Bill Hauser:

The difficulty in being an innovator is detaching what your skill is from what the client needs.

Chris Dreyer:

If you’re still doing all the work, you’re still wearing all those hats and you’re still the technician, you just bought yourself a high paying job.

Bill Hauser:

Proper budget allocation will win. The most important thing is not that you received a settlement check, it’s that you’re committed to a bigger future.

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 legal industry. On these special Toolkit Tuesdays, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technology, services, and strategies that 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 on staying sharp in the legal world. If you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, do me a favor. Scroll down to the bottom of the show profile. See the stars at the bottom? Tap those five stars. I’ll be forever grateful. Let’s get started.

Bill Hauser lives by one motto: think big or don’t think at all.

Bill Hauser:

256 million.

Chris Dreyer:

That number you just heard, 256 million, is not just how much revenue he wants to bring in each year.

Bill Hauser:

I only want to capture a percentage of the impact that I provide to the business owners that I work with. I believe that in order to deserve 256 million in annualized revenue, I have to provide a $2.56 billion positive impact.

Chris Dreyer:

Bill is the CEO of SMB Team, a law firm growth company. Bill applies the lessons learned at SMB Team to law firms across the country. They’ve helped 21 firms double their revenue in just one year.

Guys, I’m excited to have Bill on the show today. He has so many great insights. This is actually the second time I’ve had Bill on PIM. The first was on episode 35 if you want to hear that conversation. Check it out. Today we discussed how to go from being a highly paid employee to an owner of a firm, why leads alone will help your firm grow, and how virtual assistance can convert more leads in assigned cases. When I last spoke to Bill, his primary focus was digital marketing with pay-per-click but, like any fast-growing agency, evolution is inevitable. Let’s see where he is now today. Here’s Bill Hauser, CEO of SMB Team.

Bill Hauser:

You and I were on an Inc. 5000 agency panel and we talked about some of the different evolutions, all these fast-growing marketing agencies, and everyone has different approaches. With your book Niching Up, talk about the concept of really claiming that niche. I think that you made it to the Inc. 5000 list. A lot of the other agency owners that were on that same panel with us, they did the specialization route. For me, I just had to trust that the niche of the market I wanted to serve, I wanted to go to a blank slate and design what I believe was the ideal concoction for the subset of the niche that we served.

What happened was I was just doing PPC management for lawyers. I mean, this is two years ago about. We were just managing lawyers’ Google Ads campaigns. We got really good at that, and then we realized that the root problem a lot of our clients were experiencing was they didn’t actually know how to scale their law firm. We could send all the leads in the world to a law firm owner, but if they have no desire to grow, if the leads don’t plug into a plan or a long-term set of goals, what we noticed is that people were leaving our company. Even though we were doing great work at the time, people were still leaving. We started realizing that there’s nothing we can do in our current business model to actually impact a law firm owner expanding their vision and becoming the identity of the future law firm owner that they were destined to be.

That’s where we started thinking, “How are we going to help with that?” One of our core values as a company is extreme ownership. I look at extreme ownership as we don’t point the finger at our client and say, “Well, if you just picked up the phone, if you just converted those leads we sent you, then you would be happy with us.” To me, that’s a victim mindset. I hear a lot of marketing agencies do that. “Oh, if my client just picked up the phone, they just knew how to hire people, if they just knew how to scale their law firm, then our marketing services would be valued.” Instead of taking that approach, I decided, “No, no, no. Let’s go to the drawing board. Let’s solve that problem. How are we going to solve the law firm owner having a strategic plan for their business? Let’s solve it.”

Okay. So I looked at, “How can I help law firm owners right now with this?” We looked at what we are doing in our own business and we were just like, “All right. Well, is it going to hurt if we start helping lawyers create a vivid vision, a three-year vision for their business? Is it going to hurt if we start teaching lawyers how to create an annual plan for their business and pre-calculating their revenues for every month of the year? Is it going to hurt if we teach lawyers how to create key performance indicators for their law firm and teach them how to hold their staff accountable by rolling out employee scorecards where everyone knows what numbers they’re held accountable to? Is that going to hurt our clients?” The answer was no.

