342. Marketing Budgets Decoded: What to Do with $100K, $1M, and $10M w/ James Helm

Summary

Personal Injury Mastermind Episode 342: Marketing Budgets Decoded with James Helm

Release Date: August 7, 2025

In Episode 342 of Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM), host Chris Dreyer engages in a deep dive with James Helm, founder of Top Dog Law, to unravel effective marketing strategies across varying budget scales—specifically $100K, $1M, and $10M. This episode provides valuable insights for personal injury (PI) law firms aiming to scale from local practices to national powerhouses through strategic client acquisition, SEO mastery, and sustainable growth.

1. Introduction and Guest Background

The episode kicks off with Chris introducing James Helm, highlighting his journey from launching Top Dog Law in 2019 with a modest budget to scaling up to tens of millions in advertising spend. James shares his initial capital structure, emphasizing a mix of personal savings, loan funds, and credit lines totaling $187,000 at the firm's inception. He candidly discusses early challenges, including mismanaging funds due to longer-than-expected case settlements, which extended financial pressures beyond initial projections ([00:52]).

James Helm: "I think if I could have done it again, I probably would have been willing to pay money for talent earlier." ([00:52])

2. Marketing with a $100K Budget

James begins by recounting his early days with a $5K monthly marketing budget, focusing primarily on purchasing leads. This initial investment allowed him to test various vendors and reinvest subsequent revenues back into marketing. A pivotal move was hiring a marketing director skilled in videography, leading to the creation of engaging social media content—ranging from skits to rap videos—which significantly boosted Top Dog Law's Instagram following and generated affordable leads.

James Helm: "We ended up building a really big Instagram account, which was the original source of how Top Dog Law got leads." ([03:34])

Chris suggests leveraging a portion of the $100K budget towards foundational elements like a professional website and strategic branding, rather than heavily investing in custom branding alone.

Chris Dreyer: "I would buy the leads. I would still do what you do... You get at least a handful of leads every month that maybe you can, you know, monetize those." ([07:23])

3. Marketing with a $1M Budget

Transitioning to a $1M budget, James emphasizes the importance of maintaining a high percentage of the budget dedicated to marketing—historically over 50%. He admits that while aggressive reinvestment fueled rapid growth, he later recognized the undervaluation of hiring top-tier talent early on.

James Helm: "We've always been north of 50... I underindexed on people." ([13:12])

Chris advocates for a balanced approach, allocating around 30% of the budget to marketing, ensuring sufficient funds for ad spend while maintaining a lean team.

Chris Dreyer: "We spend about 30%... But if you're going B2C, 20% is the minimum in my opinion." ([15:28])

The conversation delves into the allocation of the $1M budget, suggesting investments in SEO, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, local service ads (LSA), and exploring brand marketing channels such as TV, radio, or streaming to establish a robust market presence.

4. Marketing with a $10M Budget

At the $10M mark, James outlines the necessity of achieving brand dominance within the market. This involves an omnichannel marketing strategy where the firm becomes the go-to name for potential clients in need of personal injury services.

James Helm: "If I pull up to the city, I fly in, I get into Uber, I open the door, I say, hey, if you were in an accident, who would you call? They should say your name." ([12:36])

Key strategies include:

• Omnichannel Presence: Combining TV, radio, billboards, digital ads, and PPC to ensure pervasive brand visibility.
• In-House Marketing Teams: Developing a robust internal team led by experienced marketing professionals to manage and optimize campaigns effectively.
• Brand Marketing Investment: Allocating substantial funds to brand marketing to build and protect brand recognition, even incurring the "Google tax"—the increased cost of bidding on brand-specific keywords due to high competition.

James Helm: "You have to get beyond the direct attribution buying lead stage. At $10 million, you should have a dominant brand." ([36:57])

5. Agencies vs. In-House Marketing

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the efficacy of marketing agencies compared to building an in-house team. James critiques the common agency fee structures, advocating for transparency in cost-per-case calculations by including agency fees to provide a true measure of marketing effectiveness.

James Helm: "You need to bake their fee into your cost per case... they're charging you ten grand for the fee." ([34:22])

Chris echoes concerns about high agency percentages, emphasizing the value of hiring skilled in-house marketers to optimize ad spend efficiently.

6. Challenges and Best Practices

The duo explores several challenges PI firms face in marketing:

• Creative Waste: Investing heavily in channels like TV without compelling, memorable content leads to wasted ad spend.

  James Helm: "If you're going to spend money on brand dollars, then make your brand stand for something. Make your brand stand out in some way." ([46:47])

• Algorithm Changes: Social media platforms shifting towards viral content algorithms reduce the effectiveness of organic reach, necessitating a blend of paid and organic strategies.

  James Helm: "Social media platforms used to be about your social networks like your friends... now you're only seeing the most viral videos from random people." ([43:24])

• Systemic Marketing Growth: As marketing budgets scale, the cost per case increases incrementally, requiring firms to maintain profitability despite rising acquisition costs.

  James Helm: "At the $10 million mark, your cost per case is going up, but you're doing more volume." ([28:40])

7. Underrated Marketing Channels

Chris and James discuss podcasts as an overlooked yet potent marketing channel for PI firms. Podcasts offer low distribution costs and the potential for long-term, compounded reach through archived episodes.

