What would be the one thing you’d like to tell yourself if you could go back in time and give yourself a piece of advice?
In this episode Tyson and Jim discuss about things they both wished they had known when they started their firm.
Branding: changing the name of your firm. KNOW your demographics, it will help you choose an adequate name. Putting your name on the firm’s name is not always a good idea; don´t make everything about you, try to use the service you provide instead.
Make sure you make up a system to take track of everyone who contacts your law firm. Build a database. Get your clients information, it will be of value. Use call scripts.
Segmentation: make sure you choose and work with the right clients.
Hackings Hack: Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You (John Warrillow, Penguin, 2013)
Great book for lawyers to read and to think about as they start building their practice.
Tysons Tip: UpWork.
You can hire all kinds of assistants. It saves you a lot of money and it gets things done. Your firm running 24hrs.
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up, and maximize your firm!
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Transcript: Branding
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. This is episode three of the maximum lawyer podcast. Tyson, how are you?
Tyson Mutrux
I am fantastic. How are you doing?
Jim Hacking
Great. And I’m excited about our topic today, which is what would be the one thing you’d like to tell yourself if you could go back in time and give yourself a piece of advice at the time that you started your firm. This is something that I think about from time to time, you know, we’re always learning. And we’re always developing new tactics and strategies to improve our law firm. So I thought that it might make sense for us to spend a little bit of time talking about one or two things, we’re each going to come up with one that we wish we had known. When we started our firm and Tyson, why don’t you take it away?
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I think there are several things that we would do. But I think the number one thing that I would do all comes down to branding, and that’s changing the name by firm, you and I’ve talked about this before. But I think the first thing, the first thing people want to do whenever they start their firm, whether they’re naming it, they want to throw their name on it. And when you’re wanting to grow and expand, and you and I have both gone through this with having attorneys work for us, it makes it difficult, it really does. Whenever clients are contacting you, and they want to speak to you, because you’re the guy, you’re the guy with the name on the door, I think I would go back and rebrand into something more generic. And I think people have this negative stigma for some reason about traffic law center. Now I wouldn’t name it something like Traffic Law Center. But I would have that the idea something more generic, because you can brand that you can you can franchise that if you had to, you can expand. And when people call your office, they’re wanting to speak to an attorney, not you as the attorney. And I know some people listening to this are probably completely disagree with that. But if you really want to grow your firm and expand and get larger and larger, being more generic, doesn’t mean you’re going to offer lower quality services, it just means that you are gonna be able to work on your business and not inside your business. And that’s something that you and I are going to talk about a lot throughout the every podcast probably is being able to work on the outside of your business work on it, and actually make it better as opposed to being stuck inside of it and the daily grind of things. So that’s the main reason why is I don’t it’s very, very hard. delegating work down to other individuals in your firm, whenever people want to talk to you, because you’re the guy, you’re the one that they hired, you’re the one they want to talk to. So that’s the number one thing I would change the name of the firm to something more generic. Without my without my name at all.
