Marketing Is Not Overhead: What Law Firm Owners Get Wrong About Their Marketing Budgets

My name is Etienne Hardre, and I am with How to Manage a Small Law Firm. I am one of the practice management advisors. I serve as an outsource CFO and outsource CEO exclusively for small law firms all across the country, but headquartered here in the Front Range of Colorado. And I am very excited to introduce you to our guest today, who's going to be talking about marketing. So if you have questions about marketing or how to deal with a marketing advisor, or how to select a marketing advisor, or how to hold one accountable, stay tuned. You're about to find out everything you wanted to know and more. This is Ron Stauffer with Lieder Digital.

Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you. Good to be here. Ron started his firm 18 years ago, back in 2008, when he was laid off as a marketing director for a small construction company, and decided, "You know, heck with this, I'm not going to work for the man anymore. Instead, I'm going to go start my own marketing firm and see where that takes me." And 18 years later, he's still going strong. Over the years, he has developed two primary niches. Of course, construction, seeing as that was his background, in and around construction offices. It's still near and dear to your heart But in addition to construction, he has also made a niche of solo and small law firms. Early on, as he was working with

another marketing firm, which was here in Colorado actually, he had a client who was a very small two-person law firm, and just learned about the things that make them grow and tick, and made himself a very nice little niche. So over the years he's worked with quite a few solo and small law firms, and has clients now from Alaska to Florida. So good work. Congratulations. That's a big undertaking. One of the things that I really love about Ron is that he does marketing in a very precise way. He is going to show you exactly where your ROI is coming from, calculate it down to, if possible, the penny, and also at the same time somehow make that all fun.

That's right. Yeah, I'm dying to, uh, to hear how he's going to explain that to us. But Ron, when you and I were talking last- Mm-hmm … you expressed frustration at the disconnected way that small law firm owners view their marketing budget. Mm. One of the things that you were expressing frustration about is how quickly when things are going well, and how quickly when things are going poorly, your clients tend to give you a call and try to either stop working with you altogether or cut their marketing budget for a variety of reasons. And I just want to hear from you, what's the impact? You've seen this so many times. What's the impact to those small businesses when they make a decision like that?

Oh, man. Yeah, I mean, we could talk… Etienne, you and I have talked about this before, and we could talk about this for a very long time. You know, it's like, there's a little bit of self-interest, of course. I'm a marketing guy, so I don't want people to stop paying my bill, but at the same time, marketing is the pipeline. It's the blood flow into a business. So it always frustrates me and confuses me, honestly, when people say things like, "We have a lot of expenses, so we're going to stop marketing," or, "We're going to cut marketing," or, "We're going to turn down our ad spend," or whatever it is, because I look at that and I think, "Okay, so what's your plan?" If you're struggling financially right now and you say, "Let's turn down the volume on our marketing," then you realize that your revenue is also going to go down, right? Unless you have a, a rabbit in your hat that I don't know about and you can pull off a magic trick, I don't

really know how you can do that. And so especially with small and solo law firms, one of the most challenging things that I've noticed is a lot of times it's a roller coaster, and all of entrepreneurship is a roller coaster. We know that, right? You know that, I know that. We've been running our own businesses for years. Mm-hmm. But it's the feast or famine thing, which is like, a lot of times I'll look at the CRM, let's say, especially for law firms. I'll look at a CRM, you know, customer relationship management system, and sometimes attorneys have their own. Clio is a, you know, industry-wide… It's the biggest one. Yeah. There are other ones, too. I'll look at that and I'll look at leads that have been coming in through the past couple months or years, and then I like to have reviews with clients on a fairly regular basis. Let's look at these leads that came through, and we'll look at their names. You know, this person came through, John Smith. All right, so how did John Smith go?

"Oh, we don't know. We didn't call him back." "You didn't call him back?" "Why?" "What?" "Why not?" "Well, we were too busy to take the call, and, you know, by the time we got around to it, eight days had passed and, you know, that sort of thing." And I'm just like, "Oh, my goodness, you're killing me," right? Because my job as a marketing person is to bring you the kind of potential business that you are hiring me for, and when I'm bringing it to you and you do nothing with it, that's all waste. It's wasting your time, it's wasting my time, it's wasting the potential client's time, and it's wasting a lot of money. But the flip side happens, too. So a lot of times they'll ignore phone calls when they come in if they're too busy, or they will start to panic when the phone calls aren't coming in and then say, "What do we do now? What do we do now?" Mm-hmm. So, you know, it's like the highs are high and the lows are low, and there's, there's nobody there setting

a steady, flat level of effort. So th- that's one of my biggest frustrations when I work with people from any industry, but especially small law firms are a great example. Like, if you're spending money to bring leads in the front door- Mm-hmm … and it's just… I always try to use offline examples because almost everything offline is applicable online. If you have a storefront, I have a downtown office here, if somebody walks in the front door and they look around- "Hello?" And they see that there's nobody here, what are they going to do? They're going to turn around and walk right back out, right? Right. They're not going to sit and wait for you forever to get around to- Mm-hmm you know, opening your door and saying, "Hi there. Can I help you?" Right. And the same thing is true online, right? So whether people are making phone calls or they're submitting a live

chat or a web lead or something like that, you can't ignore that. Mm-hmm. So trying to get back to your original question, marketing is something you should put in your business plan, as you know as a CFO, as an expense. It's just you have to pay to keep your business going, and it's not something … I guess my biggest point is it's not something you can just turn up and turn down right away. That's very shortsighted. And funny enough, I literally got a call from a client a couple years ago and he said, "Hey, you know what? We're spending a lot of money on Google Ads. Would it hurt our business if we cut that in half?" And I said, "I don't know that I can answer that concretely right now without really thinking about it." And he said, "You know, I'm just trying to cut back on expenses. C- can we … Let's see.

