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Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with Rise Up Media. We've been working with them for over a year and, and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. They that's right. No long term commitments tying you down.
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So what are you waiting for?
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To learn More about how RiseUp Media can transform your firms, visit RiseUpMedia.com MaxLaw and Rise is spelled with a Z. RiseUpMedia.com MaxLaw after more than 900 episodes,
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I can usually tell within the first 10 minutes whether or not a law firm is going to succeed or fail. 10 minutes. It's usually a pretty quick test, and I'm a pretty good gauge as to whether the person's firm is going to succeed or fail based on three different things. Whenever Jim and I started this podcast 10 years ago, roughly, it really does come down to like 10 things. We've gone through this, we've learned a lot of lessons from a lot of different people. We've taught a lot of lessons, we've, we've made a lot of mistakes, we've done a lot of things that are right. And the reality is it comes down to three things, usually whether a firm is going to fail or whether they are going to succeed. And that's what we're going to talk about today. And so there's been a lot of people that have sat in the seat next to us or that have been on the other end of the screen where they've crashed and they've recovered. And there's some that have crashed and never recovered. And the ones that have recovered, it usually comes down to one of these three things and the ones that haven't, it usually comes down to one of these three things. So I'm going to go through each of these and to give you an idea as to maybe if you're not succeeding, maybe why, and maybe address these yourself. Or if you're doing well, it's probably because you're doing these three things well and you need to keep doing. So let's get into the first one. And the first one is going to be very obvious to most of you, but not so much to some of you that are not doing so well. And it's that you are the bottleneck. And it's. That's more of an identity issue than anything else. Okay? It's you not realizing that you need to change who you are. When it comes to being the leader of the law firm, you are the bottleneck. Usually, whenever someone is talking to us, a lot of times they're blaming the marketing, they're blaming the intake, or they're blaming the attorneys, or maybe it's a hiring issue. But the reality is that, sure, maybe you're delegating some things, but in reality, what's happening is that you're trying to do too much work. And as a part of that, your firm is failing in significant areas because you were trying to do too many things. And you can probably do one or two things really, really well, but doing all of those things really, really well, it's almost impossible. And that's why there's a lot of experts in different fields that can help you with those things. You try to be the SEO expert, and you're trying to be the marketing expert, and you're also trying to be an amazing trial attorney. Or if you're just. Maybe you're in transactional work, maybe you're just trying to be an amazing attorney to your estate planning clients or whatever it may be. You can be amazing at one or two of those things, but the reality is you just don't have time to become an expert in all of those different fields. So if you're the CFO and the CEO and the CMO and all of these other things, and with AI, you're now some expert in AI, you're trying to do too much. And so you become this massive bottleneck, and your firm has been throttled because of that. If you can fix that issue, if you can change that identity and learn to disperse a lot of that energy elsewhere, I call it gravity. And you'll learn in future episodes why I call it gravity. But you gotta disperse a lot of that gravity into other areas of your firm so that all of that gravity is not sitting on you. All right? All Right, let's get to the second lesson, the second reason why most law firm owners either succeed or fail. And that really comes down to self awareness and whether how self aware the attorney is when it comes to their own expertise, when it comes to what needs to happen, when it comes to the firm, whether, when it comes to what they need to change, what they need to keep. And that is something, if I'm being completely honest with you, it's something that I struggled with really early on was that self awareness and trying to figure out and be honest with myself about what needs to change. This is a very self evident thing when it comes to masterminds. And we try to usually have about 25 to 35 minutes, sometimes as much as 45 minutes at a mastermind. And we try to get very quickly down to the heart of the issue. But every once in a while you'll have someone come in and they're so used to putting up these walls. And I can, I can speak to this because I'm, I used to be that person about putting up these walls. Everything had to be perfect. Everything had to be great. And if not, I didn't show it to the public. Right? That is, that, that's not a good way of getting better. That's a good way of just kind of closing yourself off and, and just staying where you are. And we would, we, you know, to this day we still have people that come into a mastermind and they want to put up these walls and everything looks perfect and you want to say, you want to kind of shake them and say, then why are you even here if you know how to do everything? One, why aren't you succeeding? Why are you here? You don't need to improve, clearly, because you already know everything. And so that is, we just want to be like, hey, we want to help you. We cannot help you if you don't tear down the walls and just tell us what's going on with the firm. It usually takes us some time. The ones that are in complete denial, they'll never lower the walls. And years later, I've seen it happen before where years later they kind of, okay, I need to address some things, I need to figure it out. And they kind of do come to self awareness. But there are attorneys to this day that I've talked to and they clearly are still struggling. They clearly have not, they're not self aware. And so they're not being honest with themselves and they're not being honest with other people whenever it comes to their situation. So whenever they Come to a mastermind, we really can't do a whole lot for them. The most successful attorneys that I know are extremely self. Aware. They're extremely self aware. They know where their flaws are. And so whenever they come to a mastermind, they talk about their flaws and that's how they improve on it because they're addressing the flaws. And I've seen