I trust this playbook because I have clients actively using it this very day to get more clients for their law firm, plain and simple. I have people using it and I call it the $500K Referral Playbook, because the first client that I got to put all these pieces together at the same time, over the next 10 months, it was worth actually $600K and newly referred business including a ton of business referred by chiropractors to his pie practice, but $500K sounds a little bit better than $600,000 referral playbook.

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now, here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules J Berkowitz.

Charleywelcome and welcome everyone to this month's live streaming event. My name is Jay Berkowitz. And I'm just going to share my screen here and we'll get rolling. All right, so we are going to share with you, Charley Man's $500K referral playbook, how to transform your law practice with partnerships. And I'm going to get to Charley in just about seven minutes. And first of all, if y'all wouldn't mind, in the chat, if you're if you get the majority of your cases, as a law firm, or even as any kind of business, from referrals and referrals, your best source, just type a number one in the chat, please. And if you feel like you're, you know underperforming, if you feel like everybody says they get all these referrals, but you're not getting a lot of referrals, just type a number two in the chat. The reason why we're here and why we're so passionate. Everybody in every business you talked to loves referrals is because referrals close at the highest rate, like for law firm and and for a digital marketing agency. If somebody asks one of my clients and they say, Hey, you know, you seem to be getting tons and tons of cases, what's your secret? And they say, Oh, it's 10 golden rules, you got to give Jay a call over 10 golden rules. When I get those calls, I'm really happy because generally that person's like a looking for a new agency. B, they talked to what am I happy clients and see, you know, they're calling me and and typically, I don't have to convince them as much that we're the right partner for them because they came as a word of mouth referral, and they start with a, you know, a super high recommendation. Same thing for every law firm, right? If you talk to someone who got a great settlement on an accident case, and you know, that person got an x in case, you're going to ask them who their lawyer was, or if someone had a tremendous result in it, you know, bankruptcy, family law, you know, criminal case, you're gonna ask them who their lawyer was. So referrals generally close at a really high rate. Because of that, you know, they're coming in, they're coming in more than they're coming in hot. Right. So we call this the $500,000 referral playbook. And we're gonna touch on two different kinds of referrals. You know, the first one is professional referrals. Obviously, you want those referrals from the chiropractors from other attorneys from MRI clinics and from you know, any kind of people you do business with people who do transcription investigators like anyone in the industry, we're going to call those professional referrals. And then, obviously, the past client referrals are great. So we're going to talk about those, those two categories, referrals from professionals, and referrals from past clients. Now, as I mentioned, I'm gonna get to Charley in the playbook in just a minute. First, a little bit about me. As I said, my name is Jay Berkowitz, I come from a really cold place in the winter called Winnipeg, Canada. Very beautiful now, I really my career, I work for McDonald's, Coca Cola and sprint, Director of Marketing, you know, really doing big brand marketing. And I saw the internet coming and I got a job and an opportunity to come to the United States at EA diets.com. And eat diets. We grew this company to $60 million in revenue. And I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association. I wrote a presentation called the 10 Golden Rules of online marketing. And we just celebrated our 20th anniversary now, because the presentation led to the formation of 10 golden rules, the internet marketing company, written five books to them, our number one Amazon bestsellers, and I'm a regular speaker at all the legal conferences. We do that weekly podcast, maybe you're listening on the podcast, and we have a YouTube channel that's been viewed. Our videos have been viewed over 350,000 times. So hopefully I have a little bit of credibility to talk to you all about marketing and marketing for law firms. So first, I want to tell you my personal car accident story because this is really relevant to this topic. Three, I was with two of my employees and we were actually up in Orlando at a conference and we were driving home the next morning and we were adopted red light, we just got off the highway or stopped at a red light. And whammo, we get rear ended sitting at a red light on the exit off the highway. Somehow an elderly woman was going like way too fast. So the three of us all took different paths, the two of them went to the emergency room. I didn't feel so bad at first. But then I went to the chiropractor. And I said, you know, I was in this little car accident, my neck feeling a little stiff, and they got so excited. They're like, Oh, my goodness, you know, you were in a car accident. And they started giving me back cushions and creams and potions. And, you know, they could see, you know, they they saw the stars light up in their eyes, that dollar signs, right? Because they knew that they were going to refer me to an attorney. And then I was going to be a great client for them over the next six months. And they were right. You know, unfortunately, I didn't realize that at the time. But I had a pretty significant back injury now. That's a great referral, right? They were referred by a chiropractor. But the reason I like to tell the story, I wish I didn't have to tell this story. Five years later, was going up to a conference in Orlando. And we're on the turnpike big, you know, high traffic highway, and it stop and go traffic, there was something going on up ahead. We didn't know what turns out, it was another accident. And sure enough, you know, come to a stop. whammo, I get punched in the back. Again, rear ended, same same type of scenario. Now, the reason I tell the story is because it was five years later, and I couldn't remember the name of the attorney who got me a pretty decent settlement five years before. Well, why is that? Well, the reason is because he didn't have any kind of Referral Engine. He didn't send me a Christmas card. I'm Jewish. He didn't send me a Hanukkah card. didn't send me a happy birthday card. But guess what, guess who did Jason Melton, who became my second attorney, and it's actually my birthday this week. So thank you, Jason. You know, he's actually got his ground game in place, right? He's staying top of mind with me. And he does an amazing job with his social media. Like I see him all the time. It's a matter of practice 200,000 followers on his Instagram, and he's regularly publishing content on LinkedIn, I see business content on Facebook. So you know, the moral of the story is, you have to have that ground game in place, right, you've got to have a regular top of mind Referral Engine in place, where you send the birthday card, you send the holiday card at a very minimum, and you got your some social media and a monthly newsletter, which is like a baseline that we do for all of our clients.