Let's cut it in half and see how it goes." I said- Okay … "Okay. You're the client, you're the boss. Not a problem. Let's do that I kid you not, I literally kid you not, like nine months later he sends me an email and says, "Holy crap, what happened?" And I say, I said, "Okay, I'm going to copy you on the email where I confirmed that I did exactly what you asked me to." But the point there was it took a full nine months until he felt that effect- Uh-huh … where he was saying like, you know, "Oh my goodness, I, the phone stopped ringing," or, you know, "The pipeline that we had-" Right … "the volume that we had has petered off to such a level that I'm panicking now." A- and so if you're my client and you say, "Ron, I want you to do this," I'll say, "Okay," and maybe I'll give you some pros and cons for why you should or shouldn't.

But that was a … I'm glad I remembered that 'cause it was a very concrete example. 'Cause I said, "You literally told me to cut your ad spend in half. You said 50%, and I did." Mm-hmm. "So now you're telling me that that was too much?" And he said, "Yes-" Oh, yeah … "clearly that was too much." But we couldn't just, like, flick the switch right You know, it's not binary. Right. It's not on or off. So we turned his spend back up, but I mean, when it takes nine months to feel the pain- Uh-huh … you can't go back tomorrow and say, "I take it all back." Yeah. It takes a while to build back up. So- Yeah … you know, I guess, like, there's this whole argument of le- leading and lagging indicators for businesses, and all that to say if a business says, "I can't afford all my bills right now, I'm going to cut back on marketing," that's all right.

That's your decision. But many times you won't feel that for a while, and you might say, "Oh, it was just that easy." Uh. And then it's too late, and then you realize- Uh-huh … oh, that was a big mistake. But- Mm-hmm … now what do we do? Oh, yeah. I think it's crazy. I think cutting off … That's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. I mean, it's cutting off your absolute lifeline. It's like trimming the roots off of your tree instead of trimming the branches. Like, the whole thing's going to die. If you need to cut expenses, I say move back in with your parents if you need to cut expenses. I mean, move into a basement somewhere, close your office. Do everything possible except for cutting marketing. Marketing is literally the wide end of the funnel. If you don't have anybody coming in the wide end of the funnel, you have lawyers sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Well, yeah, and here's something

that was burned into my mind. I had a client who, back in the days of mailing paper checks, he would mail me a check and he would say, he would write on the, I don't know whether it was him or his accountant or bookkeeper or whoever, you know, there was a cost code. Uh-huh. So every time they issued payment, how do we categorize this in QuickBooks? And it was like, "Cost code 8050, overhead." And every time I got that check, I was irritated with him. I don't think I ever, like I didn't tell him I was thinking that, but I was thinking like, "Okay, so in his mind, he's looking at me as overhead." Uh-huh. He's looking at marketing as overhead, and that's going to explain why when I'm talking to him about certain things, he has the wrong mindset. Marketing is not overhead. Right. And here's the proof. This microphone is overhead. My, my desk here is overhead.

My office is overhead. That's something I have to pay whether anything happens or not. That's not what marketing is. Marketing is you put money into this magic box. This is a, a ridiculous example, but you put money into this magic box and more money comes out of it. Mm-hmm. That's marketing, right? Like, I can't do that with my desk. I can't do that with my iPad. But there's a mindset that a lot of people have, which is marketing is overhead, therefore we should try to reduce it as much as possible. Right. And that's the wrong mindset to have, and hence- 100% … I'm really, really focused on data, ROI. What is the return? What's your ROAS, your ROAS, your return on ad spend? Mm-hmm. What is your client lifetime value? My goal with all the marketing clients I have, regardless of industry, but with attorneys especially, is look, you

spent this much money over this period of time, and here's what you got for it. Mm-hmm. And what you get for it should be much, much, much more than what you put into it. Because we track things, you can prove that, right? So that old quote, Wanamaker or whoever it was, who said, "Half my advertising dollars are always wasted, I just, I just don't know which half." Um- Exactly. In digital marketing, that's not true. Right. That's one of the most incredible things about marketing through the internet, which is you, you never have to wonder, is this working? And if you do wonder that, that means that you're not tracking it the right way. Right. And so I could drone on about this forever, but for my company, I've always had, since the very, very, very beginning, three mottos.

Number one, track everything. Yep. Number two, data wins arguments. And number three, speak in plain English. There's a lot of marketing companies out there, and they promise all kinds of things, right? Mm-hmm. I like to say that they vomit acronyms. You know? Mm. Es- especially salespeople. Mm-hmm. The really hardcore agency folks, where it's like there's 64 people in New York City, and they have all these clients like Airbnb and- Yeah, yeah you know, Hilton Hotels and stuff like that. I mean, they've got polished salesmen with suits and ties and starched collars and stuff like that, and those guys, I've seen them. I've been in those rooms where they pitch. I've followed after companies like that sometimes. They vomit acronyms, you know? Like I was saying, ROAS, ROAS, CTR, CPM, CPC, all that stuff.

Like, and a lot of times what they're doing is they're just spitting number- not even numbers. They're just spitting acronyms at people. But what does that really mean? So when you- Mm-hmm … speak in plain English, I try to really slow things down and say, "All right, Mr. Client-" Let's talk about ROAS. What is ROAS? How do you calculate ROAS? Mm-hmm. Because it's not something I made up, and it's not something that I calculate differently than other people. It's an industry standard. Mm-hmm. So if you're spending $1,000 a month on a particular ads campaign, let's say, how much more did you get back? Mm-hmm. Well, that's your ROAS. That's the return- Mm-hmm … on ad spend, and it's objective. I should be able to justify it to you, and I always keep this in mind. Whenever I send something to a client that says, "Here's what we did and here's what you got for it," I always

ask myself, "If they took this to one of my competitors-" Mm-hmm. I ask two things. Number one, would my competitor be able to read and understand this report? Hmm. Or is there anything weird that comes across as proprietary or secret? Mm-hmm. In other words, it should be templated to the point where anybody in my shoes, whether their name is Ron Stauffer or not, should be able to say, "I see what I'm looking at here." Mm-hmm. And then number two, I ask, and you can't entirely prevent this, but would that person wearing a different company shirt, let's say, but in the same role as me, would they be able to say, "I think this guy's screwing you"? Mm-hmm. The point is, even when I send a proposal to people, I ask myself if this particular attorney is looking

