← Making It with Jon Davids
Making It with Jon Davids
258 - This guy built a $2B law firm with one obvious strategy | John Morgan, Morgan & Morgan
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This is John. He's a lawyer and he makes five and a half million bucks every single day. I'm talking about John Morgan, founder of Morgan and Morgan. This is the biggest personal injury law firm in the usa, maybe the world. And it's a wild business story that has nothing to do with lawyers or law firms or anything like that. I'm going to give it to you. All right now I'll tell you how John built a business making $2 billion a year in sales. And then I'll unpack three tactics you can copy literally apply to your business right now, today, no matter what you sell. And by the way, my name is John Davids. I'm the founder of Influicity, where we currently generate over $16 million a month for businesses like these. And yes, we use all the tactics I'm sharing today. Let's go. You're listening to Making it with John Davidson. So rewind to 1988. John's been working as a lawyer for about six years and he wants to break out on his own. So he opens a firm in Orlando. He's doing personal injury law. Think car accidents, slip and fall cases. And business is pretty good. It's mostly coming through referrals in the early days. And that's how most law firms ran at this time. And then John realizes something that's going to change his business forever. You see, up until now, lawyers aren't really advertising. They see ads as tacky and cheap. And most lawyers don't want to tarnish their image with self promotion. It's very different from how it is today. And John is not like other lawyers. To him, it's just dollars and cents. So he starts buying up ad space. Local TV commercials, billboards. He actually takes out a hundred thousand dollar loan because he doesn't have any money at this point. He's a young guy with a new business and he puts all that money into. He's running ads across Orlando. He's promoting his law firm and he's got this iconic slogan for the people. He said he chose that slogan because he wanted to be able to end every ad by saying for the people. And when the Internet came along, he had for the people.com so he could just say go to forthepeople.com fewer words in every ad. This guy's a real ad man. That slogan eventually becomes iconic and Morgan and Morgan grows. It's growing very quickly. So John starts buying more ad space in Tampa, in Jacksonville, Miami, all over the state of Florida. And the phones won't Stop ringing. So he sets up a call center to handle all this load. And it's working. He's scaling both the front end and the back end, which I'll talk about a little bit more in a bit. Before long, he is the biggest personal injury firm in Florida. And it's time to go bigger. So now Fast forward to 2005. John starts running ads in other states, Alabama, Arkansas, New York. He's also pushing outside personal injury. He's dipping his toe into employment law and class action lawsuits, really taking these big, chunky cases. And here's the crazy part. John is so good at getting clients that his firm can't possibly serve them all. He can't grow fast enough, can't hire enough lawyers to take on these cases. So on top of this huge law firm that he's building, he also builds out a massive referral network so he can send thousands of cases every year to other lawyers at other firms and take a cut of those deals. John solved a classic business problem, channeling demand. You see lots of people need lawyers all the time and they typically don't know where to find them. It's not like you have a personal injury lawyer on speed dial. So they typically just end up asking a friend. And that's why John's competitors lived off referrals. So did John, all throughout the 70s. But the demand was always there. So John never needed to create demand. He just needed to channel it. And that's exactly what he's been doing now for 37 years. Today, Morgan and Morgan brings in $2 billion every year. And John is still running a whole lot of ads. This episode is brought to you by Influicity's new tool, the AI Ads Generator, available now at johndavids.com ads Great ads aren't about luck. They're about leverage. The brands that win are the ones who can launch faster, test smarter, and outspend everyone else without wasting a dollar. That's exactly what the AI Ads generator gives you. Instant ad copy that speaks to every customer and feeds the algorithm high performing variations your competitors can't keep up with. It's like strapping a jet engine onto your marketing. And right now it's free. Yes, it's free. Go to john davids.com ads that's john davids.com ads. So I've listened to John on a bunch of podcasts and I've actually talked to people at Morgan and Morgan. A bunch of them follow me on Instagram. I think they spend something like $300 million a year. On marketing and, and you can see it with billboards, bus ads, TV commercials, radio ads, Google Ads, meta ads. They do an awful lot. And I was doing some research on where they actually send this traffic. So I already mentioned one of their domains for the people dot com. You'll hear that in a lot of the ads that are on the radio or on tv they'll say go to for the people dot com. But there's another page that I found called injury dot com and I'm not even sure how I found this. I think I just typed in injury.com and who do you think owns it? Well, go to www.injury.com. see for yourself. Of course you can guess. Morgan. And Morgan owns injury.com and by the way, this is an absolutely savage domain. Like, come on, that domain alone is such a flex. Probably gets a ton of organic traffic. Probably cost them, I don't know, 500,000, maybe 800,000, maybe a milli, maybe more. Okay, but that's not what we're going to talk about. I want you to look at this webpage and I'm going to pull it up on the video if you're watching and let's just run through it because it's a really