Chris Dreyer: "The most underrated channel today is podcasts." ([50:12])

Despite their effectiveness, few PI firms tap into podcast advertising, presenting a significant opportunity for those willing to explore this medium.

8. Biggest Waste of Money for PI Firms

When asked about the biggest marketing waste, both agree that poor creative is a primary culprit. Investing in high-cost channels without distinctive, memorable content fails to capture audience attention, rendering the spend ineffective.

James Helm: "If you do TV, spend at least $5 million on TV but create engaging, memorable commercials. Don't create the most boring commercial ever." ([46:47])

9. Conclusion and Call to Action

As the episode wraps up, James encourages listeners to connect with Top Dog Law for further insights and potential collaborations. He also promotes upcoming events like PimCon, highlighting his role as a keynote speaker.

James Helm: "For our listeners that want to get in touch with Top Dog, send me an email at [e-mail]." ([52:41])

Chris concludes by reinforcing the episode's value, urging listeners to subscribe for more expert conversations that can help transform their PI firms.

Chris Dreyer: "Subscribe for more conversations with the people actually building the biggest firms in the game." ([53:06])

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Key Takeaways:

1. Budget Allocation: Efficiently distribute marketing budgets based on firm size—$100K focuses on lead buying and foundational branding, $1M emphasizes a balanced approach with SEO and PPC, and $10M necessitates omnichannel brand dominance.
2. Talent Investment: Prioritize hiring skilled marketing professionals over high agency fees to maximize ROI.
3. Creative Excellence: Invest in compelling, memorable content across all channels to ensure effective brand recognition and client acquisition.
4. Underrated Channels: Explore podcasts as a cost-effective marketing medium with long-term benefits.
5. Systemic Growth Understanding: Recognize that scaling marketing budgets will inevitably increase cost per acquisition, requiring strategic adjustments to maintain profitability.

This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for PI firms at various stages of growth, offering actionable strategies to optimize marketing investments and drive sustainable success.

Transcript

[A]

Whether you got 100,000, a million or $10 million to spend, here's exactly what to do with it.

[B]

If I pull up to the city, I fly in, I get into Uber, I open the door, I say, hey, if you were in an accident, who would you call? They should say your name. That should be your goal.

[A]

With 10 million, we go level by level. What James actually did at each stage to build a national firm.

[B]

When I had the 5K, the first thing I did was I bought leads. Then I could reinvest in the marketing budget. That's the percent spend on marketing. We've always been north of 50, which is more aggressive than anybody. But it's like we had huge aspirational growth goals and were willing to not make any profits. I under indexed on people. If I could have done it again, I probably would have been willing to pay money for a talent earlier.

[A]

This is personal injury Mastermind, powered by Rankings IO agency PI firms trust to turn ad spend into clients. From rising case costs to the Google tax, we get into everything. They don't tell you about scale scaling. Let's get into it. I just really enjoy these podcasts of James. That's why I have them on so frequently. We've become buddies over the years. You know, I thought we would do this show a little bit different. I thought we could have some fun here and do a segment. What would you do with a hundred K advertising budget, a million dollar budget and then a ten million? But I guess before we get started, for those that don't know who James is and who I am a little bit maybe your first time tuning in. James, why don't you do a brief intro?

[B]

Awesome. I'm excited to be here, Chris. I always have fun on the podcast and I'm excited for PimCon coming up this year. Let's go.

[A]

Yes, sir.

[B]

My name's James. I'm the founder of Top Dog Law. We are a national injury law firm. At this point, we're advertising in a dozen or so states. Went through the whole thing, right? Like I started my firm in 2019. I'll get into it. I only had $187,000 to start my firm. I had a $5,000 a month marketing budget and now we're spending tens of millions of dollars advertising. And I kind of want to use today to walk people through that journey. The different intervals that we had 100K, $1 million budget, you know, the $10 million budget and upwards and kind of say, hey, here is how I thought about advertising at each one of these intervals and hopefully no matter which one of those you're at, you can take something away from it.

[A]

I'm going to be speaking from your guys experience, the clients that I work with. So we work with a couple hundred law firms across the country, varying sizes. And so I get to see, you know, what a lot of firms are doing, but maybe not the full picture and how they got there. So it's going to kind of be fun to see how we approach these.

[B]

You have unique perspective though, Chris, because you're one of the only people that see a hundred different law firms of the best law firms in America. And you get to see them across DMAs and across sizes. It's like the only experience I have is my own experience, which is certainly valuable. But I think you've seen the things some firms have done well and some firms haven't done well. And so you can, you know, give that vantage point.

[A]

Yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you for that. You know, I think it's going to be fun. Look, we have not talked about this. I have no idea what direction James is going to go on, like how to spend this money and how I think about. So it's going to be a lot of fun. So let's start with the $100,000 annual budget. Another way you could think about it, James, if you want, is like, hey, it's close to 10,000 bucks a month. If you had to start a brand new PI firm, you had that 100k budget, you know, what are you looking to do? How are you thinking about it?