at this marketing proposal and shows it to their wife or friend- Mm-hmm or, attorneys are great at this, the attorney down the hall, right? Like, a lot of times they, they're in clusters. Mm-hmm. You'll have a legal building with eight different law firms on one floor or something like that. Uh-huh. Yeah. If they pass that around Are they all going to say, "Oh yeah, that sounds good. This looks correct. This looks good. It sounds like this guy is someone trustworthy." That's always my goal. And so that starts from the very first conversation, right? So very first interactions before the sale, and then it also goes all the way through the relationship to the point where at the end of a year, you should be able to have an annual review and say something like, "Okay, well, here's what you said in your proposal. You said you would do this. Here's where we are now.

It's a year later. How are things looking?" Mm-hmm. And that's something that I always try to build into my proposals, which is like, "After this many months, we'll have a review, and then you can fire me." And I always say that in every proposal I send, regardless of industry. You have a minimum number of months to work with me because marketing is, again, it's not something you just flip a switch on, right? Like, I build out systems. Right. I build out processes. That takes time. But at the end of a certain minimum amount, there's gotta be a critical mass- Mm-hmm … where either you can tell that it's working or it's not working. And so at the end of that, every proposal and every contract that I have people sign always says, "At the end of that, you can fire me if you want." And sometimes I'll literally even, just if I'm feeling goofy, I'll say like, "And you can either continue services or fire me."

So how long is that? If I was a small law firm owner, let's say I haven't worked with an outside marketing company before. I'm about to jump into this. It's kind of a big deal for me. I don't have a whole lot of money, so I kind of do need results pretty quickly. How long should I give it? I've started this new campaign. I've hired you or somebody like you. How long should I give it before I know whether it's working or not? That, that's a good question. It's one I get all the time, and I've modified my answer recently. I've started going deeper. Rather than saying, "We'll know whether it's working or not," I would say, "Well, let's define what working is." Okay. "Let's define what success is. What do you mean when you say success? What do you mean when you say, 'I need business?'" And one thing I've learned, especially in the past year or two, maybe since

COVID, I, I don't know what it was, but there was a shift in my business, but in other people's businesses too. Maybe it's just the digital things are getting so easy to, for people to understand that their bullshit detectors are really good now. Yeah. And especially with AI and ChatGPT, you can just, like, fact check. Like, "Is this guy selling me a, a bill of goods or, or is he the real deal?" But in the past year or two, what I've figured out is you have to figure out what kind of business they're looking for. So what do you mean when you say, "I need business"? What is your ideal client? What would you say is a qualified lead that would make you smile? Mm-hmm. And so in terms of minimum agreements, it d- usually depends on how big they are. A lot of marketing firms will have big contracts, six months, 12 months.

Strangely, I found 12 months or more is pretty standard a- among larger companies, and I don't have a problem with that. It's just so different than mine. Typically, mine is you agree to work with me for six months, but at the end of six months, if you don't like me, fire me. And I tell people that, because six months, you should absolutely have results at the end of six months. You should have results a lot sooner than that. And I'll give you a super quick example of the distrust, like you're saying. You got two people on the phone, metaphorically. You have the business owner and then you have the marketing person. Mm-hmm. And from the very first phone call, sometimes there's distrust. So I got a call a year ago. I think last March, something like that, and this guy said, "All right, here's the deal. I don't want to hire salespeople

to go out and sell for me. I want to try this digital marketing thing. My wife says it's great. My friends say it's great. I don't trust it. And the last people I hired, I paid them $16,000-" Mm-hmm … "and for six months, and I got-" You want to guess what I got? And I, I'm just like, "I don't know. What'd you get?" He said, "Nothing." I said, "What do you mean nothing?" He said, "Nothing. Not a single lead. I paid them $16,000. I got not one phone call, not one email." Wow. "Nothing." You think he was telling the truth about that? I think so. I'm not, I'm not sure. Wow. But I was laughing 'cause I was like, okay, so in one sense the bar is very low, right? And he said, "Yeah, but what I don't mean is I'll pay you $16,000, and then if you

give me one phone call, I'll be happy." And I was like- Right … of course then. But so what I did for him though is I said, "Okay, well, I promise you that you won't get nothing." So I've never ever, ever done marketing for somebody who got nothing. That has never happened. If it does, I would work for someone for free until they- Yeah … get something. Yeah. But I said, "So let's talk about what it is that you're doing," right? "What would you call the business you're interested in? What were you hoping to get out of it?" And he's like, "Well, I don't know. Something." Okay, great. Something. But anyway, so, so at the end of our six months, the guy said, "Well, okay, well, it, it, it was better than the last guys, but I still didn't get any business out of it." And I said, "Whoa, okay." Well- Whoa … n- now we gotta talk about this. Because I track everything-

Yeah … in his CRM, I had 23 leads. Uh-huh. 23. Yep. Not zero. 23. And I said, "Okay, well, I can see that this person contacted you on this date, and then this, and then this, and then this, and then this, and then this." And I'm s- I'm, like, looking at my spreadsheet, rattling off names and contact info. And he says, "Oh, well, well, none of those actually closed." And I said, "Oh. Oh, okay. Well, hold on. Now you're talking about something different, right?" Uh-huh. Okay. Right. Now you're talking about sales, not marketing. Exactly. So there was a mismatch up front- Uh-huh … that I didn't see coming. So he said, "No, those were 23 calls." not leads. And I said, "Whoa, whoa. Okay, hold on. Hold on." Okay, so you're telling me that in your opinion, and this

actually gets back to what you were just saying, Etienne, which is maybe this guy was getting phone calls from the other company- Uh-huh … that had zero phone calls. He said, "Well, I don't count those as leads because they didn't turn into anything." I said, "Okay." So now we have to define what a lead is. Now that- Yeah … I was not expecting. Right. So what I did is I looked at the numbers. He got 362 phone calls. Whoa. And 23 live human beings, of flesh and blood, who picked up the phone and/or submitted a live chat or something like that. So actual humans- Wow with names and emails and phone numbers who contacted him, and he didn't close a single one of them. So in his mind, he was saying, "Well, it wasn't worth it because I paid Ron for six months and I didn't get any business out of it." Oh, right. So that's where I realized, whoa, hold on.

