William Franchi

This is my model. This is working for me and I’m going to keep running with it as long as it continues to work.

Chris Dreyer

To target your marketing efforts for the most returns, you need to understand your positioning.

William Franchi

We’re going to get it right, we’re going to get it right the first time. If something messes up, you’re just going to roll with it because the only person that knows that you messed up with exactly what you were going to say is you.

Chris Dreyer

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five star review button, and if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one star review. I got a big hug for all my haters too. Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s go.
In markets where big name firms are spending top dollar to saturate traditional media, you can still capture a large audience. With social media, you can reach massive amounts of people at a fraction of the cost. William Franchi, managing partner at Franchi Law has done just that. His Tampa based firm is in competition with some of the largest names and personal injury. Instead of trying out spend them, he invests in channels that work for his firm. He has found success by reaching thousands of potential clients through social media. Today, William explains how to understand your firm’s positioning and see greater returns on social media marketing. He dives into boosting engagement and how to handle the endless stream of comments. Whatever your marketing budget is, William offers insights on how to ramp up your social game. Here’s William Franchi, managing partner at Franchi Law on how he got into law.

William Franchi

I played college baseball and I was going to go coach college baseball and I ended up having Tommy John, which is elbow surgery. Ended my season, ended up tearing it again while I was rehabbing, so more or less ended my career. I very quickly added an additional major during my senior year, graduated with two majors and then went into law enforcement and it was well within law enforcement, I said, “Hey, I should have a backup. I should get an upper level degree because if something ever happens, I have something to fall back on.” And that’s actually how I ended up with the law degree was I actually worked midnights and went to law classes during the day, in the mornings actually, and then would sleep a little bit after that. But I was chasing a guy Thanksgiving morning in 2009, I stepped in a storm drain, tore my hip up and ended up having some pretty major hip surgery.
I was almost done with law school at the time, and my plan was originally, “Hey, I’m going to stay at the sheriff’s office. And I’m going to work my way through the different departments and go work in general counsel’s office and do all that.” And after I’d gotten hurt and I was trying to come back and a buddy of mine’s wife said, “Hey, we have an opening in our corporate general counsel,” so I interviewed for it. I was like, “Hey, this is the right move at the right time,” so I didn’t have this extreme lifelong dream of I’m going to be a lawyer. I’m the first lawyer in my family. My little brother who’s 10 years younger than me, followed in my footsteps. I say little, I mean he’s 30 years old now, followed in my footsteps and he’s a lawyer also. We’re the only two lawyers in the whole family.

Chris Dreyer

Wow. When you were going to law school, were you looking at the criminal defence side? Was that kind of the original goal? Because now I know with your firm now you specialise in PI. Was that where you’re leaning towards and then you had this experience? Tell me about that.

William Franchi

My goal was actually stay at the sheriff’s office. I was like, “Hey, you had to do 25 years at the time. I could retire at 48.” So the sheriff’s offices here are large enough that at least the two that I worked at had their own lawyers that were employed by the office itself. That’s where I envisioned, once I got kind of old enough and passed the, “I’m going to go chase people and I’m going to go to all the different specialty departments within the agency,” that was kind of the plan as I thought about criminal, just partially in the sense of I interviewed with the state attorney’s office, I was like, “Well, this should be a good fit, pretty natural fit to go from law enforcement to the state attorney’s office.” And then I interviewed, did all everything, and then I got what they were going to pay me.
Quite frankly, I said, I can make more working at the sheriff’s office, plus just a little bit of off-duty extra work than I would’ve made at the state attorney’s office. And oh, by the way, I have to pay back student loans. So I couldn’t make those numbers work. I didn’t like working in the general counsel’s office. It wasn’t for me. It’s just a different type of life, especially transitioning from working in law enforcement and being on the go went out and about to, you’re in a cubicle every day. That’s it. That is your life. Eight to five, there you go. And so I sent a bunch of emails out to a bunch of different places and one place responded and they happened to be a personal injury firm. We actually did a little bit of sports work, professional sports representation together, the owner and I, that’s really kind of how we got here today.

Chris Dreyer

I appreciate the hustle. I mean, not only what it takes to be a competitive collegiate baseball player and having those setbacks and then going to night school and you’re tired, you work all day and you’re like, “Hey, I’m also going to get my law degree and let me put myself through that.” And it worked out. You hit that pothole and here we go. And you decided, you open your practise around 2017. When did you know it was time that you should start your own practise and what was the plan to kick this off and get it going?

