the gas. And then in year three, you know, you’re getting leads for $60. And they’re, you know, six figure car accident cases, you know, ROI easy. So like that’s, I’ve seen a lot of firms leap too soon and not, you know, lean into the positive KPIs and things that are moving in the right direction, just because the ROI isn’t there yet.

Tyson Mutrux
Chris, let me ask you about something. So I listened to over the weekend, a podcast, it’s Freakonomics Radio with Stephen Dubner and the podcast was is Google getting worse and they give the example in that podcast about plumbers whenever the Yellow Pages Is were really big and how they did the study. And they found that the worst plumbers are the ones that they would like to have like the a triple, you know, whatever plumbing and a one plumbing, but but they would get the most customers, right. And they were kind of analogizing that to how Google is sort of becoming where it’s almost the same thing. And I just want to get your thoughts generally on that and what you’re seeing.

Chris Casseday
I mean, you definitely have the equivalent, right. You know, nowadays with the Google My Business, or Google business profile people, you know, mashing up their business name, and you know, those type of things. I feel like it’s getting better. You know, there’s a patch there, where it was, like, you know, feels like every listing is spam in that capacity. So it’s still going to be there. It’s inevitable, I think Google is trying to combat it. Which, by the way, anything with Google My Business, or now Google business profile, like adding new locations, or things like it’s way harder to add things, you know, the days of the phone or the postcard, like, usually now, it’s like video verification, like, pull out your phone while you’re at your office show us, you know, we’re gonna get on with a live person. It’s like, whoa. So that goes to that point. I think Google’s doing what they can, but it’s just, it’s, it feels like the Wild Wild West, sometimes, you know, like, what’s next? And there’s going to be a new thing that people are going to spam and then it’s going to get, you know, reined in a little bit. But for the most part, I feel like it’s, it’s not as bad as it’s been. Hopefully, that’s a good thing.

Jim Hacking
Chris, one of the things that I’ve noticed with my SEO company that really makes me happy is they they focus on incremental improvements, just getting a click through rate or conversion rate just to go up 1% or half a percent. Can you talk about the importance of sort of small victories when it comes to marketing? Yeah,

Chris Casseday
yeah. I mean, the small victories are there, for a lot of firms or all of them, I think, they’re not easily realized, if you’re not a looking at the numbers or knowing how to interpret them, right? Like a click through rate is 3%. All right, 3%, sounds horrible, you know, oh, actually, no, 3% is great, you know, in this capacity, whatever it might be, right. So that’s where like the marketing agency, or whoever you’re working with, is going to have that, that color with it to say, like, we increased by half a percent on the on the surface, like, if I told my wife, it increased by half a percent, she’s like, What is like half a percent, that’s nothing. But in like marketing sense, depending on what it is, it’s like, that’s huge. Like, that’s, you know, 50, more clicks, and seven more leads, and two more clients huge. So, you know, to that end, like the idea of like, conversion rate optimization, I think is neglected. And the way that I will put that, in easier terms to understand is, say you have 500 people coming to your site, per week, or month, or whatever it is, say you convert, and walk, convert a lead, you know, 10% of those, which is healthy, really healthy. So you did a few tweaks that move that up from 10 to 11. What type of impact does that have for the year? You know, like, in one month, hey, we got, you know, three more leads, or whatever it is, for the year, we got 36 more leads, and we normally convert leads, add this percentage, you know, say it’s 30%, or whatever it is, wow, we made that one change. And we got five more clients from it. How do we do more of that? And, you know, it’s not just hope and pray that something happens, we make a change, monitor it, measure against it and say, Let’s do it again. You know, that work? So that’s in the grand scheme of things easy. It’s not, hey, we need to double traffic by in six months, which is a big ask, it’s how do we squeeze a little bit more from the traffic we’ve already worked really hard to get. So I think that’s something that gets lost. And that’s something that should be continually evaluated.