Also it happened to be really easy at the time for us to roll that out in a group style. I would get on weekly live sessions. We just launched this coaching program as an idea. I would get on weekly sessions and I would just teach the stuff we were doing in our own business. That became the seed of the ethos of now the coaching section of our business that really has become such a big impact on our clients. We had to go to the drawing board and started thinking, “Okay, well, do lawyers just need PPC management?” We started thinking, “Okay, well, in an ideal world…” I read this Vendasta study–I know you’re a reader, you probably read it–on agency churn. It basically looked at why small businesses leave marketing agencies.

I started reading this article. I started looking at, “Okay. Where should the ideal service business spend their money online?” It broke it down percentage on Google Ads, percentage on SEO, percentage on social ads. The lowest percent was social ads, and turns out social ads was the highest churn and right close second was Google Ads, and then SEO was the highest retention because it was perceived as a long-term investment by people. I start reading the print beneath the print and understanding… Well, I read the article to learn about agency retention, but what I learned was something about consumer behavior and where lawyers and small businesses should be spending their money online.

What we did was we took a step back and we said, “Okay, if we were to design the ideal budget allocation for a law firm owner doing under $5 million in revenue and they were able to just plug their business into a pre-identified budget allocation where we’ve already done the strategic thinking for them by practice area, by level of competition, could we short-circuit the marketing learning process by just plugging them into the right allocation of marketing with the right 80% there strategy to get started with that we could hone in over the first three to six months of working with us?” Worked backwards and partnered with Andy Stickel to add website SEO on social media ads and that was basically our beta test. Last year was our first full year of rolling this test out, and it turned out to be a awesome hypothesis test for us and lot of lessons learned, also a ton of successes.

That’s where we’re at now, is we’re… Then we go… The virtual assistant company. I partnered with Ethen Ostroff for that because I saw this trend and all these lawyers are going to offshore workers and they need virtual assistance to follow up on their leads. Answering services aren’t cutting it. Instead of just complaining and saying, “Boo-hoo, we recommend an answering services to our clients.” Let’s solve it. Wat I’m doing now is Ethen Ostroff, he is the CEO of Attorney Assistant. I am not an active participant in that business, but it’s a part of SMB Team’s eventual umbrella of companies. We’re able to take the attention that we gained from all of our events and marketing and kind of plug that into the right mix of services. It’s becoming this really, really, really fun innovation quest. It’s just becoming exponentially more fun as we’ve kind of opened our minds to what our target market really needs.

Chris Dreyer:

Both you and I. We talk a lot on the side about business books that we’re really into or watching the latest person, whether it’s Hormozi on YouTube or whoever. We get so much education from these individuals. I think you will find this surprising. I know you’re approaching your answer delicately because I have this book, Niching, on the back, but we’ve expanded as well in terms of it’s not just SEO for those exact reasons. You have to. It’s an omnichannel environment. I mean, look at how both of us as professional services market our businesses. We don’t just do one channel. We may put more budget allocation towards one or the other.

That’s why I get frustrated when attorneys say, “Google Ads doesn’t work.” Every single attorney practically listening should be doing at least a small allocation to Google Ads. Protect your brand, do some YouTube advertising. If you’re not a PI attorney, do some retargeting. Everybody should do that. Do you find that the decrease in effort and sacrifice when we’re looking at that value equation from Hormozi and having the one provider, do you find that that is one of those key elements that shine here?

Bill Hauser:

The problem with there being so many specialists out there, PPC specialists, SEO specialists, Facebook specialists, the problem is your core strategy becomes disjointed. We really have a couple pillars that we operate on in the whole ecosystem of our business. Number one is the proper budget allocation will win. The right amount of dollars spent in the right places for the right keywords with the right targeting strategy, right strategy, check. It doesn’t require this ninja-level execution where every granular detail is perfect. It just requires the right strategy and the right proportion of your budget going to the right places. That’s the budget allocation/right strategy category.