William Franchi

I had met a couple of guys at one of the gyms that I had gone to at the time. They did private equity real estate work. They did big dollar transactions and they needed somebody to review contract. Working in general counsel’s office and from doing work in professional sports, I knew how to review contracts and negotiate contracts. So I would do a little bit of billable hour work with them, review their contracts. One of the guys who was a partner with them, there was three guys. One of them played professional football and he was getting towards the end of his career, he was ready to retire. They took me to lunch one day and they said, “Hey, we want to start a title company because we’re going to be doing all these real estate transactions.”
You can start a law firm. We don’t care. We do what you do what you want. But the title company, and they ran through all the numbers and everything else, and I told them, “No.” I was making more money than I could imagine even working for somebody at a firm. I was just like, “I get guaranteed money. I’m making really good money. It’s great. Why would I give this up?” And then I started looking at the numbers that they were talking about and what it would look like to start my own business and go from there. And I made it from the lunch table where I told them, “No, absolutely not. I’m comfortable. I get a good paycheck.” My son, I think was six months old, and by the time I got out to the parking lot, sat down in my car and I started thinking through the numbers and then called them right back and go, “Actually, you know what I thought about the numbers I’m in.”
Started that and at the same time started the personal injury firm, which I actually had planned on transitioning a little bit out of personal injury. I was a little bit burnt out at the time from personal injury and was like, “Hey, let’s do the business side and let’s do contract stuff.” I kept getting personal injury clients and I kept coming back to it, and it was just kind of this realisation of, “Why am I going to try make myself something that I’m not when I’m really good and I put a lot of time and learning into the personal injury side. I’ve tried cases, I’ve done all these different things. Why try to reinvent myself?” And the law firm took off and the title company kind of stayed stagnant, grew a little bit, and I ended up long short buying them out and then selling the title company to focus solely on the personal injury. That’s been two years now at least that since I sold that.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, it’s so interesting. A lot of people are trying to discover the destination of where you’re going to end up and where the focus should be. And a lot of times these mentors and coaches, they tell you this in retrospect, but you need to have these experiences before you choose your niche and your specialisation because all of those experiences brought to where you are today and now you have this passion, you have the focus. One of the things I was looking at your website, it says, I read this review and I’m going to kind of paraphrase it just a bit. It said, “I chose Franchi Law because they were local, had great reviews and weren’t one of the big firms I see on TV. I contacted the office on a Saturday morning and after hearing the details of my case or the phone, an investigator was at my house within 45 minutes, and that was a Saturday morning.” So first you’ve kind of took a stance against the TV advertisers. So tell me about your positioning and how you think of positioning in terms of your brand.

William Franchi

I’ll start with, actually, that was probably me who took that phone call. I take all the after hours calls. Obviously during the day, it’s a little different because we have full staff, so it’s not it’s just me in a Better Call Saul office in the back at a nail salon. But TV is interesting. I’ve tried a significant amount of TV and gotten burned every single time. Morgan does a great job. Morgan, they’re everywhere. So just about anybody who’s listening has probably at least heard of them. They spend so much money. And my initial thought was, “Well, if I do it a little bit differently, I can spend significantly less and go about it.” So I’ve tried TV several times. I tried OTT, the over the top, the basically TV commercials for streaming and spend a lot of money on that and I saw a little bit of results with that.
But we have probably five or six really large law firms, including Morgan and Morgan in Tampa. Unless you’re going to outspend them, TV makes no sense at all. So where I’ve taken the branding and positioning, I’d say over the last year and a half is away from completely away from TV. I won’t do TV again. OTT may be in the future, but to me it’s the social media, it’s the website presence, it’s all of those pieces that reside on being in somebody’s phone.
Not necessarily that computers anymore, but they’re on their phones, they’re on their iPads. I want to be everywhere where they are because this is my model. This is working for me and I’m going to keep running with it as long as it continues to work. And I’ll be the social media guy, and you got to have thick skin. I mean, there’s no one commenting back on TV commercials. It doesn’t matter how much of a scumbag you actually are on TV, and I don’t mean that to anybody that’s on there, but the comments that I see on my social media, I mean, half the people out there think I’m the biggest scumbag have never spent two seconds talking to me.

Chris Dreyer

Let’s dig into all of this. You said so much there. I’ve heard Glenn Lerner say this, I’ve heard James Faren say this. They all say, “Hey, you got to saturate the market for TV, and if you’re not one of the top three spenders in TV, just don’t do it.” So on that boat, I’ve had a couple others say, “Oh, you can get a little strategic,” but you’re kind of on the, “Hey, you got to really saturate the market to make TV work if someone’s considering that.”

