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Today Seth and Jay share part two of 10 Growth Hacks for 2021.

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Transcript: Part 2. of 10 Growth Hacks for 2021

Speaker 1
welcome to the podcast edition of maximum growth live. The number one program for lawyers who want to grow their practices. Each week, our hosts Seth price and Jay Ruane tackled the fundamental questions about how to grow the profit and profitability of your law firm to watch the program live. Submit your questions and hear the latest episode tune in every Thursday at 3pm. Eastern on Facebook for our live show maximum growth live is a production of maximum lawyer media.

Jay Ruane
Hello, hello and welcome to another Tuesday show of maximum growth live. I’m your host Jay ruing CEO of firm flicks social media marketing for lawyers, as well as managing partner of Ruang attorneys here in Connecticut and with me, back on the right side, Seth price Seth of blue shark digital SEO for law firms as well as Price Benowitz your DC Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina soon to be dominating the East Coast price banner with Seth. How are you doing this week?

Unknown Speaker
Doing? Well. Jay, you’re doing well. Great to be here with you.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, so let me tell you let me get fill you in you know, it’s been a it’s been a crazy weekend. I got to play baseball all weekend with my kids, which which was awesome. Spent a lot of time on my peloton. I know a lot of people even though we’ve talked about it, I actually calculated it. And I actually did more miles on my peloton last week than I drove last week. Wow. Which is, which is the new world. So it’s a little bit crazy. But we had a phenomenal show last Thursday. And I don’t know about you. But for me personally, I must have gotten 40 or 50 DMS of people saying I love this hack. Can you give me a little more feedback, that type of thing. People were loving our hack episode. What kind of feedback did you get?

Speaker 3
Yeah, absolutely. The people were digging deep saying, Hey, these are things that I can put to work. And for me, as you know, I’ve always preached this, going to conferences, when we did that. Remember, we used to go to conferences, get a plane and go somewhere. I love the idea of getting out of the office. But what we would do is it would take us three days of sitting in a conference room, listening to people speak taking notes. And then on the way home, you would I would condense those notes. I advocated doing that. And then prioritizing a top 10 things, the three or four things you can do right away the three things you may put on the back burner and the three or four things you say yeah, it’s a good idea, but I’m not getting to it right away. And what I loved about our hack show is, to me it was an amalgamation of those great ideas without having to spend three days at a conference, people were able to get these things. And even for myself, some of the stuff you’re talking about, I’m putting into place things in what I have noticed about that whole sort of ethos of going to a conference and hearing stuff there stuff you’ve heard before. But it takes hearing it X number of times before you either push yourself to do it. Or it gets prioritized based on what’s going on your life with resources, money and staff at any given time.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely. And I you know, and one of the things that we did in our office was right after Thursday shows I actually sat down with my team and we developed a system for that post contact, follow up and involves adding them to our respective email lists, making sure that we have all their contact information in our CRM, sending them a follow up note card, sending them a connection to connect on LinkedIn, all of those things that you need to do is we now have a system for it. You know, I’m a Systems guy. So thanks for that tip. And I hope you got something out of this stuff.

Speaker 3
I’m waiting for firms like they’re very busy though their phones blowing up, I can’t get through because I want to do the ask a lawyer Facebook piece, and I’m waiting for firm flex to set up.

Jay Ruane
Well, actually, we had a meeting today. And we talked about building a system to set those up for lawyers, because you’re not the only person that asked about that.

Speaker 3
Right? So I’ll be I’ll be client client, beta one.

Jay Ruane
Okay, well, there you go. Well, one of the things that we need to talk about is that at the end of the show, I tease today’s show that we have some more hacks to give out. And I guess they’re not necessarily lesser hacks right there. It’s just a sort of all fell into the same vein of software that we use to help our practices grow. And so I’ve got a couple that I use regularly. In fact, I was using one today in connection with some email marketing. And but first, I want to talk a little bit about something that I think a lot of people need to do, and you’ve got a lot of experience in helping people with it. And that is building out your directories. And there’s a lot of different software applications that you can use for it. So maybe we could walk through that stuff