Tyson Mutrux
Love it. Great advice. All right, Chris, we are up against the time. So I am going to start to wrap things up before I do want to remind everyone to join us in the big Facebook group. Great people like Chris are in the Facebook group. And Chris, he’s always contributing. So we definitely appreciate your contribution, Chris. So join us there. If you want to more high level conversation, go to the guild, go to max law guild.com. We’d love to see you. And while you listen to the rest of this episode, if you don’t mind giving us a five star review. We would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
So for my hack of the week, I want you to think like an Eagle Scout. So when an Eagle Scout or someone who’s about ready to apply to be an Eagle Scout wants to complete it. They have to do a project and here’s the thing. They can’t do the project all by themselves, they have to get help. So for instance, we had a young man in our troop back when the boys were younger, who wanted to build a wooden walkway between the church part Looking like next to our school to the school because it was real muddy and everybody was tracking in mud. And so he had to find different people to help. He had to have someone sort of do the survey, he had to have someone do the design, and then he had to go figure out how to get the wood. And it was a much bigger project than just he himself Mason could pull off. So when you find yourself at your firm, you know, we talk all the time about how you don’t have to do everything yourself. But I think that thinking like an Eagle Scout is a good mindset. It’s like, who can I get to help with this? What can I delegate? And how can I get different people involved in the project overall?

Tyson Mutrux
Great advice. Your Bob never thought of it that way. So good stuff. Chris. You I’m assuming by now I know exactly what we’re going to ask you next. So what is your tip or hack of the week?

Chris Casseday
I would say it’s hack of the week. But it fits because it’s, you know, we’re getting close to the end of the year. So my hack of the week is schedule your 2023. And beyond goals slash marketing meeting, whatever you want to call it. You know, whether you use traction or EOS to guide things great. If not, have the meeting, get some stuff down to Jimmy’s point, pull in help when you need to. But if you don’t schedule that meeting, it’s going to be March before you know it and you’re going to be behind the eight ball and not reach your goals for 2023. You know, we still got time. We still got time before the end of the year. So let’s get it done.

Tyson Mutrux
It’s funny, we’ve not had a guest in a long time that’s regularly called Jim. Jimmy. I just love it. I just love it. So much. Really how it would be is yes, I love it. I love it. It’s like

Chris Casseday
sub 100. And of the group, I can do that. Maybe I just you know, yeah, maybe not. Next time. I can say Jim, but all right.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. I absolutely love it. All right. So my tip of the week is to, I figured this was kind of fitting because we’re having you on here Chris is like audit your the potential new client experience from the legal perspective, right? So audit that and see what it’s like do like test it out yourself. So go to your website, tested out what it’s like to actually contact your firm. And another way of doing it is actually reaching out to some of your clients that have hired you ask them what the process was like. But then also ask some people that are friends of yours. Hey, go through the process. And you tell me what you think. And how easy or difficult is it for them to reach out to you. So audit that experience. And I’m assuming that all of us will probably find that it’s not nearly as good as what we would hope. So that is my tip of the week. Chris, thank you so much for coming on really early. Appreciate it. We’ll have to have you on some more because I think that your tidbits are fantastic.

Chris Casseday
Appreciate the opportunity. And yeah, I’m always, always game for it. You guys have built a great group so happy to contribute where I can for sure. Thanks, bud.

Tyson Mutrux
Sweet. Thanks, Chris.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content content, go to maximum liar.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.


What if you could grow your leads, following and relationships with clients using social media marketing that cost you nothing? That is what our guest on the show, Kathleen Martinez did with TikTok. 

Showing off her funny, controversial, and passion for immigration law, Kathleen has grown her TikTok following to over 800K+ by showing up consistently and being herself. 

In this episode she goes over tips and tricks she’s learned along the way of growing her TikTok following as a law firm owner. She also dives into an easy way you can get started today on social media. Including biggest marketing challenges and making sure you set up an easy funnel for your leads to reach you AFTER they watch your videos and consume your content. 

Listen in!

Episode Highlights: 

1:54 Meet Kathleen

2:58 How to be a full-time virtual law firm?! 

4:07 What would be your biggest challenge as a law firm owner?! Including the biggest mistakes on TikTok …

6:02 TikTok process from Kathleen … including a call to action  

10:38 How long until you see traction on TikTok

12:55 How to post on TikTok AND Instagram … 

13:46 Using TikTok as a funnel 

14:36 What’s upcoming in TikTok land?!  

16:23 TikTok as a search engine?! And will TikTok overtake YouTube 

18:57 Starting out on TikTok?! Listen to Kathleen’s first steps here … 

Jim’s Hack: Jerry Seinfeld quote from an interview that he gave with a Harvard business:

“It’s very important to know what you don’t like. A big part of innovation is saying, you know what I’m really sick of? For me, that was talk shows where music plays. Somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands with the host and sits down. How are you? You look great. I’m also sick of people who are really there just to sell their show or. So what am I really sick of? Is a great place for innovation to begin.”