[B]

Let me first talk about my own experience and then I'll talk about maybe what I would do today because those two things are close, but they're not exactly equal. So I incorporated Top dog law in 2018, but really got started marketing in February of 2019. Couldn't quite muster up 10k a month in budget. I had 5k, that was my budget. I had $187,000 when I started my firm. It was 100,000 from sales commissions I had actually made selling pay per click and SEO to lawyers. I had 50,000 that I had borrowed from a loan shark and then 30,000 from like credit line money. Right? So I had 187k. The fatal mistake I made this is kind of foreshadowing is I mismanaged that money. I thought that the cases would settle within six to nine months and ended up being two years. That took me on a whole journey of, you know, worrying about not being able to pay the rent and all those sort of things that you know and you're feeling if you're just going through starting a personal injury law firm. When I had the 5K, the first thing I did was I bought leads. Obviously, you can buy leads, you can buy retainers. I did this in the immediate short term of like, hey, let me test some of these vendors that are selling leads. I think at the time I would buy like 10, 10 leads, right? I'd say, okay, I'll buy 10 leads for X dollars per lead. And I ended up doing okay out of those. It wasn't a total ripoff. It also wasn't great. But I got some cases. Those cases produced me revenue, which then I could reinvest in the marketing budget. I think the thing that I did that was very different though, was my first hire, rather than being like a paralegal or a lawyer or a legal assistant, was a marketing director, specifically somebody who had videography experience. And I started creating content. I did the DIY social media game and social and video was how I got my start. I think in 2019, I was one of the only lawyers doing it. Found fun ways to do like, skits, rap videos, all types of trends to get attention. And we ended up building a really big Instagram account, which was the original source of how top dog law got leads. And, you know, if you look at simply from an ROI perspective, the amount of money I spent creating content versus how many cases I got from my Instagram following through the direct messages. Like, incredible cost per case, like in the hundreds of dollars, probably the low hundreds of dollars. Why I want to kind of segment that from what I would do today is, I think 2019 was a slightly different time. I was one of the only lawyers doing social media content. The TV advertisers largely were not on social media at all. There wasn't the same kind of affiliates on social media. People weren't used to seeing a lawyer on social media, particularly a lawyer who was doing like fun and engaging content. And so it was very purple cow. I know you and I have talked about it that like, I think a lot of lawyers today create content because they're supposed to. They feel like they're supposed to, but it takes a ton of your personal time. Unless you're going to kind of hit that lightning in a bottle. I did. It's tough. You know, there's a. For, you know, as many people that have created content and have generated like big funnels through creating organic content. There's probably 50 people that spend a bunch of time creating videos that Never really take off. And so I don't know how you feel, Chris, but I feel like it would be very risky to take that 100k in 2025 and say like, I'm going to invest it all in a DIY video content strategy.

[A]

There's just more competition. So, you know, for me, what I think about is like, look, you need a website. There's some cheaper locations to get a website. It's like your foundation. I think Justia, you know, they're pretty affordable. I think they're like six to ten grand and they'll have it structured correctly, they'll host it, they have some support as opposed to just going maybe crazy with a custom brand and style guy. I mean you could spend that a hundred grand with just a branding company, right, and a logo. So if you're trying to get the most bang out of your buck, I think I would do something like that. I look at this, I was going, the look, I made a cheat sheet, right? Cause I was at a hundred K. I would buy the leads. I would still do what you do. Walker Advertising, I think has 5k a month package. Again, it's not going to be maybe the same quality of leads that your brand acquires, but you get at least a handful of leads every month that maybe you can, you know, monetize those. The other thing that I think about is lsa. If you're willing to just open it wide up and like do a lot of categories, I think that's a cheap channel. The other approach is like, could you get, I think you get one person. I would probably have it be the doer. I would, I would still have them creating content, doing YouTube, doing TikTok, you know, boots on the ground, grassroots stuff, you know, hustling. That's kind of where I'm at. And maybe network with the, the big litigating firms that have higher case selection criteria.

[B]

Yeah, that's a no brainer. I'll echo actually the point about buying leads. One thing that happened to me when I first bought those leads is you got the leads, but you also got the cases that came out of those cases. So like I had some leads that I bought and I did a good job. Like obviously those are my first clients. They have my cell phone number, I'm available 24 7. I'm helping them with like their son's divorce case. Like I'm doing like above and beyond personal service for these people. And that's how you get them to refer their friends and family. And if I'm taking A hard look in the mirror. I am not hustling like that for personal referrals today. I just don't have the bandwidth. It's like I'm managing my direct reports and, you know, so I think you're in a unique position. When you have 100k budget, you're likely speaking to clients yourself. At that stage, you're in a prime position to get the friends and family of those folks, to even ask those folks to send you friends and family. And you should be able to take the leads that you buy and then spin it into like two or three leads from it. The other point you made, which is so good is, you know, you can totally get cases from other lawyers with any. But you don't need any budget, right? Like even the firms that work with us, right. It's a referral fee model. It's not a payment upfront model. And so if you're strapped for cash, knock on every lawyer's door and say, hey, what can I take? What are your extra cases that I can take? Is there any, you know, specific carriers you don't like litigating minimum cases against? Are there slip and fall cases where you're only taking the fracture in the surgery cases, all litigate your soft tissue cases? Or if you can find like a mass advertising firm like us or Morgan or somebody like that who's, you know, spending tons of money and has, you know, a bunch of different partners in every city or state, like, how can you get on the list of those folks? So I think referrals would be a huge part of any strategy. But specifically, if you don't have, you know, a ton of budget for yourself.

