Joe Sanok:

Once we’re able to deconstruct the emotions and the triggers behind it, then we can say, “Okay, I have overvalued work. I don’t want to work 70 hours a week.”

Chris Dreyer:

It’s almost like a negative or taboo to think about working less. Like, they’ve been disciplined to work more.

Joe Sanok:

One thing that we all recognize is our best ideas never come when we’re stressed out. It’s not when you’re in court for 40 hours a week and you’re burning the candle and getting phone calls. It’s not like that’s when you have an aha moment. We rarely have aha moments when we’re stressed out and maxed out.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. On these special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors and attorneys in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services, and strategies to help law firms not just survive but thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Now, this isn’t about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links. It’s about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s go.

Grit and determination: If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have a lot of both. But unchecked hustle can lead to burnout, and rarely do we have brilliant ideas and breakthrough moments when we’re completely burnt out. Our best thinking happens when we slow down and give our mind space to wander freely. So how can we create more of those aha moments? At the end of the day, all we have is the same 24 hours. It’s up to us to use them wisely. Today’s guest, Joe Sanok, offers simple yet powerful approaches to slow down and get the most out of each day. Host of The Practice of the Practice podcast, Joe is a TEDx speaker, business consultant, and five-time author. His latest book, Thursday is The New Friday, explains how service providers can earn more while working less. Here’s chief vision officer at Practice of the Practice, Joe Sanok.

Joe Sanok:

Both my parents worked in the schools. My dad was a school psychologist. My mom was a school nurse. The message I always got as a kid was do really well in school and someone’s going to hire you. And so I did. I did honors college, got a double master’s degree, went and worked in the nonprofit world.

I remember when I was working as a foster care supervisor, I started to get this twitch under my eye. It was so stressful. I was on call all the time. These kids were just having such tough lives. The staff were fresh out of college and often so under-prepared for just the trauma they were going to experience. I started this side gig counseling practice. It was literally just to pay off student loan debt and to be able to afford a mattress, like a new mattress. Let’s save up $1,000 for a new mattress, it takes months and months to do it, and to whittle away at that student loan debt.

As it grew, I eventually got a job at a community college and was working over there and was having interns underneath me in the counseling department. Those interns, after they graduated, needed a supervisor and oftentimes said, “Hey, Joe. Will you be our supervisor?” So as I was their supervisor, their natural next question was, “Hey, you have this private practice. Can I work there?” So I quickly became a group practice owner while I had a full-time job.

I remember in 2014 I signed a lease for this side gig practice. I then had three 1099 contractors, so I got this four-office suite, had a view of the water. I ran over there during lunch from the community college. I’m doing a session there and then run back, and I go to my basement office with no windows at the college. I realize, I’m making more money at this side gig counseling practice than I am at this full-time job.

Luckily, I had a daughter at that time, used the full Family and Medical Leave Act to be able to test out where… I worked halftime at the college to be able to just pay for the healthcare and just have some basic income, and each month was better than the next. At the end of the FMLA, I left on great terms with my boss. She saw what was happening. She knew I wasn’t going to stick around forever. Left with their blessing and really never looked back. Throughout that process, though, I started a podcast so that I could just interview people and not have to pay them. So I started a podcast. Now we’re almost up to a thousand episodes of that podcast.

Chris Dreyer:

You’re the chief vision officer for Practice of the Practice. You offer one-on-one coaching. You offer podcast launches and podcast services and event and website services. So give us the overview of your business, what you guys provide.

Joe Sanok:

Our core signature programs are our membership programs. From the moment someone thinks, “I want to start a private practice,” all the way until they’re selling, exiting, going national, we have programs along that whole user journey. At the very beginning we have Next Level Practice. It’s $99 per month. It’s a membership program that people stay in as long as they want to, so similar to Netflix. Most people are as full as they want to in their solo practice within four to five months. We have small groups as a part of that. We have weekly teachings. We have a whole host of e-courses, live events with experts we bring in, and then they get discounts on services like website design. So we’ve got several hundred people that are in that that are paying 100 bucks a month.