Okay. I clearly need to update my terms and have a different conversation with people up front, which is, let's talk about what a lead means to you. Right. Right? So in the business of lead generation, I would never want to send you a lead that you wouldn't call a qualified lead. Why would I do that? That's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of everything. But again, at the end of six months, if you've gotten 362 phone calls and there are 23 people who expressed interest in hiring you- Mm-hmm and you didn't close them, that is not a marketing problem. Yeah. That's a sales problem. Exactly. So- Well, that's, that leads to the bigger issue, right? So the law firm, we at How To Manage say there's seven parts to the law firm. It starts with marketing, goes through sales, and works its way into production, right?

So all of these layers have to work together, right? If you don't have the production capacity to handle 10 million new customers, then don't spend a billion dollars on marketing, right? You, you might want to, and you might like to grow that fast, but you also have to build up your production capacity so that you can actually serve the customers. If you're paying for all these leads but your sales team sucks so badly that they're closing one in 100 instead of 50 out of 100, then you're wasting money. You're just throwing money at marketing. You need to fix your sales problem. And vice versa, right? You could be getting good quality leads, they could be coming through, and you could have great sales team, but again, back to your point, if they're not qualified, then what's the point, right? They either weren't going to buy anyway

or they're, maybe they're in a different practice area and you just end up having to refer them out or on and on. There's all kinds of things that the actual, the business owner actually has to pay attention to. So the small law firm owner thinks, "Great, I'm going to hire Ron, get a bunch of leads in here and cash checks." And there's a whole business that happens in between, right? Right. And the, what's unfortunate for me is it frustrates me when I'm able to bring in really qualified leads and they just sit there like, it's like they're dying on the vine, right? Because there's really nothing I can do about that. I'm not an employee of the law firm, I'm not an attorney, I'm not a paralegal. I can't pick up… I mean, I suppose I could, but I can't pick up the phone and

call them back and say, "Hi, my name's Ron Stauffer with the such and such law firm. Tell me your legal issue." Wow. I mean, maybe I should start offering that as a service, but there's a line of demarcation there. And pick your analogy. You know, you can lead a horse to water, you can't make him drink. Throw it over the fence. Yeah. There, there's a very clear delineation between I have done what you hired me to do at this point, and we've got to, as marketers and as attorneys working together- Mm-hmm … have got to figure out how there's… There can't be a no man's land, right? Mm-hmm. There can't be like, well, I took it 80% of the way, and the attorney comes 80% of the way here, so now there's like 20% that needs to close on this end and 20% that needs to close on this end. That's terrible, right? It has to be a clean handoff.

Mm-hmm. All right, lead- in pipeline Mm-hmm operations now, the intake specialist now, takes it and runs with it. Mm-hmm. And then the most important thing from my perspective is what happens next? It's very important for me as a marketing person to know, was that a good lead? Why? Why was that a good lead? Mm-hmm. What about that person made them qualified? And sometimes I'll ask people, uh, I ask a lot of questions in my business- Mm … and sometimes people will tell me, like, "Wow, our last guy didn't ask this many questions." That's a problem. I almost overwhelm them sometimes. Like, they're not used to it. Or I'll ask questions and they'll say like, "I haven't really thought of that before." And I'm thinking, "Wow, if you're this far along and you're building your practice and you haven't thought of that before, that's not good." Mm-hmm.

You know, I ask a lot of questions and, and I want to know lots of things. Especially with law firms, I want to know things that might not even seem relevant. What is your ideal customer profile? You know, ICP. Vomiting acronyms again. Mm-hmm. Show for me a picture. Uh, give me an avatar. Give me an explanation of the ideal person to hire us for legal issues is… And then fill in that blank as much as you possibly can- Mm-hmm … and make them an amalgam of a whole bunch of your best clients, right? Mm-hmm. 35 years old, male, father, white collar. That doesn't mean those are the only the people you serve. Mm. But if you look at your book of business and you say, "Wow, 70% of our clientele are men who work in

white collar industries, and drink on the weekends- Mm-hmm … and have tattoos, and make a mistake one time when they celebrate a little too hard and they drive under the influence, and then they get charged with a DUI. And it's the only legal thing that's ever happened to them in the, their entire lives," let's say. Okay, great. That's very helpful for me to know- Mm-hmm … because I'm working with ads tools, and analytics data, and stuff like that that can really filter and laser in and focus a lot more specifically than people might even know. So anything- Mm-hmm … that's helpful or a- anything you can give me about this person signing on the dotted line, that's helpful to me. Mm-hmm. I'll give you a quick example. A real estate agent said this one time, and it applies to every industry, including attorneys.

I said, "What's your ideal customer profile? Tell me about the kind of person who if he or she walks in your front door, you would jump up and down and clap and say, 'That's the best thing that could have happened today.'" And he gave me the best answer I've ever heard. He said, "Wendy- I said, "Oh, cool. All right. Tell me about Wendy." And he said, "I don't even need to hypothesize about this because the best customer I ever had was Wendy." And I said, "Well, okay, so like that's actually her name?" He said, "Yeah, her name's Wendy, and she lives in this city, and she drives a minivan, and she has three kids, and she's active at the parent-teacher association at the school, and her kids play in the municipal soccer rec league, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And he just rattled off all these things.