[A]

I love every bit of that and the examples, right? Like maybe, maybe you're not monetizing those SSDI cases or the rando case, but hey, if you're new, you'll take them and you'll figure out how to do them. Also, I think all these coaches and mentors talk about niching and you and I know the benefit of that, right? And focus. But like, out of the gate, you need revenue. So are you doing some business lit, you're doing some, some wills and, or whatever just to make some revenue? I don't know. I don't. I think you could be open to that. You got chat GPT to help maybe some peers? I don't know. What's your thoughts on that?

[B]

I would pass on that. That's my personal opinion. If you're trying to start a PI firm. And look, I know Lerner and Rose Doing, like, DUI and criminal cases. So there definitely is money in some of these other practice areas. And, you know, if you. I know some lawyers, right, who will say, okay, we're going to do traffic tickets, because then those will lead to our PI clients. And that's been effective as kind of a lead source for folks. I think the way I looked at the problem was, hey, I want to be in personal injury. I want to force myself to find personal injury clients. I don't want to kind of go on a sideways quest of, like, starting to do all these other legal matters to eventually get back to personal injury. I want to kind of put my stake in the ground and say, like, I'm exclusively doing injury and, like, I'm going to work like heck and be creative and hustle until I get injury claims.

[A]

Love it, love it, love the focus. You know, I sound kind of contrarian or contradicting myself because I got the book niching up and here I am, I'm saying, hey, take. Take those DI cases to come in. You're saying no. So you want to move on. You want to go to.

[B]

Let's go to the million dollar budget. The first Millie.

[A]

That first Millie.

[B]

And look, I mean, okay, what you got to be spending a milli. I mean, it depends on how aggressive you're growing in marketing. And maybe this is just a good time to, like, hit that, right? Because how much of your dollar should you be spending on marketing versus revenue? You know, I've heard in other businesses besides legal, I think the rule of thumb 20%. Is that kind of what the general rule of thumb in businesses you should be spending on marketing? I've noticed in legal that the more aggressive firms are spending more than 20%. What have you kind of seen across seeing a wide variety of clients?

[A]

Yeah, I think you're dead on. So I think it depends. Yeah, I almost started this exercise out of like, who are you? Are you the. You don't want to try cases versus, you know, and you want to be a marketer or do you want to be like a litigator? Because my strategies for that first hundred k is like, maybe I'm doing the podcast tours, speaking at Cles and doing the network thing more with my peers versus B2C.

[B]

Just the percentage of. I'll talk about ours. I mean, we've always been north of 50, which is like, I think as aggressive or more aggressive than anybody, but it's like we had huge aspirational growth goals and were willing to not make any profits. You know, I was A single guy. Yeah, I didn't have a family to support. Like I didn't need cash today. I've always lived by the motto like never for today, always about tomorrow. And so I've always reinvested money back into growth. And that's I think, actually to our own detriment. If I'm being completely transparent. I under indexed on people. So like I was, I saw a very clear return of like invest money in marketing, get more cases out. And I think if I could have done it again, I probably would have been willing to pay money for a talent earlier. One thing I tell folks is like, you know, you want A players, you want a COO or a CFO. Like those people aren't making 100 grand, they're not making 150 grand. Right. Like those people, if you really want them to be an A player, should be coming from somewhere else where they're making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars per year or otherwise. Why are they so good? Unless you're grooming them like out of college. You know, good players don't make, you know, 100 grand in C level roles. They just don't. They're making a lot more than that.

[A]

I completely agree with that. Back to the percentages thing. And I know where I was going with the B2B versus B2C. You know, I'll say for us, we, we spend about 30% so not 50. Right. So even us as a marketing agency, we spend 30. But I would say, look, if you're going B2C, 20% is the minimum in my opinion. But if you're a litigator, maybe you get, you know, maybe you can go down to 10% and maybe go a little lower because you're known for getting exceptional values and you can, you're still paying it through the referral fee. So depending upon how you factor that.

[B]

In, does the referral fee count? Right, because there's a lot of really successful firms that have zero B2C marketing expense. But you could look at the, the referral fee as a component of the same thing.

[A]

Right?

[B]

But assume, okay, assume you're a B2C firm, you have a $1 million budget. That probably means you're doing 3 to 5 million dollars in revenue. And you start to think about, okay, now I have a little capital. A million bucks is 80k a month. I can really start to think about where do I want to allocate the dollars. I know you're an SEO guy first. I think at the million dollar mark you probably should be Investing in having a good site, a site that converts, investing on growing that site, doing probably local map rankings to get that site to show up in at least your specific city where you live. You're probably doing some local service ads or pay per click along with that budget. And I would say maybe that roughly takes up a couple hundred thousand dollars of the budget. You're probably doing some type of lead buying or if you're not buying leads, you are doing like some type of traditional brand marketing that's going to replace it. Obviously we do tons of outdoor, we do tons of radio, there's TV or streaming. You're probably taking a percentage of that million bucks. And granted, a million bucks isn't very much when it comes to brand marketing. So there could be an argument with a million bucks to say don't do any brand marketing, only invest in performance directly. Attributable marketing. I think if it was me and I viewed the million bucks as this is my budget today, but I am on a way towards having a much bigger budget, I would probably start to think about branding in that first million bucks. So I think, you know, I would do website SEO, pay per click and lsa and then I would take some percentage of that budget and I would start to understand brand marketing and think through at least one brand marketing channel that works for me. And you can decide on your own. Is that, you know, outdoor, is that radio, is that, you know, streaming? Is that something different?