Once they get full or are close to full, the next question is, when do I add my first clinician, either W2 or 1099? Then we have a six-month program called Group Practice Launch. So people sign up for that program. That’s $250 a month for that six months, so $1,500 for six months. But they’re guaranteed to make their first hire in those six months, or they can come back through that program for free as long as it takes. Most people make two to three hires in their first six months to just go from solo to group. So we walk them through that whole process. There’s e-courses that support it, small groups, all accountability partners.

Then after that we have Group Practice Boss. That’s $150 a month at the time of this recording. It’s a similar model to Next Level Practice where we have the weekly meetings, but they get access to everything below it. So they get 12 meetings a month if they want to go to it. That’s way too much for anyone. They shouldn’t be going through that much training. You should be implementing more than that. All the e-courses, all the small groups. So all the support you need to be running a group practice at that point.

Then after that we have Audience Building Academy. That’s people that want to go national. They want to start a podcast. They want to be an influencer. They want to take their trauma expertise and go out to the world. Get a book deal. So we help them build an audience first. Because most people that are highly intelligent, have gone through grad school, they start with the product first. Like, “I want to sell this Mastermind. I want to sell this thing.” They sketch the whole thing out, and then they don’t have any audience that even wants that. So when you build an audience first with Audience Building Academy or on your own, your audience will tell you what they want to buy. They’ll tell you, “Here’s the pain I’m feeling, here’s the product I wish that you had, and here’s the price I’m willing to pay.” Then you can say, “Okay, I can do that. That was really easy.” So we help them walk through that process of building their audience.

So that’s our core. Then we have spinoffs from all of that. There’s one-on-one consulting. There’s some people that say, “Hey, I inherited some money. I know that starting a practice, I’m not going to make that money right away by hiring a consultant for 1,000 bucks a month. But you know what? I just want to launch this thing really fast.” So they’ll hire one of us. A mega-group practice might hire us or someone that’s leveling up outside of that into doing more public speaking and writing books. So we have four consultants in addition to myself that do that work. We have a team of 10 in South Africa that do all the backend support, so websites, social media design, podcasting, anything behind the scenes except for answering the phones. We don’t want to touch that. Then beyond that, we have little affiliate links and things like that that, if people are signing up for hosting, we monetize those as well.

Chris Dreyer:

Nice, nice. I really encourage our audience to check out the infographic that you made that divides things into marketing logistics and then the service itself. I think it’s really helpful, especially just the networking aspect of it, too, which I find just… “Hey, use this tactic. It works. It’s proven.” I’ll link to that in the show notes.

Joe Sanok:

It’s so funny you bring that infographic up. That’s an infographic that, literally, in the middle of the night I got up to go to the bathroom early on, I was still working at the college, I wrote down the idea on a piece of paper. Went back to bed, totally forgot about it. Had no design skills. Went into Word, did all those word bubbles. I’m glad I put practiceofthepractice.com at the bottom because I think it’s been re-pinned over a million times now. But it literally was one of my first info… I think it was my first infographic I ever did, and it’s one that people just find so helpful. It was just a middle-of-the night idea that I put up when I first started Practice of the Practice, and people still reference it.

Chris Dreyer:

I think even the timelines in it are very reasonable. I think that sometimes you hear these just crazy things, a little bit like SEO’s in that six to eight range. So I love it. Everyone should check out that infographic. But you offer something different in your events. You have the Slow Down School, a conference for high-achieving entrepreneurs. It’s a week of planning, work, and insight to help business owners refocus. How are you helping these attendees get so much work done in just a week?