So I just love that we can ask ourselves “What’s something that’s annoying me or that I really don’t like?” and then go against the grain and do something else.

Kathleen’s Tip: Do not be afraid to not only use social media, BUT be yourself on it! There are no judges on TikTok, their just regular people who wanna get to know you as a person, also as a lawyer. So show up as “yourself!” 

Tyson’s Tip: A trick to “be yourself on social media” is to visualize yourself being yourself and being that positive presence, in front of the camera. It’s an effective and simple tool that I recommend.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube. 

Connect with Kathleen:

Resources:

Transcript: Using TikTok As A Law Firm Owner with Kathleen Martinez

Speaker 1
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.

Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m

Tyson Mutrux
Jim hacking and tasty metrics. What’s up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson. Good to see you again. And I heard that you had a little victory that you just found out about

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, really big case. exciting result we just got an appeal back we lost at the circuit level on a motion to dismiss which we completely disagreed with the judge’s decision and we just just moments ago got the appeal back the appellate court said nope, not so fast and it back down at Circuit Court. So we went on that really exciting because it’s a tragic case where the little little girl Madison was she end up dying and so I’m not gonna go into all the details but just because it is in still isn’t litigation little two year old girl. And I’m excited that I was able to to call the grandmother right before this podcast to tell her that they were going to really get some justice. So go after justice. So I’m just happy we’re gonna bill to get the chance to do it doesn’t mean we’re going to win, but at least we’re gonna have a chance to go after him. So

Jim Hacking
pretty excited about it. That’s great. You want to go ahead and introduce our guests for today’s show.

Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. Our guest today is Kathleen Martinez. Kathleen is an attorney. She founded Martinez immigration. She received her bachelor’s degree from Mountain St. Mary’s University in Los Angeles, and her doctorate from Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. She has been practicing for over five years and is proud to provide services to the immigrant community. Their mission is to reunite families easily. And effectively. Kathleen, welcome to the show.

Kathleen Martinez
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jim Hacking
Kathleen, why don’t you go ahead and tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming a lawyer and then opening up your own firm?

Kathleen Martinez
Sure. Yeah. So I mean, I think I, like most lawyers found my path to a legal career in college. They’re like mock trial, moot court, all of that. So that’s when I really decided I wanted to kind of do that full time as an attorney. In law school, I did a few internships with immigration, family law, you know, I kind of wanted to find out what I wanted to do. And I really fell in love with immigration with my internship, specifically in an immigration firm. When I was licensed, I went straight into a family law practice, obviously, that was hectic at the least. And so I started helping my family law clients here in Texas with their immigration matters, because they didn’t want to hire somebody else. So I kind of trained myself in that worked for another immigration firm, and then decided I wanted to do that full time in the pandemic. Now, the pandemic was really why I started my own firm in a virtual format. So we’re entirely virtual, we do have a physical office, we just really don’t use it. Obviously, immigration is federal law. So it allows us to help clients in all 50 states virtually, with it

Tyson Mutrux
being a virtual firm, what are some of the challenges that you’ve faced? And how have you overcome them? Because it’s, it’s not the easiest thing to do in the world?

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah, I mean, I think mainly firms set up with my employees. So they all live all over the country. So our entire firm is like a cloud based system. Everything’s on Drive, everything’s on software, we have like 10 different software programs. Just the setup of that, and going from being trained as more of a traditional lawyer to more of a virtual lawyer was the hardest part. But I can safely say that after about two years, we kind of got a handle on it. And now all my paralegals are virtually trained. So I think that was the biggest challenge. But successfully, we’re over with that.

Jim Hacking
Kathleen, I practice with my spouse. And if she were here, she would ask you, how do you get your packets out? So that’s the actual paper production of USCIS. So paper heavy, how do you handle that being virtual,

Kathleen Martinez
we have a UPS account. So UPS power ups, they pick up the packages from me, and you know, my paralegals houses, they bring them to the clients client side, and they, you know, they review them and then UPS actually picks up the packets from my clients and Bails it off themselves to immigration. So it’s extremely convenient. My clients are happy about that part.

Tyson Mutrux
So I wonder, it sounds like you’ve got a firm that’s running well, that everything’s kind of running smoothly. What would you say your biggest challenges are as a law firm owner?