Jim Hacking
I think it’s a funny because I think a lot of lawyers don’t think this through ahead of time. And obviously, we both used our last name in the naming of our firm. And I think that a lot of lawyers do that, just because that’s what everybody does. And I don’t know that there’s that much long term planning associated with it. You know, I remember, this probably gave me some I think that when I was in law school, it was right around the change time that they started making changes to the rules about using names other than the lawyers in the name of the law firm. So I remember that there was a classmate of mine named George Graham, and he decided that when he went out on his own, he was African American. So he literally called his law firm, the African American law firm, which I thought was interesting. And I think there’s a lot that sort of tied up in that I think it sort of plants a stake in the ground, and lets you know who his clientele is. I thought, you know, I thought it might be standoffish to some other people. But I think it worked for him. And I think that it sort of was, like you said, a little bit of branding. And I thought it was an interesting approach.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. I’ve never heard of that firm. But I think that’s an awesome name. I mean, he really is he knows his demographic, he really does. And that’s marketing 101. I mean, it’s, I have a marketing degree. I didn’t go and look at my demographic when I started my firm, you know, as well as like this, but it’s marketing one on one. It’s one of the things where you have to start looking at stuff and that guy knew from the very get go, what his demographic was. And
Jim Hacking
you know, my favorite part of it. What’s my favorite part of the whole name? That African American law firm was my favorite word in there. It’s the Yes, yeah. Because it’s like, I know my buddy Dean Jackson on Twitter. He’s the Dean Jackson. I just think that when you say the it’s like, is there anybody else? I mean, would you even consider anybody else? I thought it was pretty clever. But, you know, if you talk about big law firms to I mean, there are tons of law firms around the country that don’t have those lawyers names. You know, I’m sure there’s no one at Brian cave. Or Kirkland and Ellis whose last Name is Kirkland or LS or Brian or cave unless it just happens to be that it’s, it’s interesting because, you know, names of lawyers inside of firms or as the firm name, it really sort of an anachronism when it comes to branding across, you know, all kinds of businesses. I think lawyers are sort of the one thing I mean, I guess people put their names in restaurants, if they if they have a restaurant. But other than that, I think that a lot of companies use the name of what it is that they provide.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s a great point. And I think as attorneys, we like to think of ourselves as different. And you you love pointing out when people say, you just think you’re different, and you’re not. And I think attorneys in general like to think, Oh, we’re different. We’re such, we’re so different, we’re so different than the truth of the matter. No, we’re not. If you look at other industries, you’re right, they don’t use the vast majority of them do not use their name in the company name, they use what the services that they’re providing. And so if you can find a way to develop a name of your firm, that is not your name, that is the name of your service, for example, you can use the Personal Injury Law Center, I’m not going to do that one. It’s too similar to traffic law center. But you could do something like that, where people know exactly what you do, the moment they see your name. And that’s the point. That’s the entire goal. Another problem might be is that some attorneys may not know what they’re what they’re going to do, whenever they first start their firm. They don’t know what business is going to come in. So they want to be more generic. But that’s what you want to be if you want to be more generic and you want to handle multiple practice areas, well come up with a name that’s a little more generic that allows you to do that, you know, or Natalie, she’s got her I think at the name of her firm is General Counsel LLC. And she does General Counsel work for companies. And so that’s it’s a very appropriate name. But so that if you can come up with some sort of name that allows you to handle multiple practice areas, that’s fine as well. Yeah.
Jim Hacking
And I do think Natalie’s name was clever. I think you raise a good point, though it is sort of hard when you’re starting out because you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to do. Do you know any other law firms that have sort of names without the names of the attorneys in them?
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I’ve got I know the guy by the name of Steve coffin, he runs a firm called the Small Business Law Center. I don’t like the Law Center in these because it’s too similar to traffic law center, because it sounds like you’re ripping them off. That’s always I don’t like it. But he does have Small Business Law Center. And you know exactly what he does. He handles small business matters, legal matters for small businesses. There are some other ones I’ve actually don’t have any written down. But I know I have heard some other ones. There is a firm that does debt collection that has something to do like debt collection, something law firm in it. But each one of those firms, when you see you know exactly what they do, there’s really no getting away from it, you know exactly what they do.
Jim Hacking
I want to get to that other point that you raised when you brought up this topic. And that is that sort of the ego involved in using your name and the problems that can cause later on when you try to scale? And people come in and try and are wanting to see, quote unquote, the man or the woman in charge? You know what I mean? Oh, absolutely. I think that can be a real trap for lawyers to think that, you know, well, I’ve got to do everything I’ve got to I’ve got to meet with everybody. Only I can do this only I can do that. And I think that you’re right that when you name it, the Meatrix law firm or the hacking law practice that you are probably setting yourself up for issues related to that, because clients expect to see the person that’s, you know, on the video or on the website, or, or whose name is on the door, what do you what do
Tyson Mutrux
you do when you’re at a construction site, I hear I hear these large trucks in the background. I’m gonna give you so much hell on each one of these podcasts about the sounds in the background, trains, trucks, semis,
Jim Hacking
I can, I mean, we are by the train tracks, so it does get loud here, we’re gonna have to find someone to filter that out. No, that’s fine.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s like messing with you. You’re gonna I’m gonna pick on you like Joe Polish picks on Dean Jackson,
Jim Hacking
well, that’s appropriate, because in our relationship, you are a nice person. So I think that it works out as usual, whatever.
