In this episode, Jim and Tyson finish their talk with attorney Will Norman. This time, he will give us an update on his process and explain his “5, 5, 5 Plan”. Also, Jim and Tyson will go through a list of suggestions to help Will move forward with his firm.
Will’s 5, 5, 5 plan consists on building 3 different referral networks and to obtain 5 cases from each of them. Jim and Tyson will share their thoughts about it…
“When you are starting out, I think it’s helpful to think big, and not arbitrarily hold yourself back…”
List of quick tips from Jim and Tyson after reading Will’s questions in the Facebook Group:
1. Don’t answer your own phone.
2. Have a system to capture all the information you can from anyone who calls so you can add the to your database.
3. Nitch down.
4. Take notes, CRM, keep track. “As you grow, you want people to know what’s going on with your cases.”
5. Focus on the big things. The vision. The goal.
6. Have a lead magnet strategy. Keep track of client questions.
7. Outsource
Tyson’s tip: https://icomoon.io/. A really cool and simple app to create icons, designs and more!
Hacking’s hack: http://www.monkeypodmarketing.com/. A course to teach you about automation. It’s excellent.
Will’s tip: A book. MacCarthy on Cross-Examination, by Terence MacCarthy. A great resource on how to get what want out of cross examination.
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Transcripts: Strategy ft. Will Norman
Jim Hacking
When you’re starting out, I think it’s helpful to think big. And to not arbitrarily hold ourselves back. I think that one thing about Dean Jackson that I really like is this notion of, you know, with the before unit that the before unit is the part of the business that’s supposed to bring in cases, and that that department should not care at all at all about the production.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum ROI Podcast. I’m Jim hacking at the types of music they’ve given us. So we have our recent guests will Norman back on the show this week, we’re going to talk through some more of the issues I think last week was a good groundwork of what’s going on in wills situation. And we’re excited to have him on the show.
Will Norman
They will call but it’s all thanks for having me on again.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, well, so last week, we went over some of your questions about really, how to get started now that you and your firm split your partner. I think this week, we’re going to focus on really suggestions on how to move forward suggestions for me and Jim. But in the meantime, just want to give us an update on on any changes things you’ve done in the last week, to sort of move things forward.
Will Norman
Sure. So just got a couple of the nuts and bolts things figured out, got my office space, real great place with a number of other attorneys, one of which is criminal defense. But the other ones do different kinds of civil litigation. So I think there could be a good opportunity to both cross refer, but also to just kind of brainstorm about, you know, running a small, smaller solo practice, and kind of best practices, things of that nature, you know, kind of EIN, and bank accounts, and all of that stuff kind of figured out. And then I worked on my marketing strategy a bit. And I told you a little bit about the 555 type of approach. And I took a look at it. And it looks like the amount of cases that I would need. And maybe we’ll get into this a little bit later, to make that work is probably more cases that I can do. So I think that what I’ve determined is I need to find a way to increase my average case value. And so I was hoping to pick your brain about that particularly Tyson as you’ve done some criminal defense work. Sure. And
Tyson Mutrux
who can I know it is this last week to 555 plants. So we tell people what that is. So they have an understanding of what we’re even talking about. Yeah, so
Will Norman
I was trying to put some numbers together. And I didn’t want to overthink it and try to get so granular that, you know, I figured out to the penny and how many cases and how many hours I wanted to set some goal and then try to work towards it. So I set a goal for revenue of $250,000. And I don’t know when that would be if that’s a two or three year goal, or, you know, a five year goal or a one year goal. But at any rate, I started to break that down. And I said, Well, you know, 250,000 in revenue is 21,000 a month. So if I could get started looking at maybe a suite of the cases that I do, you know, from, you know, low level kind of tickets for misdemeanor cases all the way to the higher felonies. And, you know, what’s, what’s an average case value is around 2100. So that 2100 bookcase value 10 cases gets you 21,000. So, guys, okay, well, how would I get 10 cases? I said, Well, why don’t I try to do I want to build an attorney referral network that gives me five cases a month at an average case value of 2100. I want to have a website that gives me five cases a month and an average value of 2100. And I want to have a bail bondsman network that gives me five cases a month to 2100. Now think that it’s pretty clear that, you know, that’s a long longer term goal to build those networks. And then they’ll probably build on evenly. And, you know, this isn’t an immediate thing. But just thinking about it in those terms. It doesn’t seem like it’s kind of pie in the sky. When you’re saying, Look, I want to build this referral network. I just wanted to give me five. And now that’s pretty significant. But at the same time, it’s not. It’s not a moonshot, I don’t think so sort of thinking about it in those terms. And then basically, it was looking like I’m bringing on 1015 cases a month. And so I think that it would be better if I could get my average case value up to like 3000. I only have seven cases a month. That’d be more realistic in just handling the docket. So anyway, that’s kind of the strategy I tried to think about, and I’m sure it’ll have some adjustments and tweaks but it was just kind of a simple way. Just think about it just to build a network separate networks, all they’re feeding your five.
