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, Jay Berkowitz.

Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast, we've got a great guest today, Paul Neal. He's also a podcaster. And here's a great business that focuses on helping attorney service professionals, entrepreneurs acquire the building that they run their business from. And this is something that I wish I did years ago. Now we're a virtual business. So that option really doesn't exist for me. But Paul, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast.

Yeah. Hey, Jay. Excited to be here, man. Thanks for having me on. So

tell us a little bit about your background first, where are you from? How'd you get to where you're at now?

That's a great point. And actually, one of our clients is two young attorneys. They've had a couple of years that had a couple relatively big payouts of personal injury guys, and sometimes they get some cash on hand. So one of the things I encouraged them to do is, you know, get a building that they obviously can run the business from, maybe there's a couple other businesses in the building to help you know, give them future growth opportunity and, you know, cash flow, etc. And get a little bit bigger footprint. And the other thing I recommend is a, if you can have a slight billboard location, that there's a hell of a value there. Because, you know, if you're here in happen to be in my community, but you know, I've talked about a couple places that are relatively high traffic and relatively, you know, they're not retail per se, but they're, you know, the, it could function as a billboard, for the firm. And so you're gonna get just like drive by brand awareness. And you're also going to have that physical presence in the community. So there's, there's a whole marketing component to having your own location as well. Yeah, well, those

That's fantastic. So what, you know, you said when the business conditions are right, when are the business conditions, right? To buy your building as a as a law firm, or, you know, primarily for law firms, but adjacent professional services and entrepreneurs? Yeah,

so let's start with when it's not, right. So you mentioned your virtual business, so probably not probably not a good idea. If you're a virtual business, I tell people, you know, really, our ideal client, when it makes the most sense, if you have a business that has a local presence, and a need for a local presence, a physical location, so you've got employees that are coming to the office, you got patients or clients or customers that are coming in, and, and you and you have to be there, you're not going to, you know, distribute everybody across the nation around the world. So that's requirement number one, requirement number two, when it doesn't make sense. After launching your business, you know, you've got to get a few years of what I call your sea legs, right? We're all as business owners, entrepreneurs, maybe you're an attorney, and you're working for a firm and then you venture venture out on your own. Well, there's a lot of lessons to learn, as you well know, from not just doing the the work of an attorney, but you've got marketing, you've got business management, you've got employee management, you know, now you're, you're moving to a whole different category. And so once you can go down that road for 234 years successfully, you've you've overcome some of the challenges, you've got consistent growing cash flow. And ideally, you've got either some repeat clients, or maybe some referral sources or marketing systems that are fairly dependable. So you know, that, hey, this business has got, it's got a good history, but it's also got a great glide path going forward. And another time not to buy one potentially, is if you think you're going to be exiting in the next, you know, a couple of years for whatever reason, unless you're looking to try to add real estate to package like a sale, which can add value and open the door to more more buyers, actually. But that's when it's not right. So if you can check the boxes that we're ever reason to be here locally, we have a need, we need a physical space for whatever reason, again, clients, employees, or some combination thereof. And you got two or three years of good solid, financial background and history in the future looks bright, then it's the it's time to start considering, you know, should I do this because you're going to have you're going to start and you might start from home, but then probably move into leased spaces. At some point you're gonna have a lease renewal, and it's generally not a great idea to be thinking about this 30 days before the lease renewal because it's a process and we get those calls occasionally and it you know, it's a it's it's a bit of a fire sale nightmare thing and we're like now you probably just need to renew your lease and let's, you know, come back and renew it for a shorter term if you can, but generally when you're you know, 612 18 months out on a decision on do we continue to stay here and re up the lease if that is an option, or or not? and sometimes you don't know, because you think it's an option. And your landlord will show up 30 days before and say, Hey, we're not going to renew it, or 60 days before I get those phone calls, too. So, which is another reason why you should consider it, but we're not even there yet. So I think if you've, you've checked those boxes, and you're, you're within that window of lease renewal, that's when you really need to start digging in and say, Hey, does it make sense now, and it may not, it might be something that's a three year plan, or a five year plan or a seven year plan based upon your overall strategy.