good example of a beautiful landing page that you can use in any performance marketing campaign. Take a look at what this page looks like on the desktop before I even scroll down. And of course a lot of people are going to be looking at this on mobile, but I'll just do it on desktop for now. So right at the top of the page we have a scroll. We've got Fox, cnn, abc, USA Today, NBC as seen on. And this just scrolls at the top. So the very first thing that my eye is looking at is validation. It's social proof. It's instant credibility. And what a beautiful, simple way to do it. Very few words, mostly pictures, instantly hits me. Then on the left side I've got a simple clear headline. Car accident. We make filing an injury claim easy. Below that I've got in the smaller text, the fee is free. Only pay if we win. Now above that, I've also got 5 stars, 150,000 5 star reviews. On the right side I've got a very short intake form. And the headline on that form is $30 billion recovered. Again, more proof. And then I have just five fields. First name, last name, phone number, zip code, email. Now if I was going to edit this myself, what I'd probably do is ask for the zip code or the location first. And then based on that, I would expand with conditional extra fields. So I would say once somebody enters the first field, let's show them more fields. I never like to show more than one or two fields at the beginning because I want it to feel as though you're going to enter just one or two things. And then once, once you do those one or two things, it expands and I can ask for more information. That's the one thing I would do on this page if I had to nitpick. As we scroll down, we've got another headline. What is an injury worth? And we've got a self diagnostic calculator so you can say what your injury is and then right away get an estimate of what it might be worth. And of course it's going to be worth hundreds of thousands or a million plus dollars. And then we've got some examples of injury cases. I scroll down, I've got more reviews, more testimonials, video text, scroll down more. What do you think? I'm seeing more social proof. So it's a really simple page, not a lot of words, very high impact. There's a little bit of inconsistency here. I hope the Morgan and Morgan folks are listening to this. You've got $30 billion on top, but it says $25 billion on the bottom. Somebody updated the form and forgot to update the rest of the page. They've got their three step process. Get started quickly. Meet your team, build your case. I love one, two, three step processes. Everyone understands and can digest that it's a simple listicle. All right, check this out. What does the fee is free mean? And then it says, you don't pay anything up front. No hourly rates, no surprise bills. We only get paid if we win for you. That's it. And so they're really making this totally idiot proof because people are going to be really skeptical. I'm sure they've had people come in and say, well wait a minute, you say it's free, but what are the hidden charges? And they feel like they're going to get scammed. And, and so Morgan, and Morgan wants to make it super clear that you don't pay. And notice I'm all the way at the bottom of the page here. I've got one single call to action. There's different words on the buttons, but every button is going to do the same thing, which is get me to contact them, get me to call their call center or submit my form, submit my information, give them my email, my phone number. That's all they're trying to Do. It's not about giving me more information about the firm. It's not about, you know, there's no about us page, Nothing like that. No distractions, Straight to the point. Something else that you notice with this law firm and a lot of law firms is the idea of focusing on one avatar. This is something that Morgan and Morgan does well. Like I said, it's very, very common in personal injury in general and in law in general. Firms and lawyers are really good at focus. Which, ironically, is something that most entrepreneurs struggle with. They're not very good at. If you want to start from a very high level when you're a lawyer, the first thing you do pretty early on in your career is you decide what your specialty is going to be. You're going to do corporate law or family law or injury law or insurance law. I got a buddy who started in corporate M and A and then moved specifically to veterinary M and A. So he's just handling the buying and selling of veterinary clinics now. And believe me, there's a whole lot of business just in that one niche. I've got another buddy who has a small personal injury firm, and he's doing really well with just dog bites, because that's his specialty. And you can get really specific. Now, if you want to go one level deeper, look at the ads and think about the services and the kinds of cases that a personal injury law firm can take on. They could take on car accidents, slip and falls, dog bites, wrongful death cases, medical malpractice. They could do workplace injuries, product liability. There's so much. But if you look at their ads, they're always super specific. Again, focus. Speak to one person about one specific thing. That's how they can afford to spend so much money on ads, because they work. Were you involved in a car accident? Were you in a workplace injury? Did you have a slip and fall? If I just went up to someone and said, hey, has anything bad ever happened to you where you've been injured in some way? They won't know what the heck you're talking about. You need to be way more specific than you think you do. Now let's zoom out. Compare that to how a general business would market themselves. Ask someone who owns, I don't know, a furniture store and say, who do you sell furniture to? And they'll say something like, well, anybody who buys furniture. Anybody who has a house or an office. Well, yeah, but if you just sell furniture to anyone who will buy it, you