Tyson Mutrux
So I derailed you, you’re fine.
Jim Hacking
I think that it is a real trap. And you’re sort of locking yourself in, you know, to one sort of approach when you build everything around yourself. And it’s interesting, because you and I definitely are not afraid of self promotion. And you know, you know, I have more than 140 YouTube videos out there and you do a weekly video and you have all your videos on there too. And so I think that there is sort of this catch 22 Because you want to be personable you want to be someone that your clients relate to, but at the same time, you don’t want the whole business to be dependent on you. And I think back to that book that we have both read called Built to Sell. And if everything’s about you and your names on the door and everything’s about you, you know, being the face of the firm, I think you do set yourself up for difficulties down rode either in scaling, or wanting to sell your practice or things like that?
Tyson Mutrux
No, absolutely, absolutely. So here’s what I’m gonna do. I think we’ve beaten this to death, I want to get to yours because we’re already about 11 minutes in. So I want to kind of get to yours, but you want to go ahead and with that, you want to give your tip because as you mentioned, Bill to sell, which I think is a fantastic book, it’s one of those books that makes you really think and break things down, step by step by step by step. And you don’t, until honestly, until I read that book, it was harder for me to break down my entire firm, but whenever I read the book, it was great. I mean, it really makes you step outside, look back in your firm and say, I can really break this down even more, because I thought I’d broken it down until I read that book. But you can really, I mean, now if you look at my office manual, it’s there is a detailed step by step process for everything. Because that’s what you need. If I got hit by a car today, someone can walk into my firm and operate my firm without a problem. So that’s that’s part of it.
Jim Hacking
That’s a good sign. And I don’t think I’m there yet. I think that there are a lot of systems and processes that we do things a certain way. But a lot of it’s sort of amorphous and not not as rigorous as that. So that’s something we’re working on. Yeah, Bill to sell would be my tip for the week I read it.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s a hackings hack is what it is. It’s hackings hack of the week.
Jim Hacking
Thank you, sir. I read that on the way to infusion con two years ago. And I think I read the whole thing on the plane on the way there in the way back. And it’s one of those business novels. It’s a short read. It’s a story about an ad agency that’s trying to be everything to everybody. And they decide to niche down even further than just public relations. And they go all the way down to making logos because logos is something that they could systematize they could automate a lot of it. And they could make it sort of a regular part of their business. And that was sort of when they built the systems around that it really helped them streamline things. And it meant turning down a lot of work that might have been temporarily lucrative, but would have taken them off their game. And so it’s a great thing, great book for lawyers to read and to think about as they start building their practice. That’s perfect.
Tyson Mutrux
No, I mean, that was a perfect description, that book. Do you want to get into your question? Do you want me to give my tip of the week Tyson’s Tip of the Week,
Jim Hacking
I think Tyson should give his tip of the week.
