What Kind of Mickey Mouse Operation is This? 

Walt Disney, the visionary behind Disney World, had to keep his plans a secret to acquire the necessary land. This story serves as a reminder of the importance of dreaming beyond our current realities, believing in our values, daring to make a difference, and taking action. Disney's meticulous operational practices are a testament to their commitment to excellence. From nightly touch-up painting to replacing trees and shrubs, and even strategically placing trash cans every 30 feet, Disney leaves no stone unturned in maintaining its magical aura.

What about taking some of the best practices from Disney World and using it for our law firms? What would that look like? 

Creating a welcoming physical space for clients, considering factors like parking, accessibility, and physical comfort. What about understanding clients as individuals and showing genuine care and interest in their lives? This and more is what Tyson talks about in this MaxLawCon22 presentation episode. 

Episode Highlights:

• 01:23 Walt Disney's four keys to success: dream beyond today's realities, believe in sound values, dare to make a difference, and go out and do the work
• 03:57 Disney's meticulous operational practices, including nightly touch-up paint, replacing trees and shrubs, and maintaining cleanliness with trash cans every 30ft
• 06:04 Creating a sense of belonging and comfort for clients, similar to the feeling of being at home at Disney World
• 10:54 The importance of involving clients and allowing them to play an active role in their cases
• 17:20 The importance of recognizing and rewarding clients for their wins and staying in communication with them
• 19:18 Creating a unique and special experience for clients, emphasizing a sense of belonging and identity

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Transcript: What Kind of Mickey Mouse Operation is This? 

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - So in today's episode we're sharing a presentation from Max Lakhan 2022. Keep listening to hear Tyson metrics as we share his talk. What kind of Mickey Mouse operation is this? You can also head to the maximum lawyer YouTube channel to watch the full video. Now to the episode.

Speaker 2 (00:00:18) - Run your law firm the right way. The right way. This is the Maximum layer podcast podcast. Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Tricks. Let's partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Tyson Mutrux (00:00:40) - I absolutely love Disney. Just raise their hands. And I know that many of you that are parents, have you heard that? Raise your hands. That song. Yeah. Get stuck in your head. How many of you have been to Disney World? Yeah, I mean, Disney is a marketing juggernaut, but operationally it is an operational masterpiece. What Disney is, it is 27,000 acres. That's how big that land is. And it's interesting because when Disney was building Disney World, he was constantly reminded of the mistake that he had made with Disneyland because the mistake that he made was not keeping it a secret what he was building.

Tyson Mutrux (00:01:23) - Because what had happened was, is he bought the little plot of land for Disneyland, and then people heard about it and then started buying up all the land around Disneyland. So he could not expand and actually build what he originally wanted to do with Disney World. He had teams that secretly went out shell company after shell company after shell company to go out and buy land. And he actually hired a former CIA agent to to actually do all the covert ops. It was a really interesting thing, what he did, to be able to build Disney World. And by the end, people started to get wind as to what he was doing and they started to buy up land and it probably cost them a little bit extra money. But overall, that 27,000 acres, roughly 43mi², he got it for fairly cheap. Right. It is just an operational masterpiece when it comes to Walt himself. He really had four keys to success. And it's in something that you've probably heard before, Dream, Believe, Dare Do.

Tyson Mutrux (00:02:28) - Have you heard that before? Dream, Believe, Dare do. And what he believed was is dream beyond the realities of today. Dream beyond the realities of today. He was a dreamer and many of you were dreamers, I do know that believe believe in sound values. Hopefully many of you, because you listen to Jim and I talked about this a lot, is having core values. Hopefully you thought about the core values, but believing in sound values. There is a reason why Walt Walt resisted selling alcohol in parks, right? He believed in sound values. He wanted the parks to be about family, okay? He wanted them to be about family. He had very sound values. Dare dare to make a difference. Be different. Right. Make a difference, really important. And then just go out and do it. Do go out and do the work. Right. I talked about execution yesterday. Go out and do the work, get it done. When I was talking about the masterpiece, operationally, what Disney is, I mean, I don't know what if many of you realize the things that they do on a daily basis to maintain those parks every single night they go around, there's a crew with touch up paint and every little knick is touched up with paint every single night.

