In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Charles Boyk, AKA Chuck. They will go over his career as a solo practitioner and the philosophy and marketing strategies behind his successful law firm.
“The more people you help, the more people you turn on to marketing, the better relationships you have with everybody in the community.”
In the beginnings:
Chuck couldn’t get a job after he graduated, so he was forced to be a solo practitioner from the start. At that time, he sure wished he had a job in a firm, but in retrospective, it was a blessing because he had to start working on marketing from day 1.
His firm: https://www.charlesboyk-law.com/
“To me marketing is like breathing, you have to do it every day. And you have to have the attitude that it’s a fun experience.”
The List:
If I were just starting my law firm today, the first thing I would do would be the list. The list of all your past clients, everybody that has ever contacted the firm, all you employees, employees friends, judges, opponents, and with that list you can create an email newsletter.
“As an attorney, my job is a storyteller. And we tell the stories of a our clients, the successful cases… We make them the heroe en the story. We tell the stories of people in the community. We communicate good things, and people in the community that have overcome things. Basically we try to help other people.”
Necessary for every firm: Online presence!
“We are only as good as the cases that we have. And unless you have a plan, and you have somebody that on a day to day basis is working to carry out the plan, how are you gonna be successful?”
Max Law Con: May 17th and 18th
http://maxlawcon.maximumlawyer.com/
Hacking’s Hack:
A Chrome extension.
http://www.crowdtangle.com/
Whenever you are on an article you can see how popular it is and a lot more!
Chuck’s Tip:
Get a local library card and listen to audiobooks for free, and listen to them while training.
Tyson’s Tip:
2 books. Both from Gino Wickman.
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business/dp/1936661837
Get A Grip: An Entrepreneurial Fable . . . Your Journey to Get Real, Get Simple, and Get Results
https://www.amazon.es/Get-Grip-Entrepreneurial-Journey-Results-ebook/dp/B009K44DQY
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Transcripts: Marketing Strategies of a Successful Law Firm
Chuck
We’re only as good as the cases that we have. And unless you have a plan, and you have somebody that on a day to day basis is working to carry out the plan. How are you going to be successful?
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.
Jim Hacking
Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m taking matrix with Jimmy.
Jim Hacking
Nice and I’m really excited about our guest today. I’ve known chuck for a long time back from the bend glass days. He is a tremendously successful Personal Injury Attorney out of Toledo, Ohio, I got to meet Chuck face to face. Last year at John Fisher’s mastermind experience in DC that Seth price hosted. I got to sit next to chuck and sitting next to him just getting to hear all the wisdom and the good advice he had on marketing all the cool things he did. And I got to run a couple of things past him. It was a it was a great benefit. So we’ve been wanting to have him on the show for a while we had on a gone last year. And we’re just really glad to have Chuck I know he listens to the show on his treadmill. So Chuck, welcome to the show.
Chuck
Thanks, guys. I appreciate finally being on the show. I listened to it all the time. All right,
Tyson Mutrux
Jack. So tell everybody about your background and how you started your firm. Just give us a little insight into yourself.
Chuck
I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, I went to Bowling Green State University on a debate scholarship. I debated through college, I went to law school at the University of Toledo. When I was at law school, I was in a clinic program, prosecutors clinic and I got to try like nine jury trials before I became an attorney in the clinic program. I couldn’t get a job after I graduate. So I was forced to be a solo practitioner to court appointed cases and got to try a whole ton of cases when I was young. At the time it you know, I sure wished I had a job with a firm but in retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise because I had to start marketing from day one and trying a bunch of cases to get a reputation.
Jim Hacking
And so Chuck, when did you start your law firm and talk to us about what launching a firm back then was like
Chuck
I’ve been practicing since 1983. So I guess this is about 35 years now. I started as a solo practitioner, eventually I was in with some other attorneys in a firm that we made ourselves. Those all ended badly. I’m currently in a law firm. It’s my firm Charles Boyk Law Offices LLC. We have five attorneys and upcounsel. And I think 20 staff people. We do primarily plaintiff’s personal injury and some workers comp. And we do a large volume practice of personal injury, everything from med mail, auto accidents, construction accidents, and we’re branching off by doing some mass tort stuff to
Tyson Mutrux
check. I’m always curious about people that get into personal injury law. You’ve been doing it for quite a while what interested you in personal injury law.