Speaker 3
and let’s back up present why why do you care? Right? I mean, there are a lot of people here like of course, that’s what I got to do it. But when we talk about SEO, right you have content you have links. When we talk about local the citation, the name, address and phone number the nap that That’s the currency. And there are a lot of different ways to populate the world, a digital world with your name, address and phone number. So that when Google is determining where you rank in, or if you do rank it all in the three pack that you have authority in local. So these directories which are back in the day, when I started, I just literally sat down, who’d Google legal directories, find it, and it would add our name, address and phone number, if they allowed for a link, God bless. That was the sort of the process I went through myself. And even when I started the law firm, and the early days of blue shark, we had a team that did this all by hand. And I was like, Hey, you want to do anything? Right? You do it yourself. But what happened is exponentially it took on a greater and greater time suck. And that’s where it comes down to software J. And we that’s sort of the conversation today. And my hack is discussing, not just one, but four different primary options that you have for populating the directories with your name, address and phone number, what you want to keep consistent, to be able to signal to Google, hey, we are not just a good SEO option for the algorithm. But we’re a good local SEO option for the three pack the map pack.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, because local, really, it really is everything now, you know, all the local signals really matter. It’s tough to have a huge geographic presence. So your local listings have to be really have to be solid. So let’s start off and it would probably be best if we take basically from you know, beginning with training wheels all the way through, you know, your experience, you’ve got team members, that type of thing. So what’s the what’s the easiest way to get on

Speaker 3
the entry point, you got the least amount of money and you say, I got to do something because I think that even if you’re a b2b player, making sure that your name, address and phone number comes up can make the difference of being found or not found Moz. Moz is as a tool for local, it is cheap. It basically gets you to a ton of directories. There are three main aggregators and helps feed you to those and is sort of the entry point. If you do nothing else pay mods around 100 bucks, and basically upload your data across the web. It’s not set and forget it, but it’s about as close as most things are in life.

Jay Ruane
Okay, so MAS is one and I think it’s like 100 bucks a year or something like that. It’s cheap, because it’s, it’s there’s no manual actions. It’s literally just a computer algorithms spitting out directory listings to all of the, I guess the input variables that the directory mean

Speaker 3
aggregators. And that’s what you’re paying for Gotcha. The fact that you’re getting to those three main aggregators, that is like a huge one, you do that, that’s 80%. That’s why if you just if you do nothing else, but this if your competitors are doing anything, if you’re in a rural spot, or a b2b person, this can be a game changer. Similarly Yext, a little more expensive. But that’s the next level. Also three aggregators, and then a whole bunch of other directories mas just as a few extra directories beyond the three main aggregators that then send out all over the web. But mas does another note several dozen directories beyond the three aggregators that send out to quite a few places.

Jay Ruane
Okay. Let me ask you this question, then, why can I just find those three aggregators and upload my own stuff into them?

Speaker 3
You know, in theory, if you wanted to take the time, you could some, some places some things you can do some things you can’t do. To me, this is a no brainer like is especially if you if that’s your only job. That’s why it’s so cheap. They just it’s basically a direct API to those aggregators. It doesn’t get messed up. The thing I will tell you about yas MAs and Yext two things, you are renting the listing you are paying for it for as long as you pay them when you stop paying them. It’s not going to be taken care of. But there are some big advantages to it. So I really like it for somebody who is just starting out, potentially, who’s going to move if you know, you’re about to move, if you think hey, I’m starting now. But I have a partner to bring them on and change the name of the firm. Every time you make a change. You need to update those directories. And by doing it through a Yext literally a couple clicks in their interface, and boom, it’s taken care of, that’s a huge deal compared to the time if you’re doing it yourself, or one of the ones we’re gonna talk about in a minute, where you have to go back and manually do everything.

Jay Ruane
Okay, so let me ask you this question. Okay. I’ve been in my in my building now for over a decade. But we’re anticipating buying a building next year, we have an idea of where we’re going to go and so, six months, nine months from now, we’re going to be changing. I’ve never signed up for one of these services is now a good time to sign up for say mas, get them to confirm everything so that six months from now, when I do have to make that change. If I can have them do it and not have to worry about it, would that be a good tactic to use?