Jim Hacking
So I had some thoughts about what you just shared will. And I say this with all the love and due respect that I can give you. But why do you think that’s the limited number of cases that you can handle, I feel like that you said something that sort of caught my ear. And that was that, you know, you said, I want to get this many cases, because that’s the amount that I can handle. I mean, I would encourage you to think perhaps of 10 times as much when if you got 50 cases, instead of five from each of those referral sources, I understand the the importance of having realistic goals, especially at the beginning. But I think at least from a mental exercise, I would encourage you at this stage to not tap what you could bring in based on what work you can perform. I know obviously, as attorneys, we have an obligation to provide competent and thorough representation to our clients. But I think that when you’re starting out, I think it’s helpful to think big, and to not arbitrarily hold ourselves back. I think that one thing about Dean Jackson that I really like is this notion of, you know, with the before unit, that the before unit is the part of the business that’s supposed to bring in cases, and that that department should not care at all at all about the production. And that if you are going to limit yourself to cases, the number of cases that only you can do, then you’re really gonna cap out pretty quickly. And I think that I would encourage you to think about leverage with an associate down the line. And you don’t want to arbitrarily throttle yourself at this early juncture. I
Will Norman
think that’s, that’s sound advice. And I have been thinking of how to kind of benchmark and how to plan my growth, so that at x capacity of cases, or once we’re bringing in so many cases, you know, when would be appropriate to get an associate. And I haven’t worked those numbers out yet. But you know, I think that as long as I have a realistic understanding of when I would have to bring in more, more help to handle the subset of cases that would help me kind of expand my thinking in the way that you’re talking about. So I think that’s great advice, I’ll definitely incorporate into my thinking going forward is not to not to think small, think big, and then grow accordingly.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, I had the same thoughts whenever you were talking about that Jimmy did. So I think you keep using this word capacity, maybe get away from that word, maybe think about a little bit differently. And I think that another way of putting what Jim was talking about, I think if you if you put your systems in place, if you get everything moving well machine, you’re not gonna have to worry about the numbers and how many cases you have to pump into the pipeline, you have to worry about the capacity or anything like that. Because once you have the systems in place, you’re gonna be shooting cases through and taking care of them and really taking care of clients and doing a really good job. I want to address the thing about the price points. So you have essentially in your five by five plan, you have three feeders, give your website referring attorneys and bail bondsman, at least in Missouri, in Illinois bail bondsman are not saying in Missouri, they are their big thing, rural counties. So the lower end cases are from bail bonds and a website placed in Missouri that may be a little bit different from where you are. But in Missouri, those are lower in cases. So it can be harder for you to get that higher price point. But if you focus on the attorneys, the attorneys are the ones that are really pumping you up, doesn’t want to Hey, man, my guy will he knows what he’s doing. I refer all my cases to him, he’s gonna take care of you. Those are the higher value cases where you can really increase the value in what I mean increase the value, you can double and triple your fees in some cases, because no matter what it makes sure you’re providing the value that they’re gonna get for that. But some of these referral partners when they send you a case, no matter what that clients can hire you just because that attorney gave their work. So you may want to revise your plan and focus on that middle section of referral partners, because you can charge a lot more money. And I’m pretty sure any of our listeners or any other attorneys that focus on referrals from other attorneys will last for this. They’re much better clients usually. And you can charge significantly more money. So if you’re wanting to raise your rate, you may want to devote your attention to that, as opposed to the other two buckets.
Will Norman
That makes sense. Yeah, definitely. I guess. I did. Consider the fact that, you know, even though I’m asking for, you know, this many referrals at this price point, that as I went through that process, it’s very likely that, you know, one referral source or another would give me more referrals, and that different referral sources would be at different price points. So I’d kind of thought that it would kind of turn out, you know, as I get more information differently, but I think that that’s, that’s good advice on I’ll definitely take a look at that. And I guess the the one last piece is I’m trying to develop different referral sources. But then the other question was, of course how to triage it and how do you prioritize? And I think, as of right now, in given what you two are saying that my focus is going to be on attorney referral network, and then also the website, just because that takes time to load. So you really got to get out in front of that, because it has a lagging success rate, if you will. So yeah, sound advice again,
Jim Hacking
alright, so we’re gonna go into some sort of quick tips from Tyson. And Jim, we spend a lot of time talking about the overall practice. And we want to get sort of granular and talk about some, some nitty gritty. My first piece is one that Tyson I talk about a lot. And I want to make sure that when you go out on your own, that you’re not going to be answering your own phone, but you’re going to have a buffer so that people are calling to pick your brain and sort of get free advice and that you really have a system in place to not answer your phone, and that you also are capturing all the information from anybody who calls so that you can add them to your database.