Chuck
So originally, I think I told you, I did criminal defense. And then I would have other attorneys that would hire me maybe to try cases, or to handle some of their personal injury cases, because I would basically take anything that would walk in the door. And I think the thing I liked about it, it was trial work, it was helping people and being blunt about it, I enjoyed the financial part of it. I mean, you can make a whole lot more money on a personal injury case than you can on your average criminal case. And I think that was a big part of it. And one thing that was interesting is I saw that the guys who had the best cases made the most money so to me, it was how do I get these cases because oftentimes the the guy who had the had the really good case really didn’t even know it was good and didn’t know what to do with it.
Jim Hacking
Chuck, tell us your philosophy then and your philosophy now on how to get cases.
Chuck
I mean, I guess I look at it kind of like you know, like sports recruiting I’m a big football and basketball fan of college basketball coaches and football coaches and recruiting and to me getting cases is this kind of like recruiting I’m a whole lot better attorney if I have good cases. So what we do now what I’ve learned over the years is we have three branches of our recruiting or for getting cases we have the online branch which would be web reviews, social media, Google logo, we have the relationship portion which would be newsletter Maven gifts to our best clients, meeting dot Doctors meeting chiropractors having lunches with people. And then we have our community and our PR, which would be the various charities we do to get out in the community, scholarships, student teacher awards. And it also includes we have press releases on all of our big cases. And we have really good relationships with most of the media in town. So, to me, marketing is kind of like breathing, you have to do it every day. And you have to have the attitude that it’s a fun experience, it really is, I enjoy the marketing, just as as much as I enjoy handling the cases.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, Chuck, so the listeners know, the overarching theme of today is the top strategies for a successful law firm marketing plan. But my question is for you, if you’re just starting your law firm today, where would you start with your marketing,
Chuck
the first thing I would do would be the list. And what I mean by that is the list of all your past clients, both the physical address the mailing address, the email address, so I would have all your past clients, everybody that has ever contacted you reaffirm all your friends, all your employees, friends, all the judges, all your opponents. And with that list, you could at minimum, create a email newsletter. And what we do is, we send a newsletter, both a paper newsletter and an email newsletter to everybody, we produce it in house. And we have I think, 25,000 on the newsletter list and over 15,000 that we send monthly on the paper newsletter list, and basically market from your herd. And the reason why I’m saying market to your herd is, these are people that have either contacted you or have a relationship with you and know you. So the first thing I would recommend is keep your list and do something to your list. So for example, I have some of my young attorneys that have E newsletters that they send out about themselves and about the community. And I’m having them from year one, try to come up with their own herd.
Jim Hacking
Chuck, tell us about how your firm has grown on the back of that marketing. I mean, I think you’re very, very humble, when it comes to what you built. But having a list of 25,000 people that you’ve you’ve built basically, one person at a time, I think it’s pretty remarkable. And just talk about that a little bit.
Chuck
So basically, anybody that contacts us gets on the list, any friend gets on the list, judges opponents, I mean, we get a large number of referrals from insurance, defense attorneys, attorneys and other law firms, people we’ve met in the community. So part of it is like when we communicate people in our newsletter, the newsletter in our communication is not really about us, we might have something about us. But normally, I look at it as an attorney. My job is we’re storytellers. And we tell the stories of our clients to successful cases, we make them the hero in the story. We’re not the hero in the story at all, we tell the stories of the people in the community, our bikes for kids winter, our teacher of the month, our student of the month of businesses in our community, so we look at our relationship is to tell the story, and communicate good things and people in the community that have overcome things. And we basically, you know, try to help other people. So when we’re talking to the news reporters and stuff, a lot of times we’ll connect them with other attorneys. We’ll connect them with stories that need to be told. I mean, all of these reporters, for example, on a daily basis, they got to come up with something creative and some neat stories. And we try to provide that to them. For local businesses, we try to tell their stories. So for example, I have a full time videographer a lot of times, what we’ll do is, we’ll help friends in the business community, and we’ll sit and brainstorm their marketing for them. And what we’ll do is for free, I’ll have my videographer create a video telling their story. So the more people you help, the more people you turn on to marketing, the better relationships you have with everybody in the community. That’s great.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s really a great example of the the Go Giver principles. That’s, that’s pretty awesome. I don’t know many, many firms that are doing things like that. So that’s really awesome. So Chuck, will you talk a little bit about the different parts of your firm’s marketing plan and which of those parts that you think are necessary for every firm?