Joe Sanok:

I think one thing that we all recognize is our best ideas never come when we’re stressed out. It’s not when you’re in court for 40 hours a week and you’re burning the candle and getting phone calls. It’s not like that’s when you have an aha moment. We rarely have aha moments when we’re stressed out and maxed out. So just starting with that, when we go for a walk, maybe after a workout, or we’re taking a shower, or maybe we go for a drive and we just decide to turn the radio and podcast off and we’re just going to think, for me, it’s the first 10 seconds of any meditation. My brain is like, “Oh, it’s time to be quiet? Not going to happen,” and I get all these ideas. We all recognize that we have great ideas when we slow down, so I started with that concept five or six years ago with Slow Down School, more on a hypothesis. What happened to me was just, it shocked me as much as you. I was a skeptic. I wasn’t at the beginning saying, “We’re getting this much done in one week.”

What we do is people fly in on Sunday. We meet together. We talk about our goals for the week. We talk about who we are. We connect on personal levels. Then on Monday and Tuesday, we genuinely slow down. We go for a hike at some of the most beautiful spots in America, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes National Lakeshore. It overlooks Lake Michigan. Most people when they think of a lake, they think you can see the other side, but it looks like an ocean, which shocks most people that haven’t seen the Great Lakes.

Then I often bring in a massage therapist who does massages in the middle of the forest, so full on forest bathing, which for some people, they’re like, “That is out of my comfort zone.” For other people, they’re like, “That sounds awesome.” Do whatever you want. If you want to just sit on the beach and drink a beer, that’s cool too. We bring in an executive chef. We have a salad bar that’s farm to table. They literally grow it there on the grounds. So we have amazing food, we have amazing people for those first couple days, and we’re not allowed to talk about business.

What happens is, day one, people are like, “Oh my gosh, I flew all the way to Michigan to come to this conference. I spent all this money and time. I’m away from my practice.” They get all amped up. Then by day two they’re like, “Why the heck don’t I do this more? Oh my gosh, I woke up so rested by hiking four miles yesterday. I feel like my body needed that.” They’re like, they want to live in that glow forever. Then Wednesday and Thursday and Friday morning, we run full tilt towards their business.

What naturally happens when we slow down is those best ideas come to the top. The things that maybe on Sunday night we say, “Here’s my goal. I want to double my revenue next year,” okay, maybe by Wednesday they say, “My marriage is really bad. I’m working way too much. I want to work on that and figure out my time to work fewer hours, but I still want to increase the revenue.” So then there’s that clarity that happens. Where then when we do sprints and I teach them how to figure out their sprint type, how to figure out exactly how they best sprint, we do these 20-minute sprints, I’ve seen people that were stuck for months get things done in those 20-minute sprints that they couldn’t get done for six months.

I had one guy, he was in a Mastermind group. Every time it was his turn for a hot seat, he wanted to write a book. He is this amazing marriage therapist in the Chicago-land area. Had a huge practice. He’s known. He had been all over the country. He hadn’t written a book. There was something about outlining a book that, every time he’d have his hot seat, we’d talk through what to do to take those first steps, and he wouldn’t do it. So when we took those 20 minutes, he spent his first 20, he said, “Joe, can I talk to you for 20 minutes to plan out my future sprints?” So we talked through what to do. In one sprint after that, he got nine chapters fully outlined in 20 minutes, this thing that had been hanging over his head for six months. He realized, “If I have a book that outlines my method, that’s going to be a game changer for me. That’s going to be a multiplier. It’s going to go beyond this ‘I show up, I get paid’ type of thing.”

So over and over, we now see that people have launched businesses. There’s a therapist that launched an SEO company there literally by just asking people around saying, “I like SEO. Would any of you want to be customers?” She got 10 customers from that group with just literally an idea. We see it happen over and over. When we slow down, it’s actually easier to go kill it and do the right things.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s incredible. I’ve been to a lot of these retreats. It’s most of the time the opposite. Most of the time, it’s, you’re doing the workshops, and boom, you do the activity at the end. It’s kind of interesting to hear in that meditative, you’re not thinking about work and it opens your mind up to creativity. When you’re talking about sprints, are you talking about agile scrum? Are you talking more like maybe workblocks, workflows like, I think it’s Pompadour, that method? How do you define a sprint?