Now, the next thing is you want to take the game up a little bit, I call it the pizza party, or Ken Hardison, first talked about this on on about five years ago on one of our monthly webinars. And he calls it the inner circle, or you could call it the VIP VIP club. And basically any past client, you know, when you're starting out and you're small, you invite all your past clients once a quarter, to a buffet or pizza restaurant, and you just have a low cost, nice gathering, you give them a bunch of your swag, you give them a bunch of your you know your stuff, right? And you got make it make it really fun door prizes. You give out your books, if you have a book branded merchandise swag, so they can you know, they can wear your logo, if they will make it cool, by the way, don't have like a massive law firm logo on it, one of the things can talk to us like private VIP cards. So they've got private backdoor access, as a referral an idea for any friends or family who get get injured getting an accident or whatever practice area need. And it doesn't have to be super expensive, right? It can be a room at the Golden Corral or, or a pizza place, as I mentioned. So that's what Ken called it. And then, you know, after, as soon as we got into COVID, we had to come up with a solution. So what we came up with our, with our clients is this VIP box. And this works really, really well for referrals. So that's what the box looks like. And here's what it looks like in person. So we send out these boxes. And inside the box is a gift certificate. So they get you know, we buy them lunch or coffee. So basically, we took the pizza party to them, we've got these VIP cards, and they're super heavy stock. And then we've got a bunch of branded merchandise in the box. Now we don't stop there. What what we do is we're using this very tactically. So for this client for Stewart and Stewart in Indiana, we're sending 20 kits a month. And what we're doing is we're sending five every week. And we're very precisely selecting 20 past clients who didn't do a Google review. We sent five a week. And then a week later, we call them up on behalf of the client. And we say, you know, Hey, just wanted to know you're part of our inner circle, part of the Stewart and Stewart family now, I want to make sure you open the box because you know we're buying your coffee or buying your lunch. There's a gift certificate in there as well. We got some VIP cards. You know God forbid any of your friends or family are ever in an accident. We want you to refer our firm and we gave you the price Have a backdoor VIP access number with those, those little VIP cards. So the VIP cards are in the box. And then we ask them for the five star Google review. So we're even taking it one level higher. And that's why we do five a week, because the new cadence you want to target is one to two new Google reviews per week. Now, if you're a young attorney, and just starting out, you know, a lot of people kind of poopoo, the BNI, or the local networking group. But I asked Phil Schneider, who's the attorney in our BNI group, I said, Phil, you know, how much business have you gotten from BNI, he said, over a million dollars. So this is not to be poo pooed, the local, a really good, organized local networking group puts a team of 40 people on your side, looking to send referrals to you, like everyone in our BNI, I'm always looking to send, you know, roofing jobs to our roofer, or air conditioning jobs to the air conditioning person. And, you know, personal injury, I just sent a great case over to Phil. So that is an awesome way to build your local Referral Engine. Now, if you're the head of a massive firm, you might, you might not look at that. But I'm always amazed at how many guys who run big firms are still in their BNI, they've been in it for 15 or 20 years, and they're doing great, you can find BNI, as the business network International to largest networking group, I guarantee there's one in your market. And if you're not going to do it, you know, get some of the young attorneys to join the BNI Group on behalf of the firm. Now one of the key things that they teach in BNI, that's super important. And Charley is going to talk to you about strategies for this. But it's a BNI terminology, I believe it's called the one on one. And one thing a lot of people overlook with these networking groups is they go to these networking groups. And they go, you know, they go to the weekly meeting, or the monthly meeting, you know, for three months or six months, and they say, Oh, this didn't work for me. But you're missing the most important part, in part, because we like to refer people who we know, like and trust. And so if you don't get to know people in your group, if you don't get to build a personal relationship, they're not gonna refer you and you're not going to refer them with any confidence. So the first thing is you want to set up a coffee, or even a Zoom meeting, and do that one on one where you get to know them a little bit. Ask them about themselves, ask them about their family, ask them where they're from, ask them where they went to school, ask them what their hobbies and passions are, you know, really get to know them a little bit as a person, and make sure they get to know a little bit about you and a little bit about what's a great referral for you. And then once you get to know them a little bit, then you want to take that that relationship even a little bit further. And I learned this from from my good friend, Lenny Sklar. He said you don't you know, he said, Let's have another one on one. I said, Wait, we just had a one on one. And he said one on one is not a noun, it's a verb one on ones is, is an ongoing thing. And so we had another lunch. And we came up with a great idea how we could do this joint event where we invited our our own customers each other we refer to each other, and one on ones are really an ongoing thing where you're going to get to know them. And then the next time, Lenny and I got together with our spouses, and we really started to deepen a relationship where he became a really strong referral partner next thought ideas as you can take that to another level. My friend Gary Solomon Does, does lawyer dinners. And he invites, you know, six or eight different attorneys, maybe from different practice areas, or maybe all consumer facing, he hosts a really nice dinner gets everyone together. And he said that's yielded him tremendous benefit over the years. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Charley and he's going to take you through the playbook. I just wanted to give you the foundation on some of how I look at referrals. Charley is the founder of law firm alchemy. He's the host of they don't teach you this in law school podcast, I think is most important job he's most passionate about is dad. He's also also a leather artist. He's a runner, and we first met at GLM, the Great Legal Marketing conferences run by Ben and Brian glass. So without further ado, Charley, welcome aboard.