Speaker 3
Yes and no for me, let’s talk you you are a special case. Generally, really, I would say it’s an entry point for everybody. If you’re not doing it, you should be doing it with the exception of we get to these next two software’s after there are a few others out there. But the idea being these are easy turnkey software’s The only piece, the two pieces of warning, one I mentioned is that you’re renting it you access suppression technology. So it suppresses bad listings, and the moment you stop paying them that disappears. But the other piece that I think is sick significant, is that when you do them, some of the main places you may care about like, like a Yelp, there are a handful, I think about a dozen, maybe 10 to a dozen, where they are not they may submit to those places, but you need to go by hand and take care of those yourself, or potentially paying up the for those to be done. And make sure that you’re not forgetting about those because those are some of the most powerful places. So again, for somebody who’s doing nothing mas, and Yext, absolutely mas being the cheapest, easiest entry YECs being one step a lot further along. The two software’s that come after that sort of in the, in the in that sort of continuum, bright, local and white Spark, okay, those instead of using, you know, a rented policy, there, you’re actually paying to have the citations built. So the good thing is, you’re sort of like, instead of you’re buying an office next year, you’re buying your citations, so you own them. So the good news is that you don’t have to keep paying for an annual subscription to keep them live. At the same time, if you do move, if you do get a new partner, if you change your phone number, you now need to either go in manually and change them or pay for a new listing. And so it is what were I, to me, a large percentage of the calculus is where you are, as far as your stability, you know, maybe you move next year, yeah, you’re gonna go to my guesses, a bright logo or white spark and pay for new ones or pay them to update your existing ones. But for somebody who is in that earlier phase, a lot of people in their first five years of practice may move five times. That is a huge headache. And unless you’re playing the higher level SEO, you know, the x can be perfectly fine to begin with, as you start playing for the angles, some of the what, you know, I like to get away from the suppression services. And there’s some SEO benefits to getting the ones that are done manually for you.

Jay Ruane
Okay, so I can give you a little bit of my experience with it. I have a Moz account that I set up a couple of years ago after I watched Rand before he left Moz at a seminar. So I set that up. I was a customer of Yext for a long time. And yes, got really expensive because I had a number of office locations. So I was paying, you know, a couple $1,000 a year to Yaks. And one of the things that that jumped out at me was a blog that I wrote, I’ll try to find the link and I’ll put it down in the in the, in the comments if I find the link was that yes, to put you on a lot of directories, but a lot of the directories that they put you on when your pages weren’t indexed by any search engine, especially not by Google. Now, one of the things that that the people suggested in his blog was that you actually take your listings that you have on all of these directories, drop them onto a page on your website, saying, We can be found in the following directories, and put those links there so that when Google indexes you they find those links, because they you know, Google’s not going to index, you know, Yext with every link every directory that’s out there. But I just wanted to put that out there. When I’m actually

Speaker 3
playing the game. You could have overseas labor, go and click through for things. By the time you’re getting to that level, and I think you show to prove my point. As you progress, you will outgrow them, you could outgrow a Yext, and that’s when you go and decide, hey, I’m gonna do it myself. I’m gonna use one of these other tools that are out there in order to in order to create the citations in a way that is most SEO friendly.

Jay Ruane
And so what we did actually is when we launched our new licensed lawyers site, we actually decided to go with white spark, and have them build our directory listings for that brand, to see how they did instead of just dumping it on Yext or dumping it on Moz because we were running into the issue of having two brands at the same address except for a suite number, and we wanted somebody to manually do it. So that’s certainly something that people need to need to consider.

Speaker 3
Right? Yeah. And BrightLocal we love it, give some extra flexibility reporting, you know, pick, you know, again, they’re all awesome tools. Figure out what But the needs you have are. But it’s funny, I’ve had this conversation with some of my favorite SEOs at, you know, when I was at PubCon, it is definitely a process that people have generally, you know, that evolve through. And there’s a place for each one of them, depending on where you are on that spectrum.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely. Okay. So now I gotta give you a couple of different software pieces that you can use, because I’ve done a number of hacks here. So I’m gonna give you two right now, before we throw it back to Seth. Seth has talked about the importance of adding pictures to your Google My Business listing, because Google likes seeing you upload pictures regularly. And they want you to have pictures that are relevant to your practice, or relevant to your business. And in your case, it’s a practice, and automating that process really became kind of difficult for me, because I would never remember it was always on these things, a million things I needed to accomplish in a week. And so what I found and we can go back, if you want to go back to some of our episodes in in April, in May, when I’m lamenting the problem that I was having with my GMB profile for one of my brands, I found a consultant who is going to help me get restored. And one of his products that he offers is this thing called Local picks. So I’ll put the down below, I’ll make sure that you guys have the URL for it. But essentially, what it does is you sign up for this service, and I want to say it was, you know, eight bucks a month or something like that. So it’s, it’s not expensive. And then it is an automated message to you, where every 5678 days, depending on how many you select, it will send you a text message saying, hey, don’t forget, it’s time to upload a picture to your GMB respond with a picture. And we’ll post it for you. And so it’s just reminding you to do it, you grab one of the pictures that you have off of your phone, you respond to it, and boom, they place the picture for you. So it’s a way for you to sort of remind yourself to post pictures to your Google My Business Profile. And it allows you to sort of take the thought out of it. And that’s which

Speaker 3
which I get I you know, look it part of our our job here is to sort of push back to me, there are ones I like, wow, that’s a game changer to me, put a friggin Google, you know, a calendar alert. And theoretically, you shouldn’t be doing a che i know you love doing this stuff. But this is one where the marketing assistant should be doing this in a perfect world.