That's awesome. So one of the things we're recommending now for a lot of law firms, is a multi location strategy. And the principal reason is based around marketing, local Google Marketing. So the Google Maps and the Google Local Service ads reward you for proximity.

Now, you can't tread lightly on this strategy for a couple of reasons. Number one, is, if you open a second third location, you have to have enough Google reviews, to give it a little bit of oomph, you know, in the in the algorithm. I don't know if that's written into Google, Google patents, but And so Google reviews are really important. But the good news is you don't need like 500, you only need one to two per week. So if you're at the size of a business where you're getting like, you know, let's say you're, you know, generally signing 30 or 40 clients and closing 30 or 40 cases each month, you know, then you have enough wherewithal to spread the reviews around to 234 locations. The second thing is really important, you gotta have a physical location, like you can't have a WeWork, or a post office box, like you can't fool Google with that, as a matter of fact, it's against their Terms of Services, try and fool them. And in some instances, if like a competitor complains, or sometimes the algorithm triggers a Google investigation, you have to physically go to the office, and they basically do like a FaceTime, where you got to show them, hey, you know, here's your sign on the door, here's our files, here's our desk. So you know, you need to, you need to legit location and, and sometimes it's enough to just be like, I say, to lawyers, you know, get an office in your accountants, office. And I know, it's super great if you're at like, Main Street and First Avenue, and you can have, you know, if they're the main street address, you can have the first avenue address, there's a door on the side, you can put a sign on the door, that works really well for this Google initiative for the maps, and local service ads. But you know, there's a lot of money to be made from those calls that you're gonna get from the maps, and from Google screen local service ads. So it's really a valuable strategy for the firms that are at that level. But you know, some firms are going to the next, the next step, like the guys who really have some deep pockets are getting second and third locations. And one guy is a super smart guy, my friend, Jeff Phillips, of Phoenix is getting retail locations. So he's actually getting like small mall locations, strip mall locations, because those are great retail store fronts, couple people can work out of that location. Now the thing is, if you're like, a couple people have long commutes, maybe a couple days a week they can, you can find a location where there's lots of consumers, you're going to take advantage of that proximity marketing in the Google algorithm. So talk about the strategy of buying multiple locations. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's

That's great. And, you know, I was wondering, Morgan and Morgan is, you know, building out their national footprint, but they even have, you know, they're the largest personal injury attorney in the country. They even have six locations in Orlando, which, which is where their big head offices and I was always trying to figure out, you know, why? Why is that, and then it became real clear, you know, they were targeting different Google Maps, locations, and local service ads. So as I mentioned, and then someone told me, they were, you know, buying these law firms. So they were, you know, buying the location by getting the existing, you know, just changing the name, but they had the Google reviews, and they had the built in traction there. And then obviously, you know, now, the light bulbs coming on, John Morgan's, pretty smart guy is probably the real estate play as well. Oh, yeah.

This Yeah, this is some of the best consulting for law firms. And it's nothing to do with marketing. Yeah, except for the proximity play. How much is involved? Like, you know, let's say you, you know, you're decent firm, like, my, my client. I mentioned earlier, a couple guys, couple locations, and they add a couple more locations. How much is involved in managing the real estate?

Yeah, I mean, it depends. So if, you know, if you're just going to be, you know, an owner, user, and you take the entire space, so it's really, it's not that much more than, again, managing your home, you know, managing leased space, because like our manager, Yeah, cuz, nine times out of 10, like, if your air conditioning goes out, you got to call the AC guy,

you gotta know the landlord's not gonna know, errors, you might even be on a triple,

you might even be on a triple paying the freight for all that anyway. But if you but if you employ one of the strategies that that a lot of our clients do, and you build or buy a space larger than you need in my, maybe you take 60%, you lease out 40 somebody else, then now there's a little bit of landlord responsibility. So you might have a management company handle that for you. I mean, you can do that. You can even have a management company handle your own space, if you pay them a small percentage, right. So that would be an operational consideration. But I mean, they, they that's what they do all day long. And, and so it can be autopilot if you want it to be and it's not very expensive at the end of the day. What

do you think about the timing? Like, I mean, I guess the biggest thing going on the market, everybody, you know, who aren't day to day, like your assumes that a lot of people aren't going back to work, that commercial real estate value is declining. But then there's other interesting factors, like I've seen a ton of buildings, convert to Amazon warehouses and ghost kitchens. And, you know, the amazing thing about commerce interval, see if that doesn't, what you think, like you assume, you know, market change, people aren't going to the office, you know, building devaluation, commercial real estate devaluation. But there's so many other factors, what what are you seeing in the markets today?