And I said, "Okay, that's very interesting. Why?" And he said, "Well, I'll tell you why. Because she's a mom, and she has this connection, and she loves helping people, and she's at this age bracket, and she has this many kids, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And he had such a, a really good profile of her. Mm-hmm. And I said, "But what makes her so great?" And he said, "Well, she hired me when she bought her house. So I helped her buy her house and I helped her sell her old house, and she referred eight people to me- Mm. Mm … because all of her friends look just like her." And I said, "That's very interesting." He said- Uh-huh "So when you ask me, Ron, like what's my ideal customer profile, it's Wendy. And so whenever I get business cards printed, I think, 'What would Wendy think of this?'" "Whenever I do a radio ad, I think, 'How would Wendy respond to this?' Whenever I do a,

a promo at a high school basketball game, I think, 'Would Wendy be there?'" And that's just such a perfect encapsulation of really good marketing. Who's your Wendy? And you can use it for every industry. Wow. Who is your Wendy? Tell me who that person is. I had a client who was a construction litigation attorney, and we were trying to figure out what is the exact procuring event that would make somebody contact this law firm, right? Mm-hmm. So not just like w- we do construction litigation and real estate litigation and construction defect litigation. I said, "No, no, no. Let's get really specific about exactly what is it that would make people pick up the phone and call you or submit a form online." And so

we went through this exercise and- Mm-hmm okay, this kind of a person who purchased a house that's about this many years old, probably in one of these neighborhoods, and the problem that they're going to have is something like this, and the way that it manifests itself is through this, which is going to make them start to think, "I might need to contact an attorney." And when they do that, they're going to do this. And so we want to show up here, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. So I'm looking at an email on my screen. "Rating five," exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. "Just got a huge call just now about soil expansion and foundation issues, and she found us straight from Google. We still have yet to call her, but it looks veryyyyyyyyy good.

Yippee!" Exclamation point. That's what we're going for, right? Mm-hmm. And that kind of feedback from the client back to me is so helpful because now I know what we're doing works, right? Mm-hmm. Now, I, I don't know what that was, like an $80,000 client value or something like that. Mm-hmm. But because we had an ongoing relationship of saying, "Don't just tell me what you do. Boring. Your services." Mm-hmm. "Oh, everybody expects that of you." Mm-hmm. "But let's really dig down deep and start to figure out if this is the kind of a flaw at your practice, one of your practice areas, what does a client look like who finds themself in the situation where they need you? Not just want to talk to you, but need you. Map that out. What does that look like? It looks like a person who bought

this kind of a house, this kind of a neighborhood, they have this much equity in their home, and they start noticing cracks in the garage, and they watch it for a while and they think, 'That's not good.' And then it gets worse and they think, 'Ooh, that's really not good.' And then they start making phone calls to the builder, and the builder says, 'Not my problem, because your house is now eight years old,' or whatever, right?" Mm-hmm. "And then they start to see that crack get even bigger and they think, 'Now I'm in trouble, and now the builder can't help me.'" Mm-hmm. "And so then they're calling concrete companies saying, 'Hey, can you fix this?' And then the concrete company says, 'I can't really fix that because that's not just a crack in your concrete. You have a structural foundational issue due to expandable soils.' Now they're thinking, now they're thinking, 'Ah, maybe I need to get an attorney.'"

Mm-hmm. "Because here's the problem- And I, I went down this step. One, I contacted the builder, contacted a concrete company, a warranty company. I'm out of options. It's getting worse. Somebody did something wrong, and now we need to right that wrong. Mm-hmm. And it's not me, the buyer. It's the person who built the house. How can I hold them accountable? Maybe an attorney. What kind of an attorney? Probably a construction attorney, right? Mm-hmm. An expansive soils attorney. Bingo. Ding, ding, ding. That's exactly the kind of lead they want. It was like five out of five, like jumping jacks and somersaults. Like, "Yes, this is what we were looking for." And that was only after a couple months of marketing. So that's my long way of saying six months is a good is a good starting point, but there should be a lot

more much, much sooner than that. And then just also knowing we have to be very careful with what do we mean when we say success? Yeah. What do we mean when we say- Yeah business or increase in business? What does that look like? Well, let me ask you a question then. So for a law firm who's been working with customers for a while, who has a Wendy, right? They can look through their client Rolodex and go, "Oh yeah, that one right there. That … I'd like more of those." Right, right. But let's say you're a … Let's say you're launching your law firm, and you're not quite sure exactly what your avatar would be. What w- what would be your best advice to help somebody figure out to define their client avatar in as much detail as they possibly could if they're fairly new to business? If they're starting their own business, I would ask them, "What did you like doing

when you were working for someone else?" Because- Yeah … at least in every case that I've never met anybody yet who graduates law school and then says, "I'm going to start a business." You know? Right. Yeah, most of them don't, for sure. My name's Ron Stauffer. I'm just the Stauffer Law Firm. Like- … that hasn't happened. Usually, there's a period of a couple years where they work for another firm- Yeah you know, with two, three, five, 16, 35 other attorneys, and they get assigned a specialty. Mm-hmm. And they start to figure out, "I really like DUI cases," let's say. But I don't like, you know, immigration cases or, or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. So again, it depends on your practice areas, but typically with a criminal defense attorney, a great example, it shifts and changes, and there's a specialty there. So, uh, DUIs are the best example.