Jay Ruane
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. My whole thing is calendars can get missed. Emails, reminders, get missed 95% of text messages are opened within three minutes. So I am moving everything I can to be a text message based reminder. Because I find that gets me to take action on something or my team actually take action on something that’s a lot faster than expecting somebody to to check their email and remember to do that. I

Speaker 3
got a question for you as Mr. Systems. Is there any way to set on a Google on your Google Calendar to have the appointment reminder come as a text rather than as an email?

Jay Ruane
You know, that’s a good question. I’ve never investigated that I’m in the middle of a middle right now of making my CRM sync up with Google Calendar and having multiple calendars. I’m in the process of getting that all set up. So I’ll look into

Speaker 3
that and listen to that. Because to me, and again, that taking nothing away from that software, if you’re a guy who’s on the move, and you’re like, hey, I’ll take a picture of uploaded today. Maybe it works better. But to me, I’m always thinking about, hey, a lot of software sounds great. It’s sort of like the buying of Google GoDaddy to domains, which ones are there because how important is that photo compared to other things. So when you’re using it, your your staff and you have so much attention that you know if you know one of the things I don’t like about Google is the posts which they you cannot get rid of the announcements of how many views you on the post, they want those posts, they will continue to email you incessantly almost impossible. Turn those notifications off. And so the idea is prioritizing, what are the things that will actually make you money versus Yeah, be nice to have more photos. But if I upload three a month or four a month, rather than a weekly basis, is it better? Yeah, it’s better to do it on a weekly basis. But where do you want to put the prioritization of stopping what you’re doing to post something?

Jay Ruane
Yeah, I mean, it really comes down to you know, what you prefer for me this weekend, I was at the ballpark. I got the text message. I happened to be on a field where they have a banner for my for my law office, took a picture of the banner set it up. Didn’t have to think about it any much more than that. So that’s how it worked. It was just

Speaker 3
taking your time and attention and that’s always the pull and tug, which is we can do it ourselves. But until somebody else is doing it, it’s not a J ruin system. It’s J Wayne’s life.

Jay Ruane
Right? Well, that’s true. Okay, so here’s another piece of software that I use, and I actually use it today and it’s software called Side mail. And side mail is really interesting because it allows you to validate your domain and set it up without having to without having to set up mail servers with Google Apps for Business or with Rackspace or something like that. So say you want, you own a domain, you’re putting up a website, and you want to have you know, newsletter at Atlanta divorce firm, or newsletter at Colorado Springs dui.com. And that’s not your main site. It’s like a landing page site or something like that. But you need to sort you want to give people the impression that that site hat, it’s not going to be you at your Gmail address or you enter Yahoo or AOL address, or you know, one of the rulings you ruin right. So like, for me, right, we have a Mr. pardons, which is one of our brands, Mr. speeding ticket, I’ve got the licensed lawyers, I’ve got a whole bunch of sub brands. And when we send out our newsletters, we don’t want necessarily the newsletter to come from. At ruin attorneys, we want it to come from at Mr. speeding ticket. And so in services like MailChimp, or Constant Contact, you have to validate your domain, site mail for under $100 A year allows us to send email as that domain, it basically acts as a pass through. So I’m able to validate a single domain names email address, I can do multiple ones as well, that’s one of the benefits inside mail. So I can have a custom at the custom vanity url.com email address for as many websites as I have up there without having to go through the added expense of setting up Google Apps, or Rackspace or whatever it is to actually have an email box because all it is it passes through the email. So whatever destination email address that you want, and you can send as that as that email as well.