Chuck
Sure. So the online presence originally we were the with foster webmarketing for maybe 1010 or 15 years, they did a great job. And eventually I met Seth price and blue shark marketing. So currently, we’re clients of theirs. And here’s what I really like about it is, we come up with a online plan. So for example, we use SEO Moz, which is a service out of Seattle, where we basically track every month 200 keywords. And for those 200 keywords, we sit there and get what is our Google ranking at the first day of every month. So I can sit there and tell you for these 200 keywords? How many of them, I’m on page one, how many if I my number one, number two, number three. And then Annika runs me the statistics. And then based on those statistics, we talk to Seth Price’s team at blue shark. And then we have goals and strategies of how to move up on every keyword. So part of it is to evaluate how you’re doing on your web presence. Obviously, you’re looking at the number of calls and the number of cases. But what we’re trying to do is, you know, be on page one for every keyword in and try to be one, two or three, what we’ve noticed, that’s massively important when we talk to clients on why they call us off the internet. It’s based on testimonials. So we have over 200 testimonials online. And we have individual goals for every week, every month. So realistically, online, you really have to have goals and a plan. I mean, without goals and a plan. You can’t accomplish anything. So we don’t necessarily meet all of our goals every week. But I think you need to come up with an individualized online plan, with goals and with deadlines. I mean, when you listen to like football coaches or basketball coaches talk like Nick Saban, they talk about the process. And it’s the same thing in any business. What’s the process goals and deadlines in a plan in one of the advantages with Seth price and blue shark is they’re a team and they know how to do the backlinks and a lot of the things to add Google juice that I really don’t have an expertise in.
Jim Hacking
Chuck, what do you think it is about yourself that made you feel drawn to the marketing side of things? I know you like trying cases, and you said that you’d like to do the marketing almost as much. And I know you guys are really great storytellers. Your magazine is a real eye opener for what is possible with content. What do you think is your background?
Chuck
I think, when I was young, and I realized, like I said to me, you know, one of my favorite things is the sign up a really new fantastic case. So I understand that a lot of firms have people that do the intakes and everything. But we read cases like a, b, c, d f, if we get a fantastically large, neat a case, I love to go out to the people’s house, to meet them to see what their house is, I don’t mind running out to the hospital and signing up a great case. Because to me, that gives myself and my firm an opportunity to help somebody and turn somebody’s life around to tell somebody story. And to me, it’s like a new project, a new toy for me to play with, to meet somebody that I’ve never met before and the opportunity to tell their story. So for me, the marketing is my way of getting the really neat new cases that I can deal with. So another example you talked about was the our magazine. So we have a magazine at the end of every year, we keep track of like our biggest cases. And we tell we pick about 10 of their stories. And we have pictures, we tell the story. We talk about their low portions of it. And then we talk about how they’ve recovered. So for example, our lead story in this magazine in 2018, is a woman who was hit by a drunk driver lost both legs, and now is learning to walk again and is becoming a motivational speaker. And we talk about and tell her story. The reason I came up with a magazine is I was once meeting with some clients in the hospital and they were doing a beauty pageant where four or five different attorneys would meet with them. And I didn’t get the case. And the reason I was mad was I had a specific exactly on the point pass case and I told them the story, but I knew if I had a magazine and I could show them the story that I’d handled this case that this person had a great result that I could have gotten the case. So we create the magazine and in the magazine we also put in all the winners of our community involvement situation. If anybody wants to get a paper or in pdf of our magazine, feel free to contact us. And we’ll send that out to you. Because proud of it, she did a great job. And I’m sure we’re well happy to give you all that information.
Tyson Mutrux
Check. I’m glad you mentioned, Monica. That’s a nice segue to my question. So you have Annika working for you. And she’s a real rock star. And she she works in your community marketing and does a lot of marketing for you. At what point did you realize that you needed a full time person to do your marketing stuff?
Chuck
You know, being blunt about it, I don’t think I could do it without a full time marketing person. And you’re right. I mean, she is extremely passionate about this. She’s very personable, you know, she takes all of this stuff personally as far as helping people. So I kind of think I was very lucky because Annika is one of these people that have I call it the likability gene, meaning everybody likes her. But she’s, she’s extremely good. But you really need somebody to figure out and do the day to day stuff on the marketing. So I mean, I think as soon as you can afford it, and I think you almost cannot not afford it, you need to get a full time marketing person. I know, Jim, you’re in strategic coach, and I’m in strategic coach. And I’m the type of person on my Colby profile that is really great at coming up with great ideas. But actually doing the day to day work is something as far as the marketing I’m not really good at. I like the ideas, and I like the results. But I’m not the one who does the day to day work. So I think a marketing director is essential. I mean, realistically, we’re only as good as the cases that we have. And unless you have a plan, and you have somebody that on a day to day basis is working to carry out the plan. How are you going to be successful?