some very creative spaces, there's a space. I mean, so Florida and Delray Beach, Atlantic Avenue has become a real go to place with restaurants and retail. And one of the banks opened a very clever space, it's almost like Starbucks. And the Starbucks is the third place, right, like home work, and we're hanging out with friends. And so they have all these, you know, little spaces where you can take, take a call spaces where you can have a one on one, one on two, meeting that there actually is a coffee shop. And then it's like the open bank is right there. And then in the back, they have actually a couple boardrooms, you can rent. That'd be an interesting concept for personal injury law, I like to have that kind of city space, you know, welcome people into your space, be a part of the community, have a coffee shop, build the brand, and have that, you know, all the other great opportunities you talked about, about, you know, owning the real estate, the tax advantages, and the retail billboard I talked about?

Yeah, I mean, wow. Absolutely. I just think about that, from attorney standpoint, most attorneys are, you know, so many of them are trying to build, you know, get networked into that community, like you said, so you know, your your internet marketing, but then also your business development is locally what a great way to do it, open your space up. And you've got these boardrooms for, you know, have all the events and the meetings right there in your own facility. I mean, that has to lead to business, right? And just that trust factor that hey, you guys, it's like, I've got an open kimono, you're coming into my office, here it is. Right.

So we were talking earlier, you know, you told me about the six businesses and you know, a couple of big wins couple and not so big. You had some tips for business owners, what what are some of your couple of your go to business strategies that you'd like to share with the, you know, the maybe the young business owner? Or even the not so yeah.

Well, you know, yeah, I've experienced a lot. I mean, I think, depending on where you are in the business, I mean, I think the the biggest tip that that couple of tips that I can think of is number one, you just got to have, you got to have a vision of what you want. I mean, at the end of the day, it you might not know right away, but you really need to put some head time into what you're trying to do, where you're trying to go and do something that lines up with what you're passionate about. And I don't mean like, you know, I love to do this, I'd love to do that. But, but just just from a missional standpoint, you know, because if you don't start with the end of mind, and you know, Good to Great was a or Stephen Covey was was written about that begin with the end of mind, the seven habits, I mean, you have to know where you're going in order to chart the right path and know if you're on track because you're gonna get knocked off track, you know, all the time and the goal is to try to get back on track as quickly as you can. So I'd say it's tip number one. Tip number two, I would say align yourself with people that have done it before you and you know, get some mentors get in some kind of a group It's good to have people outside of your industry that are successful. But also, if you have some in your industry, get that, seek that out, even if you know, you have to whatever you have to do, because their experience is invaluable. And, and number three, I would say, get started and just keep going the end of the day because you're gonna have setbacks. And I tend to be an analytical guy, and sometimes over analytical as my wife reminds me and so you just, you don't get enough feedback sitting in your own mind, you have to take action, and then look at results and then make adjustments and take action. But something always good happens on the other side of action, even if it doesn't look like it right away. Because you might think one direction is the way to go. And you might smack your head against the wall. But at least you're gonna learn something that and make an adjustment and move on. So so that's what I would say the three tips.