Speaker 3
So question I like what a GoDaddy might get info at just thrown in, right? This is like if you want to do more if you want to, if you want

Jay Ruane
to do more. So I have like leads at or newsletter and you

Speaker 3
find that you don’t want to go through the whole $5 a month per goal, setting it up with Google apps you’re

Jay Ruane
using, it’s really just a pass through that’s going to wind up it’s an alias, right. But I need to validate it with the mails the email program. So I use side mail to do that. And one

Speaker 3
benefit, which I’m not sure you thought of because you have people who have opted in for your lists. But you know, there’s an issue, if you get too many people marking you as spam, they can blacklist your URL. I wonder if this is a way to sort of diversify it. So that if you’re sending something more risky, you could send it from a different domain than related attorneys. You know, you would hate to see one of these get get blacklisted, but it’s better than your main fu domain.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely, absolutely. So that’s one of the reasons why we do it. We’re gonna be doing an announcement in 10 days or so it’s going out to 6500 lawyers that have opted into another mailing list of ours, but they’re not on this topic, but we’re going to take a shot at it. And if they mark this as spam, it’s not the end of my world. So that’s so that’s a that’s a thing. Now I want to talk to you had another one. So let’s talk about that.

Speaker 3
I’ll conclude with my final one is just a tool that we love around the office for sort of local search, right? We want to know where we are like, are you in the three pack, aren’t you and it’s very frustrating, because you may be sitting at your house. And you may do great there your office, but then as you know what’s going on two miles away. And so local Falcon is a tool that essentially allows you to look at an entire jurisdiction with boxes showing you no finite geography that will allow you to see how you are showing theoretically, in the three pack are what your local searches in each of those sub listings geographically, and you’ll see that generally, if you’re doing your job, right, your best results are right at the epicenter of where you are. And as those boxes move away from your Epi Center, you’re generally doing less well. And so it’s fascinating to see where a competitor that might be on the other side of town starts to bump into you as you do it. And while it’s not 100% Let’s say it’s 75% so don’t wig out you know based on the results you got to double check it but the it gives you a good sense as to trends. What’s what’s happening. Are you doing well? Are you not doing well, very broad strokes we really enjoy using it’s very addictive.

Jay Ruane
You know, it is addictive. You can get down a rabbit hole really, really quickly on that. The thing about local Falcons is that you buy credits. So it’s not like you buy it’s not like a monthly service you have to pay for monthly you just buy a ton of credits and then use Imagine go but you wind up using a lot that first day because you’re doing interesting thing about it is that we actually discovered a competitor, who had clearly opted into using a new SEO provider and stuff because we saw them pop up as we ran local Falcon, and then their presence started to grow larger. And so we were able to sort of track their growth digitally, as they started to compete with us in a market, because we saw them pop up on local Falcon, I don’t know if I would have found them as a competitor looking for them to take away market share. If I had not had that, have your heads in

Peter Shankman
the sand? You’re just looking in your immediate place, you don’t see what’s going on further epicenter, you know? Absolutely. The thing that we like it for an entire nother episode is spam, local spam. So what we’ll see is, as we look at it, we’re sort of seeing what’s all out there. There are a lot of people, some are overseas, but some of them are local, who are placing exact match names into the three pack. And Google has not figured out how to make that a non ranking factor. Spam still works in the in the local three pack. And so that, you know, it’s a cat and mouse game, where if you’re trying to protect your territory, and somebody keeps putting spam there, you’re constantly sort of signaling to Google, hey, this is not a real firm, or, Hey, this is not the real name of the firm. It gives you a sense as to what’s out there who’s infringing upon your territory.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, I really liked that. That’s great. Okay, so I’ve got two more that I want to talk about. And then when we get done with these two, we’re going to take a quick break, and then Ryan’s going to come back with another great book review. But the two that I want to talk about is one that I’ve been talking about for over a year. If you are friends with me on Facebook, and you’re watching this, you probably recognize that I send out birthday greetings to basically everybody. And I’d like to say that I do it. Because I get up every morning and I’m hard at work typing away saying happy birthday to people. But I found birthday but and for 30 bucks, it has changed my engagement with people on their birthdays, I always felt bad when I would miss somebody’s birthday. But birthday but is a great software that you can set up both with Facebook and with LinkedIn. And it allows you to upload a picture, upload an image that says Happy Birthday, send a customized message to people on their birthday. And that way you never forget to wish somebody a happy birthday. And if a lot if you’re like me, you have a lot of friends that refer you business over the course of the year. And so being able to pop up in their feed, say happy birthday, you will get the Thank you, you know from them most of the time, it reminds them that you exist and it gives you an opportunity to grow your firm by way of referrals because all those people are saying hey, if nothing else, he wished me happy birthday.

Speaker 3
Are you able to personalize the message? Can you look at the month and sort of say add an extra note for somebody you you know, want a specific message to?