Kathleen Martinez
Oh, gosh, I mean, I think you know, the biggest challenge like I said earlier with, obviously the initial setup, I think any law firm owner, when you’re learning how to be an entrepreneur, and also marketing, marketing was probably the biggest challenge at first because as an associate attorney, you’re not trained on how to run a business you’re not trained on how to market and grow clients, you know, you’re kind of trained out in the more traditional model of you should just you know, have referrals coming out of the gate. So I really trained myself in a non traditional manner when it comes to tick tock so I do all my marketing on tick tock, it’s all free. It’s the best way to you know, obviously get clients right now as a business owner. So I think that was my biggest challenge as well as, you know, employees hiring the right employees when you’ve never met them physically when you can’t supervise them. And person all of it’s done virtually. So I think that was probably those two are my biggest challenges.

Jim Hacking
Awesome. Well, I’m glad you brought up tick tock, let’s talk about it. What mistakes do you see lawyers make when it comes to tick tock? I have a few ideas mostly about being boring. But besides that, what other myths? Yeah, so

Kathleen Martinez
I’m, yeah, I actually agree with that. See, I have a lot of lawyers who is on the side kind of training when it comes to tick tock and I see a lot of them trying to be boring and professional. I mean, for good reason. But it doesn’t grab the attention of the generation that is currently on tick tock, you have to be like other influencers, you have to grab their attention, you have to have clickbait titles, you have to be entertaining and funny because people don’t have the attention span to watch a 10 minute informational video with their hands crossed on your desk looking like your professional. So that’s the biggest mistake I see with lawyers is not trying to blend with the trends and be someone who a random person would want to stop their scrolling feed on and watch.

Tyson Mutrux
So walk us through your process because I we’ve had some some influencers on before. And everyone has a different process for when it comes to recording the editing, production, all that kind of stuff. So will you walk us through through your process so people have an idea as to how it works for you. Because it’s not as easy as just clipping a video posting on the internet. It’s, there’s a lot more to it.

Kathleen Martinez
Oh my gosh, it took me so long to kind of get the hang of it. It was definitely a learning curve. Yeah, I mean, Instagram and Facebook easier. You just make curated posts for your hire someone to do posts for you with information on it. But for tic toc. I mean, you actually have to yourself, be an entertaining person. You have to be funny, you have to be smart, you have to offer information in a way that grabs the attention of people. So how I did it is I actually hired someone from YouTube, who’s kind of a guru and influencer himself. He coached me specifically on how to make my videos TRENDING. But I have to, I still have to do a lot of research myself. So I mean, every day I’m on YouTube, as I get ready in the morning saying, which hashtags are trending? What are the most trending sounds right now? And how can I use that with immigrant content specifically, so I’ll use a trending sound, and then I’ll make it about how to get a green card. And I’ll just kind of curate it or tailor it to my content. So I typically film two days out of the week, and I’ll just take like, four hours each day, and I’ll film like maybe 3040 videos, and I’ll save them all drafts. So that way, I’m not wasting a lot of time filming. Obviously, at the beginning, it takes a long time to get the hang of it. But once you’re good at it, you know, it actually doesn’t take too much time. With immigration specifically, we’re obviously very dependent on news, because immigration is always changing. And so I’m always looking at the news that morning and seeing how I can update my followers on that as well.

Jim Hacking
Definitely one of the things that I’ve played around with and tick tock is this issue of a call to action, like what are your best ways to get people to raise their hand after you know, commenting or interacting with you on tick tock and bringing them over into potentially being a client?

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah, so I mean, for me, and it’s specifically for immigration, all make very short videos with very cliffhanger texts, like Did you know that you could get a green card from being a victim or witness to a crime and that’s all I’ll say, I won’t give more information. And then all these people watch this tick tock and all what they’re like, wait, I know someone who was a witness to a crime, I had no idea could get a green card this way. I’m gonna call her and I’m gonna schedule a consultation. I also do a lot of live lives are so important for lawyers. So I’ll do like two to three lives a week where I’ll do kind of immigration q&a, obviously, people ask me very specific questions like how can I get a green card? And I’ll be like, I don’t know, you have to schedule a consultation with me. So I’ll give broad general answers and broad general texts on my Tiktok that’ll make them require them to schedule a consultation with me so that they can find out more information.

Tyson Mutrux
When we go live on platforms like Facebook or even YouTube, we use something called stream yard where it allows us to interact with people or we’re using it do you use anything like that when you go live on tick tock? Are you just kind of get your phone out and just start going live?