DUI attorneys are notorious for, and I don't mean this as an insult, I mean, like, everybody knows this. They're the people who put the placard in front of the urinal at the restaurant- Uh-huh. Yeah … bathroom that says- Right, right … "Former breathalyzer operator. 35 years in law enforcement. I used to be a cop, but now I'm an attorney." Mm-hmm. Okay, so the point there is what they're saying is, "I'm the DUI guy. Call me. 1-800-DUI-GUY," right? If that works for you, great. If you're not quite sure, think back or look around to whoever you've worked with in the past and say like, "Wow, turns out I'm actually really good at, you know, trials," or something like that. So there's a personality quirk there, right? Like some people- Mm-hmm … really like litigation, some people really like being trial attorneys. Yeah. Some people- Yeah … really

like criminal defense. Some people like- Yeah … you know. But I guess what I'm saying is if you're starting out, just figure out what it is that you're… Here, okay, here's how I would answer that. Figure out what you can make money with the fastest. Mm-hmm. And I tell that to… I've been a startup advisor for many years in various forms. My local startup incubator here, I'm on their- Yeah … marketing slate of, uh, mentors, and what I always tell people is get to that first dollar as fast as possible. Mm-hmm. No matter your business. The worst way that people start a business is they plan it forever and ever. Mm-hmm. And, you know, they have a business plan, and they've got numbers on a spreadsheet, and they're like- Mm-hmm … "Well, when we start we're going to do this and we're going to do that." And a gal came in one time, and she was this nutritional coach or something like that, and

she said, "Well, it's not quite ready yet, but you know, I'm pretty close." And I pulled up her website and I said, "Okay, so right here it says 'click here to book a session with me,' but that button's not clickable." She said, "Well, yeah, I just, I haven't connected it yet." I said, "How long ago did you build this website?" She said, "You know, nine months." I said, "So for nine months your website- Mm-hmm has been advertising to people that you are open for business, and there's a button that literally says 'book a session right now'?" But you didn't connect it. You got 99.5% there. People can't hire you. They literally cannot hire you right now. And she said, "Well, yeah, because I just, I haven't really gone in full time yet." And I said, "But think of the people who may have shown up here and wanted

to book- Yeah … and couldn't." Right. Like, how hard is it? You could've been full time by now. Yeah, right. And she said, "Well, I guess it's not that hard." So I said, "Your homework tonight is before your head hits the pillow, I want you to promise me you're going to connect that," right? Mm-hmm. "That button, next time I see you- Mm … it has to be live. I have to be able to book a session with you and pay you money." "Okay." So I would say the same thing to law firms, which is what is the fastest, easiest way for you to get to that first dollar as fast as you can? Even if your plan is to grow and get the fifth floor on a downtown high rise skyscraper- Sure. Yeah, yeah … something like that. But what is something you can do right now? Uh-huh. What is something you can invoice for this week? Yeah. Whatever it is, even if you don't like it. Yeah. Maybe it's document prep for construction

companies who are submitting- Yeah … documents for being a prime contractor for a municipality or something like that. Yeah. There's a need for that. They pay people- Sure … they pay attorneys for that all the time. Whatever you can do to get money right now. Well, let me ask you, let me ask your advice on something, 'cause this is something I hear all the time, especially from two groups of small law firm owners. One, from the group of law firm owners who just get started, and so they haven't quite figured that out yet, and two, from the group of law firm owners where they've been trying something for a while- Mm-hmm but for whatever reason they're, it's difficult, they're out of money, life got hard. Okay. And so one of the things I hear them do all the time, and this is something I consistently advise them not to do, but I want to hear a marketer's, I want to hear your perspective, 'cause I keep telling them what you would say. Okay. But here you are, so now you can say it. If this is what they try to do,

they try to say, "Well, I'm in," say, "personal injury," right? Because I want to do the gigantic contingency cases- Sure … that I see on television. But that's not working out for me because contingency cases take forever, and so I'd like to add a different practice area. Mm-hmm. I'm thinking about getting into family law. And you're like okay, the connection between personal injury and family law might exist, but I hope doesn't exist. And I always tell them, look, you're diluting your marketing. Mm-hmm. So you have your avatar defined for personal injury. Yeah. You got your website up, you've got your keywords up, you've got your social media going. Mm-hmm. You've been talking personal injury for the last 18 months.

Now all of a sudden because times got hard or because that's not working out or it's too slow or whatever, you'd like to add another practice area. Now, what's the impact from your perspective as the marketing vendor who suddenly has to try with probably the same resources to spin up a new practice area? Mm-hmm. What would you have to go through? Would that be a good thing for me to try to do? How would that impact me as a small business owner? I would treat them as two separate businesses. Almost two separate law firms. There you go. Because I don't know how you want to say it, the psychographic profile of the people who hire th- those kinds of attorneys is completely different. Yeah. Um, I always try to think … Unfortunately for me, I've had to hire attorneys multiple times in my own life. Yeah. Unfortunately for me, fortunately for

my clients, I've gotten threatening extortion letters from attorneys saying, "Your website has a tracking snippet which is against the law, and so, uh, here's a demand for $5,000. And, you know, I'll see you in…" I got one … It's literally, I got one a couple weeks ago, "I'll see you in Los Angeles Superior Court." I was like, "Okay, never saw this one coming, all right?" Uh-huh. "What do I do?" Okay, so now I have to talk to a business attorney. Uh-huh. More complicated than that because Los Angeles Superior Court is in California. Yeah. Right? Not in Arizona. Well, so I c- so I can't call an … I mean, I can call an Arizona attorney, but he's going to say, "Well, I'm not licensed to practice law in California." Yeah. Right? So I bring that up to say there's a very specific need. And I, again, what is the procuring cause? Mm-hmm. What is the thing that makes people say, "I need an attorney"?