Jay Ruane
Well, you can personalize it as far as adding their name to the message if you want to, you’re allowed up to three messages. You can’t say, Hey, I saw you in August Happy Birthday. Or a cool graphic or right if you notice Tyson nutrix. I turned him on to it about a year ago. And he has the office graphics that he does with his happy birthday. Things which are really kind of cool. I actually had our photographer in last November, and I took a picture with a cake with a confetti a champagne bottle, and with a with a noisemaker. And I put those things out there and I get all sorts of comments on it. So it’s a lot of fun.

Peter Shankman
You know, one, one, I’ll give a morbid thought. But I’m sure you’ve had to address it, which is there are a number of people on Facebook that have now passed away. Yes, our families just leave them up. Do you go through an edit to make sure that you’re not wishing somebody who’s past the Happy Birthday? Yes,

Jay Ruane
they actually have a Do Not message list that you can add people to that list so that they don’t get those messages. And it’s and it’s effective. Because I you know, I had some people who passed away this year. And it’s one of the things I do is I went in and I made sure that they were on the Do Not message list. And their birthday came and went with no message from me. So that’s that does work. And then the last thing that I want to talk about is something that we’ve actually used recently is a product called link whisper and I don’t know if you’ve used link whisper in your practice, but link whisper allowed us to actually find internal linking issues that we were looking for. We had a number of posts on one of our websites, we probably had 80 or 90 pages that had no internal or external links on them. It was just content. So they had like maybe one link with a sidebar or nothing. They Oh, they had a sidebar. Yeah. But it was just you know, we’re talking you know, 1000 words about a particular topic and nothing no internal link in the in that copy.

Speaker 3
You know So this is your checks and balance. And

Jay Ruane
this is my checks and balances. So linguist for basically crawls your site, indexes your site and allows it to know, okay, you have this page, I’ll give you an example from from one of my traffic site, you have a page about passing a school bus, right. And then you’ve got passing a school bus mentioned on a number of other pages. So now we’re going to artificially create that link with just a couple of clicks, because those pages should be linked to one another, you know, perhaps I haven’t changed about points. And there’s a mention of, you get five points, if you get caught passing a school bus, that page should link to the other one. And you know, it’s not perfect, but it does a lot of the heavy lifting. And the interface is rather easy. So you can identify the things that the algorithm got wrong, or the algorithm got right, and you can change up some of the text very easily. And it was a flat fee for a website. And it was inexpensive, I forget what the price was. But link whisper was what we used. And at what and we added like 500 internal links to our one of our traffic ticket sites, in an afternoon.

Peter Shankman
Unlike anything else, there are things I do I put this, that while I love it for like a blog concept. The thing to be careful about is that like anything else, there’s suggestions. So if you’re if you believe the more the better, great, but if you’re siloing content, and you don’t want you want Google to see stuff within a defined silo there, that’s where it’s almost like the difference between a Yext that does it automated. And then the next step, I love the idea of better than not having internal links at all. But I also want people to sort of think, hey, is there a device defined structure. And if you are using a tool like this, making sure that you’re not working at cross purposes to what your bigger structure or goals off?

Jay Ruane
And so let me follow up with that. So we deployed it on our verticals that are focused on one particular area, so speeding tickets, pardons lady DUI, I did not deploy it on Ruana attorneys, which is my main site with 5000 pages, that stuff, we’re doing the internal linking manually, because we don’t want to run into problems where we’re linking cross silo, that’s an issue. And so

Speaker 3
it’s going to give you suggestions. Because, frankly, from a cost benefit point of view, you may not put the resources towards internal linking, which is why it said to you, Hey, dude, you don’t you’re not, you know, you’re not internal linking. Great, we can put a bunch, it shows some velocity. And when you’re not siloing, it doesn’t really matter.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely. So that’s a lot man, we’ve got we got four directory things that people can look at, we’ve got local Phalcon, we’ve got the local picks, they side mail, beat a bud birthday, bud, Lake, whisper, we’ve got a lot of software out there. And this is what we wanted to talk about last Thursday. You know, there’s a lot of good hacks out there, there’s a lot of good products that you can use, but you need to know which ones are real, and which ones, you know, could give you a false sense of security, perhaps, and also things that, you know, maybe you may not know about just yet. So says here’s what we’re going to do next. We’re going to take a quick break. We’re going to hear from our sponsors, of course. And then when we come back, Ryan, we’ll get right into another great book review. The stuff he’s been doing has been great for us. So I’m really looking forward to that. Sounds good. Sounds great. Awesome. We’ll be right back folks with another edition of Max growth live.