Will Norman
Yes. So that’s one of the first things that I addressed was kind of putting together my systems one, the first thing I did was make kind of a flowchart of how a receptionist would handle the calls. And basically, if it becomes a critical case that there would be some intake information obtained before she scheduled a call back. If it’s a referral case that it’s the information sent to me, so I can refer it out to my preferred attorneys. And then if it’s an existing case, to schedule a call back, and I’m looking for some virtual services to try to help me out in the beginning here, open to suggestions. Of course, I heard your great episode on Ruby receptionists I’m definitely looking into them. But there’s a lot of different providers out there.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, if you want to send us a message, actually, you know what we’ll do on the Facebook page, I’m used multiple different companies. And I think Jim has to so we can give you a few options. Ruby is the most expensive, but they’re by far the best. So it just depends on really your price point. And really what you want. There’s other ones out there that are comparable, but not as good. So And just so we’re clear, we’re given these tips. These are based on question you had given to us. So may want to post those questions on the Facebook page, where you had a question about considering criminal defense of the niche. And then also maybe niching, down even more than that. And my suggestion to you is, if you can niche down even more, and we sort of talked about this last week, but if you want to take just sex cases, or become the like the Fourth Amendment guy, like we talk that are just federal cases, things like that, at least in St. Louis, there’s a lot of attorneys that just do one or two things within the criminal realm. And they do really well, because they’re known as that guy, or that gal. So you may want to consider doing that. So that’s, that’s one of my suggestions. And then on top of what Jimmy was just saying, you had a concern about cases possibly falling through the cracks as you grow. And what Jimmy said, make sure you have some sort of database to put those those clients into whether it could even be a spreadsheet, you know, it could be just that if you want to start off with that, but you want to have a CRM and I recommend the CRM because you want to take notes, like your life depends on it. Because if you drop dead tomorrow, you want to want to be able to hand this all of your files off to another attorney, so they know exactly where the case is. So that’s why I’m saying take notes. That way, when as you grow, as you have attorneys come on board as you have paralegals or assistants come on board, they know exactly what’s going on. When it’s just you, you may think, oh, it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t take notes. I know what’s going on with the case. But you really do because you’re going to forget things. But the most important thing is as you grow, you want people to know what’s going on with your cases, that way they can help your clients also have on that part of it. I think you’re sort of getting away from this, but you were sort of driving yourself insane. I think with this paralysis, think about all the small things you need to do. Don’t worry about that worry about the big things, focus on the big things, the vision, the goal, things like that, all the all the small things on the place. So like Jamie said, we’re going to go through these as quickly as possible. So we’ve got a lot of suggestions, we want to make sure we get through all of them for you. That works for
Will Norman
me, I’m all ears.
Jim Hacking
Alright, so my next one will is Have you thought about a lead magnet about something that’s going to help to get people when you have your website up and running to leave their contact information. I think that if you haven’t thought much about that, or if you haven’t started working on it. I think what I would do is for the next month, I would just keep track of the questions that people ask you the most and whatever the top 10 are the answers the spiels you give to people when they come into your office, I would turn that into a white paper or a special report, make it free to for download just traded email address for the report.
Will Norman
So I haven’t given that some thought. And I think that the two is Tyson’s point I think the two areas I’m going to look to focus on would be Ovi eyes and then general Fourth Amendment cases that really meshes with what I’ve done my entire life and having a detective for a father and brother, you know, I just kind of understand how those things work and think in terms of probable cause a Fourth Amendment issues. So I was actually wondering on the lead magnet, if it should be something more general or really try to target maybe Ovi is such a good volume practice, you know, to say, you know, the five things you must do if you’ve been charged with an Ovi. Right, and I’ve put something together to that effect, or more generalized because, you know, I practice in all areas, you know, the 10 questions to ask your criminal defense attorney before hiring him. And so I put those things together. I don’t know if you guys have an opinion on, you know, would you go more narrow, specific, because you get kind of super qualified leads? Or, you know, more general because it covers a broader swath?