Mm-hmm. Because attorneys are like mechanics. I told my mechanic one time, "Gary…" I love my mechanic. It, it, it's very hard to find a mechanic that you trust, at least for me. Yeah. But I told Gary one time, I said, "Gary, I really like you and I trust you, but I don't want to see you very often." Right. ' Cause if I'm in your waiting room here, that means something bad has happened. Yeah. I don't bring my car to the mechanic because it's fun. Right. That means something bad happened. I don't want to be here. A lot of times it's the same with attorneys. So you gotta put yourself in the mindset of somebody who's hiring that person. And so when I get a demand letter or an extortion letter, 'cause that's what it is, saying, "You need to pay me $5,000 because I'm offended about the analytics script you have on this website, and if you don't, I'm going to sue you in Los Angeles Superior Court"

Okay, the reason I would pick up my phone to talk to an attorney and the kind of attorney I would want to talk to is completely different than the kind I spoke to when my 16-year-old daughter rear-ended our neighbor and- Mm-hmm broke his bumper. Mm-hmm. And the guy wakes me up at 7:00 o'clock in the morning banging on my door, yelling insults at me, and I'm thinking, "I have n- What? You, you woke me up out of bed," and this guy is, like- Yeah … shouting at me saying, you know, "Your daughter just hit my car, and you dirty this and you dirty that, and I'm going to sue you." And I'm s- Okay. Whoa. All right. Look, calm down. Let me think about how to process this information. Right. That's a completely different thing. Yep. Entire worlds apart. Now, attorneys might say, and they do

sometimes, "Oh, well, it's the same thing. I mean, you're talking about defense in both cases, right?" Yep. Like, "Somebody's demanding money from you, and I can help with both." Maybe you can, but your marketing can't. Right. Because I would never go to a website that says, "We help business owners with extortion letters or frivolous demands," and ask them, "Can you help me make my angry neighbor stop threatening to sue me because my daughter-" backed into his bumper?" Totally, completely different. So- That's right … to use a… I think that's a really good example of in the attorney's mind, perhaps law is law or defense is defense, but it really is not. Yeah. So you gotta be thinking about the pipeline. What is, what is the difference between the mindset of someone… You used what?

Accident attorneys, right? Uh, personal, personal injury and- Yeah … family law, like- Totally different. Completely different. And they, and the client- Here's the thing about marketing. Clients sometimes seem kind of dumb to us in our practice. So, like somebody called me one time and they said, "Talk to me about lead generation." "What do you mean when you say lead generation?" I gave this whole spiel, and then he said, "Okay, great. So now can you tell me about demand generation?" And I was I was taken aback like, "Okay, they're kind of basically the same thing, but it sounds like in your mind you're thinking that these are two very different things." Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's kind of weird. That sounded like a dumb question, but they don't know, right? Yeah. And I work with lead generation and demand generation all day- Mm-hmm … every day. I know that. Yeah, yeah.

They don't know that, so it's wrong of me to say, "Well, they're dumb if they don't know how it works here." Mm-hmm. And so sometimes you just gotta embrace it and say, "No, they're not dumb." It's just the difference between what they know and what you know- Mm-hmm … is almost insurmountable, so just embrace it. Yeah. So all that to say, maybe you open a sep- maybe literally in that case, maybe you literally open a separate practice or at least get a DBA and a separate website and a separate- Yeah sign on your door, right? So that a- as far as the client can tell, there's two different kinds of law, even if it's the same attorney answering the phone. Right. And there are ways to do that with marketing. Like, I help people with that all the time. I have a landscaper, to use a non-attorney example, a- and he's got a hardscape- Mm-hmm hotline and a l- lawn care number.

Oh, okay. Right? Yeah. Two different numbers. One is for if you need mowing and, and raking and leaf clearing and t- Yeah … bush trimming and stuff like that, great. That's … I have one project manager for that. If you need the stuff that requires like excavators and cranes and stuff like that, we have a different number for that. They go to the same phone. Yeah. Nobody needs to know that, right? Yeah. But for marketing purposes, they're very different. And for attorneys, what I did for one attorney is I said, "You're getting a significant, a number of Span…" Here's a great example. "You're getting a significant number of phone calls in Spanish. Let's create a Spanish hotline." Yeah, right. That way you know every time that phone rings, they're calling you in Spanish. So all of our Spanish ads ring the Spanish hotline. Again, the same phone rings ultimately, but there's a way to set the expectation,

"Hey, Mr. Client or Senor Client," right? "Call our Spanish hotline." Yeah. They know that way when we call that number, somebody's expecting me to speak Spanish. Right. So- Yeah … just by virtue of the fact that it's the same person answering the phone doesn't matter, but it's a totally different… It's a different pipeline. It's a different- Yeah … mindset. Rather than sending a Spanish-speaking person to call an English number- Mm-hmm and the person on the other end isn't expecting that, and they're like, "Oh, man, I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish. Hold on, let me see. Is anyone… Where's our translator?" So- Uh-huh … that's all part of marketing, right? Building systems. Marketing is a system. Well, so at the… Okay, so let me, if I were to summarize, I would say if you're going to add a second practice area, you basically need to treat it like an entirely different business with its own separate marketing

budget, its own separate marketing systems, its own separate everything. So adding another practice area to your firm may not be the silver bullet that you might initially expect- Yeah. … because it's so much extra work to get out there and tell people that y- that you're doing this. Yes. That's a great way to summarize it. I would say it's not double, but it's somewhere close to that. Yeah. Yeah. Al- almost it's a whole separate business. Yeah. Okay, well, we're wrapping up here in the final few minutes, and I'd love for you to, to kind of wrap up by helping our small law firm owners understand how they can maximize their relationship with an outside marketing vendor like yourself. What's the best way for them to feel

confident that they are going to get the most out of this relationship that is key to their business? And while you're answering that, one of the services that How To Manage a Small Law Firm offers is we offer the outsourced C-suite services, so like CEOs and CFOs. One of them is a CMO, chief marketing officer. So imagine that this small law firm owner that you're talking to might have engaged with someone like us who's an advisor to their firm, who's acting as their chief marketing officer. How can they work with you? What's the ideal way to make your job easy, to help you get them the ROI that they so desperately want? What's the ideal way for that communication, that relationship to happen? Do you want to not talk to them for a

year, or what should that look like? In a sentence, it's two things: regular communication and closing the loop. So what I mean by regular communication is, if you're a law firm that has a whole bunch of cases with all these specific nuances and you're dealing with tricky, complicated things, criminal defense with immigration law sensitivity, for example. If your client is here on a green card or something like that, some crimes are, like, automatic deportation. Mm-hmm. Okay, that's a subspecialty, right? Like- Mm-hmm. Right … you have to understand immigration law and criminal defense law. That's more complicated than, "I punched a guy in the face here in the downtown strip because I felt threatened, and I'm claiming it was self-defense." That's a different story. So a lot of times I'll ask attorneys