Awesome. So I always end with some, you know, what I call sort of like the quick snappers. These are just some quick questions, and also things I learned so much over the years, we've been doing this podcast for about 15 years. What are some of your tips for personal productivity? Any apps or tools that you use? Yeah, I'm

bad timing on apps and tools, because I'm having computer issues right now. But I, honestly, now this is gonna sound old school because I do have a little bit of wisdom right here, as they say, right. And I don't grow up. One of these kids really tells the tale. You me? Hi, EJ, my best tool is a yellow notepad, a legal pad and a pen and to go to my favorite coffee shop or somewhere. And I like to do it at least once a week, and I try to carve out every day, 30 minutes if I can't, if I can't get down there. And just think about review back again. What's the goal? What am I trying to do here? You know, what are the what are the challenges and just just think and just kind of get quiet and get a legal pad in the in the important issues tend to bubble up and it helps me to kind of get clearer for the day. And sometimes I can make pretty strategic changes there, that when you're in the day to day, you know, working in your business, it's hard to see, you know, the bigger picture. And so you got to step away from it. I had a mentor once told me he was funny. We were learning how to to delegate, you know, build a team and systems and delegate. He's like, how do you know if your team is really effective. And he said what he used to do, and he owned a little airplane business. He said he would take every Friday off until like half days. And he would go to his planning, but then he would take randomly just like three days off and not like give people notice. And then he'd come back and he'd see what, what was failing, what was falling apart. And so he knew that that's what he needed to address to fix. And then he would repeat the process, right? And so because you don't really learn when you're in there, and you're Google, and you're answering everybody's questions, right? You want to get away from it a little bit.

That's great. I love it. And definitely when you're doing you're not thinking might catch you off guard here. But are there a couple of those big paradigm shifting concepts that came in that coffee shop? Can you remember those moments? Yeah,

I mean, I think that the one of the biggest paradigms for me is, was the idea of, I don't have to be, again, very analytical, and kind of driven towards perfection. This idea that I think a lot of business owners fight with, and I've fought with it too, is that, well, I can do it so much easier myself, okay, comes easy to me, whatever it is, right. And the problem is, those things that come easier that we think we can do really well, that might be true. But what I realized was if I could do it at let's say 100% But I can hire somebody and train them and even if they only do it at 70 or 80% now and the reality is sometimes they do it a whole lot better in many cases than I ever would have. But it's in between here I think that I can do this right and I gotta you know, I gotta train somebody and all that, but, but the realization that if you can help somebody do it at 80% level, then now I bought all this time back for myself that I can I can now put into there the few things the one or two things that I really am good at and that no one else can do and that I really do like which really generally boils down to the strategic level things the thinking and the you know, business direction and all that. And so it's it's a bit of a hard, you know, for me anyway, it was a hard kind of questioned or this epiphany it took a while and I'd heard it for a long time and I've done it for a while but I don't really think I believed it for a while, right? And then finally it hit me. It's like, Hey, this is crazy man. You only got you've only got 24 hours in a day and you don't want to work any of them. And you're working all these hours.

Right? What are your best business books?

I think, the best one outside of the Bible for me, I love proverbs. It's just so much wisdom on money in business and whatnot. I think it's the best book ever written on that on business and a lot of things. I love the E Myth by Michael Gerber. Because to me, he helps people sort of in that whole paradigm of working in versus working on, I'm

only laughing because email is almost all it's like, three to four weeks, every month is come it comes up as one of the answers.

Yeah, I mean, because it's really it's foundational, right? I mean, we're not taught that's the stuff we're never taught. And we all all of us, I go into business generally want to go to business, because we've got these ambitions and dreams to be free and having, you know, all that, and then you realize you're not and it's, you know, now you've got a job times two plus all the responsibility, right. And so he was the first one to really kind of to challenge that and educate people on it. So I think that was great. And again, I this this idea, Dan Sullivan, his idea of who not how is one I read not that long ago, which reinforces this whole idea of don't try to answer the question, you know, how to do something, that's where most of us get sort of baked in a squat and paralysis of analysis, but ask the question instead, who can do this for me? And that's, again, that idea of leverage, and from his perspective, and I know we said earlier, you know, even if somebody does it 80% as well as me, his argument is, there's people that will do it 300 times better than you. And so by finding someone like that, you don't have to get wrapped around the axle on, you know, how am I going to learn this, like internet marketing, for instance? Well, you can learn internet marketing, if you take time, energy and all that. But it's so much easier to go to uj and say, Jay, can you just do this for me, because I want to focus on being a lawyer, I want to focus on building my business. And people say, Why don't want to pay for that? Well, you're gonna pay for it one way or the other. Right? And he, there is no free lunch. And so