Tyson Mutrux (00:03:57) - Not quarterly, not weekly, not yearly. It's every single night a crew goes out and does it. Another thing that they do is they go out and they replace trees and shrubs that need to be replaced every single night. And the reason why they do that is to make sure that it looks like opening day every day. That's one of their themes. They want to make sure it's opening day every day. When you've arrived at Disney for the first time, and I want you to think about those of you that have been think about your first visit and hopefully it was a very, very pleasant visit. And just think about how clean everything was and how just magical the feeling was. I just I'm thinking about it now and I just I get these chills because I just loved it so much. Every 30ft there's a trash can. I don't know if you realize that that's part of the reason why it's so clean. Every 30ft in a park is a trash can. And the reason why they did that is they for a long time, they were tracking people and they were saying, okay, at what point do people start to litter? And they realized 30ft.

Tyson Mutrux (00:05:04) - So they were looking at the data, they were collecting the data, they were looking at it, and they said, okay, this is something we need to do. Another thing is that every employee is responsible for picking up gum, and it's amazing. If you've been on Main Street USA, you don't see if you go to a lot of these theme parks, you'll see like little splotches of gum all over the park, right? Not in Disney. You do not see that if someone has happened to have dropped a piece of gum and someone has actually stepped on it, they scrub it up immediately and get it off the ground. They take meticulous detail. Something else that they do is they actually will they have a rule where there's no gum or peanuts sold on site. It's really interesting that you cannot find a pack of gum in all of Disney World. Just amazing. And I'm going to pull up my slides. And what you're going to notice is many of these are just pictures of me and my family.

Tyson Mutrux (00:06:04) - That's all these are these all these slides are going to be you're not going to have to write down a the notes on these slides. But there are some key points that I want to point out as to why Disney is so successful and some of the things that maybe you can do with your firms to make your firm successful. And the first is really a sense of place. Okay, A sense of place. And what I mean by that is a sense of belonging, right? When we arrive at Disney World, we feel like we belong. This is a picture of my coffee cup. We like to say at the Grand Floridian, it's right on the water. It's just wonderful. And we feel when we are there, we are at home. I think about this a lot of times when it comes to just handling cases and running the law firm. I think of Jim when it comes to immigrant home. Right. A lot of his clients feel like they are at home. We spend a lot of time with our people and how they talk to our clients, how they talk with our clients.

Tyson Mutrux (00:07:03) - We want our clients to feel very comfortable. They've got a place. Finally, we hear this all the time. We thought that attorneys were just jerks. We thought that they were selfish. We thought that they only cared about themselves. And you all make us feel like we are at home. So that's something I want you to focus on, finding a place for them. The next one is the sense of being special. So these are magic bands and the actual style of them has changed a little bit. I think this is the first time we went to Disney World and some of the pictures. You'll see how they changed a little bit. But whenever you're there, you feel special just because you're a customer. And if you kind of think through your case processes and what can you do for your clients to make them feel special just because they are one of your clients? One of the things that we do is they they are are people know to talk us up as attorneys, right? You know, Anthony Laramore is one of the best medical malpractice attorneys in the state of Missouri.

Tyson Mutrux (00:08:08) - You're going to be in really, really good hands with him. And when a client hears that all of that apprehension about actually hiring a lawyer and actually hiring this particular lawyer, it melts away. So think about the things that you can do in your firms to make your clients feel special. And maybe that's a John Fisher shocking all box. You know, maybe that's one of the things that you do think about the things that you can do to make them actually feel special just because they're a client. Another thing that is really, really special about Disney is the sense of community that they create. I would like to think that maximum lawyers done a pretty good job of building a community right? When you come to this conference, it is different than most conferences and it's funny to to explain it to somebody before they've been here. It's almost like trying to explain a cult. It's really hard to do sometimes. I'm sure that many of you have had that conversation. I've heard some of you talk about your spouses calling Max Law cold.