Awesome, Jay. It's so good to be here. And happy birthday, by the way. Hello, thank you. I am honored to be here on your birthday week. So yeah, I'm excited to talk about this because we're not even just going to go strategica we definitely are exactly like you reference, Shay. We've got some very specifically tactical things that we're going to be able to do but one of the first things I like to do is help people disassemble themselves and reassemble themselves in a matter of a few minutes. And then I'm going to play what I call a 10 minute magic trick. For every one a 10 minute magic trick in which 10 minutes I'm going to make it half a million dollars. It's a pretty good magic trick, isn't it? So the first thing that I want to do is I want to talk about value creation, wealth creation, how we make money because I think it's really important to kind of establish a big why behind what exactly we're doing And here. So I have these four stages of wealth creation that I talk about with coaching clients. And frankly, I talk about in some capacity, even with my own kids more and more as they get older, and the idea of how you level up in life, and everyone's going to be able to relate to these four stages, which is great. So these are four stages of value creation, if you're riding along at home, which I suggest that you do.

So the first way that you get paid in life, is you get paid for what you do. When you came out of law school, you had, you had a set of skills. The Liam Neeson thing is a very particular set of skills, right? That you were able to apply to a law firm, and they hired you predominantly for what you can do what you can achieve within a billable hour, you were plugged into their systems, they understood that you could produce a legal product, first way that you get paid in life, I mean, in the SEO world, right, it's your just ability at first to do SEO, like actually get the darn thing done. The second way you get paid in life, is you get paid for what you know, this is where the majority of service professionals end up stuck. And that's what we're gonna fix here for them j is most people are stuck on the idea of getting paid for what you know, here's the good news, you get paid more for what you know, than for what you do. It's when you're an attorney, and you start to level up your skills, you can charge a higher hourly rate, you're more efficient, your end product is better. Because of the knowledge and experience that you have gained, you probably have a couple of team members that allow for you to create leverage, you're training them from the knowledge that you've gained in order to make them excellent for the client. So you're getting paid for what, you know, in some cases, maybe that's becoming a senior attorney and another practice because they just recognize you're a better tactician, you're better at strategy than say, the average for the average associate. Here's where we're really playing right now. Because like I said, this is this is where a lot of people end up getting stuck. And I don't want you stuck there. So we're going to transcend to the next level, which is getting paid for UI, you know, this is a big difference right here. And I'm gonna go ahead and share Step Four with you as well, it's actually important that we have step four right now to create some context. And step four is getting paid for who you are. To give you an example of who gets paid for who they are. Mike Morse, Shawn Morgan, these are people these are attorneys that you recognize who get paid for who they are. It's a celebrity status. core issue here in the era of social media, is the number of people who want to skip to step number four, we all just want to be paid for who we are. And we're skipping past the essential step of who we know. It's incumbent on you to go out and introduce yourself to people to make new friends to accomplish these meetups that we're going to talk about to go to the BNI groups like Jay mentioned, and bring people into your orbit and make yourself part of theirs. Because if all you're doing is hoping to become a celebrity on social media, and all you care about is people knowing you, you yourself will never really be known. Okay, so let's get into a little bit of how we actually allow people to know to get to know more people, right? So this is what we're focusing on the who, you know, then before we drop into the actual playbook, and I play me a little magic trick for everyone. I want to talk about one specific thing. And I'm gonna ask him to ask for some chat interaction real quick. I promise this will be absolutely painless the same way that Jay did it, get your hand over the one button for me. And what I'm curious about is, if you identify predominantly as an introvert, can you go ahead and put a one into the comments for me, if you identify predominantly, as an introvert, go ahead and punch one into the chat for me and I'll even get things started because me, I identify as an introvert, that Derek press that one button for me if you identify as an introvert, by the way, I do understand the humorous idea of asking a bunch of introverts to essentially raise their hand and self identify. There is a little bit of irony in doing this, but I know that any audience that I talked to, and I know that we've got some real introverts in here because there's not nearly enough ones popping up because they're being their best introverted selves. Whenever I do this in a live room 70% of the room raises their hand. Again, kind of funny getting introverts to raise their hand but as they see other introverts doing it, they start feeling more and more comfortable. The reason I always bring this up is introversion is a lie that we tell ourselves. And we convinced ourselves, I'm an introvert. That's why I can't do this networking, oh, I'm gonna figure out a way around it. I'm bad with people, I don't know how to talk to other people. The majority of folks identify as introverts, which means that if you develop the very simple superpower of being the one to reach out to all of these other introverts, and invite them to a chat, invite them to that one on one, you will build a network much faster than any other individual will, because they're all so scared of their own introversion and telling themselves this horrible lie that holds them back. So that's a lie that you've been telling yourself for a while, it was a lie that I told myself for a while, I said, Ah, I'm such an introvert, you know, I'm going to stick behind just digital marketing, I'm going to stick behind, you know, all kinds of walls. And by the way, it would be just as foolish to say that, Oh, I'm an extrovert, all I do is go and meet people. I never worry about some of that behind the scenes stuff, you got to have that done as well. But if you feel like you're an introvert, go ahead and drop that facade for yourself. You just need a few good questions to ask folks. Charley, I