Jim Hacking
I really liked the analogy that coaches are only as good as their players. And the lawyers are only as good as their as their cases. I think that’s a great analogy. How has your firm grown over the years? What does it look like now? Where do you see things headed?
Chuck
So I have myself for other attorneys and upcounsel in about 20 staff people, we’re starting to expand into mass torts, that’s an intriguing part of the practice. We’re talking to other law firms as far as like retiring attorneys about buying their practices. So I want to expand, but I don’t want to get too big. I still want to spend my time about 50% of the time on marketing and running the business and maybe 50% of the time on handling some of the top cases and then working on strategy with the other attorneys. I mean, I’m 60 years old now. And you know, I never really want to retire. I mean, this is too much fun.
Tyson Mutrux
Chuck, what is it that you struggle with the most management
Chuck
of people, I don’t enjoy managing people. I don’t really like that at all. So that’s, that’s really difficult for me. I have an office manager that helps out a lot. I like strategizing the cases. And I like strategizing the marketing, the big picture stuff, so that that’s what I enjoy the most.
Jim Hacking
Before I heard of Chuck boy, the really the only thing I knew about Toledo was That was where cleaner was from on mash. And now whenever I think about Toledo, I think about Chuck boys and about the community of Toledo and how your marketing is really geared towards Toledo talk to us a little bit about what it’s like to be a big fish. And in a smaller city.
Chuck
It’s really fun to be part of the community. So we have a community where I grew up here, I live, like in Bo in rural Bowling Green. You know, it’s a situation where most of the attorneys know each other. We know most of the media people. I know the mayor, the mayor comes in and cats, our dogs and stuff like that, even though we sue them on a regular basis. So it’s kind of a nice situation where you know, everybody, I think either I’ve represented, you know, most people or I’ve sued them. So it’s kind of seems kind of kind of fun and entertaining from that perspective. But it’s nice because we can get active in the community. So I went to Toledo public schools, which isn’t the necessarily the best rated school system, and we have a program or we have the teacher of the month and the Student of the Month and we’re friends with the administrator and you know, one of the interesting things is that’s about the only school district around that I don’t sue anymore. I pretty much sue every other one except for them because we have the charity with bikes for kids is a really good. Annika has it such that we’re on TV. She’s on TV with the winner two or three times a week every week of the summer. bar. So it’s neat because it’s kind of our community. And by doing lots of things in the community, we can feel good about ourselves, the employees feel good about being active in the community. And it’s kind of just the right thing to do. So, you know, it’s fun to be in a community and be an active participant.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright, so Chuck, hopefully I can ask this question the right way without sounding too offensive to some firms. But when you’re a smaller firm, you can sort of use the bigger volume firms as the boogeyman and say, you know, you can’t hire them. Because you know that all they do is kind of push cases through and we do deal with work yada, yada, yada. And it seems like you’ve been able to as you grow, as you’ve grown, to not become that Boogeyman. So how have you done that? Is it through the Community Marketing? Is there other stuff that you’ve done to prevent your firm from becoming that Boogeyman? What we
Chuck
have a lot of Cleveland and Columbus law firms that do a lot of TV advertising, we have a lot of solicitation letters that are allowed under Ohio law. So there’s a lot of that, I think, we try to be regular people. So one of the examples are, we have dogs in our office. So we have like two or three dogs in our office at any given time. We promote the dogs, if somebody comes into our office, unless it’s a dog by case we have dogs running all over the place in the office, we have toy chests for kids, whenever they come in the office that they can get that information, I make sure that all of our attorneys on their card have their cell phone numbers and are willing to take phone calls from clients. I mean, I talked to clients over the weekend on our on a regular basis if they need it. I think we just try to be regular people and not try to, you know, act like we’re too important for anybody else. And I think that’s what all of my attorneys and staff are just regular people. So we look at these people as as friends. We encourage clients if you have a divorce, landlord tenant or any of that stuff, to call us, and we’ll refer you to a good attorney. I mean, we’re not going to do those cases, but we refer them out. So we try to you know, like the old saying, people do business with people they like and trust, and we try to be people that you would like and trust. So I think just trying to be the common person.