The second category, which leads to your point, is the centralization of points of contact. What we’re noticing for a small business owner or a law firm owner, if you feel that you have to… Let’s say you change your law firm’s marketing plan and then you have to communicate that change to five different vendors. What’s the chance that every five of those people are A) going to even get your communication or B) even listen to 50% of that change in strategy the same way as the other four? Chance is like zero. You’re basically signing yourself up for a disjointed strategy when you… Now, I think that there’s a level to this. Okay. If you’re a $10 million law firm, you probably do need a really high-level spidey specialist for just one piece of your marketing. That’s where it shifts. But for 90%+ of law firms in United States, they don’t need a specialist for each section of the market. They need a central point of contact for their marketing. I agree with you on that.

Chris Dreyer:

As the old saying goes, to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. For an agency that has one core competency, their recommendations may become non-objective.

Bill Hauser:

Unconsciously, you’re biased by whatever your dominant skillset is. I think the difficulty in being an innovator is detaching what your skill is from what the client needs. Sometimes your deepest skills form your deepest ruts. I just think that taking that step back and always thinking… If you’re an attorney, if you’re another business owner listening to this, I think one of the highest value things is just detaching yourself from what you think your service is and then asking yourself, “What outcome is this end consumer giving me their credit card information for?” It’s not the tactical bullet list of the stuff you’re doing for them. It’s usually something a lot different than the tactical bullet list of what you’re doing.

Chris Dreyer:

I kind of want to shift it to that attorney’s perspective. When they’re looking at their firm and they’re making these same types of decisions, and I want to… We’ll laser in on the personal injury attorney, the one that wants motor vehicle accidents and slip and fall and all of this. Where does that play into in terms of positioning? You’ve got your individuals that go deep like a Joe Fried on trucking, you’ve got Papantonio on torts. How does that play into a focus compared to those back end and doing multiple things to solve the consumer problem? Or maybe it’s entirely different.

Bill Hauser:

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of ways to look at this. If you kind of go into the deep secret society of the PI lawyers, you see a lot of innovative business models that are kind of like… I don’t know why, but it seems like so many PI lawyers are so tightlipped. I don’t know why. Just a lot of PI lawyers I meet are just not open about their stuff. To each their own. I think the owning of MRI centers, the collaboration with obviously doctors, chiropractors, and then that’s more of a back end referral/business model element. On a front end when you’re talking about offer creation for a personal injury lawyer, what we’ve seen works the best…

I mean, we help lawyers as part of our coaching program. We help them form sales scripts. We help them identify… It’s the traditional consulting sales script that we’ve augmented for a law firm where you identify the dominant buying motive, you do conversational fact finding, you have them say they can’t solve it on their own, that whole conversational needs analysis-based script, urgency-based decision-making at the end with an incentive on making a decision right now. We use all those principles when we coach law firms how to do that. What we notice is that the things you’re already doing just need to be repackaged. Don’t call your phone line just, “Hey, you can call us whenever.” Call it a personal injury hotline. “We’re one of the only firms that has set up a personal injury hotline through your entirety of your case where you can call this number and XYZ will happen 24/7, 365.”

Now, how much work is it going to take for you to set up a separate phone line that has a slightly different deliverable than your general receptionist answering the phone? In the client’s perception, they hear, “Oh. Wow, this firm has something different than all the other PI firms.” Another example is treatment check-ins. Are you one of the only firms that’s going to help maximize the value of their case through some proprietary methodology or process that you have that’s going to help the potential new client stick to their treatment schedule?

“That’s a huge problem in the personal injury world, and we as a law firm solved that. Here’s how we solved that. It’s through the XYZ process that we invented, and we’re one of the only firms in XYZ market who actually does the XYZ process. Why? Because we’re the inventors of it.” Throwing stuff like that into a sales script can take you from whatever your wanted case conversion rate is now and add a couple extra percentage points on it. Trickling this through your intake team being trained on what makes you unique and so that they can circumvent objections before they come up during the sales process, we’ve seen that work so, so powerfully because most law firms are just measuring each other against experience and, “I’m going to fight for you and I’m aggressive.” When you actually have a unique system to back up your law firm, holy crap, it’s crazy how far that goes.

Chris Dreyer:

You were referring to them as a client and not a customer. A client is a person and has feelings. A customer is just a widget, a thing. Even just the words that we use play into this. I think that all of this, a lot of times… Again, many of the PI attorneys, they’ll go in and it becomes this commodity game where they’re just throwing money against something and you don’t have this multiplying impact with a good, memorable message. Take me to… We got a PI attorney, they’re wanting to grow, they had a nice settlement recently, they want to invest, they want to get a mentor. What’s the initial process look like if they want to get some coaching and work with your business?