don't want to stop your flow. But this is a great lesson that I was taught. I think it was in the Andrew Nierenberg book about live events. You know, every everybody thinks they're more of an introvert than everybody else. But you know, you just group, everybody is super shy. So like, one of the best things you can do it at like the cocktail party, when the conference is starting whatever's go up to the person standing alone, you just made their day. Because they're just like, Oh, my God, my boss made me go to this like Chamber of Commerce meeting. And nobody's talking to me, and I'm a loser. And I don't know who I am. If I'm going to even talk to anyone before I go home, and you go up and start talking to them, you Oh, my God, you made their day. And now you're also not the one standing on their own feeling uncomfortable. So that goes live in person, and so much. So for the networking. Oh,

So priority number one, other attorneys, including competing attorneys, this is really important, folks. Okay, you have to also send you also have to try and talk with your, quote unquote, competition. One of the easier wins to get is meeting with competitors, and finding out that they have a different ideal client subset than you have. And would they would be happy to refer to you, clients who are outside of their ideal client profile. It could be a vice versa scenario where you can both be supporting each other. Because do you want to know where your best potential set of clients are probably already going. other law firms in the same practice area, we literally know for a fact that your ideal clients are going to those folks. Now can we find firms that don't handle your ideal client? Bring them to us? Yes, absolutely. Other attorneys related professionals. So you know, the chiropractors if you're personal injury, financial advisors, if you are, if you are an estate planning attorney, you can do bondsman if your criminal defense, marital therapists, if your family law, all of these related professionals that are part of the circle of influence when someone is going through this particular legal issue. And then the last category are community leaders. Basically, in every single one of these cases, what we're looking for is a population, a dense population of your ideal client, we know that other attorneys will get it. We know that the related professionals will see those folks shortly before they need your services. I was at Craig golden Forbes summit earlier this year moderating it and one of the things that Craig talked about was in the personal injury side. Can you be friends with? One what morticians? Essentially? Why is the name escaping me of people, funeral home directors, thank you. There we go. Finally, click Funeral Home directors go and make friends with them as well. He gets cases referred to his law firm from there. And then community leaders, one of the best examples being Jim Dodson down in Florida, Jim gets tons of referrals for cycling accidents by meeting up with all of the affinity clubs that handle cycling and giving away free helmets and all sorts of goodies to them. So if you just focused on this core plan right here, this is worth half a million dollars to you comfortably, and I made it with 17 seconds to spare on my clock right there j. So that's the 10 Minute magic trick on this playbook. At this point. I wouldn't be surprised. It'd be Jay you have some insight on details to be fleshed out here that I can flesh out for the group. Otherwise, if you have a question specifically about this, that you want to drop in chat, I still have a lot of things I can go in depth on. But I'm always interested, what the first problem that should be fixed for the audience is.

Alright, well, let's open it up to the audience. Go ahead and type in the chat. If you have any questions I'm, I'm going to sneak in really quickly if nobody else does, by all means. Let's get started. So the two meetups per week, how do you book and what's the benefit of in person versus zoom?

It Charley, I want to news Jack, your news, Jackie, please. And you know, thank you for giving me a great idea. I watched a legal movie over the past couple days. And it was a movie called dark waters. And it was a story against Dupont, and Teflon and they sort of blew the roof off. You know how bad some of the harmful ingredients are putting out into the environment. And so what I did, and I'll just, I'll zoom Jack just to show how here we go. In chat GPT. I said write an interesting and thought provoking 800 to 900 word email. Summarizing the movie dark waters in the case against DuPont tells you to short, interesting stories about the attorney and the farmer in the movie. And so now I have my weekly email ready to go where I can tell the story about the movie I watched because it would have taken me about an hour to write, never do it. And I can tweak this out a little bit myself in five minutes and send it out as my interesting little. And it's interesting because I'm all of my world now is lawyers. So it's a it's easy to news Jack stories about the law, you know, watch an episode of suits or watch a movie about law or read seven books written by lawyers. Yeah,

that's a perfect, perfect example. And it's leveraging AI, it's, it is exactly that idea of curation. Rather than Jay needs to come up with his like, you're gonna go in and do a ton of research personally on this legal case that you heard about. Instead, there's a movie that you get to reference. And you know what America loves. America loves movies, we could talk about the downfall of the cinema however we want. But the truth is, they're still making money, people are still showing up, we have more television streaming services than ever before. Entertainment is entertaining. So leverage that when you're when you're talking to other folks. Over time, you'll grow your own voice. And perhaps and I have some amazing clients who I work with who they already have great voices coming out of the gate, and they understand copywriting and just naturally, they can be an interesting person. But give yourself permission early on to curate your content, as you learn what your voice is, as you learn the main things that you like talking about and what you are able to say that makes you interesting to other people. And