Jim Hacking
Check with four or five other attorneys in your office. Talk to us a little bit about your mindset when it comes to marketing. Those other attorneys that aren’t Chuck, boy, how do you do that?
Chuck
So each one of our attorneys has a unique personality. The one one guy has a really good background in working for a mass tort firm. So we have him write blogs. we publicize him in the newsletter, and we talk about our mass tort of the month and we talk about his expertise. We have a young attorney who just came over from an insurance defense firm, who is the editor in chief of the Law Review, we talk about her background, we have her write articles and blogs, on what the insurance company is really trying to accomplish and the secrets from the insurance company. We have another young attorney Leah Michael, she’s actually going to be with Annika at your event in St. Louis. She has an E newsletter where she has the likability gene to and she’s really active in local politics. And so we have her have her own e newsletter. And she has a neat little dog and she talks about the adventures of her and her French Bulldog. So we’ve tried to personalize them unique to their their own likes another attorney. I have Mike Bernal. He’s a board certified super lawyer whose background is he did death penalty cases in the prosecutor’s office. And then he was all state’s top insurance defense attorney. He’s going to start a podcast and he’s just going to drive people around in his car like Jerry Seinfeld, local people and in talk about the great things in Toledo, Ohio, and what are the best places to go to and we’re going to personalize him and local people and tell their stories.
Tyson Mutrux
I love it, Chuck, these are a ton of great ideas and like a lot of great information. And I could talk to you all day and ask you questions all day. This is this is fantastic. But I do want to be respectful of your time. So gonna sort of wrap things up. But before we do next week, Jimmy is our conference. Do you want to talk a second about that? Yes,
Jim Hacking
we’re really excited about everyone coming. The registration is going to close this week. So the conference will be on May 17 and 18th in St. Louis. We’re getting pretty close to 70 folks registered and it’s pretty exciting for our first time out. So we’re excited about of the
Tyson Mutrux
really good stuff. Jimmy, before we get to your hack of the week, I do want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group. There’s a lot of engagement going on there. People like Annika people like Chuck are on there sharing a wealth of information. Jimmy YOU and I don’t even have to post that much anymore. Usually listeners and members of the group posting things, ideas, questions, holes, and things like that a lot of great information. Also, please go to wherever you get your podcast, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever, give us a five star review if you enjoy the podcast, Jimmy, what is your hack of the week.
Jim Hacking
So for my hack of the week is a Chrome extension that I stumbled across off our friend Gary Vaynerchuk. And it’s called crowdtangle. And if you download the Chrome extension, whenever you’re on an article, you can see how popular it is. It shows you how much it’s been shared. And then if it’s something that’s really trending, you can you can share it yourself. So I just started playing around with it. But it’s pretty nifty.
Tyson Mutrux
Really cool. Chuck, you listen to podcasts, you know, the routine. So do you have a tip for us?
Chuck
One thing that I just did was I got a local library card. And what I do is, I listen to audiobooks, a lot of the audio books that are on your site or on John Fisher site, you can get online for free. And I just use my local library card don’t have to go to the library. I download the books, and they have just my local library has 1000s and 1000s of books. And I just listened to it why exercise so doesn’t cost you anything. And it’s a great source of free entertainment.
Tyson Mutrux
A really good idea Jimmy actually told me he did that, I don’t know, like three or four years ago and i i started doing that. So that’s a great idea. My tip of the week, I’m gonna give you two books because I think they go together and these were recommended to me by Ryan McKean. One of them is called Traction. The other one is get a grip and they’re both by Gino Wickman. I took Ryan’s advice, and I read Get a grip first. And then traction. Because it he’s right, it does just makes more sense to put things into context for you. It’s basically a game plan for how you’re gonna run your firm or run any business. It’s really interesting with detailed checklists and, and diagrams flowcharts it’s really interesting, and it’s very, very detailed. And so I recommend getting the paper copy of traction. If you want to, you can listen to get a grip, but traction is kind of like a workbook in a way. It’s not a workbook, but if you follow their advice, it’s going to be like a workbook. So I highly recommend those are very, very detailed. Very good. So that is my tip of the week. Chuck, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, a lot of great information.