Tyson Mutrux
Let’s do that. Okay, so something I rely heavily on as virtual assistants, which you and I are going to talk about in another episode. But I use Upwork for a lot of things that used to be oDesk. Go to upwork.com. You can hire virtual assistants, you can get logos made, you can have your accounting taken care of you can do just about anything that you can do virtually it can be done on Upwork. You can hire people from the United States, United people from India, you can hire people from almost anywhere in the world. And it saves me a lot of money. And I get a lot more work done. It’s really interesting. John Fisher just posted a blog post last week or this week, it was either earlier this week, or last week, about a 24 hour law firm. And actually made me feel good because I mean, that’s what’s going on. I mean, at night works getting done. I’m sleeping. And then when I get up, there’s plenty of work to be done. For example, letter dictation, things like that, where up dictated something, it gets spit out to Kelsey, my assistant. And in the morning, she prints everything out and I come in sign letters and work has been done like it’s it feels great walking in the morning, when I’ve got a stack of letters to sign that works been done overnight. So of work, I guess it will do virtual assistants in another episode. But Upwork is a great resource for attorneys. Great, but
Jim Hacking
All right, so now I want to talk about the thing that I wish I had known or had done when I started my law firm. And it’s something that I figured out several years in. And I think that the tip is or the approach is to make sure that you set up a system to keep track of everyone that contacts your law firm. So if I were starting my firm today, I would make sure that I had a brain dead method of keeping track of everyone who contacts our firm for assistance. So, you know, there are many, many reasons for this. The main one is that, you know, you can really build a database of people who contact you for help over time. And if you if you keep track of all those people, I mean, right now we are adding probably 30 people a week to our database just based on who calls the firm, or who reaches out to us via email or over the web. And so what we do is every Monday, those people get an immigration newsletter from us about, you know, topics in the news topics at our law firm things that are happening with us. And it just gives you that opportunity to communicate with people because, you know, one thing I’ll talk about a lot is that when people raise their hand and indicate interest in what you have to offer, they don’t always buy they don’t always hire you right then But I’ve had many, many people who on a Monday after I’ve sent my email to everybody, they say, oh, Jim, I’ve been meaning to get a hold of you. I’m glad you sent this email that reminded me to call you in cases come out of that. So I think a lot of people when they realize this, if they have not been doing this, or if they have it sort of spread out in many different things, different capturing systems, I think that they ended up kicking themselves, because of all the lost opportunity that they had to communicate with people who reached out to them long ago.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And something that it’s hard to convey to your staff. They don’t you I want to, I want to mine as much gold from them as I can, for example, like dates of birth, who they’re from area to things like that. And it’s really something I’ve had to train people to do is really, you’ve got to ask the questions. They’re afraid to ask the question sometimes, but you have to get that information, get an email address, get a phone number, get a mailing address, find out who their spouse says. And you can do these in ways where it doesn’t sound like you’re, you’re prying into their life. For example, when I get their date of birth, for example, let’s say it’s a client that I’m a person that I’m not going to take their case, because I don’t take that type of case. And you get those types of calls all the time. So do I. I say just, you know, we send out birthday cards every one every year. Do you mind if I get your date of birth? You know, obviously, I would like I’d like to send you a birthday card. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Who doesn’t want to get a birthday card? I’ve never had anybody tell me? No. So you can ask for things like that, they’re not going to tell you you know, for the most part, the email address is the one that really people don’t like to give away. But I just tell them, Listen, you know, if I have any information, I can pass along teach mine if I get your email address, if it’s a prospective client on a case that I would take, I just say, Hey, I wrote this book on hiring an attorney. Do you mind if I email you a book a copy of it? Oh, absolutely. I’ve never had anybody tell me no to that. Because like, Oh, you’re giving me a free book, you’re emailing it to me, that’s fantastic. So there’s a variety of ways you can market to these people and one minor information and to market to them, once you have that information. But you need to get it you have to get the information. And so you’re right, whether it’s it’s typing into a spreadsheet, whatever it is, it’s got to be mindless, it’s got to be, every time the call comes in, you’re getting that information, no matter what you’ve got to get it, it’s because otherwise it’s worthless, you’re you have probably marketed in some way, whether it’s through referrals, whether it’s the internet, whatever it is, you’re paying for this information, if you think about it, you’re investing in it through your marketing. So you want to you want to be able to get some value from it whenever they’re calling into your firm. So you want to take that information, otherwise, you’re letting money go out the door.