we've got some pretty interesting folks on here. Like, you know, first time attorneys just graduated, some pretty advanced folks. So I just want to take one of the thoughts that you shared a minute ago and explain sort of the advanced class for some of the other folks in the room. And that is the simple one on one. So Charley and I actually met at a couple of conferences. I saw him present he was great. So I grabbed him at the end of his presentation said hey, can we do this on a podcast? This would be great. So we arranged a 30 minute zoom one on one where we talked about it got to know each other a little bit you know as like our first coffee one on one than we actually did the podcast recording. We spent about 45 minutes together got to know each other even more I learned interesting things about his leather work and his his running and whatnot. And then now we're doing this and obviously we you know we've interacted a few times talking about the planning for this and then The next time we see each other in person, hopefully soon, we're going to be like old friends. And it's what I talked about earlier about that. No, like and Preston, you know, the tip is, it's super easy to do a podcast or to interview someone for your blog. And it's a great it's like, no one ever says no. You know, like, on my podcast, I interviewed Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist. Tim Westergren, the founder of Pandora good at but we lost him, the founder of Zappos passed away. Yeah, Tony, say, I mean, unbelievable people. And all you have to do is ask Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee, you know, on and on and on. And tons of the amazing people you mentioned, Mike Morris was just on our podcast, Ken Hardison on our webinar. So it's a great vehicle to say, Hey, can I write about you in my blog? Can I interview you, if you just want to do blog, and obviously taking it to the next level of podcasts, and webinars is an awesome way to build those relationships?

Oh, yeah, that's the cool thing is as you build out some of these resources, like the weekly email, like the monthly mailer, these are also ways for you to get some more of those meetups coming to you and to share with the world, some of the people that you've met, remember that these are not siloed activities, you don't have to have the meetup be completely exclusive of how the email is going to work and how the mailer is going to work. These things can help each other out, perhaps someone that you meet is a really interesting individual who would love to contribute to your monthly mailed newsletter, while you're taking some work off of your plate and giving them space to be highlighted. And making them feel the love from you. Whether you have a podcast or even using your social media platforms. That is, that's another resource that you can use for other individuals. And as someone who like I use a lot, I'm using LinkedIn quite a bit, I have a podcast this at the other thing, I have a I've used as a place to meet a lot of people. And then I like to use it as a place to broadcast about the people that I meet. And I will tell you, the truth is like there's, I can never remember to broadcast and share about every single individual in the network. But at least I know to use that resource to broadcast about people in my network. Because it's not just about people knowing me, it's important that there are people who I am getting to know, and having some people who would who are interested in getting to know me as well. But that takes time, man. It drives me nuts when people just so badly want to skip to the I want to be famous. You know, the average famous person worked really hard at a meet a lot of people had to fail a ton to had relationships that they messed up because they like Oh, overstretch themselves over promised under deliver all kinds of stuff, until you start to get paid for who you are. And by the way, not all of us here will get paid simply for who we are, that may be a destination that you don't arrive at the fourth stage. It's fantastic. But it only happens as a byproduct of going through the other three stages. And it may not happen for you. And that's okay, because the majority of money gets made between stages two and three. In that transition right there, you already make a lot of money when you move from what you do to what you know, the amount that you make when you go from what you know, to who you know, and you build out that network of people. And again, I was so obsessed for a long time. I remember Dan Kennedy saying, there is no problem that you can't solve. With a good sales letter. I was like, awesome. I can sit behind a desk and just send sales, emails, sales letters, all that type of stuff, all my problems will be solved. And then I realized that might be a slowish way to handle things. I'm gonna have to build these lists and yadda yadda yadda. Why not meet people who are interesting, folks. And the great joy that I found j is within the law, firm support and success based people like you and so many others. We're all like, actually interesting people who are interested in each other and have some pretty fun thoughts to share, and are all really driven and excited about the success of the others in our network. And it's an amazing place to be the same thing for the law firm and I. J, I feel so humbled by the fact that my view of attorneys is exceptionally positive. Because I have met so many great attorneys that when I meet someone at like a block party, and I mentioned I work with lawyers, and a lot of them are like, Oh man, lawyers that must be tough and I know Do you understand they're great. There are a couple like in any profession, there are a couple of bad apples, but for the most part, they're awesome. Awesome People who get bad press at times. But

yeah, and I think most of the bad press is spread by like the insurance companies and people like that. Yep.

Yeah. I mean, look, attorneys are on the other side of a lot of big lobbying efforts that's hard to go up against. But

thank God, there they are enjoyable people, because you and I spend most of our days with them. And when I selected the attorney niche, I didn't realize it was going to be so omnipresent that like, every, almost my whole day and every last week, I was a pillar, you know, where every, every event is, an every breakfast, lunch and dinner. So the four steps, you know, you touched on a second ago, the first one is what you do. So let's talk about these as I want to flush this out a little bit. So as as like, let's say consumer facing attorneys, the folks you mostly work with, you know, what you do is basically, here's my interpretation, basically, like you, this is a graduate attorney, and a lot of those folks are going to get a job, they're going to work somewhere, learn some stuff, or they're going to hang their shingle, then then the next level is what you know. And so the difference between that entry level attorney who's billing, the lowest hourly rate and the firm are getting the smallest cases, and somebody who has some experience and has become excellent at what they do. There's a lot of the current best practices that you ate rank your attorneys A, B, and C, the A's get the best cases, and you know, the B's and C's gonna have to earn their way up to getting the best cases. And so the what you know, is the people who are better have advanced capabilities and track record, right? It's not a good, just the longest work or the hardest work gets to get results, right.