Becca Eberhart
Hey, it’s Becca here. I’m sure you’ve heard Jim and Tyson mentioned the guild on the podcast and in the Facebook group. The Guild is this perfect mix of a community group coaching and a mastermind. Guild members get so many benefits, including weekly live events and discounts to all maximum lawyer events. Head over to maximum lawyer.com forward slash the guild to check out all the benefits and watch a few testimonials from current members. So head to maximum lawyer.com and click on the guild page to join us. Now let’s get back to the episode.

Speaker 5
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a bigger impact. You have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically throughout the time that we’ve been working with blue shark digital our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group grew over 14 100%

Jay Ruane
Seth and his team have years of experience in this area.

Speaker 6
blue shark is truly a part of the firm. So I don’t consider blue shark any different than the employees in my office.

Ryan
I’m Ryan McCain, and I’m here for this week’s episode of Just bucket. And this week I am covering the Marine Corps way. The Marine Corps way is one of the very first business books that I read when I was building my firm, and it was recommended to me by Don Keenan, famous plaintiff’s lawyer down in Atlanta and former Marine and I’ve read a lot of books on leadership, a lot of books on business development and some of The very, very best books come from the military. And the reason why is if you think about it, the military is the biggest employer in the country, it is the, it has the most human resource and logistics experience of moving, motivating training people and training them to do really critical things. So there is a mountain of research that goes into everything the United States military does in terms of leadership and people management. And it’s not always intuitive. I think, you know, before I started really reading in this genre, I thought that military leadership was very much top down. The, you know, the general told the, told the soldiers what to do, and they did it. But quite the opposite is true. And there are immense leadership lessons that, you know, someone like Gary Vaynerchuk would absolutely recognize going on in the Marine Corps. And, you know, with this book, I just wanted to, you know, take away three, give you three takeaways from it. And, and things that I thought were a little bit interesting, and you may be able to use in your practice, one of which is that one of the biggest awards that Marines give to each other is the toilet seat award. And the toilet seat award is for initiative, somebody who shows a lot of initiative on a project that isn’t successful. And the point is to reward and encourage risk to recur to encourage, you know, smart decision making, understanding that the outcome isn’t always there. And that’s going to happen, that’s going to happen in cases, that’s going to happen with marketing plans, that’s going to happen with hires, that’s going to happen with you know, how you’re trying to build your firm. I mean, I remember one time I went to some mastermind, and I came away with the idea that we should have menus. And so I did this whole thing, I had these little clipboards, it just didn’t work out. But that was toilet seat worthy, because I’m trying to improve the culture, and I’m taking risks. So you know, in your organization, or for yourself, you know, consider really consider a toilet seat award. People love trophies, they really do. So, the second point that I that I got away from this book was, you know, Marines are really, it’s really important to have the speed of decisions and the delegation of decision making. And that’s sort of one of the core principles of the Marine Corps. So what they do is, is the leadership follows a 1/3, two thirds rule, the leader, the leaders, make one thirds 1/3 of the decision, and delegate the other two thirds of it. And you know, how many of us in our office own 100% of the decision making, and we, you know, inspect, expect our team to just follow orders or follow our systems and how to do it. But one of the things I think I could work on, is really delegating that two thirds of the decision making, you know, here, here’s, instead of saying, like, here’s how you do this, A to Z, you say, you know, he, I’ve made the decision to do this. And here’s what here are the decisions that you need to make to make this happen. And they find that that creates ownership and speed. Making decisions quickly is very important. And also training your people to make decisions for you is an incredibly powerful reflex for them to have and for them to feel empowered, and some ownership. The last point that I that I really want to make is, you know, one of the one of the real principles of leadership in the Marine Corps is just walking around. So you know, leaders in the Marine Corps will walk around, you know, they’ll they’ll, they’ll ask the Ask the soldiers, how they’re doing, they’ll check their boots to see if they’re running the miles. And, you know, so much can be gained in any office. And I’ve heard you know, Seth and Craig Goldfarb, talk about making the rounds. You know, I do the same where I just walk in and just talk with people, how are you doing? How’s it going, you know, there is so much to be learned from that. And there’s so much trust in and relationship to be built by doing that. You know, if you’re not doing that you’re really missing out. You know, even if it even in today’s world of COVID with a lot of us being remote. You know, you can Slack message people call people, Zoom people, but really try to get out into the field. Get out to where your people are, and walk around and see what you see. Are you seeing somebody who’s flustered? Are you seeing somebody who’s exhausted? Are you seeing someone who’s disengaged? Are you Seeing someone who’s ready for a bigger challenge, and you need that kind of intelligence in your business. So, in sort of summary, this is a this is an old book. I don’t know if you can still find it if you can, it might be on, you know, Amazon or eBay used for a few bucks or you see it at a used bookstore. Pick it up. I think that there are a lot of good lessons in this book that you can use in your business.