Bill Hauser:

The most important thing is not that you received a settlement check, it’s that you’re committed to a bigger future because you are going to be… As an attorney, you’re not going to fit in our program if you don’t have growth goals because, I mean, we have 450 attorneys now working with us and it’s become like… I get emails within a week if someone is a bad apple. Just because you landed a settlement check, I would invite you to really ask yourself, “Do I want to scale my law firm? Do I want to turn this law firm into a business or do I want it to be dependent on me and have this be a job for the rest of my life?” There’s a lot… The majority of attorneys, I know it sounds crazy, the majority of attorneys have chosen the path where, “I’m going to have a job. I’m going to be like a highly paid sports athlete.”

You notice this in the trial world. All the trial lawyers, they chose to take the skilled route, highly paid skilled surgical specialist route where it’s all dependent on them being great in the courtroom. You can make millions of dollars a year taking that route and not building that big of a team around you. That’s not our specialty. Our specialty is a law firm owner who wants to turn their legal production business into a self-running machine that runs itself that eventually you hire a CEO or a COO to run. I always call a business a commercial profitable enterprise that runs without you. That’s a business, a commercial profitable enterprise that runs without you. The core infrastructure of your law firm should be producing a profit for you and it should take a very minimal input of your time.

Therefore, the gateway for you to build that is just a couple leadership skills. You’re just three to five core leadership skills away from building that firm. Once you’ve made that commitment that, “Yes, I am going to scale my law firm, I’m going to remove my… I’m going to fire myself from my current job role.” Then working with us looks like mainly booking a call with a member of our team and then them going through vetting out whether you’re actually looking to grow your law firm and then if it’s a fit, our coaching program… Before Andy and I merged, to get the marketing and management coaching that we offered was $80,000 a year and now we offer our coaching program for under $40,000 a year. Our prices have gone up every three to six months since we launched it. Yeah, don’t be surprised if by the time you listen to this you’re like, “What?”

Chris Dreyer:

I think there’s this confusion too. A lot of attorneys, they’re like, “Oh, I started my own company.” But if you’re still doing all the work, you’re still wearing all those hats, and you’re still the technician, you just bought yourself a high paying job where you’re talking about moving away. I think what’s interesting here is so many CEOs are put on this pedestal as superheroes, your Bezos and Elon Musks, but who’s the real winner? Is it the chairman? Is it the owners? Because they’re not talked about. There’s this big mystery around the Rothschilds and all of this. It’s like but there’s these individuals that have truly ascended, but we’re seeing the highest paid job owners wearing the CEO hat.

Bill Hauser:

Yeah. Hey, here’s an interesting way to look at this. I teach this in a piece of our program and I call it the sports analogy. When I ask people like, “What is the intention of a sports team?” Most people answer, “Well, it’s to win the championship. If it’s a football team, it’s to win the Super Bowl.” Well, if you look at the average cost or investment of buying a sports team, you realize pretty quickly that the goal of a sports team is to provide a positive return on investment to the owner of the sports team. There’s two metrics that will produce a positive ROI or have a likelihood for that. A is winning the Super Bowl or making far into the playoffs and B is selling out the stadium. These two goals get delegated. A, the goal to win the Super Bowl, that goal gets delegated to a head coach or a GM, so actually the GM will own that goal.

Then the vice president of marketing or a chief marketing officer will be delegated the goal of selling out the stadium. Great. Now let’s take the GM. GM now has to delegate the goal of winning the Super Bowl to the head coach, delegates three numbers to the head coach, and that is you have to score an average of X points per game, you have to prevent the opposing defences from scoring over Y points per game, and your average return on special teams should be X number of yards per return. Okay, great. Head coach takes those three KPIs, pushes those KPIs to an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, and a special teams coordinator. Offensive coordinator then takes that to the quarterbacks coach to the running back coach.