Tyson Mutrux (00:09:10) - I think it's kind of funny, but that community is really, really important. What can you do in your firms to build that community? Another thing that they do is exclusivity, right? You can you let them see you let your customers see what they can have access to, but they can't have access to it unless they upgrade to it. And many of these things, I'm not going to give you all the answers. I'm just going to give you some ideas and you all need to go back and think about them. What are some things that you can do to build that community that also have that little. Bit of exclusivity out there to upgrade. And those of you that have those subscription services, it can be a little bit easier for you, right? A little bit easier for you. If I were to do immigration, I think maybe what you could do is you could do an upcharge for certain select services, you could do things like that. Again, I don't have all the answers, but that is something that Disney does really, really well.

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Tyson Mutrux (00:10:54) - This other part this is one of my favorite parts is engagement. They do engagement, involvement, active roles and active participation. And clients want to usually take a part in their cases. They want to have an active role. Now, there are sometimes some people that say, I'm going to pay you, you do the rest of the work and that's fine.

Tyson Mutrux (00:11:19) - But many times they want to have an active role and was something that Disney does. This is my daughter and she is dressed up. Who is this? Who's this Princess Bell, right? She's dressed up like Belle. And we went into this room inside the castle and we got to walk around and they got to play roles. This is my son, Jackson, and he's got to play the role of the horse. Philip So Jackson got to play the role of Phillipe. We paid to do this, but we were a part of the show, right? We paid to come in there, but we got to be part of it. So what can you do in your firms to have your clients a part of the process, have them play a role in the process, be involved in the process? It's a really, really important. Another thing that Disney does really, really well is if you are a regular customer, they reward you. Now, this is not necessarily a reward, but if you look down, there's the lanyard and see the little pins, something that many, many people that go to Disney World do is they will go every single year and they will put pin after pin after pin and they'll have the year on there that they've been.

Tyson Mutrux (00:12:33) - Does anybody in here do that? Yes. Yeah, we got we got a couple people do it. And what can you do in your firm to reward your clients now I don't know how many of you actually have a some sort of practice where you might have a returning client. Right. So and I don't know what you can do in your practices to actually do that, but you can reward them. It's not like a coffee program where you can stamp a card or whatever, but you should think about things that you can do to reward your clients for coming back. Another thing that they do really well, and we talk about this and Ryan McCain talks about this all the time is when it comes to employee culture, right? Having that really tight knit culture, making sure it's a culture where people want to join your firm. This is my son, Hudson. He's wearing a goofy hat. This is my daughter, Emma. She's wearing another hat. She's she's got Disney clothes all over her. But it's having that culture where customers want to promote you, right? Having that great customer client culture where they want to talk about you.

Tyson Mutrux (00:13:34) - And it can be really, really easy sometimes to just think of our clients as numbers. I went through that phase and about 4 or 5 years ago we redid everything because clients were turning into a number to us. Okay, how much money are they going to make us on this case? So it's and what we did is we went back, we went to the drawing board and we started to think of our clients as actual human beings and asking them, how have these injuries affected your lives, asking them about the hobbies that they do on a daily basis. You know, what's your religion? Okay. And the reason why we know that. Have you missed church? Have you missed all the activities that come along with attending your church? Okay. One of my clients, she was an artist. She had injured her shoulder. She's retired. The only thing that she cared about in the entire world was painting for six months. She could not paint. Okay? That was a significant impact to her.

Tyson Mutrux (00:14:27) - Think about how you can support your your customers. Your clients support that culture critic great culture where because you're caring about them as a human being, they're going to go out and talk about you, right? They're going to want to put on your firm shirt. They're going to want to put on the firm. Add and say how great you are. Another thing is, is that Disney does really, really well, is creating physical spaces where you can go. And it's a talking point. This is one where they have a sign with a photographer set up and you go and you stand there, they take a photo and you don't know what's going to be below you. They just say, Hey, make this face. And then in your app shows it pops up this picture and it's a cool little activity that you can do. They also have other photo opportunities, another picture of Emma, another picture of Jackson, where you can go and you can take photographs. And it's a fun little thing, right? These physical spaces.