[A]

I'm going to go a little bit more granular on some of these. So like, for example, yeah, I do think you should do search and I'm not trying to do everything looks like a nail, you know, whatever that saying is, I'm the hammer and that channel's the nail. But I mean a lot of the tactics that you do for SEO apply to these LLMs from a discovery standpoint and where the future is heading, you know, you want discovery. So I would definitely do the search. You know, maybe you're at a 10 to 30, 10 to 20k a month there, splashing a little LSA. Now here's where it gets a little bit different for me. On the Google Ad side, I would do performance max. I wouldn't do a search campaign unless I had a little bit of brand recognition. So I would do the audience signals. So I would layer in the keywords. So PMAX, you can do themes. So I would do 50 themes all around car accidents because I would want to go volume. I wouldn't want to try to spend my entire budget trying to do a $30,000 cost to acquire semi truck or more, you know, or not even a semi truck. I mean just a commercial. I wouldn't want to gamble there. So I would go volume, I would go after car and I would do performance max. But so first I would do the themes, but then I would do the layer on audience signals. This is where everybody goes wrong. Okay, so you want to. You can do Custom segments in PMAX and you can include URLs that your target prospect visit. So the Fine law car accident lawyer page, the AVO motor vehicle accident page, your competitors in your market, whoever's ranking number one, those need to be the, the signals because if you just set, if you just run a PMAX and you don't do themes and you don't do signals, it will not work. It will not work. So I would do that. Just know it's not going to be as good as like, you know, bidding on those bottom of the funnel, but you're going to get more leads. Even up is excited to announce their latest solution. AI Playbooks. Drive proactive case decisions with AI Playbooks by automatically flagging critical information across every case file, from intake to resolution. EvenUp is pioneering AI solutions tailored to help personal injury law firms save time, resolve cases faster, and consistently settle for more. Backed by $235 million in funding, they support over a thousand firms nationwide, from solo practitioners to leading PI firms in the country. Learn more today at evenuplaw.com on PIM. We focus on building external success, marketing growth strategies, the systems to scale a firm. But there's another side of the story. What it takes on the inside to lead in law. That's what Law Her Powered by Rankings IO is all about. Hear from the boldest women in the legal world, how they navigate power and lead with purpose. If you want that kind of insight that makes you a better leader, not just a better operator, this one's for you. Search Law her wherever you get your podcasts and hit subscribe, you won't regret it. Here's where I struggle. I think that I would do some grassroots marketing with wearables in the community and try to be try to build my community recognition strategically from an investment standpoint. And this is one. And look, paid, social and meta. Your cost to acquire directly is going to be way too high. Like I don't see how you're going to get an Allegian Facebook campaign under 10k, but I think I would still do it. Is what's crazy if I was doing the other things because I Think you do get a little bit of brand recognition, even though it's legion, because you're wrapping a radius around your dma.

[B]

That's what we did is the first hundred K I put into the videographer, I put into creating organic content, trying to do viral content through the following. That way, before I did any of the branding stuff, the next thing we did was paid social. And we still spend, you know, seven figures a month on paid social. We're a social first company, so it's a little different than a firm that isn't. But here's the reason I'll make the argument for paid social and why I generally like it is because I think you get the benefit of direct attribution with the repetition of television. People say the phone is the new TV. Right. That's been something that for five years to 10 years now, we've heard Gary Vee and all these people say create content. People aren't watching the television in the living room. They're watching their phone. And so I think there's a really strong logic to say when I'm paying for ads on social media, whether it's YouTube or TikTok or Facebook or Instagram, I'm getting the ability for people to directly convert. And if I'm doing it right, I'm also getting brand recognition in my market. And so if you want to measure every channel as a performance channel, if that's your mindset, you want to look at dollars into Facebook or Instagram, dollars out, that's fine. But if you're also playing the marathon game, you're getting those eyeballs from people who don't need an emergency service right now. But maybe, especially if your ad is really good, they're learning who you are, they're drawing some type of emotion that's associated with you. And so you're getting the benefit of that brand without the conversion through social media.

[A]

Yes. So that's where I'm at. And I go on Facebook and I get hit by these advertisers promising these $1,500 cases through Facebook ads, or, you know, what have you. The reason that some of these can do that, you know, these Legion companies, like your Quintessa cases on the Demand Case Connect, is because of their TAM, they're spreading out and they're targeting 40 states, and they're kind of. They're. They're monetized all these markets, and the overflow goes to, like, the other Legion providers. They sell them back to them so, like, they don't have the leakage you're like, maybe you could do that if you had a network. But like, that's how they get those. If you just do paid social and particularly meta, and I have some experience with this and I've seen it through our clients and you wrap a 20 mile radius or a DMA and you come in, your cost to acquire it is not going to be $2,000. I don't care who these Facebook people are, what they're saying, even with 200 pieces of creative looking at all the ad inventory, it's not going to be there. And James, maybe, maybe correct me if I'm wrong, but so I would just say just be cognizant that there's a lot of charlatans for the most part. And even if you do face paid social, absolutely right. Your creative has got to be on point like it is. It's so critical. Any thoughts on that?