The example here is, yes, the owner of the sports team is getting paid the most in this whole equation, assuming the sports team is successful, they’re building equity in this whole equation, but they’re doing the least amount of work. This is the hardest paradigm I notice. It takes literally a year for attorneys to finally have the epiphany where they are the designer of their business, not necessarily the doer. I hear so many stories, Chris, of attorneys who worked with amazing companies like you or me or other companies and get all these leads, and then they’re like, “Holy crap. I hired these people and then the firm imploded and then we’re just going to go back to being small again where I was doing everything myself.”

The reason that you experienced that is because the infrastructure of your team was not set up for scale. If you’re doing drive-by delegations like a drive-by shooting, every delegation that you give to someone is, “Hey, could you just get it done by tomorrow?” That’s not an effective leadership system. An effective leadership system starts with you being clear on your vision like a sports team owner would be and disseminating that vision all the way down like a funnel and codifying it and putting that into a documented revenue plan and putting that into a documented set of quarterly boulders. I know you run on traction, right?

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Hauser:

We have a law firm abbreviated version of that where we tie it into case valuation metrics and intake-specific goals and stuff like that. The bottom line is this: you get paid for designing the funnel that I’m explaining here. You don’t get paid for doing elements of the funnel. You get paid for two things: designing the funnel and deciding on the priorities of the funnel. Now, the hardest thing to do is to step back once you’ve made the decision and to let your team make mistakes. You know this. You’ve scaled your team wildly. You have so many people that work with Rankings with all the freelancers and all the internal staff, and it is so hard to not step in and fix mistakes as they pop up.

Why? Because your name’s on the company. As a lawyer, most times your last name is included in the name of the law firm so it’s, “Oh, if I make a mistake for a client, that means I am a terrible person, I’m a terrible human, I’m worthless. Everyone’s going to hate me.” No, your business produced an outcome like a hot dog cart that produced a bad hot dog and most lawyers end up with the comparative reaction of rolling up in the fetal position and going, “I’m going to downsize like I did before.” That is the biggest epiphany shift, and I’m sorry to go down this tangent but you just hit it on the head when you were talking about who really gets paid the most. It’s a complete dichotomy from where you’ve been spending your time versus where the you making 10 times more should be spending your time.

Chris Dreyer:

And not only that, it’s profit too. When you have systems you can become more profitable, you eliminate the duplication of efforts because of mistakes and you can eliminate waste and you can become more efficient at all these things. That’s what’s also not talked about. I think so often we hear, “Maximise, raise your fees, raise your fees, more value, more value.” Yes, that’s important, but then there are these other things, the processes and training and the right people and top grading and all of these components of running a good business and delegation, come into play.

Bill Hauser:

That’s why I think net promoter score is the holy grail. When I tell lawyers this they’re like, “What? You mean I can survey how happy my clients are? I don’t want to do that. Everything seems good because people are being quiet.” I’m like, “Dude, open the floodgates. Send a survey to every one of your clients tomorrow and be ready for what’s about to happen because silence does not mean happiness.”

Chris Dreyer:

Right. It’s the unknown. When people have the unknown, they fill it with the worst possible things in their mind if they don’t know what’s happening. That’s a transparency thing too. Let’s kick over just briefly because I’ve got… Your CEO’s going to be joining me in the future about the virtual assistant company. Just briefly let’s touch on that a little bit more. How does that work? How does it help law firms? Tell me a little bit about that.

Bill Hauser:

Yeah. Okay. You work with a lot of very big firms, and this is where we’re finding… There’s two sweet spots for the virtual assistant companies. The first sweet spot is for high budget advertisers or social media advertisers. The reason I make those two distinctions is because high budget advertisers get a high lead volume. These are typically attorneys that are either doing a really aggressive SEO and/or traditional plan, traditional advertising, TV, radio, billboard, getting a ton of inbound leads. The social media bucket I use is because social media has the highest percentage of unqualified leads and it also produces very high lead volume at a low qualification per lead. How do we solve that? What we’ve noticed is that lead follow-up is the missing link in the firms that meet these two buckets. You’re just not following up with your leads.