Kathleen Martinez
I just go live? Yeah, I’m pretty like bare bones about it. But yeah, I mean, I just go live, when my followers have both, you can look at your analytics. And they’re always like the most available around four or 5pm, as well as 8pm. So I’ll go there. And I’ll just do a one hour q&a. And that’s about it. And I have a link in my bio, where you can just directly schedule your own consultation. So it’s really nice. I’m just like, click the link in my bio, they do it themselves, that syncs to my calendar. So it’s the fastest definitely the fastest way to get consultations for my firm.

Jim Hacking
One of the things I talked to people about when it comes to tick tock in YouTube is you never really know which video is going to go viral or get more views. Do you have any sense as to what are some common characteristics of the ones that get the most views and like,

Kathleen Martinez
right, so I mean, you almost it’s very humbling because the algorithm changes every single month. So at the beginning of each month, tick tock will just switch up the algorithm and I’ll even throw Tiktok off and like pause the app for a few days for everybody. But all I actually I will research what trending video so I’ll use hashtags in my niche. So like every Monday I’ll look up those hashtags like immigration and documented, I’ll see the most trending video within my niche and I will literally just copy that video and make it a little bit more my own. So right now I’m note I just do my own research I’m noticing that like five to seven second videos are the biggest trend was long text because Tiktok really prioritizes watch time so like you have a chance of your video being watched 100% of it short. So if it’s five to seven seconds and you have a really long text and it takes them seven seconds to read it, the algorithm is going to push out your video, but I mean, it’s so humbling because it’s always changing right when I think I got it, it’ll change the next month.

Tyson Mutrux
Well, as soon as we get done, I’m doing what you just said. I’m gonna see what happens just to test it out. That’s very cool. How long did it take for you to start to get traction on Tik Tok? Because I’ll be honest with you like I’m doing well on Instagram, but I can’t get like on Instagram. We’re doing really well on reels but tick tock, I’m not getting any traction and there could be a variety of reasons but like how long did it take for you to get traction on Tik Tok?

Kathleen Martinez
You know, it’s a funny speaking of Instagram, I’ve noticed I used to ignore Instagram and now I noticed that they’re competing with Tik Tok. So their reels algorithm is actually better than Tik Tok. Right now, I’m doing better on Instagram at this point. But when it came to Tik Tok, I just made the craziest video possible. I did a video about how I was raised conservative and I went way left when I became an immigration attorney. And it just shocked people. So it was, I guess, seen as like, I don’t know controversial video kind of a shocker i Here I am, like extremely white woman talking about how I was raised conservative and privilege now how it went super left when I became an immigration attorney. And it just shocked people. I mean, I think that’s what initially put me on the algorithm and that I just started talking about how I like standing up for immigrants and misconceptions of immigrants. And I think people really liked seeing someone who looked like me and had my profile really stand up for undocumented immigrants, because that’s not very common on that app. But yeah, I mean, and then I heard him hired my coach and my coach really encouraged me to do the hashtag thing, do research, see, which is the most trending in my niche, copy it, make it my own, use the same hashtags, same sounds, and never actually participate in trends. So you see those trending videos and most often they’re not, they’re kind of stupid, but I’ll use the sound in that trend, and I’ll do something more specific to immigration.

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Jim Hacking
You’re listening to the maximum lawyer podcast, our guest today attorney Kathleen Martinez, she has a big following on tick tock. I’m gonna ask a very basic question because I don’t know the answer. So you said you you film your tic tac or you filmed during the day, a bunch of different videos. I honestly don’t know. How do you post on tick tock and post the same thing on Instagram? Is that possible? Or is that what you’re doing? Is that a dumb thing to do?

Kathleen Martinez
No, it’s a smart thing to do. No one has time to just, you know record individual posts for both platforms. What I do is I a website called naps tick SN AP ti K. Don’t use the app, use the website and you can download your tiktoks Without a watermark and repost on Instagram. I reposted on YouTube shorts as well because now YouTube is now competing with Tik Tok. Everyone wants to be Tik Tok. So that is like the biggest hack when it comes to posting on other platforms.

Tyson Mutrux
I love that I wonder how does it work when it comes to the lead gen and then getting them into your funnel? Because I get the idea of it generating leads. But I worry a little bit about having to actually deal with all these messages on a regular basis. So so how do you filter filter them into your funnel other than them scheduling a time to meet with you by through the link?