Tyson Mutrux
No, so I think your second one is spot on, shoot me an email, I’ll give you an example of the one I have. For criminal defense, it’s, it’s very similar to that one. And all the questions are targeted to funnel them towards me. And so you talked about specific awards, you know, did the attorney at Does the attorney have this award, things like this one last time, the attorney tried to case things like that, so and then I give suggestions that are neat. You know, if an attorney hasn’t tried a criminal case, in the last six months, you may want to think about somebody else, things like that so often is to use the other chance to look at a bad thing, that’s a great one, because what it’s doing is actually funneling them towards you with each one of the questions. So make sure each one of those questions is targeted, so that it will put you in a favorable light, that’s a big glass technique, if you look at any of his little books, he’s done the exact same thing. We’re basically just funneled with all the clients or all the questions will follow the client towards you. And also, it filters some of the clients out so those that’s that’s another point that’s on the questions. And with your lead magnet, the conversion numbers have been better for for sheets until like tip sheets, things like that, as opposed to books recently. So if you listen to in your reading the conversion blogs or list a lot of podcasts a lot more, I wouldn’t say all of them because I know Jimmy’s book, and it’s pretty good. But if you’re just looking at capturing leads, while the conversion numbers will tell you that it’s better just having a tip sheet or one sheet of questions as opposed to a large books, you may want to consider that as well, and maybe even test it out to have the book and then on one and then have the actual tip sheet or questions on another and test the conversions to see which one converts better.
Jim Hacking
Speaking of websites, well, what’s your plan with the website? What do you what do you think and as far as your website, and I know, you got your own domain name and everything, but what do you think and as far as layout and content, so
Will Norman
I had a few hours meeting with my friends over at in Hill, Willie and Michael Hill, they do nursing home law. And they are the real sharp guys came from a top plainness firm went out on their own, and they just, you know, eat, breathe and live this stuff particularly well on the website. And they’ve given me a lot of good ideas on how to generate content and what content to generate. And then, you know, additionally, they’ve kind of given me some of the guidance on, you know, kind of how to structure a website. So for instance, you know, for the purposes of getting a faster load, you want to use a couple of different of the WordPress, which is schema or Genesis, that gives you a faster load helps you out on SEO, and then what they had recommended in, you know, attempting to just build it out for the first time, essentially, to go get your WordPress theme figured out, you know, get a couple of pages of content. And then essentially, they said to go to a site called Design crowd, and you basically put in a description of what you want in your site, and different designers will submit you, you know, I don’t know what it would be, I guess examples or I guess quotes, where they give you an actual website, built out a bit. And then it’s an iterative process. So you can say I like this, I don’t like that. And they ended up I think getting their website done for $1,000 or something. And, you know, it’s it’s incredibly sharp if you go there. So that’s what I’ve been thinking, I’ve put some of the content together. And, you know, I’m on design crowd. So I have a username and all that. And I plan on submitting the description sometime here this week. But again, you know, that was kind of the conversation I had with it. It seemed to match with not trying to go too heavy on spending initially will still get a good product, but I’m open to suggestions or if that sounds like a you know, that has some sort of fatal flaw to it. I’d like to hear it.
Tyson Mutrux
I actually think that’s a great idea. I don’t disagree with that. Jimmy, do you?