especially, because of the nature of their business, sometimes it takes a very long time to get to the end when they can finally say, "All right, so this client contacted us in January, and then we did this, and then we did this, and then we have a court date here. Okay, so it's October by the time they finally get resolution," let's say. Still, keeping me in the loop on that and then closing that loop is very important because I want to use that as a case result, and I want to be able to say, "They came in with this. Here's what happened, here's what we did, and here's the result we got for them." But sometimes, like, it drags on for so long that memories get bad and people say like- Oh … "Oh, I can't remember. What did h- No, hold on. No, that was the other guy." Oh, right. And then it's like, okay, well now we're like, we're lying, you know? Uh-huh. Because you've forgotten what happened, and we're not going to make this up.

So regular communication is very important. These days I try to ask people at the very beginning of an engagement, "What is a good cadence for you? Should we talk twice a month? Should we talk once a week?" And in the beginning it can be multiple times a week. It depends on their workload and the level of interaction that we're going to have, you know, putting our systems together. So regular communication is very important. And part of what I mean by that is don't do musical chairs with your staff. Hmm. So I'm answering your question, which was phrased positively, like, "What can you do?" But with a negative. I'm saying, "Don't do this." One thing that absolutely kills marketing efforts is when the person who answers the phone, y- you're doing musical chairs.

Or, you know, I went… Here's a super quick example. Hopefully I'll try to make it quick. I went and met with a potential client. The marketing director reached out to me, said, "Hey, here's what we want. We want to do this. We want to do Google Ads. We want to do that," that sort of thing. So I went and met with the practice manager. Mm-hmm. Well, the marketing director that I had originally been talking to, that person quit. Oh. So I show up, now I'm talking to the practice manager, and the person that I've been talking to for the past two or three weeks online is gone. Mm-hmm. So all that context is gone. Okay, so I start talking to the practice manager and I give him my proposal and he says, "That's good. All right, great. We're going to do this. We're going to do that." Great. Okay, we get started working. About three or four months later, the practice manager quits.

Man. So now one of the, the staff that I had been talking to before but I didn't really know, okay, now she's the practice manager. Oh. Okay, it's like, oh my goodness, every time you do this it takes so much of the wind out of our sails. Yeah. So if at all possible, don't do musical chairs. Yeah. It, it's, it's money wasted. It's a significant- Yeah … waste of money because we're, like I said, we're building systems. Marketing is a system- Mm-hmm … if you're doing it right. So you're hitting the reset button and eventually I'm going to have to give up and say, "Look, Mr. Client, I can't work with you because- Mm-hmm … every time I talk to you it's a new person." That's a lot of money down the drain. And then so closing the loop is the other important thing that is extremely important. So again- I, as a marketing person,

using that example of sales before, I'm not your salesperson, right? I'm not the one who's on the phone closing the deal, sending the invoice, saying, "Thank you for hiring us. Let me take your money." Right. That's not what I do. I can enable your sales team, but that's about as much as I can do. But you gotta close that loop, meaning- Mm-hmm … again, if there are 23 leads in the pipeline, I gotta know what happened to them. Mm-hmm. Did they become clients? And if not, you can't just say, like that one guy did, "Well, those didn't turn into anything." Look, okay. Right. Yeah. Let's review every single one of these. Don't just say none of them turned into something. Give me an example, a reason for each one of those. This one, what happened? Okay, well, it was t- they didn't want to pay that much money. Okay, great. Thank you. That's helpful.

So now that's a price objection. Good. I'm going to put that in the CRM. All right, what about this one? Well, this person was calling for her grandmother. Okay, what's wrong with that? Well, her grandmother ended up hiring someone else. Oh, okay. Great. So that's a qualification issue. So now we need to know, are you calling on behalf of someone else? Do we have a way to follow up? Do we know leading into a conversation that this isn't the person who's actually paying the bill, right? So now we can make our system a little more sophisticated. Add that to our qualification. Is the person who's calling us the one who would pay us and hire us? Yes? No. So going through all of those and then making sure that we get feedback, because what that does is that tells me what we don't want to spend money on, what we

do want to spend money on, and any kind of client that we're looking for looks like this and does not look like this. That's what I mean by closing the loop. So all that to say, the client is responsible to a certain extent. The law firm is responsible to get back to someone like me and say, "Here is feedback on what you gave us, and here's why it turned into business and is good," or, "Here's why it didn't." Both of those are very important, because if I don't get that, you're just spending money, right? Mm-hmm. It's like a turnstile at the subway station. You're just going ching, ching. People are going in. I don't know where they're going. Are they getting on the bus? Are they going in and then going back out? I have no idea. You gotta fill me in on the details. Wow. Well, thank you so much, Ron. This has been phenomenal. I guess what has become clear to me

is that marketing is less of a magical box and more of a gigantic complicated machine that I'm very glad I don't have to try to work on a daily basis. So I'm thankful that there are people like you who understand the machine and have spent the time over the years to hone this machine so that it can produce the results that you want it to produce. So thank you very much for pulling back the curtain and showing us a little bit of, of what we can use a, an outside marketing firm to accomplish in our small law firms. It looks like we may have some questions in the chat, but we're not going to really have time to get to them. So if you don't mind, we'll share your information with Ron, or I myself, Etienne, will get back to you some other way and try to get

your questions answered via email. We appreciate it. Thank you very much, Ron, and we will get your info so that people can get ahold of you if they have any more questions. Would that be okay? That sounds great. Happy to help. All right, awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you guys for showing up. Thank you, Ron, for being here, and thank you to How To Manage A Small Law Firm for sponsoring this whole thing. And stick around for the next one. Look for us online. We have these kind of training webinars on a regular basis