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah, so I mean, I do have a social media person like on my Instagram, just going through my DMs I just pay her to do that. But we have an automated message that’s like the best way to clear them out. So we have you know, basically anyone asking for immigration questions, she just clicks like respond automated response. And it has the link for them to schedule a consult. And that’s that either like turns them off that they don’t want to pay for it or it makes them schedules. That’s the fastest way to deal with them. But it is a lot of work. That’s why I literally hire someone to do it for me.

Jim Hacking
So what’s next for you? Where are things headed? What’s going to change and tick tock land? What should we be paying attention to?

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah, I mean, I mean, just in general for tick tock. I think the algorithm is constantly going to evolve. Tic tock right now I’m hearing is they’re trying to be more of a search engine so they’re trying to become the next YouTube if they haven’t already. So educational content as well as being entertaining too. Talk is actually starting to favor professionals and less relatable people. So they like doctors, they like lawyers. They’re over the influencer blogger stage of Instagram. They’re trying to get away from perfectly curated aesthetics. So people like us, it’s actually our prime right now, for Tiktok. And in regards to me, I mean, I think we’re just expanding, we’re a virtual firm. So we save a lot of money, all of my employees work from home, which is great, you know, and I think we’re just going to hire more and more and have more clients, which is really nice. But thanks to tick tock, I’ll never spend another dime on marketing, that’s for sure.

Tyson Mutrux
When it comes to the immigration practice, are you wanting to and I know that you, you can sort of practice anywhere, but are you wanting to sort of have like that national reach when it comes to your firm? Or do you want to make it sort of a regional practice?

Kathleen Martinez
We’re not regional at all. I mean, I think we have clients from Texas just because it’s a big state for immigrants, but we have clients all over the country. And that’s because of tick tock so not a lot of people actually know like, even in Texas who followed me on tick tock, so I’m constantly advertising live videos that I can help you with immigration in all 50 states, and then I’m virtual on the right consultations can be done over the phone or over the computer. So I think we’re already at the national level. We’ve talked about maybe wanting to be more regional, but there’s really no point with immigration, we don’t have to be so likely, I think we’re just gonna, you know, expand, but we already have that reach thanks to the internet.

Jim Hacking
One of my kids told me that young people use tic tac for a search engine. Is that true? And how does that work? That is

Kathleen Martinez
correct stop because they’re trying to become the new YouTube. So you know, I don’t know if you’ve noticed on recent videos, if you go to a trending video, you can go to mine, you’ll see on the top, it’ll say like immigration lawyer, I don’t put that there, tick tock does. So they’re trying to make your videos specific to search engines. So how you can do that better is a really long description, with keywords and keywords on your titles as well, and your hashtags, it’s so important to put massive broad keywords in there that people will search, it’s really just all about SEO. So if you could make their content specific to tiktoks, you know, philosophy and their goal of being a search engine, you’ll definitely get a way more vital and very fast.

Tyson Mutrux
Alright, I want to I want to get your bold prediction here. Because Jimmy is a I’d say for lawyers, at least a YouTube legend. And so do you think that Tiktok will overtake YouTube? Or do you think that YouTube will remain the leading search engine? So that’s when he gets your prediction on that?

Kathleen Martinez
Well, that’s funny, because I read this morning, that tick tock is now the leading search engine, but I’m not sure if that was correct. I was gonna ask you guys about that. Because, you know, obviously YouTube has a different a little bit more of a, you know, a different I guess, reach, you know, is longer, more informational videos. But with this new generation, I just don’t think the they have the attention span for long videos with a bunch of ads, and it irritates people to see a ton of ads on videos, or they’re just trying to get a quick video in the next one. So I think with Generation Z, even millennials and with our current attention spans, you know, I think tick tock, if not already will be deleting cert search engine for sure.

Tyson Mutrux
Jim, do you want to take a shot at that one? Well, I’ll

Jim Hacking
just tell you that it took me 10 years to get to like 55,000 subscribers, it took me six months to get the 30,000 followers on Tiktok. So yeah, that’s what that’s worth the algorithm and tic tac land is just, it’s like none other. It’s unbelievable.

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah. And it encourages people to go on tick tock because everyone wants a following. Everyone’s kind of selfish in their own right. So ever, you know, people joined to talk because they’re like, maybe I’ll get a following then they end up following you. The algorithm is just way, way better. Even YouTube shorts. The algorithm isn’t great. My shorts don’t get good views on there, just Instagram reels is finally competing with Tik Tok finally getting up there, but I think YouTube is losing its popularity and I don’t see it being extremely successful in the long run.