Joe Sanok:

So we keep it really simple. We always say is, for 20 minutes, we’re going to work on something. So literally, there’s all these different ways that people conceptualize it. For me, I’m like, whatever works for them. But within Slow Down School, it’s, “What’s one big thing that you’ve decided you want to do?” For example, Michael, who he did the book, this book had been hanging over his head over and over for two days. It’s like, “I got to work on the book.” Okay, let’s break that down into 20-minute segments of things you think you can probably achieve in that period of time.

So we do a quick standing meeting with everyone, go around, “All right, what are you going to achieve during this 20 minutes, anywhere you got stuck?” So you spend two to three minutes just quickly, like anyone’s stuck, “What do you need help with?” Then they go for 20 minutes. “Raise your hand if you’re stuck.” I float around with all the participants. Then we come back together after those 20 minutes, usually stopping midstream so that we’re still in that flow state, and then just go back into it. For me, I think there’s lots of great techniques out there that we can borrow from. But really, what are you going to get done in 20 minutes? If you’re stuck, let me know.

Chris Dreyer:

Kind of segueing right into that is you get the new book. It’s Thursday is the New Friday, and it’s all about making money only working four days a week. I started off, there’s a little bit of the skeptic, right? Most of our attorney listeners, they’re grinding. Many of them, even when they’re doing their core values exercises, they have true grit as one of those values. It’s almost like a negative or taboo to think about working less. Like, they’ve been disciplined to work more. So what are your arguments against that? What have you found of this idea of working less but being more productive?

Joe Sanok:

I think one thing we need to look at even before we get into that is, where does that come from? The industrialists taught us that people are machines. They taught us, we plug it in, we get a certain outcome. The Model T kicks out of the assembly line. In 1926, that’s when Henry Ford instituted the 40-hour workweek. It was specifically to give people the weekends so they would buy cars from him even if they worked for him. So the industrialists taught us that you’re a machine. As an attorney, you have output. You get paid for that output. We then now look, and we say, right now we are living in a post-industrialist world. I would hope most people value people beyond what they can achieve. There’s many areas of what the industrialists taught us that we have deconstructed. Yet, there are still very valuable things that they gave us. So there are lots of jobs, such as an attorney, where if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. That’s very similar to therapists, to counselors. If we don’t show up, we don’t get paid either.

Where I think the problem is, and we’ll get into the four-day workweek, is that we haven’t set up for ourselves, what is enough? What are the goalposts? Do I want to make 200K a year? Then how many weeks a year do I need to work? How many hours a week? How many billable hours, how many marketing hours, how many things I do get paid for or don’t get paid for to know what those goalposts are. Now, when I look at that and the kind of life I want to live, do I want to live that way?

It’s so tempting when we get a phone call at 8:00 p.m. from a client saying this crisis is happening to take that call. Now, we get to decide as business owners if we want to do that. Part of especially attorneys is having that hustle, being available, being able to, when your client’s in crisis, talk to them, and you bill high rates for that, as you should. But being able to say, “Here are the boundaries for me, here are the boundaries that I articulate to my clients,” that allows us to say, what kind of life do I want to live? Which then gets us into, why are we working this much? Now, you referenced that for a lot of people that’s really hard to not hustle so much. That’s part of their ingrained grit that they have. That’s true for a lot of people. I talk in a whole chapter about the overvaluing of work in American society and the undervaluing of fun. So doing just some really simple experiments to think about, is this the life I want to live?

