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If your firm feels one good decision away from a breakthrough, then this is for you. We're hosting our first mastermind of 2026 in Phoenix on February 26th and 27th, and it's two days designed to actually move your firm forward and grow who you are as a leader.
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Day one is a full day of.
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Hot seats where you break into groups and work through the real problems in your business. Day two is our wellness workshop, featuring sessions that help you boost your energy, lower stress, and think more clearly. We have Jocelyn and Erin Freeman, host of a top 10 marriage podcast and masters in psychology, teaching relationship skills that you'll use at work and at home. A lunch and learn on habit formation with Tyson and more. View the full event details and grab your seat@maxwell events.com.
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This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix.
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Today we're sharing another session from MaxLawCon 2025. Today's episode features Ryan Weber, the marketing brain behind Thomas and Weber, Law at the Lake and CMO at Weber Marketing. In this talk, Ryan digs into the excuses that keep lawyers from showing up on video, even when they know it would help their firm grow. He shares how simple, consistent content can build trust, attract the right clients, and drive real revenue, even in a practice area that's not exactly flashy. This is Smart people. Dumb Excuses with Ryan Weber.
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Tyson texted me I don't know a couple months ago and was like, hey man, you want to speak at maxlock on sure, dude. What do you want me to talk about? And his words were, I don't care. Make it fun. Here I am. Dance puppet. So I made a presentation. Lawyers. You guys. Smart people. I'm married to one. Dumb excuses. I hear them all. So this should be fun. Let's get to seeing the reality check. So if you guys are running a law firm in 2025 and running a 2015 marketing playbook, you're probably getting passed. Let's think about 2015. What was happening? Like, the Internet was just a thing. I had barely. I graduated college, but social media was just becoming a thing. I think Instagram barely had a video on there, so big difference. Now it's like you can only do videos. I also didn't wear my glasses, so I. I may peek around the corner to see. So what's happening is your competitors are already doing things on the Internet. If you're trying to be what you were in 2015, you are getting passed. And if you are not evolving with what's happening in the world, you are going to get passes. Every other speaker that talked about this today, they are correct. And I'm not just making it up. It's just data over time. The clients nowadays are using the Internet to research you guys way more than before. And they're doing it before they even call you. They're going to the Internet. They're typing in your name. They're trying to find out if I like this person before they even call to reach out. So we should probably have a presence on the Internet. That would help make some sales. The last thing Brooks talked about, the robots, they are indeed coming. They are here. And what makes you different is you. You are different than the robots because you have a personality. They do not. So raise of hands. We're going to get a little hand raisey. So who loves recording videos in here? Can't see because there's light over there, but cool. Very few people. Very few people. It's just common. Like people don't like it. And this is why these excuses are why you don't like recording video. In my little intro here, I've recorded over 10,000 videos. Talk to a lot of people about recording videos. Here are your excuses. This is where it gets fun. I'll sound dumb. We debunked this in the title of this presentation. Because you're lawyers, you're smart people. You won't sound dumb because you're smart people. The general public thinks you guys are super smart, so you won't sound dumb. If you sound dumb, that's because you're not good at what you do. But we know you are. So this silly excuse. I don't like how I look. I have another secret to tell you. You look the same on camera as you do in person. So if you don't like how you look, that's a you problem. Don't say I can't record videos because of that. Because that means you don't want to meet clients either. Debunked. I don't like how I sound. This is genetics or smoking. Can't change that. Someone else has already made a video like that. Great. That's another person. You're this person. You say things different than they say things. You can tell I'm not the lawyer. I have to talk like I'm the dummy in the room. So it's like really simple here. But here we go. I don't want to dance on camera. Do I look like I dance on camera? No. Have I made money from videos? Yes. Don't need to dance on camera. Don't suggest you doing it either. Actually, I'm too old. You guys are like, what's he gonna say about