fall into the who cares category. And for proof, look at the Most successful furniture companies in the world. They all have a super specific avatar. Think about it. Restoration Hardware. They sell to wealthy people, big houses, big rooms. People who want their homes to feel like a luxury hotel in Napa Valley, go to Ashley Furniture. They sell to middle America, practical buyers who want things like financing, package deals, delivery, good prices. Look at West Elm. It's for younger urban professionals, millennials who want their first apartment to look cool on Instagram. Then you got Ikea, the 800 pound gorilla. And that is for budget conscious people, probably a little bit younger. And everything is flat packed, affordable, minimalist, easy to carry up three flights of stairs. So all these furniture companies have picked an avatar and they're all successful. I mean, IKEA did like $52 billion last year. Ashley's at 10 billion, Restoration Hardware's at 3 billion. West Elm is, I think at 2 billion. They all go narrow so they can sell big. And it's the exact same thing with Morgan and Morgan now they've gotten really big. So they have different departments for different types of injuries, but they all have a super tight focus. First thing I always tell new clients at pick one avatar. Pick one person you're going to sell to. And of course they say, well, we sell to lots of people. We have lots of clients. That's cool. Pick the most profitable one you can serve the best and you can expand as your budget grows. But if you're spending 5, 10, 20,000 bucks a month, your dollars are going to go a lot further if you just pick one. This episode is brought to you by my Playbook social media selling machine, available right now@johndavids.com playbook. Let's be real. You don't want likes. You want sales. You want to know that customers are going to show up every day from the content you're already posting. This playbook shows you how that's done, how to turn social posts into cash flow, and how to scale in a way that's simple, repeatable, and on brand. Grab it free right now at johndavids.com playbook. That's johndavids.combookbook. and one other thing that I love about Morgan and Morgan is how they figured out both the front end and the back end. Every business has a front end and a backend. How we get customers and how we serve customers. So if you look at how this firm is structured, they've got a really well built front end. We've talked about a lot of it here and I'll mention full disclosure. Influicity runs marketing For a lot of law firms, Morgan, and Morgan is not one of them, but I've studied all their funnels, and I have a really good idea of how it all works. You got the ads on the top, and they're sharing a lot of emotional stories, because these are emotional decisions. It leads you down. A very simple and straightforward funnel and a landing page like the one I just showed you, A landing page built for idiots. Idiots like me. Because I want to make sure that I can figure out what to do in the first three seconds. If I don't, I bounce. That's how all your clients are thinking. And then you've got an intake process. They've got an intake call center, which is great because it gives you speed to lead, which is critical, and a simple onboarding process. They talk about their 1, 2, 3 onboarding process on that landing page. And then because they have so much excess demand, more customers than they can serve, they can choose to take you on as a client internally or refer you over to one of their referral partners and take a commission on that. And this system runs 24, 7, 365. It's pretty hard to beat. And that's just the front end. The customer experience continues all the way to the back end. And John's talked about this publicly, about how efficiently they run. So, for example, as a personal injury firm that settles a lot of cases outside of court, they want to make sure they're getting the most money they can for every single client. So how do they do that? How do you maintain that when you're settling literally billions and billions of dollars worth of cases a year? Well, if the case is worth more than a certain amount of money, I think it's something like 30 or $40,000. They have a settlement committee, which means that no individual lawyer can sign off on a settlement on a big case. They have to take it to the committee and get signed off as a committee. And this ensures that they maintain their standards and that you can't have some rogue lawyer just rushing into a settlement. They have other systems to make sure they collect testimonials from happy clients. They have a whole referral system and a referral network. They've got really generous bonus systems and packages for their employees. So to build a great business, you need to have the customer getting engine, which we talk about all the time on this podcast, the front end. But you also need a customer serving engine. And especially if you're a business builder who gets obsessed with growth, that's something that you can sort of forget about you. Put blinders on. You're in growth mode all the time. Never forget to make your customers super happy because they will be your best salespeople. And after all, why are we in business? You want to be in business to do good for your clients and they will do good for you in return. That's the story of Morgan and Morgan, the biggest personal injury firm in the world. So much to learn. My name's John Davids. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com. This episode is brought to you by my one minute marketing roadmap, available@johndavids.com roadmap in 60 seconds you'll get a custom report showing you how people are finding your brand, where you're losing them and how to fix it. We used a decade of data from Influicity and layered in AI to give you a real action plan. It's fast, it's free, and it might just change your business. Go to johndavis.com roadmap and get yours right now.