William Franchi

The last venture that I did was this lead gen. I spent think 60 grand over a two-month period for spots that ran, I think three or four days a week in a really condensed timeframe and got one phone call and it was produced by the TV station following the model that the consultant said worked for the other places. So even taking it on that level and essentially kind of taking the equivalence and what we did was we looked and said, “Okay, here’s…” not we, as me, but the TV station, this is where, “Hey, these spots cost more, but there’s not a lot of competition.” And it gets into, I guess a little bit of the nitty-gritty of how the big firms buy their media because a lot of times they want to sell you the court shows, for example. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked into a doctor’s office that has the court shows on. There’s seven PI attorneys with commercials back to back. How are you going to separate who’s who?
The only one that’s going to out outpace that noise level is the highest spender unless you are going to be everywhere. And I think honestly today it may be more than just who’s going to spend more if you’re going to go that route. I think it’s more than who’s going to spend the most in TV, who’s going to spend the most in TV, but who’s also then going to spend the most in billboards, who’s also then going to spend the most in radio? And if you hit those three, yeah, sure. I mean, that’s how Morgan and Morgan get, I would assume a vast majority of their cases. But I mean, you can’t throw a stone and not hit a billboard or hear a radio commercial or TV commercial.

Chris Dreyer

To be memorable in any market, you need saturation and repetition. Over the top or OTT ads live on streaming platforms like Hulu or Netflix. But be careful because those CPMs can really add up. The repetition can be challenging because the environment is so fractured. This means that the user’s attention is split among multiple platforms, which can dilute your messaging. William explains his experience with OTT ads.

William Franchi

A local TV station approached me and said, “Hey, they wanted to come in and talk.” They’re actually the ones who got me with the consultant. They came in, they pitched it. Look, I liked it. I really did. And from a branding perspective, do I think that it may have made some impact? Yeah, I do. But at the end of the day, if it’s not actually producing cases, I look at it and evaluate and go, “Does it really need to stay? When you’re talking about spending eight, 10, $12,000 a month, which in the big scheme of advertising isn’t necessarily a lot, but you start getting more than that, you got to bring in more than a million dollars every single year just to justify that spend, which means you’re bringing in $100,000 every single month, and it just becomes this kind of give and take of, “Where do we want to be?”
So do I like OTT? Yeah. And it essentially fits within my model and thought process of I want to live everywhere that is online. For me, it just wasn’t the right place, wasn’t the right time because I’d rather take those dollars and put them into a more direct with Instagram and Facebook and lower level TikTok. Just a little bit with YouTube, I do pay per click, I run my own pay per click and I run it just on The Law Father. So if anybody puts in the Law Father anywhere, we’re coming up with a pay per click ad.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, I think that’s super smart. I mean, you got to protect your brand. You got to protect your taglines and your identity. You’re crushing on social media. You got over 100,000 followers on Instagram. You got over 30,000 on TikTok. You got to have a very engaged audience. Now what you said is totally true. I’ve seen it myself, right? Doesn’t matter how nice you are, how valuable the content is, you’re going to have your trolls and your haters and all of that. So let’s start with Instagram. Let’s just focus on that channel. I know that kind of there’s crossovers each, how do you grow following? What’s kind of just the overall strategy and your mindset when it comes to being successful on that platform?

William Franchi

Probably a little bit of luck to begin with because some of what started the kind of trend of all of a sudden we had all these followers and all this engagement and all of these comments were things that I did somewhat tongue in cheek, partially because we had been stuck at 1600 followers for a year, year and a half. And the break point was I had one company running it, and then I said, “Well, I want to bring it in-house, just going to find somebody, hire somebody, run it in-house.” And so we actually technically run it in-house, although she now has her own company that she runs for social media, she does a tonne of engagement. So I know from one aspect there’s this mix of engagement. You got to get in with your audience, you have to go on and view and like and do all those different things, all those things that I don’t necessarily have time to do, which is why we put the money into someone who actually goes and does that type of thing.
But yeah, I mean it started with, I think it was one of two, I can’t remember which one was first, but you should see your girlfriend video, which it came from a real case. I mean, I got a lot of people who are like, “You’re a scumbag.” It generated from a real case that I had and it’s an amazing thing. I see a lot of relationships break up because of car accidents. Just for whatever reason, it’s enough of a stressor that people go, “Okay, we’re going to go our separate ways.”
And that’s what had happened and that’s where that one came from. But the next, that was extremely tongue in cheek. My six years in law enforcement, I spent working drugs. I worked in high drug areas, found a lot of drugs, and I could tell you the statute backwards and forwards. Well, it’s actually in Florida at least, it’s not actually illegal to use drugs because in Florida it’s only illegal to physically possess it. So if you could find some way to, and this was the kind of the long version of it, if you could find some way to use a drug without possessing, it actually wouldn’t be illegal. So it was just like catching lightning in a bottle where all of a sudden you got those comments and now we got the spike of people being engaged and interested and now take that plus the engagement. And it just grew and grew and grew from there.