Exactly. A good way to frame it up would be if you've so like, we have the Val pack or money, mailer stuff, coupons that show up, and we always get there's like Northern Virginia Wills and Trusts, or whatever it is, and they do basic wills and trusts. I don't know it's something outrageous like $150, right? I don't know how it's got to be software driven, right? They're just being paid for what they do, because they're just presenting it as like, this is what the thing is, this is the price that is yes or no, that's all the consumers deciding. The stapling attorney who gets paid for what they know, is perhaps sending out a seminar mailer, because now there's information that is of interest, to me, their value is not in creating the will alone. Their value to me, is strategist and improvement in PEI. The mills are often getting paid for what they do we settle your case fast. That is, that is what we do. The what you know, version of that is going into the strategies and the negotiation and helping people understand the anatomy of the case and the role of attorney versus client. And they know like, Hey, this is a process, rather than this is just speed, a maximum velocity to for whatever cash we can get on the table. So

first step what you know, you're an attorney second step, sorry, what you do. Second step what you know, you're a good attorney, so you're getting the better cases. And who you know. And the simplest iteration of this is you're probably getting referred. The tougher cases. Yeah. Several attorneys. I meet with our I forget what it's called there. There's a higher level of attorney there, right, another series of very, very tough exams. And so they're often referred the serious injury in the depth cases. Board Certified. Yeah, board certified right,

depending on the state that you're in

a little different by state. I'm thinking of a couple of guys here in Florida, who, who get those really, really tough cases, and they only take on 10 or 15 a year, but they're the massive, you know, multiple death, death, death cases, serious injury cases. Yeah. So who you know, in this version is, you get referred the cases, because people know you and know about you and your expertise. And does that parlay is what gets you to that next level to celebrity? That's

I interviewed Gary on 10 Golden Rules podcast. And back then he was he worked in a wine store, his dad's wine store and he had just become a breakout YouTube celebrity. And the interesting story is he said, You know, I knew that I needed to blog. But I just couldn't get myself to write something every day. And then when YouTube came out, I was made for it. And I had the discipline to record a video every single morning, and we faced wine or we'd have a Somalian. And we we'd have a new a new manufacturer, and we'd interview someone. And then I spent the rest of the day talking about what I did, answering the same question over and over. What's a white that goes nicely with fish? He said, spent the whole rest of the days building that celebrity. Yeah, but yeah, he certainly was conscious of it. Oh, yeah. That's the fourth step who you are like, Yeah, you know, to become a Mike Morris of John Morgan to get Gary Vee. I'm thinking of Ben Crump. And in, you know, in the similar space 100% Ben got a couple of huge cases, George Floyd and two or three other like super media cases. And I guess, that publicity equal, like Morgan and Morgan's TV ad spend, because I don't know that he didn't. But I don't know that. John Morgan won, you know, multiple multimillion dollar cases, got the wherewithal to run the TV, to create the bigness and to run billboards saying he's bigger. Mike Morris, I think built a tremendous track record and got on TV and had the wherewithal to build his brand and wrote a book and became known and in the business of law communities,

where you're already is another example of being paid for who you are. You sort of know that someone is paid for who they are, when there are a lot of people who point to them and say something like, well, he or she's not even the best attorney to handle this. It's like that's not really the gauge here. There's no such thing as one single best attorney to handle a case, there are a lot of attorneys who can handle a great case. It's the ones who, by the way, it oftentimes helps when you have a in a celebrity attorney when you've got a major national case, who then knows how to deal with the media who because by the way, over time, they've built additional skill sets of what they do and what they know. And you know, someone like Ben Crump is going to know how to handle the media side of it, and develop a case in the public's mind just as much in a jury's mind. And that's important, because in case like George Floyd, that's as much a cause as it is a case. And that is important, oftentimes to the people involved. And that is, that goes under recognized.

So giving a couple of thoughts started here. The next thing he gave us was the three key components your 10 Minute magic trick. So number one is to Meetups week. Number two is a monthly mailer printed this. And number three is a weekly email, weekly, not quarterly, please,

not quarterly, my goodness. And we want to know who will hate you, you'll never show up. One

of the conversations I had recently with Chris early actually, it's great love, Chris. And, you know, Chris talked about even twice a week producing content. And I asked him if he calendar arises, because one of the secrets we've found is, you've got to get it sort of structured. And then the other expression I'm thinking of is what you measure gets tension and improves. So if you don't say that, hey, I'm gonna get two emails a week or one a week and measure it and track it. It's not going to happen. So what do you think?