[B]

Yeah, one, one thing that's interesting is just the comparison to tv, because as you're saying that I'm thinking about the argument for tv, right? Like, I think, okay, what's the traditional way of tracking television? All right, I'm going to spend, you know, 100k a month on television. I'm going to ask people who call my office, how did you hear of us? And the number that say television? Then I'm going to take the total ad spend, I'm going to divide it by the number of signed cases that say television, and I'm going to say, this is my cost per case. If you're running that math, I find it unlikely that you're going to come in at a cost per case. That feels really good through that direct attribution methodology. But if you do it this way, if you say, okay, I'm going to commit to doing TV for three, four or five years. And you know, I don't have a ton of experience with cable tv. I'm making an assumption, but I'm saying I've seen this with other, you know, of our branded channels where I'm saying, okay, I'm going to look at my total ad dollars spent and say, Philadelphia, my original market, maybe I'm spending 10 million bucks in Philly. And I say, okay, 10 million bucks in Philly generated this many cases. And then I look at my cost per case that way and I'm like, oh, that's actually pretty good. And so I think if you solely focus on direct attribution through a Facebook or through a television, you're always going to come to the conclusion, I got to turn this off. But if you zoom out and you think, hey, a lot of these customers, they're getting hit by me 35 times before they convert. And despite asking the question of where they heard of us, I'm really never going to get perfect data on where they actually heard of us. And so I'm going to use a little bit of instinct and I'm going to say, this is what my spend was in this market, this is how many cases I got, this is my cost per case. And I know some of these cases are probably friends and family and some of these cases came in through a personal network or whatever else, but I think that my media spend plays a part in them ultimately going with my firm, you're going to come to a different calculation on the success of those channels. So I would just encourage you, if you're at that $1 million mark and you're starting to invest in your brand, no matter which platform you, you select, don't get too hung up on the immediate cost per case number specifically over the first three to six months, because you got to enter this marketing with the mentality, I'm going to be doing this for 10 plus years. The first 6 month direct cost per case number is not going to have a big impact on my decision making here.

[A]

I couldn't agree more. And so I like, I love looking at the blended, like the blended CAC and even the attorney fees, right, With a lot of people don't calculate those fall off rates, those drop rates of, you know, people underestimate their drop rates, right? For whatever reasons, you know, they don't have medical or they switch attorneys or, or whatever, you know, statutes, they, whatever the reason are, they drop. You'd know better than me. But like, let's just say that you could monetize 80% of the cases that you sign up, which, I don't know, maybe that's high. And you look at a minimum policy of 25 or 30, you're looking at what, you know, eight grand. But, and if you look at just the eight grand, that doesn't factor in the bigger cases. So then it's like, well, what's, what's my actual true case value or attorney fee? Is it more 12 to 15,000? So I think it kind of applies to everything and more. So, you know, in the past, when I started in 2012, 13 and you started several years ago, it's like everything was like kind of consolidated. It's like tv, Facebook, you know, search. And now it's like, I don't know how and like, maybe you could do a direct channel attribution, because there's like a handful, but now there's like, so many. Even social. You got Facebook and insta and TikTok and X and whatever comes next and. And TV, you got streaming and OTT. So kind of going on a rant there. But I agree with you entirely. I think you got to zoom out. I also think with the systemic marketing, too, like, you know, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on, like, how that plays into this level and how it lowers your. Your cac. You know, what's your thoughts on the systemic stuff, like the referrals and kind of that compounding reputation?

[B]

What we saw with our systemic marketing was basically that as we spent more and more money on our advertising budget, our cost per case went up because each incremental case costs more money than the last case. Let me just kind of zoom out to explain what that means. So say you're a law firm generating 200 cases a month, and you say, all right, I'm really trying to blow this thing up. I want to get to 400 cases or 500 cases. I don't think you can expect those incremental 300 cases to be at the same cost per case as the first 200. At least that was our experience, is I saw my, like, original cases, and a lot of this had to do probably with organic social media and how we build our systemic marketing in Philadelphia. But it was like those cases were the cheapest cases we're ever going to get. And, you know, as we've grown and hit a thousand cases and gone up from there, it's like every single additional, like, hundred or, you know, a couple hundred cases costs more and more money because there's a blended factor of. You're saying, okay, if your first, you know, 200 cases cost a thousand bucks and your Next, you know, 300 cases cost 2000 bucks, and your next 300 cases cost 2600 bucks. By the time you get to the 800 cases, you're blending the 1000 plus the 2000 plus the 2800 or whatever, right? And so your overall blended cost per case is then higher, but you're doing more volume. So while you might be making a lower profit per case, you're doing more units through the funnel, so you're making more profit at the end of the day. And so that's something we've seen at every level of growth as we've scaled our marketing budget is the next, you know, hundred cases have always cost them more Money than the prior hundred cases. Obviously you need them to still be profitable in order for it to be worth it to continue to deploy those advertising dollars. But we've never been able to go backwards, right, where it's like, okay, you know, our first 200 cases cost this and now we just added 300 more cases at half the cost of our first 200.