Chris Dreyer

I’ve had several successful attorneys on the pod talk about their Instagram strategy. I can’t think of one that was just like, “We just give value and tell them what to do after a car accident.” It’s always something like how to argue a lawyer that was Jefferson Fisher. Yours is, should you sue your girlfriend after a car accident? Do you think, is it being different? Is it the humour, is it the controversy? What do you think goes into this?

William Franchi

I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I think some of it comes down to the person. And look, we do most of those videos in one take and we don’t have a script. So Ashley will come in and she’ll go, “Here’s the topics that I found. And I’ll go, “Okay, here’s the ones that I found.” We will literally just go off of should you sue your girlfriend or can you sue your girlfriend? Right. That’s it. That is the starting point. There’s literally no script after that. I come up with it about 10 seconds before she hits record. I think of it in my head, and the first time it’s uttered is right there on video. So some of it’s the person and can you be engaging? I mean, if I were to just sit here and in every single video go, you should sue your girlfriend because you can.
Or it’s not illegal in Florida to use drugs, right? No one would care. It wouldn’t matter how controversial it is. So there is some aspect of how fun can you make it? And I mean social media’s entertainment value, but that’s kind of where I see it, is that can you provide some entertainment along with, and I get more and more comments on when I see people out that, “Hey, that’s really good advice. That’s really usable,” especially the gun stuff. People apparently in Florida like their guns. It generally generates a lot of comments and feedback and a little less controversial, I think, than some of the drug and alcohol ones.

Chris Dreyer

Interesting. And then the time commitment and the cost. So mentioned TV, you’re talking 30K a month, 60K in a two-month period, and that’s not even saturating, it’s not enough. And OTT’s kind of similar from my experience. And then you’ve got social. Everyone talks about social’s free, and I’m doing air quotes because you also have a lot of time involved in it. And if you have a team, then you got your team. So talk to me about, do you have a cadence where maybe once a week you come in and shoot theses or tell me a little bit about that, a little behind the scenes.

William Franchi

I know people could look at our Instagram and go, well, you had 1600, and then almost seemingly overnight you have 108, 109,000 whatever it is. And we bought zero of those. I know there’s places that you can actually go buy followers. We legitimately bought zero. And right now, for the last couple of months, I’ve run really minimal ads on social media. Part of it’s November, December are not a good time to run ads. And we actually signed more cases in December than any other month this past December. So I said, well, we’re going to take a break because we got to take care of some other things, so we’re going to pause some of that. That’s the beauty part. You can jump in, jump out, and there’s not really a ramp up. But as far as cost goes, I mean, yeah, the ad spend can be minimal.
The ad spend is definitely far less than OTT. I mean, if I took the same OTT budget, we would saturate all of social media. YouTube’s a little bit more expensive than Instagram, TikTok’s I think the cheapest, but there is a time commitment. We’ll generally do two weeks worth of videos in about an hour, hour, hour and a half at least in terms of shooting it.
Now my social media manager comes in and she’ll shoot the videos and then she edits them. I would imagine there’s probably a few hours of editing because we try to shoot it all in one take, we kind of cut down on the editing, and I was on TV for a little while, and even though it was a tape show, I always treated it as live. I kind of got into that mentality, “We’re going to get it right, we’re going to get it right the first time.” And if something messes up, you’re just going to roll with it because the only person that knows that you messed up with exactly what you were going to say is you. I think we cut down on some of the time. And then the cost for her is in the big scheme of things, minimal less than what I was paying for OTT. Great.