I have this Plus one/Minus one exercise where, when you go into the weekend, whatever that looks like, if your weekend’s one day, you look at, “What’s one thing I could add to this day that may add more value to my weekend than in the past? I want to try something new.” It could be, “I want to tell my kids that I want to go drink coffee and read a book that’s not about business. I’m really into sci-fi, whatever. I just want to do that for an hour on a Saturday morning and just not be interrupted by those dang kids.” Okay, let’s give that a whirl. Do you feel better? Do you feel more prepared for your week when you do that? Then the minus one is let’s take one thing out of your schedule from the weekend. Maybe you do your grocery shopping every Sunday, and you hate battling the crowds. You’re an attorney that’s charging all these rates. You probably could just have your groceries delivered. Try that for a Sunday and see if you feel better.

What you mentioned about conferences where we work hard and then we have the play at the end is how we often think. We reward ourselves after doing hard work. Oftentimes, what happens is our weekend is in reaction to the week before, instead of in preparation for the week ahead. We don’t say, “What can I do this week that’s going to make me set up for success next week”? Instead, it’s, “I am so fricking tired. I just need to have a drink and watch Netflix.” That may be what you need, but also, is that preparing you for Monday morning? And if not, what do you want to adjust over that weekend?

So once we’re able to deconstruct the emotions and the triggers behind it, then we can say, “Okay, I have overvalued work. I don’t want to work 70 hours a week. The amount of money that I’m making is as much as I want, or I want to make more, so maybe I have to raise my rates, maybe I have to change my marketing, find new clients, whatever,” but then starting to say, “What are the hard and soft boundaries around this? If I worked fewer hours but wanted to make the same amount of money, what would that look like?” We can dig into whatever areas you want, but I think it’s important for us to dig into that emotional side of how we got here before we even say, “Here’s the techniques of what to do.”

Chris Dreyer:

There’s so much to unpack there. It makes me think of Mike Michalowicz’s book, Profit First. It’s like taking the fun and then creating the life around that, instead of taking profit after the fact, after you pay expenses, so to speak. It’s a similar type of concept, and I really love that. You mentioned the billable hour. Does this make you gravitate more to the value-based fees model and not cost-plus and get away from that billable hour? Have you even taken that into account into creating this type of outcome?

Joe Sanok:

Yeah, absolutely. With my consulting, people could look at that and say, “Well, it’s X number of dollars per hour.” Over time though, we say, “Well, what are people asking for? What helps them get that outcome they’re looking for?” So the typical person will do six months of consulting with me. It’ll be $1,500 a month or so. The actual time I’m spending on it is about 60 minutes total in that month. But how do I give someone $1,500 worth of value where they say that return on investment is through the roof? So we have different Mastermind groups that I don’t run, that I have an accountability coach run that is other people around that same phase of practice or business. We have all sorts of… a whole library of courses that we’ve created. We have a whole library of experts we’ve brought in, people like Mike. He did an hour-long Ask the Experts. So people get access to these things to make their consulting more effective and to get better outcomes in that by having it not just be talking to Joe twice a month for 30 minutes.

So even just starting to think through, where are there opportunities within my practice to say, “Sure, you get my billable hours, but are there extra supports, extra things, paperwork that is very common that you can start to streamline? How can we implement some AI as a part of this?” where you’re still spending time on it being the final eyes and ears to make sure that everything is legally done correctly and that it’s not entirely your own time that’s going into every outcome that you’re working on.

Chris Dreyer:

I think that the expertise perspective from that, I heard… I can’t remember which book I read, but it was like some piece of equipment wasn’t working. The guy came in, and he analyzed it, and hit the hammer once, and it worked and charged like a thousand bucks. He’s like, “No, you’re paying me for my expertise and all the knowledge that I acquired to learn where to hit the hammer.” So you mentioned some leverage there. We’re talking about value-based fees. You mentioned some leverage from AI. AI’s all the topic, all the rage right now. Are there certain aspects of AI that you’re implementing in your practice to help you be more productive?