Jim Hacking
So the other day, I was down in our conference room, and I was just working on my laptop, and the phone rang, and my front desk assistant answered it. And I could tell that it was somewhat pushy person who, you know, really wanted to make an appointment with me. And he, I think he wanted to make the appointment with me, like that day. And I was booked during the day and I heard my receptionist talking to the person. And you know, the way he’s trained is to capture that information right out of the box. And you know, what we say is, you know, in case we get disconnected, it’d be great if you could give me your phone number and your name. So we have that. And then he gets the email address. And then he gets, you know, the topic. So before they can even explain what their issue is, what he’s supposed to do is get all that information. And it just takes about 30 seconds to get someone’s full name, phone number and email address. And that’s all we get at this stage of things.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, it can be complicated to get that and here’s why. Because Morwen does a great job. The problem is, is that you if someone’s calling in that’s called before or if there’s someone that’s a current client, you don’t want them asking for that information again, and again and again. So it can get difficult in the wording of your scripts. And I have scripts, I think you have scripts call scripts we do. So we you have to word your script in a way where and your person has to know don’t ask the same person the same questions. But you have to word your script in a way where you’re not pissing off your clients. Because listen, I’ve been a client for a year, why are you asking me for this information? So you just have to make sure that you word the script in a way, you have to find out who they are first and then get that information. That’s
Jim Hacking
funny, because I haven’t really delved into how they delineate between people who’ve contacted us before. And people who haven’t I think he just asked, I think he says you know, are you a current client? Or is this someone, someone new? And I think a lot of times you can just sort of tell from the context. But anyway, I was listening to him on the phone. And this pushy person sort of got on and off the phone without him capturing information. And I rarely sort of get upset or angry and I wasn’t angry, but I just jumped up and I said whoa, dude, that’s not how we do it. You know that, you know better than that. And he felt bad and it was fine. No big deal. Because if someone’s calling and pushy and not wanting to follow our systems, then they’re probably not going to be a good fit for us anyway, and we can talk about that in other episodes.
Tyson Mutrux
I was I was bout to say that as I, as I say, you don’t really want that person as a client anyways, do I mean they’re there, but you never
Jim Hacking
know, he might have been his wife might be being deported that, you know, it could be anything. But generally, yeah, generally, those aren’t the types of people that I’m gonna want to work with. But in any event, I just think the message and the lesson is sort of clear that you got to capture that stuff. And then you know, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to do with it. I think that as you get more sophisticated, you’re going to segment those people, you can do a campaign through email based on the topic that they called about. So for me, if they wanted to know about citizenship, they could get a set of emails about that or for you, if they wanted to know about a DWI, what happens with that, you can market to them through that. And so I think there’s just all kinds of opportunities, but they all start with you actually capturing the information from the people that contact you
Tyson Mutrux
use the word, I want to make sure people know what you’re talking about. You talked about segmentation. And I know what it is. But I think you may want to explain that because that’s a term that I’m not sure everyone might know.
Jim Hacking
Segmentation is just a matter of tagging people with the appropriate tags so that you can market to them in a particularized way so that they get the message that they need or the information that they want about their particular issue. And so if you think of it as a series of buckets, if you have seven buckets, because there’s seven practice areas that your firm offers help with. And segmentation is just a matter of making sure that people go into the right bucket.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I give you an example. Yesterday, I had to send out an email really quick it was to all my all the attorneys that I know. And you got it and you probably didn’t think it was automated, but it wasn’t automated email. And I had that list in place because my list is segmented, but I’ve got all my attorneys and a specific list of specific bucket. I sent out an email blast really quick about a happy hour we’re doing tonight. And Jeff Oh, yeah. Did you? Wait, dude, I
Jim Hacking
knew it was. Oh, come on. All your tricks. I taught you all your tricks.
Tyson Mutrux
That was a good one. One. It was good. My open rate was fantastic.
Jim Hacking
What was the what was the headline? I don’t remember tomorrow. Yeah. See, that’s good. And I sent one out the other day, and it was about this is my weekly email. And it was about a judge who was being forced to step down at the immigration court because she had a break or something like what was it? It wasn’t mostly Greek. That was a different one. But this one was time to say goodbye. And I think it really freaked people out when I said because it’s time to say goodbye to that judge, but they thought I was saying goodbye to them. I don’t think I saw that one. That was a couple Monday’s ago, probably about a month ago.
Tyson Mutrux
So I missed that summer. Well, that’s it. That’s a great one. That’s a really good one. And else you want to you want to add?
Jim Hacking
No, I think that we’ve given a lot of good information for people. And I hope that if people like the podcast that they subscribe to it on iTunes, and we’ll have information on that on the webpage about how to do that. And
Tyson Mutrux
also maximum lawyer.com and also our Facebook page. I want to make sure I plug those people go to those and get onto it and is it anything to check? Is it maximum lawyer or the maximum lawyer.com
Jim Hacking
actually have both but it’s I think the main one is maximum lawyer.com. So
Tyson Mutrux
go there, check it out. And let’s not do any questions. I have nothing else to say.