this? Yeah, it's just a silly excuse. Like, my wife's law partner was 63 years old. He was recording videos for YouTube. My clients aren't on social media. This is silly. You know, why would a property intellectual business owner be on social media? They are. They're not gonna tell you that they're like scrolling TikTok at night, but they are. My wife's law partner came to me after we started recording videos and he said, you'll never believe it. What? Dude, I was just in a closing with an 80 year old man and he was buying a property. And I said, how'd you find me, sir? He said, well, I got on Facebook and I saw your video and I said, damn, I like that guy. I want to do business with him. And so I closed at your office. And he was like, people are finding us on the Internet. And he was 80. Yeah, man, everyone's on the Internet. Debunked. I don't have a nice camera, so who doesn't have a cell phone in here? Great. You have a nice enough camera. Okay, cool. I don't know how to edit. Great. Hopefully you guys have a law practice that makes a little bit of money. You could pay somebody that knows how to edit and do all this for you. I don't know what to talk about. You are lawyers. You have clients you talk to every single day. They ask you questions. You guys send emails after they ask you a question and you answer their questions. Video like this is easy. Let's keep doing excuses. So another one. This is a big one. I was talking to JB the other night and he was like, yeah, I make the excuse. I don't have time. Like, cool. Love it. Love this excuse. Because my response is, you tell me you don't have time to make more money because we know video makes us more money. I don't have time to make more money. Cool, good for you. I like more money, so I'm going to make time. So here's the truth. Every excuse we have, I mean, we can keep going on excuses. Every excuse we have is a reason for you to miss opportunities to make more money, get more clients, build your brand. Can we all agree with that? Yes. Thank you. So my wife is back there, much smarter than me, does a YouTube channel. I manage it. She talks. She is my puppet that I have dance. It's perfect. The right camera. Brooks. So we are not Jeff, but we do have 88,000 subscribers. That is peanuts in the YouTube world. But for us, that's huge because who in here knows and likes anything about real estate law? My real estate attorneys. How exciting is that? Not very. So we have 88,000 people that have said, I want to learn about real estate law. Boy, oh, boy, they are just a ball of fire. I bet it is the most boring practice to try and make content about. Why is Jeff doing good? Because he can talk about police knocking down doors and coming in and be like, I'm going to tell you what to say. What is she gonna say? Like, here's the contract updates for 2025. But you know what? That video got 80,000 views because it was timely and no one else made a video about it. Win for us. The other thing you can't see up here, I also can't see, which is why I'm right here. We have made $23,000 in ads for YouTube paying us to market our own business by putting them on YouTube. That is peanuts in YouTube world. That's not like, I'm gonna retire. I wish do some more closings. But I take that $23,000, and that's where my marketing budget comes from. So I have $23,000 in free ad spend to make me more money. That's nice. That's fun. What it does for our law firm. So we don't want to be YouTubers. We actually would not use social media if it didn't make us money. We don't like it. And I get it. A lot of you guys feel the same way, but it makes us money. We have gotten approximately 15 phone calls every single week from people across the country that call our office and say, I saw a video. I want Tiffany to be my lawyer. Whoa. It went away back. That's cool. And what's that done for our business when we started? When I got there in 2018, I sold my gym. I said, I'm gonna get into this marketing thing for the law firm. I sold my gym and I said, how are we doing? We had done 14% of the closings in Mooresville, which is the city we live in. 14% of all the closings. Every closing that happened, 14% of them happened in our office. There's 10 other law firms on our road that does real estate closings. I was like, seems like a cool number. 2020, we started the YouTube channel. Number grew. Last year, we did 37% of all the real estate closings in Mooresville. That's pretty cool. What did we do different. We made videos. I'm a marketing guy. At the most simple marketing plan. We make consistent videos over and over again. So why video? I don't need to go long on this because a lot of people have talked about it. It builds trust. They see your face. It builds your credibility. They see you, they know you. They like you. People want to do business with people they know, like and trust. This is a marketing phrase that's used across everywhere. But it's true. So this is why we do video. Who in this room. Raise of hands. Has spoken to 50 humans in one room at one time this year? Excellent. This is way more than I thought.
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Cool.