Joe Sanok:

One thing that I’ve been doing recently, and it’s more me just testing it out before I give it to the team so eventually this will be a team member that does it, but just in between podcasts and meetings, if I have 15 minutes, I’ve been making very specialized, authoritative posts around particular topics. For example, just did one of how to start a counseling business in California. So I told AI I want a 2,000 word article on this. But then once I got the first draft, it was pretty basic. It was, “Set up your legal framework.” It’s like, I know that in California there’s certain things that, like, a counselor can’t be an LLC in California. You can’t. But the AI didn’t pick up on that. Then I went to other websites and attorney websites and quoted them and filled that in. But it took eight minutes to maybe build this 3,000 word article all about California. So building those lead generators that are highly, highly specific, that’s one thing I’ve been doing lately. Even just, anytime that I have any sort of presentation, I have it at least start in AI.

I would say it’s more of an initial brainstorm, that energy that goes into, “Okay, I’m presenting on this particular topic. I need 20 slides on this. Sketch out what I should say in each slide.” Then I put that into a Google Doc, share that with our marketing team who builds out all the slides. Then from there, I’ve obviously put my own content, my own stories into it. But that initial brainstorm energy is where we’ve been at least testing AI right now with mostly information-based consulting and podcast.

Chris Dreyer:

You’re the host of The Practice of the Practice podcast. It seems like it’s mostly geared towards counselors, but I imagine there’s considerable overlap just in the professional services space. What can an attorney expect to learn if they tune in?

Joe Sanok:

Unlike a lot of the other therapy-type podcasts that are 100% just about, “How do you run a practice? What are the nuts and bolts of it?” if I find something interesting, I want to interview someone, the lens that I go through just happens to be the lens of private practice. For a lot of people that are in massage therapy or attorneys or dentists, they get tremendous value, too, because we’re talking about some sort of service-based business, and how do we find that to be successful?

To me, the basic core is there’s people that don’t know you exist that need your services and in some way they need to find you. That’s mostly networking and marketing. There’s lots of things we can cover in networking and marketing. Then the other half of it is, what happens after someone contacts you? What’s the user experience? What are the operations? What are the workflows? If we just look at any service-based industry and say, “How do people find you? Then what happens?” that’s your people. That’s my people. Then I can interview people through the lens of a counseling private practice, but it’s applicable to anyone else.

I’ve interviewed Mike Michalowicz, talking Profit First. I’ve interviewed Pat Flynn to talk passive income. I’ve interviewed Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman to talk about marriage therapy, and a lot of people that are just practice owners saying, “Here’s how I think through it.” To me, whether it’s in our membership communities or the podcast, I believe that as a community, we’re going to be way smarter than I ever would be. So to just say, “Hey, how are you doing this? How are you thinking through it?” Even though you’re podcasting to a different audience, Chris, how do you think through podcast sponsorships? How do you think through when you do affiliate links or joint ventures or don’t you? When do you sell your own products? Those kinds of conversations across industries, we can learn so much from each other. Then I have a lens I’ll view it through, and you have a lens you’ll view it through, and then we’re both better because of that relationship.

Chris Dreyer:

Those questions are exactly what I think about, too. You’re right. I use it as a feedback loop. I think this is an amazing conversation. We’re talking about productivity. I’m just learning so much from our conversation. But it’s the best form of knowledge that you can obtain because you can take your curiosity to that level and ask the real experts on the topic.

So on that, so on podcasting, how do you think about sponsorships? I think about OPM, right? If I sold sponsorships, even a 30-second midroll, is someone really going to tune out because there’s a 30-second midroll but could potentially allow me the funds to maybe invest in other entrepreneurs to pay for them to come on the show or to enhance distribution or the quality? I could get multiple employees to enhance the audio and things like that and expand our team. So how do you think about those types of components as it relates to podcasting?