that on the show significantly, where someone will come on and they'll talk about all these things where I will tell you, early in the podcast, I was kind of like I would be embarrassed to talk about some of my flaws and they would come on and I'd be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they're willing to talk about this. And the reality is they're doing it because they wanted to get better. And that is a very valuable lesson, especially for younger attorneys and new law firm owners. You need to become self aware and get your flaws out there so you can improve them. And I promise you, if you learn that lesson early on, you will outperform all of your peers by significant margins. This is a really, really important one. The self awareness part of it. It's extremely important. All right, so lesson number three is probably my favorite one. It's not the most important one. It's my favorite one. And is that boring wins every single time. It wins all the time. I think a lot of us think of success as, oh, it was some genius move or it was this amazing marketing tactic or maybe that person just has really, just amazing charisma. It has nothing to do with any of those things. Okay. It really doesn't. They answer the phone whenever clients call. They have great systems in place. They have a really good intake team. They do all of the basics extremely well. They extremely boring. You have, it's, it's really interesting how, I mean, you think of the Morgan, Morgan and Morgan's of the world. Now they are a highly successful firm and so this doesn't really apply to them. But I will tell you, Morgan and Morgan, I guarantee from the beginning did the basics really, really well. And now we, right now we think of them all as like this massive marketing juggernaut. Yeah, that may be what it is. But it started with the basics. And I will probably tell you they probably do the basics to, to, to this day pretty darn well when it comes to, you know, solo, mid sized, to even large firms, the successful ones, they're doing the really, really boring things really, really well. They're returning phone calls whenever they say they're going to Return the phone call, they're getting the discovery out on time, right? They have a process for everything. They've got the systems for everything, even their marketing. And it has. It's not flashy, right? It's not usually, you know, beating your chest, you know, saying how great you are. It's. It's really. It's usually talking about how, like, the things you can do for the clients, the potential clients. That's one of the massive marketing mistakes that law firm owners make is they make it all about themselves as opposed to making it about the actual potential client. What can you do for them as opposed to what can they do for you? They don't care about your decades of experience, that building authority is part of it. But the meat of your marketing needs to be about what you can do for that client. That's what they care about. They care about themselves. They don't care about you. So all of these. These firms, they do the boring things really well. The successful ones, the unsuccessful ones. What they do typically is they will focus on one area. They'll try to make it as flashy as possible. You name it. Whatever it is, it doesn't work. So they shift gears. They try something else, and then they try something else, and they try something else. And they're constantly trying to change because they want to chase that flashy thing, when in reality, the really successful ones are just doing the really boring ones. Boring work really, really, really, really well. So I will tell you, a firm, a lot of you, I'd say most of you have not heard of, I know a lot of you probably have, but most of you have not. And it's McCready Law Firm out of Chicago, and they've. They've been expanding, I'd say, pretty rapidly. They're an injury law firm, and I will tell you, they do things in a pretty boring manner. You don't hear a lot of flashiness out of them, and it's because they just do the basics really, really well. Really, really well. John Fisher, I'd say, is. Now, I think most people know about John Fisher because of his book and everything. So I think some people might consider that a little bit more flash because he's got the book and everything. But the reality is John does, and he's put it into his books. He puts all his protocols into his books, and he does the basics extremely well. He cares about calling people back. He cares about making sure that the files are done right. He does all the. All of the basics really, really well. So it really just it's boring. It's boring. But that is what works. And the with social media these days, we want to have these really flashy videos and we do what we want to have all these great brilliant ideas. The reality is boring is what wins. It wins all the really time. All of the time. So it really just does come down to those, those three things, right? It's you're the bottleneck. So you gotta, you gotta change your identity when it comes to the bottleneck. Number two is you gotta be a little more self aware, actually a lot more self aware. You need to be more self aware about where you currently sit, where you need to improve, all of that. And number three is be more boring. Do the basics really, really well. Get the systems down right. And if you do those things really, really well, I promise you you'll double your firm in a year. It's really simple. You do the basics really, really well and you're off to the races, really. So your competition cannot compete with those if you do those three things really, really well. All right, that's all we have for you this week. Make sure you check out Beckett's List. Co you can find the best and worst vendors. So really looking for the best vendors, but it's really, you can also look and see the vendors to avoid if that is an issue. And you can also find out pricing things like that, what they do well, what they don't do well. Beckett's list is really good. If you're interested in the association, go to maxim lawyer.com and make sure you get your tickets to max. Go to maxlawcon.com See us in October in Atlanta. Thanks everybody.
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You know that feeling when you leave a conversation with someone and suddenly your brain is firing on all cylinders again? That's Max Lacon. This October in Atlanta, you'll be surrounded by law firm owners who are building smarter businesses, dialing in their systems, growing their teams, using AI, improving intake, marketing and finances. All of it. The conversations, ideas and people in this room will push you to think bigger about what's possible for your firm. And honestly, there's just something different about being around people who are actually doing the thing. Go to maxlockcon.com and grab your ticket today.