So this is what I love is measuring the difference between process and outcome. So a lot of what we've got on this system, this referral playbook, it's it's very much measuring the process in order to create the outcome, right. So if I'm measuring my ability to get out one email per week, that is mean measuring a process, it would be the same thing as if you saw a difference between process and outcome would be let's say we have these two meetups per week, right? Two meetups per week really is more of an outcome of a process. And the process might be reach out to four law firm owners every week for the next six weeks in order with the objective being to scheduled to meet ups per week, the process is every week those reach out to for I can't guarantee my outcome will happen. But I am shooting for that outcome of two meetups per week. Now, here's the reason that they're different. It's what can you control. In this case, I'm telling you all, as part of the playbook, you need to get to Meetups per week, I'm giving you that outcome and saying you need to figure out a process to make that work. It's fine if you do more meetups, but you cannot do the excuse of well, I reached out to a couple of people and no one scheduled. I said you have to do to Meetups per week. So figure out how to do that if you can't figure out how to do that. We need to build a whole other level of entrepreneurial skills for you. But the weekly email, my ability to press press publish is 100% in my control, so I'm just measuring the process on that, I might need to have an additional process measurement for myself of let's say my goal is to send my email out on Thursday morning at 6am. Right, I might need to measure my process that every Monday, I draft my email and schedule it for Thursday at 6am. And that might be another process that I measure. And then on the back end, things that are not as measurable is my ability to keep a content library for myself. I mean, for me, I have paper notebooks I use good notes as well. I have lists that I keep on my iPhone, my iPad all over the place that are constant content starters for me because I don't really like looking at the blank page and trying to figure something out. I want to be inspired not just have to force inspiration onto a blank page.

Yeah, great point. I mean, actually, Chris early and I were both saying we both use Evernote, and whenever I used to, but it's just a simple you know, there's a one note on Mac, simple note taking function that when you're on your phone, your tablet, your computer, you get an idea, you just immediately write it down. And yeah, it makes it very easy to content super easy. Another tip that I'll share my good friend Brewster Cal Hey Bruce, if someone is listening, tell Brucey heard his name. And he was, you know, creative behind Miami and all kinds of huge brands. And now he's a keynote speaker, author. But he writes a blog every week. And he says if he doesn't get his blog done, he has to work on the weekend. So that's his own personal little discipline. There you go. And in terms of calendar rising, I'll, I'll share the tool we use. Shout out to my dog Good friend Josh Nelson, from seven figure agency who first showed me this nice. And you know, simply what we do is like this is ours. This is for 10 golden rules. And we do the same thing for our clients. So like, on Tuesdays, repurpose content is coming out. Social media is going out in the blues, we've got a somewhere on here would be our our webinar. So here's like the first webinar invite. And you all are here today, although those of you who are here today, if you're here in the future, the reason we got the live audience we sent a in two weeks coming up, save the date, this this webinars next week, this webinars tomorrow, this webinars in one hour, and then in a couple days, we're gonna send out the recording. So maybe some of you are here. Because of that. This is once a month, we send a case study. This is a press release going out for something. And then we cascade everything. So the email goes out. And then it goes on all our social media and stuff like that my personal social, and the company social. But the message here is you don't have to do this crazy amount of content. But right. The important thing is to calendar is it like for a lot of our clients. It's just like every Tuesday, we do what we call cascading we post a video, post a blog, posted on the socials and link to it posted on Google Maps, great content as well. And then once a month, the newsletter goes out. Now that's a baseline that we put in place for our content. And then hopefully they do the community stuff. But they know we're posting on Tuesdays, and the monthly newsletter is going out on Friday. And they know they can layer in, you know, on Wednesday or Thursday anytime they want with like a community event or something like that.

Yeah. That's great. That's great. I love to organize it. I'll show real quick. The so this is like an example of how I keep the notes for myself that I'm going to use when I write. Let's see if it'll come up here. Here we go. So, yeah, this is like I sat down with, you know, this is my iPad. This is I call it the stack in good notes. And I just keep writing in stories linking to things so that way whenever I need to get inspiration, it's right there waiting for me. I can't remember which I mean, there's a million authors who have said something to this effect, but it's regarding inspiration. Yes, I need to be inspired to write fortunately, inspiration shows up for me promptly at 9am every morning. That's what the great writers create for themselves is a situation where they are automatically inspired.

A lot of people say a great creative comes in the shower. Why do you Yes?

My sarcastic answer is nudity. That really what it is, is out there's it's unfortunate, I cannot remember the exact brain science behind this. But the same effect happens when you go for a walk. And it has something to do with like short term memory and it turning into long term memory and interacting. It's a little bit of it is the cluttered desk phenomenon. Where if you have a cluttered desk and I say that as someone who has a cluttered desk hidden just off screen over here, when you go to search for something that you tend to know where it's at, in the process, you will often find ideas related to it that then interact in a positive and novel way that you would not have otherwise discovered a lot of times when you're trying to solve a problem for yourself in a very linear fashion. Like I have this issue with my SEO that I'm trying to conquer. And I'm or I'm having trouble creating content, right. And I'm just I'm so focused on creating more content. Now when I'm focused on that, I tend to think in a very linear way, and I'm only going to access the resources that are directly in front of me. Whereas when you're on a walk or in the shower, and these thoughts start to kind of collide with each other in this open zone. This is where you discover some of these novel ideas where the connective tissue happens because you're not trying to force getting to the outcome that you think you want. Instead, you're in a more neutral state, there is actual brain science behind it. I don't know it right off the top of my head. But that's kind of the that's the gist of it. As I say,