Jim Hacking
I mean, that’s roughly what Tyson and I did. We both click WordPress themes, and we had people that are helping us implement it. And so I think that crowdsourcing that are going out to a virtual assistant or something like that is perfect.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. So that’s actually a good segue, Jimmy, because you asked some questions well, about really, when to hire and outsourcing. So I’m gonna talk about all those in one little summary. So a couple of outsourcing services that people will look at. And we’ve talked about before on the podcast, the cheapest but they’re, they’re deceptively been increasing their prices, as Fiverr, FYI, ve r.com, you can get this is more for quick jobs. I’m having your letterhead design it designed for five bucks, things like that. Now, they have been giving multiple options now where you can get like packages for like $30, or $100. So their prices are increasing. So just be mindful of that. Usually, you can get things done for five bucks, but it usually takes a week or two to get them done, as opposed to, you can spend like 30 bucks to get it done the next day. So just keep an eye on that. upwork.com, which used to be oDesk. I love Upwork. I’ll reveal my numbers. In a later podcast, Rob, look them up. But it’s insane how much I’ve used up work over the last three years, I was actually surprised whenever I started, I ran the numbers to see really how many hours of work has been done. So I’ll talk about that in a later podcast, you wanted to know what to outsource or delegate and day one, phones, definitely you want to delegate or outsource it. If you outsource, music services that we talked about Ruby, whatever it may be scanning, you definitely want to delegate that if you scan, I don’t get paper files, and then also coding the documents, I would outsource that. So that’s what we do. I get one of my assistants to scan documents. And then we have someone actually code those documents. And then also bookkeeping is one. And then the last one is transcription, I get a lot of worked on transcribing documents, I transcribe pleadings, blog posts, whatever it may be letters. And then a big part of question was When to hire. So when to give you some facts to consider if your work is suffering. So have you noticed a decline in the actual customer service aspect of, of the whole client experience, make sure you that maybe assigned to you want to hire, you have too much to do each day. So you’re spending more time in the office, you’re not getting that done. So that’s obviously a sign. If you have at least six months of overhead in the bank, that may be in the you’re in a position, you may want more than that. But I’d say at least six months of overhead in the bank where you can actually support payroll and paying for your rent and everything else. Another factor that you may want, that you may overlook is, you know, the actual work to do going forward. And the only way you’re going to know that is if you track your leads and track your numbers and know where things are coming from. Because if you don’t know those numbers, you may not know that but if you have the work, and then also the space, okay, so when you do this get to buy computers, you know, you’ve got to buy to train people to get other procedures in place. So you can’t hire less Yeah, that stuff in place. But again, the space that’s once overlooked, your rent will increase quite a bit once you start hiring people see, like keep that in mind. So those are all factors you may want to consider when you want to hire. Yeah,
Will Norman
that’s a big question for me. I mean, you know, you say right off the bat, you know, have scanning outsourced and or at least done by someone else, and you know, a couple of other on site things. And, you know, my thought was to remain solo, just have, you know, one of the receptionist service and a bookkeeper outsourced. Now those have to be done on site, I imagine there’s not another way that you can do scanning. So you’re saying get someone in maybe even a couple of days a week to do to do the scanning and all that
Tyson Mutrux
law student with Jimmy talked about last week, get a law student, that could probably be your best bet to start off, because they’re not going to want a ton of hours, and you’re not gonna have to pay him a ton of money. So the lawsuit will be a good one. Perfect.
Jim Hacking
All right, so we’re about at the end of the show, I’m going to go ahead and wrap it up with everybody and we’re going to do our tip or hack of the week. So Tyson Do you have your tip of the week.
Tyson Mutrux
So remember, we’re designing websites or designing lead magnet, things like that one of the biggest headache is doing the actual icons or logo, things like that, that go on to your website or into your lead magnet. So Jason was really put me on to this app. It’s called Ico moon. Sounds like icon moon with Ico m o n. And it’s an app you can download. And it’s really cool. It’s really simple. If you have a lot of different icons, you can use and download and put them on your website or wherever you may need them. So, Ico Moon is my tip of the week.
Jim Hacking
Alright, so for my hack of the week, Tyson and I are getting ready by the time you guys hear this in Fusion Khan’s annual convention icon 2017 will be over. But while we’re out there or another be spending some time with my man I’m Greg Jenkins, and Greg used to work for Infusionsoft as a trainer. He has a program that’s very reasonable to teach you about automation, I think it’s about $29 a month, I’ve learned more for the $29 than I have in just about any kind of Infusionsoft related field, he does. The best job I know of explaining it simply and concisely teaches you the real basics. He’s got some very reasonable tutorials that you can learn about how to use Infusionsoft how to automate, I highly recommend it if you go to monkeypod marketing. It’s where you’ll find Greg, and I highly recommend it.
Tyson Mutrux
Well, what is your tip of the week,
Will Norman
my tip of the week is a book that I’ve recently read called McCarthy on cross examination, not really a law firm management book more of a sharpen the practice saw there. But it’s just, it’s a really, really great resource on how to get what you want out of cross examination, a kind of, you know, almost brain dead system that will allow you to be the storyteller to your jury or to your judge, control. And, you know, control the witness and basically make it so that their option is either to agree with what you’re saying or look bad. So McCarthy on cross examination, great book, very quick read, and I think a great resource for any attorney who does cross examination.
Tyson Mutrux
I recommend that I’ve read that book. I’ve heard of that action, multiple families. It’s a really good book. So people that are interested in cross examination, unlike Jim hacking, who does immigration work, but that I definitely plan on checking out Jimmy got anything else.
Jim Hacking
For the record? I will be cross examining witnesses a week in next month in May we have a trial immigration attorneys do go to court and do cross examine people, so I might have to check out that book myself. Everybody. Have a great week.