if you're a bluff, and asked me like, can we hire someone in house? To do what you do? Yeah, I said, you really can't because like, even if I'm supposed to be like, one of the Guru's in the internet marketing space. And, you know, I really used to be good at running Google ads. But now I have someone who does it full time, all day, every day. And when I go in the platform, it's pretty confusing these days, God help you, you know, trying to get into Facebook, and good luck trying to crack the search engine algorithms on Google Maps, or SEO. So we have teams, people who do all these things full time, and they're all way better than me at it now. So, you know, what happens a lot of times is, you know, the firm will hire someone to be their in house digital marketing agency. And they'll get someone who's really good at like those ads, you know, they ran the ads for their firm, but they don't know anything about the SEO, or the social or the, the video, and they fake it because they know more than the owner. But it really is, in my opinion, as effective a solution as hiring an agency that really gets it and really has a specialist who do each of those things, and have developed the best practices. And then the other thing is seeing the scope of it, right, like we're seeing 50 or 60 markets across the country. We we really see what's working and we can apply it to the other markets.

Yeah, it's it's the same thing. And like buying your building, I tell people like in the book, I wrote that, you know, the DIY approach is a way to do it, you can certainly go through the process and educate yourself and find funding and all that on your own and you can do it it but but the thing is, you just don't know what you don't know. And there's a lot you don't know, there's a lot of pitfalls and landmines along the way, that they're not going to tell you, you're just going to find out the hard way. And, you know, there's, there's a litany of them. And so, besides all that, to your point, we see tons and tons of deals every day, and every month and every year and nationally. And so we have a we have a pretty good pulse on it. Whereas you're when you go down to your local bank and say I want to buy a building. And they say, Well, sure, you know, I need x y&z and it's going to be 20 25% down, and they're gonna, they're gonna give you the one loan they've got in there, the one tool and they're a little in their toolbox to try to solve your problem and you're going to swallow, you know, because you're like, I need how much money and

you don't fit but if it's not a fit, you're out of luck. Yeah, yeah.

And statistics say you know, they only approved about 24% 25% of applications but and the other thing about that is to to your in house person, how do you know that they're doing a great job just like how do you know that bank deal is the best deal for you? You know, Though all you know is what you see in, you're busy doing your thing, and there's no one has that 30,000 foot where you know your best, it's in your best interest as the agency owner to make sure you're delivering the best value for your clients because you want them coming back. You want them successful. But your employee, we both know how employees can be, you know, they take sick days, they do all kinds of things and SharePoint, if they know a little bit more than you, they can fake you out and you think you're getting the best return you can get and the reality is that you might not be getting anywhere near the best return you can be getting so

great. Who's your NFL team?

I'm a college guy.

Alright, that's okay. It's still answered. Which

which college is now it's almost the new NFL. It's almost we're now almost pro with the NIO money amazing chips. And it's it's so we're gonna have the NFL, we're gonna have the first tier college top 20 which is basically the farm league for for the NFL, and then everybody else that gets a little bit of money while they're in college. And then they go on and work jobs. But it's really quickly

changed the paradigm for the athletes, right? Because if they're making, you know, a million dollars or a couple million dollars in college, they don't have to run out to the NFL. And right they can, in some ways control their destiny a little bit more. Last question. Where can people get in touch with you? Yeah, sure.

easiest place to get in touch with me is at our website, own your building. now.com That's own your building. now.com I wrote a book called unleash your business. How To Unlock wealth autonomy control by buying your building and firing your landlord.

Yeah, get out there. Let's get off the leash. Get off the leash. Being on a leash that if you see if you're not watching the YouTube today. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Paul, thank you so much for your time and your advice and, you know, really paradigm shifting thinking for a lot of attorneys and I hope we're changing some lives that in 10 or 20 years. There'll be thankful they listened to this podcast today.

Yep, absolutely. I appreciate it. Jay had a great time. Thank you.

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