I think part of two additional theories to throw at it. One is, you know, I solve a lot of problems in my sleep. Actually, I pretty much wrote a book in my sleep the other night. I didn't have very good sleep, but I wrote down all the chapters. And it's called growth strategies for law firms. So it'll follow on this book, the advanced internet marketing. And what happens is like you wake up and if you write it down, right, but I think the shower has the same effect, especially if like I go to the gym before I shower, but if you go straight to the shower, it's I think your mind solved the problem and it just comes out when you're waking up. It's not that the shower caused it. It's that your subconscious solved it. And now the waking mind, but I just came up with another theory when you were speaking, which is like it's the one time a day when you're not scrolling Facebook to entertain yourself listening to the other day, and they said, you know, you've got to shut off. Oh, I was listening to the Elon Musk book, and Elon state where he just like, he zones, everything out. And, you know, it's like the one time we're not entertaining yourself, you give your tough selves time to think, you

know, people with ADHD and I say this, I don't have it myself, at least I don't believe so I just I don't believe so chances are I don't, I have friends who are actually diagnosed with it. Some who are medicated, some who are not able to take medication for it. And one of the things that ADHD has is this idea, it's hyperactive disorder, one of the things is hyper focus, that they can go into this state of being so zoomed in on something, and it allows for rapid solving of a problem. Most of us don't actually have that as part of our brains. And so we do need to let the mind wander and go to work for us. There's actually an app that I have on my phone. I think it's brainwave FM is the name of it. And it'll play I can't remember the name of the sounds it is. It's like delta wave type stuff. More or less, it's like having a white noise machine plugged directly in your ears. That seems to work a little bit better than a white noise machine. And there are times when like, I take my kids to dance or whatever it might be. And I've seen the routine at this point about 68 times, so I'm comfortable with putting in some headphones and zoning out well, I sort of nominally watch it and just let my mind wander a little bit. Sure, I could listen to a podcast and audiobook, I could be productive. And there are times when I absolutely am. And I enjoy doing that. But there are times when just 20 minutes of ambient noise and just kind of allowing movement to happen and being tuned out from the world. I mean, assuming the parents don't try to talk to me, I'm sure I'm that strange individual who's just like zombies hanging out in the corner and they don't know what's happening. I'm like, Look, I run one business. I'm about to open a second, please, I've got a lot of time that I don't have a lot of time I need to just zone right now. So that moment of letting that your brain wander and connect things. I keep a notepad nearby. Sometimes something will land on the notebook. Sometimes 20 minutes goes by. And it's just 20 minutes where my brain got to relax. And that's a good thing too.

I love it. resemble Peter Shankman called the ADOS. Attention deficit. Oh, shiny. I'm like shiny bald guy, like constantly doing 17 things. I know. It's terrible. Awesome. Well, maybe on that. So we'll we'll wrap up. Unless you have any last brilliant thoughts. You didn't share you?

Not today, I think, Jay, I appreciate your your line of inquiry on several of these things and fleshing out some of the ideas. You know, I love to play the 10 Minute magic trick. It's always interesting to hear what other people pick up on. And I think one of the things that like this is so notable, you know that you're talking with someone who it really clicks with who has that experience? Who is at that certain stage overall, when the thing that you first want to extract was that four stages of value creation, as opposed to like, oh, what email program do you use, because that we can all go and google that particular thing. But the rest of it, that's where the real depth comes? Not everyone's gonna pick up on it. But I hope everyone noticed that like, that's what Jay is doing for you all is highlighting these meta level ideas and anchoring them for you with some practical pragmatic concepts.

Yeah, I'll share that with the with everybody. If you're ever moderating a panel, at any of these events, we all go to one of the super valuable things I often do is, I'll grab two or three of the key things that I learned. And I'll restate it for the audience. And I'm obviously coming. You know, I mentioned I already interviewed Charley on this topic on my podcast. So I'm coming with an educated mindset. I even listened to the podcast earlier this week, to prep for that. And so I can hit a couple of those high points relatively easily, easily from my notes. And for people, like you said, it sort of creates that rock of learning around the key points and hopefully brings it home in another way. Yeah,

it's always a document you feel that. I will.

And by the way, you can do it in the audience. It's a great, great tactic where, you know, ask a great question. And it can be somewhat of a leading question, Hey, you said, there's those four stages of learning where he can make more money. You know, what, explain to me how do I get to stage four? You know, something like that, you're going to anchor for b Oh, hey, that guy asked a smart question. And then the rest of the conference, you know, and by the way, you gotta say, I'm Jay Berkowitz from 10 golden rules, Charley, thank you so much for that brilliant debt. 10 minute cheat. Well, anyways, with that Thank you so much. Where can people find you?

So if people want to go to law firm alchemy.com, you'll find a whole horse host of resources there. And if you really love this referral playbook and want more of it, go to www dot law firm alchemy.com/referrals and you can download an even more filled out version of the referral playbook over there. Awesome.

And you teased us You said a new businesses coming in? Are you gonna give us any more info yet?

Let's just say that there's an email marketing problem that needs to be solved. Awesomesauce

Charley, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you for being here. And that's it.

Jay, thank you so much. Always, truly, always a treat to talk with you. Cheers, buddy.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com. That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com.