[A]

I love every bit of that. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you a couple follow up questions on this before we move to the fun money. A little bit more money to play with. So stick in still at segment to that million bucks. You know, just briefly like how do you think about the team? And then also this one's a little bit longer to answer market. Like when do you start to think about maybe I expand the market or expand my tam so staff and then kind of the market.

[B]

I think in terms of the staff questions first, you can do a lot with a pretty minimum staff if you only have a million bucks, right? If you say okay, roughly each marketing personnel is going to cost me, what's six grand a month? That's 72, 72K, right? Like that's a rough math, you know, that's you're not probably getting anybody with any kind of deep expertise at that price point, but you're getting somebody who can maybe do some stuff for you. You know, I think if your total monthly budget is 80k, you probably don't want to spend like 25k on people, right? Like you probably want the money to go towards the actual ad dollars. This is how I always think about it, is what is the budget that's actually going to add dollars versus what is the budget that's going to either employees or agency fees or whatever. And I still remember when I used to sell, you know, pay per click is these people that would pay, you know, fifteen hundred dollar agency fee and then spend two grand. And it's like, man, your ratio of capital deployed to fee is so dumb. You know, it's like you should be spending 6, 7, 8% of your total budget on fee and the rest needs to be an actual ad spend because that's what's going to generate the customers. And so when I would think about my first 80k and I know that's hard, right, because you have to at least get basic people that can do the thing for you. But I would think about, you know, how could I spend 60k of it at least on actual ad spend and less than 20k on agency fees, employees, et cetera. So you're actually putting those ad dollars to work.

[A]

I just, I wanted to really highlight and stamp a point that you said. So, you know, from my perspective on the agency perspective. So I'll put that hat back on. It's like, I see these agencies that do a 15%, you know, PPC management or 20% management fee, and they'll talk about their strategic advantage and all this stuff, but I'm like, is the value providing enough? And here's where I'm going with that. You got to have really good talent to justify that, because you start to incentivize the firm to bring the staff in house. Right. If you're paying, you know, 100K on a Google Ad spend and the providers charging you 15%, you know, you're looking at 180 grand a year. Now we're talking like, hey, at 180 grand, like, maybe I can pick up a solid Google Ads person. Right. Like, so I think that's a constant thing that the agencies have to balance. But the benefit is, is they can kind of fracture attention. Maybe they don't have to give all the resources of it from a labor perspective, and that's how they can charge those cheaper fees. And I think some of the agencies that just stick to these archaic 15% with no scale, they're just, they're doomed for failure, in my opinion. Maybe they'll, they'll last for a year or two. And look, I might get some hate on this, but it is what it is.

[B]

This is how I think, how about this for fair. And I think agency owners may even agree with this, is you got to bake their fee into your cost per case. Like, don't tell me what the cost per case is, but then leave out the part that's going to your fee. Like, if I'm paying, you know, my cost per case is 2,500 bucks. That's not. Shouldn't just be based on the media spend alone. You know, it should be 2,500 bucks for the media spend. Then if you're charging me ten grand for the fee, you need to bake that into the overall total and then tell me my true cost per case, including your fee. Because that's what I need to compare to my other options of doing it internally or doing it elsewhere.

[A]

Yeah. Or otherwise. I mean, you do have to just be a gangster, you know, and have the talent and have the true talent that can justify it, and you just can't get it anywhere else. Like, they have this expertise and you just can't Find it anywhere else. So I would just say, and there.

[B]

Is a lot of agencies that, that do do that, by the way. Like, you know, we've gone the route of building the internal marketing capabilities, but we're a marketing first organization like managing marketing people, knowing what to look for in marketing people. It's hard if you're, you know, a law firm primarily focused on litigating cases. And so I don't at all think that it's unreasonable to hire an agency at a million dollar a month budget. I probably would do that. You know, we're always testing agencies against our in house team. Even though we have the in house team, we always want to see if an agency can outperform us. But I think you just need to compare the agency apples to apples by baking their fee in with the cost per case.

[A]

Yeah, and I want to be clear, I don't want to, I'm not trying to convey that you should bring it all in house because I think they're, you know, without what we're seeing, we're able to provide a fractured like team. You take SEO, where we have content writers, technical SEO, link building, etc. If the firm tried to bring that in house, that might take the whole, you know, million dollar budget versus So I think in some of those scenarios that's where it would be worthwhile to work with an agency. I guess where I'm saying is these, you know, percentage management fees at scale, they kind of work against the agency. Unless they have, they can continue to prove those, those case values and they're contributing new intelligence and strategy. But if they hit this kind of coast, you know, I think the firm's going to start looking at those fees. All right, so I think we beat that one.

[B]

Should we get to the 10 million?

[A]

Yeah, 10 mil. Or, or we could just say a little bit more. We could say, we could say a million dollar a month, you know, 10 million to 12, you know, million dollar a month. Where were you at? And then kind of, how do you think about it now?