Now, you and I have interviewed some of the biggest, best law firm owners in the nation, the market dominators across multiple states. They all have one thing in common. They all have a very, very clear… Most average around a 15 touchpoint follow-up process, call, text, email, 15 times, 15 days, three touchpoints a day through three different vehicles. Most law firms… The heavy hitters have this in place, but most law firms don’t have this in place. What we do with the virtual assistant company for high budget, high lead volume is we first set up a intaker to strictly do aggressive lead follow-up. If you charge retainers then that’s going to go to an appointment. If you are PI, that can go right to a contract sign because obviously they don’t have to pull money out of their pocket. The follow-up thing is like holy grail.

Now, we have law firms. Okay. Now, you and I know the VA world. We have multiple law firms that work with us, Chris, that have over 60 virtual assistants hired through us per firm just doing primarily lead follow-up. Now, they do dec page retrieval, they do medical record requests, they do other specialized tasks, so that’s where we call that the Henry Ford model. It’s an assembly line approach where we have a VA dedicated to lead follow-up, VA dedicated to administrative tasks like dec page, medical record requests, et cetera. That’s one bucket. The smaller law firm bucket, which is the highest volume of law firms, they don’t have enough leads to merit someone just calling leads back full-time so this is where the virtual assistant ends up being more of a jack of all trades. They’re going to do lead follow-up, they’re going to handle elements of their intake process that the answering service is not handling.

Name me one answering service that calls back dropped calls and that it’s duplicatable and it happens all the time. It doesn’t freaking happen. Holy crap, dude, in criminal defence, have you ever seen how many people get anxious and drop calls on this? Bro, we did a test on this. It was insane. We had one of our clients before we did the VA company call back all of their dropped calls from the last week, and this is a high budget criminal campaign. 80% of the callbacks, this is on dozens of callbacks, turned into signed and paid cases. Okay?

Chris Dreyer:

Wow.

Bill Hauser:

This is a week of data and then a week of calling afterwards.

Chris Dreyer:

Unreal.

Bill Hauser:

80% on dozens of dropped calls turned into signed cases, okay? So dropped calls, holy crap is this an absolute money pit for attorneys right now. That’s what your VA should be doing right off the bat, dropped call callbacks, okay. Follow up on leads that did not yet convert. This is super vital, especially if it’s a right fit case. For example, what we do is we like to give the virtual assistants case criteria, “This is a right fit case. This case is worth following up with 15+ times.”

Oftentimes, your intake team doesn’t know what leads to… We call it tunnel follow-up. They don’t know what leads to follow-up like a laser beam tunnel on because it’s a perfect fit case, so they just brainlessly follow up with all leads equally as though they’re all equal case values. You train the VAs on how to reach out to other points of contact. Sometimes if it’s a catastrophic injury and the person injured calls, well, you should be doing research and finding the family member of the person who called. Just these little nuances that you can train a VA on can literally uplift your revenue overnight. That’s kind of the intake bucket.

Then we have the delegation bucket. Smaller law firms, they need stuff off their plate. They need administrative work off their plate. They need email off their plate. The art is finding activities that the virtual assistant can do on offence all the time. Why do I say that? Offence all the time means they can choose to follow up with leads whenever they want and they can choose to handle administrative tasks whenever they want. The problem when you have a jack of all trades VA just doing inbound is let’s say a call pops up and they’re in the middle of a task. They can’t finish the low-level task that the attorney needs so it ends with unfinished work. The key is to design them more on an offensive task list.

What we do is we help them create their list of granular tasks along with their list of offensive lead follow-up tasks, and that becomes kind of the model for the smaller law firm. But holy crap, Chris, I have sold a lot of stuff. This is the one thing in our company where I’m having to pump the brakes. It’s like… You’ve been through this before, but it’s when you find that product market fit thing and it’s just like… It’s the first time in my business that I’ve ever felt like I have to pump the brakes because it is that high a demand.

Chris Dreyer:

Amazing. Yeah. I see so much application there. Amazing. Yeah, and you’re right. Everyone concentrates on the lead gen and then not the follow-up, not the closing, and there’s these multiplication effects where one plus one equals three sometimes when you have this fire in all cylinders, you get more cases, more reviews, that flywheel powers up. It also pairs nicely to another episode for those listening. Chad Dudley, he was talking about identifying those top 5% of cases because those can end up being 50% of a firm’s revenue, and you do really need to identify those and put your best trial attorneys, your best attorneys on those because all cases aren’t created equal.