Speaker 8
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Jay Ruane
Okay, so another great book review by Ryan, that was awesome. You know, it’s great, I get to be kind of lazy. And just hearing his takeaways without having to do the books myself. It’s like my own version of Blinkist.

Speaker 3
I was gonna say I just read up my Blinkist. And I was like, why am I doing that? I got Ryan, well, did

Jay Ruane
you see if you have the Marriott Amex card? They’re giving it to you for free? Because no one’s going to Marriott I just got an email about that today. So

Speaker 3
we’re the worst part is I think I got that email thought of Blinkist. And then when paid for it with it with the Marriott with the with the Marriott card. So maybe if I paid with it with the Marriott card, it won’t.

Jay Ruane
So I mean, I have, I gotta tell you, I mean, my points balance is going up and up.

Speaker 3
I rather have a tight points balance and sitting there with several million points. It’s so depressing. Yeah. Wait till we can go back and use them.

Jay Ruane
I just I just spent 100,000 points by my kids Fire tablets for Christmas, just because I’m like, You know what, I gotta spend these points on something. You know, that might be bad,

Speaker 3
that might not be a bad. You know, again, it’s something weird because during this pandemic, I have not been points crazed. I’ve just sort of like banking everything and figuring it out. Figured out later. It’s almost and I’m just, you know, we both know, and probably why you spent it on the tablet, there’s a good chance that for Marriott to survive, that those points are going to be deflated in some massive way. We already took a 40 to 50% deflation on the Starwood merger, there’s no way that the airlines and the hotels are going to be able to provide free travel because we’re all sitting there with these, you know,

Jay Ruane
massive boys house. Yeah. It’s

Speaker 3
gonna I would got to think they’re gonna throttle capacity and raise the, the the point necessary for for travel.

Jay Ruane
Yeah, I mean, I was I was like five nights away from going into platinum elite, for next year, when all this stuff happened. So I’m wondering,

Speaker 3
I have a pretty good feel. You pick up your phone and five nights away, they’ll give you right now, if you want to stay in their hotel, that they’ll make you anything you want in

Jay Ruane
the local courtyard. Marriott is like $49 a night right now.

Speaker 3
Well, that’s the other issue. The points have not adjusted. Right. So I was in New York, visiting my parents the other a couple weekends ago. And so while exactly while the hotels in Manhattan, were at 100 bucks a night, which is unheard of the point tallies were the equivalent of what it was 250 a night. So you can spend your points now, but like it, you have all these points sitting there, but you’re basically spending them at 20 cents on the dollar. Because right now you can buy the $49 hotel room, you know, rather than what the points equivalent are. They’re not they’re not reducing the points values.

Jay Ruane
Absolutely. Okay. So we’re gonna we’re gonna wrap up the show now, but Seth, tell us who we have on a Thursday show.

Peter Shankman
Well, we are looking forward we got the Jersey Boys coming and they they are a powerhouse. We met them through John Fisher’s mastermind experience and these guys have taken Jersey by storm. They not only have built an incredible powerhouse pie shop, but you know, tell them what they built a second business division, which is one of the things we’ve been talking a lot about on the show.

Jay Ruane
Yes, your they got really interesting, you know, as PII lawyers, they they you know, we have little talk about this at a mastermind. They were concerned about the changing consumer demographics long before COVID and how they’re thinking driverless cars, people living more in cities rather than in the suburbs. Back then that was a big talk. And they were talking about how they wanted to do something to diversify their general PII automobile practice. And so one of the things that they were looking to do was getting into employment law. And that’s really been working well for them. And so I want to talk to them a little bit about how they did that why they came to that because other people are making other moves. It’s a great way and they’re growing inside their firm rather than growing outside, like we’ve talked about with with Sarah, for example, as growing outside her firm. So yeah, and Mario as well. So it’s really sort of going to the other end of the spectrum, which I think this will be a really interesting way to talk about it with these guys. And of course, hanging out with rich and Bill is is always fun. Absolutely. Awesome. So that’s gonna be it for us today. Thank you so much for being with us. I am Jay Ruane, affirm flex. He is Seth price of blue shark and we are Max growth live. Thank you for being with us. And we’ll see you Thursday. 3pm Eastern, another edition of maximum growth live shooter McGavin out. Take it easy, folks. Bye for now.

Speaker 1
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