Jim Hacking
My daughter is in charge of our tic tac channel for the firm, and she’s helped me follow those trends and do all those things. I’m just wondering if she wants to become a tick tock or what advice do you have for her starting out?

Kathleen Martinez
Yeah, hashtags are huge to understand what your niche is. So if it’s a specific area of law, to be following the biggest creators on Tik Tok and to be copying their content, I’m we all do it all the immigration lawyers, we do the same content, we just copy each other and utilize trending sounds, and really pay attention to the algorithm. So if you see that something some video in your niche has like 5 million views, you need to be copying that right away using the same hashtags, same sound and implementing lives as much as possible to kind of nurture your current following.

Tyson Mutrux
I love this. I can’t wait to re listen to this episode because I’ve already gotten some tips from you that I’m gonna implement right away that we’re not doing so very good stuff. But we do need to wrap things up. We want to be respectful of your time. Before I do. I want to remind everyone to join us In the big Facebook group, and if you want a more high level conversation, go to max law guild.com And join us there. And while you’re listening to our tips and hacks of the week if you don’t mind giving us a five star review, we would greatly appreciate it help spread the love to other attorneys that need the help Kathleen before I go to Jim for his heck the week what is your handle so people can find you?

Kathleen Martinez
It is attorney Martinez just all one term, no capitals or anything like that.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s easy peasy. Love it man. Just lawyer Tyson. So it’s easy peasy. Jimmy, what’s your heavyweight?

Jim Hacking
So it’s surprising how many times I’ve cited Jerry Seinfeld is one of my hacks of the week. But this one gets to a great question on innovation and how to figure out where to go next. And it comes from an interview that he gave with the Harvard Business Review. And the reporter asked him how he came up with his show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. And here’s what Jerry said, it’s very important to know what you don’t like a big part of innovation is saying, You know what I’m really sick of, for me, that was talk shows where music plays somebody walks out to a desk, shakes hands with the host and sits down. How are you You look great. I’m also sick of people who are really there just to sell their show or product. So what am I really sick of is a great place for innovation to begin. So I just love that. And I thought that we as we walk through our days as lawyers, as parents as family members, you know, we can ask ourselves, what’s something that’s annoying me or that I really don’t like and then go against the grain and do something else.

Tyson Mutrux
I really liked it. I love love Jerry Seinfeld, I think he’s great. He’s, he’s like one of the only comedians that can make people laugh without, you know, getting, like cussing a bunch and getting into Yeah, a bunch of other things. A lot. Great stuff. Jimmy. All right, Kathleen. So we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week. It could be a podcast, it could be an influencer. It could be a book could be whatever you got for us. Do you have a tip or a Hackworth?

Kathleen Martinez
I think it’s more broad. But for lawyers specifically, to not be afraid to not only use social media, but be yourself on it. I have a lot of lawyers who are clients of mine in my consulting firm that want that are afraid to use social media too afraid to be genuine, or to use social media in a fun way and not have fun with it. Don’t be afraid, you know, they’re not judges on tick tock. They’re just regular people who want to get to know you as a person. Also, as a lawyer,

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. Very good stuff. And I think my tip might help a little bit, at least with this. So I’ve met with Jason selkoe, a few weeks ago, and he’s, he’s my coach. And so he was, I was telling him like, I felt like I wasn’t being as present at home. And like, we’re like with our kids and everything. And he said, well, like whenever you go through your daily routine, like he’s got this 100 seconds to success, kind of a thing that you go through, somebody calls up, that’s what I’m calling it. And he says to like visualize yourself, being patient with your children and being present with your children. And it really is helpful. So that’s how it would help with when it comes to your tip is like, actually visualize yourself being yourself and being that positive presence in front of the camera or being whatever you want to be in front of that camera for people on Tik Tok, or YouTube or Instagram, whatever it is. So sort of visualize yourself and it really is effective. It’s a it’s a simple, simple tool that’s really, really effective. So I recommend it. Kathleen, thank you so much for joining us. Hopefully people will follow you at attorney Martinez. Lots of great information being shared here. So really appreciate it.

Kathleen Martinez
Thank you so much. Appreciate. Thank you for having me. So yeah, thanks.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. To stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to maximum liar.com Have a great week and catch you next time.

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