Tyson Mutrux (00:15:23) - And the reason why I brought this up is think about your offices. Think about whenever a client comes in and what their experience is like, what do they experience. This is something that is an afterthought for most of us. It's something that we don't think about. Who is the first person that they're going to talk to? What's the first thing that they're going to see when they're parking at your building? Where are they going to park? Are they are they going to have street parking or are they going to have what parking is parking free? Is it paid? If you've got garage parking whenever they come upstairs, are you going to stamp their ticket? All of these things think about these physical spaces and how it affects your clients lives. For us, we cannot be in any building that has stairs only. There's just it's just not a building we can be in. We have injured clients many times. They're on crutches. Many times they're in a wheelchair. We have to have physical spaces that make sense for our clients.

Tyson Mutrux (00:16:16) - So this is something that you want to think through, think it through what works for your clients and maybe for some of you that if you do trademarks or if you do immigration, where someone comes to the United States and it's they've actually become a US citizen, you create physical spaces for your clients whenever they get a settlement check, right? Create spaces for them to be happy and then really think about it as a photo opportunity. You can you can create spaces for a photo opportunity recognition. Okay, This is the next thing. And this picture really has nothing to do with recognition except for I like that his hands are up in the air. This is again, Jackson. Recognize your clients for their wins. And I'm not talking about necessarily your wins in the courtroom or your wins for something they did on their case. Recognize your clients whenever something's going on in their lives, Something that we do really, really well in our firm is whenever something happens, whether it's something good or bad, we will send them either a care package where we will send them a card, whatever it may be, and it goes a very long way to building that goodwill with our clients.

Tyson Mutrux (00:17:20) - Because how many of you, every once in a while have an angry client, raise your hands. Okay. How much easier is it to have a conversation with that angry client when you've sent them a care package over the last few months? Pretty damn easy. They're going to give you a little bit of grace. So recognize your clients, know your clients. That's part of it, too, is understanding who your clients are. No what's going on with their lives in their lives, staying in communication with them and then recognizing them for it. And then the last one I want to go over again, just a picture. It's just a picture. It's just me and my family. It has nearly nothing to do with my presentation other than this. There is a Mickey in here and I think on this one, just Mickey, do you know what they call employees at Disney? They're cast members, right? There is a very specific proprietary language that they have at Disney in having that language inside your firm is important.

Tyson Mutrux (00:18:21) - And I want to point that out to you, because we have things like we theme everything. And that's something that Disney does really, really well, is they theme everything. So we do things like we've got these pre deposition calls. We have them called Fact-Finding calls, we have injury impact calls, we theme a bunch of different things. And we do that both internally so people know what things are. But then also this so clients know what they are and what to expect. And they look at them as look at them as benchmarks. In their case, we call our people peeps, right? So we've got that proprietary language where we call our people peeps. They've got passion, they've got energy. They get they energize other people, they execute, they have edge their peeps. That's why we call them peeps. So having that own proprietary language is something that Disney does really, really well, that you can apply to your firms as well. That also helps with that firm culture. So I'm going to leave you with this.

Tyson Mutrux (00:19:18) - We got 40s, so pretty good on time. I want you to go out. I want you to think about these things. I'm going to read them off really quick again, see how you can apply them to your firm sense of place, sense of being special because you're a client. Having communities and membership for engagement, involvement, active roles and active participation. Five Reward your clients. Six Have a great. Like culture seven Having physical spaces for your clients and understanding how those affect your clients. Eight Recognition Recognize your clients and nine having that proprietary language. So I'll leave you with this go out dream believe, dare do. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:20:06) - Thanks for listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your hosts and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.