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This is what a room looks like. This room has about 150 humans. How about 100? 100 people at once? Good. Now let's think about this. If you got a video that got viewed 100 times, do we think that did bad? Kind of sad. Makes us a bad video. Yeah, but there was only like 20, maybe 15 people that have spoken to 100 people one time. Very, very bad video gets us that many, many times. 500. This looks like a movie theater. Very few people. Thousand people. This is, I don't know, a bigger movie theater. But a thousand views on a video is very common when you start doing good. And this is three times a week, four times a week, every single day. Thousand views, thousand people. You're in front of that you didn't have the opportunity to. Very few of you. 10,000 people speaking in front of a tennis shirt stadium. Probably nobody. If there is good for you, you're better than me. 100,000 people. The big house. Biggest college football stadium. There will be zero people in this room that will speak in front of 100,000 people. Unless you're like a politician and I haven't met you, but we have one video that has over a million views. It's 10 of the big houses. It was posted in 2020. Posted in 2022 and 2024. That video, for some reason hit the algorithm. Don't know why. And overnight, that video got 10,000 views. And it's grown and grown and grown. To this day, it's still getting 2,000 views a day. And it has over a million. I have 10 big houses. That Tiff's face has been in. Pretty cool. So all that to be said is video just allows you to reach more people at once. So every person you reach can refer others, creating exponential growth. Who's like finance? Who likes financial stuff like compounding interest? That's cool. That's video. So how do I stand out in a crowded social media market? This is where I usually am. Like, here's how to record video. Get your lighting right and your cameras and it doesn't matter. This is just kind of like I've changed this presentation to now be like, here's some weird marketing things that I do when I think about posting on social media in general, educational videos equals money. Educational videos are also very boring and people don't want to watch them. But if you post educational videos, we know that that will result in making you dollars. Entertainment videos equal eyeballs. People want to be entertained, but it's very unlikely that an entertainment person will also make money. There are broke tiktokers that have millions of followers because they don't know how to do education. I don't trust them. I just like them. I gotta pay money. So when we can combine both of those entertainment education, that's when the magic happens. I should have had like a magic. So here's our philosophy. When we are coming up with our marketing plan, we want to be the one person on one platform solving one big problem consistently. Which platform should I be on? And I hear like, oh, our marketing channels go across everything. Great. That's really hard if you've never done it before. Just do one. We are the real estate lawyer on YouTube. There's none others. Sorry, like, don't do it. That's fine. I keep winning. I like that. Go me. But if you want to do that, there is opportunity there. So should I be on TikTok? Yes. Just do the one that you're good at and you like and you enjoy the most and just do one and get really good at it. Then you can multiply after that. Here's my big marketing philosophy. Be the opposite of your competition. So let's close our eyes. Let's imagine here our clients are sitting there and they're picturing a lawyer. What do they picture? An old white guy in his beautiful suit looking like Brooks Derrick sitting at his mahogany desk with his books behind him. Right. That's what clients think you guys are and you're not. So we try to be opposite in all of our videos because people generally don't like lawyers. I do them weird because I'm married one. But like, they don't want to. Like, I woke up this morning and good golly, I can't wait to go see a lawyer. Just doesn't happen. So we try to be opposite. Like we have females, young, generally fun, entertaining. We don't wear the suits, we don't Sit in front of, like, stuffy desks. We do everything opposite of what the perception is because we don't want to look like everyone else. We try to be different and stand out. That's one of our philosophies every time we go on camera. This is a new one that I've started kind of like building into. It's building a moat with AI and all the stuff that you can do with that. A moat essentially just means what are you doing different and unique that AI or your competition can, cannot do. It makes it very challenging for somebody to copy and imitate you because it's going to allow you to stand out the most, the longest. So a moat could be. Well, essentially, I'm just smarter than my competition. It's fine. It still works. It's a moat. It could be that I'm more creative. It could be that I have the best quality camera. Like, there's plenty of things that you can do that will help you stand out and make it harder for others to copy you. So create your moat that you can own. Find your format. I'm just kind of cruise through this because the time thing. So formats are essentially just something that you can repeat. So it could be titles of videos to figure out your topic. It could be styles of videos. It could be anything that you can find and change. One little factor to repeat, an example would be for our video titles. We've been using how to do a thing that somebody wants. Insert their parentheses. Legally. That's what they want. So example for TIFF would be like, how to fill out or, Sorry, how to back out of a real estate contract legally. Really simple, broad, easy to understand. Just keep changing the one thing in there and then dance, puppet, talk. So to wrap this whole thing up, I titled this slide, what have you got to lose? And so I like to kind of go through this scenario. Many of you are not recording video right now. And so you're sitting there and you're thinking, what if I record? I'm so scared.
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Scary.
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What could happen? We record videos. They could work or they could not. If they work, we have 88,000 subscribers. We have 15 phone calls. Jeff makes hundreds of thousands of dollars off his YouTube channel or nothing. You're just where you're at. You recorded videos. So it's not really the question of what have you got to lose? Is what do you stand to gain? Sa.