Joe Sanok:

I think one of the problems with the typical model of cost per thousand is that that’s based on a Joe Rogan-type show where it’s the huge audience and you’re getting 30 bucks per thousand people. For shows like yours and shows like mine, if we start with, how many regular listeners do we have per episode? So just really basic. Even if it’s a hundred people, that’s not a bad thing when you’re looking at sponsorship when you’re hyper, hyper niched. Then what’s the average net worth or income of that individual? So thinking about, if I have therapists that are listening and they’re charging $150 to $200 per counseling session per 45 minutes, if I can save them 45 minutes with some product, theoretically, that product should then be worth 200 bucks for that hour, if they understand just basics of simple ROI and their time. There is some teaching of your audience there.

So for me, just starting with, what are all the things that people ask me that have potential products that they could speed things up? Websites, for example, Brighter Vision is one of our sponsors. They specifically make websites for counseling therapists. TherapyNotes, they have an electronic health records that’s only for therapists. They’re across the whole US. We take the receptionists, so they have this iPad thing where, instead of people coming and sitting in your lobby and then all the therapists awkwardly put their heads out like ostriches, the person checks in like at a professional doctor’s office. They just put in their date of birth, and then a text goes to someone. So finding those things like that.

Then we’re having people pay $1,000 to $1,500 per episode for that mention and doing three episodes a week. Then we have more than enough to be able to have a professional team to say, “How do we keep raising the bar?” We have a sponsor coordinator that every single month follows up with our sponsors and says, “Here’s what went live this month. Here are all the links. Here’s what’s happening next month. Your plan includes all of these things.” So they never have to question, “Wait, did you do the social media posts? Did you not do the social media posts?” Even by doing that, we just were talking at the time of this recording with all the people for next year in regards to their sponsorships. Over and over, we keep hearing, “You guys communicate better than any of our other sponsors,” so they keep wanting to increase their sponsorship. That’s how we do multi-six-figure sponsorships because we keep reinvesting at each phase.

I didn’t have a person early on. It was all me because it was just me. Then hired a sound engineer and then hired show notes people and just slowly did that, hiring. A lot of that now AI is helping with. Then to fund it, we’re like, “We know how to do this. There’s lots of different podcasters out there. Why don’t we quietly offer to other podcasters that we can take over their show and do all the behind the scenes?” So we’ve got, at any given time, five to 10 podcasts that we’re supporting, that then that helps fund my team as well.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s incredible. Then you could even maybe do the podcast network and do the dynamic ad insertion and go that route. For the attorney listening, we’ve kind of got this split dynamic. We’ve got the large volume practice that’s advertising a lot direct-to-consumer, that’s doing the TV, the radio, the billboards, and we’ve got this other that maybe is getting a lot of peer referrals. They’re litigating these very intensive cases, and they’re low volume. For the high volume business, is this a great avenue for them from a direct-to-consumer perspective? It’s definitely phenomenal for the litigator, for those referrals, getting your authority out there but isn’t an avenue for the B2C players.

Joe Sanok:

I think that you really have to be careful in that area, because when you look at how much just in time it costs to put on a podcast. Say you had an attorney doing a podcast. You look at what their hourly could have been. You look at how much cost goes into the average podcast, $100 to $200 per podcast, if you’re going to just outsource all of it. I always like to think through A/B testing whenever you’re looking at any marketing. Say it’s $700 for that one hour of podcasting. If we put $700 just into Google Ads and then compared those two, how’s that going to perform?

For most of those larger practices, it’s often so regional that you’d be better off having a regional podcast, hire some college student to say, “A history of crazy accidents that have happened in northern Michigan,” and then it’s like, “Brought to you by these accident attorneys,” something like that, that’s going to be highly specialized in an area, if that’s where your audience is. Because lots of places aren’t going to be across the entire nation, but podcasts inevitably will be. What happens if you get people from states that you’re not licensed in or other places, then, sure, maybe you could expand. But as a direct marketing tool, I would say podcasting wouldn’t be my first area to typically spend time with such a niched in area or topics.

Chris Dreyer:

Joe, this has been amazing. Just one final question here. What’s next for your business, and where can people go to find you?