Bill Hauser:

If you have full-time employees at your firm, chances are they’re not checking in on your current caseload and current clients as frequently as they should. The 30 day case check-in is the key. It’s the centerpiece to a successful client experience for a law firm. The reason your team isn’t checking in on your active cases every 30 days is because they’re flooded down with administrative tasks that a virtual assistant could do. You don’t know what you don’t know. Until you hire a VA, you don’t understand. You probably went through this when you hired an executive assistant, Chris. Did you have a perfect job description put together and know everything they were going to do before you hired an EA?

Chris Dreyer:

Absolutely not, right?

Bill Hauser:

You just got to pull the trigger.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Oh my God.

Bill Hauser:

We’re going to figure it out.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. Thank you, Matt Martin. Thank you. Just thank you. Bill, this has been amazing. I’m going to have to have you on again in the very near future because you’re moving so quickly and I want to see how this evolves and you’re just going to continue to create more value for the firms that you work with. Just one final question here for the audience is where can our audience go to connect with you to learn more?

Bill Hauser:

Yeah. I think our YouTube channel is definitely a disproportionate value train for us. If you go to Bill Hauser on YouTube and Andy Stickel on YouTube, Andrew Stickel, those are our two YouTube channels and within there you’re going to see… You’re going to be like, “Why are they giving away… Kind of like Chris, why are they giving away all this free information?” It’s because people like Chris, people like myself and Andy, we just want to raise the tide of the industry. We just want lawyers to be more successful. If I die tomorrow, I know the content that I’ve put out will make the world a better place.

Then our quarterly events, man, I got to pinch myself. The people we’ve interviewed over the last year, Magic Johnson, Kevin O’Leary, Alex Rodriguez, Gary Vaynerchuk twice, I mean it’s getting out of hand. So yeah, if you haven’t tuned into our quarterly events and you’re ready for a Tony Robbins kind of kick in the butt session, it’s one of a kind in the legal industry. We had 2500 attorneys register for our last event that we held just a few weeks ago. It was… Having that many attorneys at an event is really fun, especially when their cameras are on and I have them all stand up and do standing exercises. Man, I love what I do, man, and I love everything you’re doing, Chris, bringing value to the industry.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Bill for coming back a second time for sharing so many insights. Let’s recap. Before you commit to any growth plan, consider where you want to end up. Do you want to be a highly paid employee or an owner who delegates?

Bill Hauser:

An effective leadership system starts with you being clear on your vision like a sports team owner would be and disseminating that vision all the way down like a funnel.

Chris Dreyer:

Once you’ve made a decision to scale your firm, get systems and processes in order that can handle the increased lead volume.

Bill Hauser:

Putting that into a documented revenue plan and putting that into a documented set of quarterly boulders.

Chris Dreyer:

As the leads begin to flow in, follow up. Think of potential clients like a sales manager would. Take notes from the big firms that dominate across multiple states. They’re very clear on the number of touchpoints they need in order to convert that lead into a signed client.

Bill Hauser:

Most average around a 15 touchpoint follow-up process, call, text, email, 15 times, 15 days, three touchpoints a day through three different vehicles. Most law firms… The heavy hitters have this in place, but most law firms don’t have this in place.

Chris Dreyer:

Let go of that idea that you and you alone can do it at all. Administrative tasks are eating up more time than you can imagine. High value tasks are falling through the cracks. Key positions like executive assistants can help you focus on growing your firm. Special shout-out to my executive assistant, Matt Martin. He is my chief of staff. He pays my personal bills, he helps me write emails, he helps me write my book, he helps me with my real estate transactions, with investing. So many things that he does. I’m so thankful to you, Matt. Like Bill said, you don’t know what you don’t know. No matter where you are in the growth progress, there is an agency to help you to get to that next level. Agencies with multiple core competencies like SMB and Rankings can help you get where you want to go.

All right, everybody. I hope your toolkit feels a bit heavier today from all that knowledge Bill dropped on us. To get the first interview with Bill or the Chad Dudley episode I mentioned in the interview, head over to the show notes. While you’re there, leave me a five star review. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io.