Chris Dreyer

Yeah, that’s awesome. So you batch it, you get together, you have the editing, you got the team helping you. We mentioned earlier you got people that get upset and people say things and you have your community management aspects. So on one side of the coin, you need the comments, the likes and the engagement, the content to drive up your visibility in the feeds. But on the other side of the coin, you got just sometimes it’s just mean remarks and all this stuff. And I know on Facebook you can block these individuals, you can… What’s the balance? Do you just let them all roll and just let them go? Or do you occasionally block some haters? How do you make that decision?

William Franchi

It’s like this. I keep very minimal notifications on my phone just for everything. At one point, I turned the notifications on for comments. For whatever reason, I may have changed the setting, and I did it by accident, comment after comment after comment. As much as I go, it doesn’t bother me. Every time you get an alert on your phone, you go to pick it up and it’s, “You’re a scumbag. You’re this, you’re that,” I got to a point, and I had called Ashley and I was like, “I can’t do this. We got to do something different. I can’t keep doing these controversial things.” And I actually may have asked her to take it down.
She didn’t, which was good. I turned the notifications off. Now, every once in a while I’ll look to see what the comments say, and I think because it’s on my time and it’s when I deem that I’m going to go through and I’m going to look at some of them, and it’s not this constant bombardment, I can do with it. And what I’ll do is I could care less about the ones that are, you’re this or that, lawyers are trash, whatever. And if I see one that actually makes sense, I’ll respond back. I had another PI lawyer in Tampa trying to tell me I was wrong about something in the comments. I’m like, “Number one, really? You want to get on this back and forth? And number two, yeah, I know the case law on this one. So you’re not really all that right.”

Chris Dreyer

That’s fun. I’m sure your loyal followers appreciate that too. And you go back to back. That’s so exciting. You found your channel that you’re just crushing it on. You’re doing really well on social and you’ve had these experiences, and I imagine too, if you wanted to go back to TV in the future or OTT, now you have the experience where you could go plough into it and you know what it would take because you’ve spent the money and you’ve invested there. Where can individuals go to connect with you and what’s next?

William Franchi

On all of our socials, it’s @TheLawFather. So it’s @TheLawFatherTampa for Instagram, @TheLawFather for everything else. What I see as the next step really is a lot more on YouTube, really gotten reels down, gotten TikTok down without having to do any of the stupid TikTok dances. YouTube Shorts is probably our next step. I have a podcast as well it’s Law Father Podcast and trying to try to dive into legal topics, sometimes sports topics. And I run those on live like TikTok live, Instagram Live, and then it’s on every place where you can find podcasts, that type of thing. So that I think is the next step, is expanding the YouTube aspect and expanding the podcast and getting it out there more.

Chris Dreyer

Thanks so much to William Franchi, managing partner at Franchi Law for everything you shared today. Let’s get through the key takeaways. It’s time for the PIMM Points. PIMM Point number one, traditional marketing channels are a great way to target specific audience, but the barrier to entry is extremely high in saturated markets. Evaluate your budget and your position. You may see a bigger ROI when direct marketing to potential clients over social.

William Franchi

But to me, it’s the social media, it’s the website presence. It’s all of those pieces that reside on being in somebody’s phone. This is my model, this is working for me.

Chris Dreyer

Point number two, to see success on social media, ya need to have an angle to get attention. Stiffly reading the law probably won’t get you engagement. Successful accounts provide value and are entertaining. Every attorney we’ve spoken to who has seen success on social has a thing. They invite you into their kitchen for a casual coffee and chat about employment rights, or they casually explain how to argue like a lawyer in their car. William found success in stirring the pot and getting a little controversial. Whatever you do, create interesting content and views will come to you.

William Franchi

I know people could look at our Instagram and go, “Well, you had 1600 and then almost seemingly overnight you have 9,000, whatever it is.” We legitimately bought zero. And right now, for the last couple of months, I’ve run really minimal, minimal ads.

Chris Dreyer

And PIMM Point number three, do it in one take. No matter how robust your budget, the more time you spend recording, the less time you’re spending on other areas of your business. William batches content and treats each social post like a live TV show.

William Franchi

I was on TV for a little while, and even though it was a tape show, I always treated it as live. So I kind of got into that mentality, “We’re going to get it right, we’re going to get it right the first time, and if something messes up, you’re just going to roll with it because the only person that knows that you messed up with exactly what you were going to say is you.”

Chris Dreyer

I’m Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far, it’s time to pay the tax. No, I’m not talking about taking your cash like Big G. I’m asking you for a five star review on Apple or Spotify. Leave me a review and I’ll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome and thanks for hanging out. Come back for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. Now get out there and dominate.