Joe Sanok:

We spent the last year and a half really working on our operations so that we wouldn’t have cracks if we grew. So for me, as an innovator startup guy, I like new ideas. That was very hard for me to walk through that process, but I’m so glad we did because now we have the systems to really scale. We just did this thing called Level Up Week where it’s our big sales event. But really we’re in a growth phase where we’re looking at the products that we already offer. Instead of launching too many new ones, we just dive in and offer those. We have found that people, after Group Practice Boss, when they’re at that seven figures are asking, “What do you have for us?” So we’re offering this seven-figure Practice Club that we’re going to be opening up in January 2024 for 12 people. So that’s a new product.

But for the most part, we’re going to just keep doing what we’re doing and growing. The team is reining me in from too many new ideas, which I think is good. We need to do what’s working. We need to find that 20% that gives us 80%. Really, for me, it’s been a full circle back to that kind of scrappy… when it just was me, of saying, “Okay, when I’m working, I’m going to run. I’m not going to outsource everything to the team. I’m going to get my hands dirty again.” For a while there, I had outsourced almost everything, and it wasn’t working a whole lot, which was great, but also, I felt so disconnected from the business. I have a new energy around it and just that original scrappiness.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Joe for sharing his insights. Let’s go over those takeaways. Stop, take a breath: When you’re stressed out and juggling a million tasks, your focus is on keeping all the balls in the air, not innovating. Pause: Strategically, taking a breather can unlock creativity and enhance productivity.

Joe Sanok:

We rarely have aha moments when we’re stressed out and maxed out. So just starting with that, when we go for a walk, maybe after a workout, or we’re taking a shower, or maybe we go for a drive and we just decide to turn the radio and podcast off and we’re just going to think, for me, it’s the first 10 seconds of any meditation. My brain is like, “Oh, it’s time to be quiet? Not going to happen,” and I get all these ideas. We all recognize that we have great ideas when we slow down one week.

Chris Dreyer:

Rethink free time: Are your weekends a reaction to the past week, or are you proactively setting yourself up for success?

Joe Sanok:

I have this Plus one/Minus one exercise where, when you go into the weekend, whatever that looks like, if your weekend’s one day, you look at, “What’s one thing I could add to this day that may add more value to my weekend than in the past? I want to try something new.” It could be, “I want to tell my kids that I want to go drink coffee and read a book that’s not about business. I’m really into sci-fi, whatever. I just want to do that for an hour on a Saturday morning and just not be interrupted by those dang kids.” Okay, let’s give that a whirl. Do you feel better? Do you feel more prepared for your week when you do that? Then the minus one is let’s take one thing out of your schedule from the weekend. Maybe you do your grocery shopping every Sunday, and you hate battling the crowds. You’re an attorney that’s charging all these rates. You probably could just have your groceries delivered. Try that for a Sunday and see if you feel better.

Chris Dreyer:

Look for efficiencies: If you notice that you’re doing a task over and over, can it be automated? Can AI step in to take the lion’s share of that work? While the AI output isn’t perfect, it provides a solid starting point that you can refine and customize. AI can save you hours of manual work.

Joe Sanok:

If I have 15 minutes, I’ve been making very specialized, authoritative posts around particular topics. For example, just did one of how to start a counseling business in California. So I told AI I want a 2,000 word article on this. But then once I got the first draft, it was pretty basic. It was, “Set up your legal framework.” It’s like, I know that in California there’s certain things that, like, a counselor can’t be an LLC in California. You can’t. But the AI didn’t pick up on that. Then I went to other websites and attorney websites and quoted them and filled that in. But it took eight minutes to maybe build this 3,000 word article all about California, so building those lead generators that are highly, highly specific.

Chris Dreyer:

All right, everybody, I hope we added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Joe and Practice of the Practice, head on over to the show notes. While you’re there, lead me a five-star review. I’ll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.