[B]

Yeah, so 10 million is like a real budget. I know that you look at the Viv apps data too. So VivX is basically summary of advertising dollars being spent in every market in America. You can break it down by advertiser, you can break it down by channel, you can kind of slice and dice it any way you want. One thing that's kind of interesting, I would say about the $10 million mark is that tends to be about what the biggest spenders in the market, each market is spending not true. In some smaller markets, like maybe Ohio or North Carolina, like there just aren't advertisers of that size. But if you look at the California or the Texas or the Georgia or the New York or the, you know, these kind of markets, usually the biggest group of advertisers is right about at this $10 million month mark. We did it a little differently, we went wider. This is nature of us, you know, working with partner firms and not entirely being vertically integrated in each market and wanting to kind of cast that wide net and work with the best co counsel we can in, in joint representation agreements. So we got Philly up to I think like 4 or 5 million before we went into a second market. And then we started kind of building each market up smaller so spending like 2,3 million in a bunch of different markets, I would say that's uncommon. The most common way of doing it, particularly folks who spend a above 50% of their budget on TV, usually that $10 million is in like one primary DMA. And I think the main thing I would articulate at $10 million is you have to get beyond the direct attribution buying lead stage. That can certainly be a part of your marketing mix. But I think at $10 million you should have a dominant brand in your market. I know Angel Reyes, for example, against brand marketing, thinks, you know, brand marketing isn't worthwhile. And so there are people who, who feel differently. I think as a, as a brand marketer myself, I think 10 million is where you really can segment your brand as the law firm that the random Uber driver in your neighborhood says they would call if they were in an accident. Like that should be your goal with 10 million. How about that? Like if I pull up to the city, I fly in, I get in an Uber, I open the door, I say, hey, if you were in an accident, who would you call? They should say your name. And what would be the other signals that that would be happening? It would be branded search, right? Like you're getting a ton of people that are searching your brand directly. It would be omnipresence. You're not just on television. You're on television and radio and billboards and digital and pay per click, right? You're using a total omnichannel approach to your marketing. You probably at $10 million, have a good in house marketing team led by a senior person making, you know, multiple six figures a year. Right? You're not just using a man or woman you just hired right out of school, college that's running your marketing at $10 million. You probably have an experienced CMO, head of marketing, director of marketing and under them they probably have a couple of support staff that are specialists in various media channels or marketing strategies. You truly have an in house marketing team. You're probably working with a couple of agencies. You probably have an SEO agency, you probably have a pay per click agency. I think at $10 million you really start to have enough capital in this competitive B2C personal injury advertising space where you can really brand your firm to stand out and be there for the long term.

[A]

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's definitely omnichannel. You need like a major awareness distribution component and you need a capture component. So you're going to need the search side with a little bit more. On the Google Ad side, maybe you're paying for brand dollars because you are actually putting stuff out to the market.

[B]

You know, the good old Google tax. At $10 million you're paying the Google tax. Yeah, I'll give a little shout out on that. Nothing I hated more than than the Google tax. Chris knows we've had tons of conversations about this. You know, at, at $10 million you're doing enough brand marketing where you're getting people conquesting on your brand and you're having to bid lots of money on your own brand to protect your brand. But the money is worth it.

[A]

Yeah, I mean then you know the big marketers are spending on adthena and tracking the people bidding on their brands and then sending those cease and desist out. I mean it's just the nature of the game but you kind of know you've made it. When people start bidding on your brand, you're like, hey, my brand has value. Instead of someone bidding on car accident lawyer, they're bidding on my name. So that kind of speaks to the brand itself. You know, I think for me I'm gonna try. I'm putting some of my largest clients kind of picturing with what I'm about to say and what are the commonalities I see? Number one, they all have a brand. All of them. Not one of them is just pure direct response. They all have a brand that are getting the best cost per case, that have the most thriving business. Number two, most of them are spending at least a hundred thousand dollars a month in Google Ads on that channel alone. At least a hundred thousand dollars. And then the third component is they are doing one of two typically. But I'm going to say that I haven't seen the third, but I would love to see it so either they're doing TV or radio, but I think, I think programmatic and streaming is right there. I think that's you're choosing one of those threes to kind of put a lot of dollars for distribution. That's what I see. You know, here's the thing that I don't see, James, across 200 firms, I'm just telling you, not one of them is crushing it in organic social. They just aren't like, I know some people like, oh, I'll get leads on organic social. Okay, first you're a litigator and your whole strategy is different than everything we just talked about. And you're advertising to your peers. It's hard to get attention do the hooks to create the consistent content. I don't see it. So I'd love some pushback there. But, but yeah, so I see the capture component, the search, Google Ads, a hundred K retargeting, right. High frequency first three days, then trickle off for the next week and then a major vehicle for distribution, typically TV or radio.

[B]

I'm not going to push back too hard. I think that my counter argument if I was Steel Manning the other side is we still see huge volumes through our social media profiles directly. I think we're an anomaly. I think also one thing to just call out in terms of the algorithm change and I love to study this stuff, I'm such a geek about it. But social media platforms used to be about your social networks like your friends, right? So you think about how these platforms work, the algorithms used to optimize to show you your friends and the pages you follow and what they're doing now. I don't know if you realize this, but it's all been TikTok iFied. You're not seeing what your friends are doing. You are only seeing the most viral videos from random people you've never met. This isn't just TikTok. Every other social media platform has adopted that. So what are the second order consequences? Well, the folks like us who have built enormous followings, we're not reaching our followers because they're just seeing viral videos because the algos are TikTok ified now. And so you're not getting in front of the people. Even if you put in all this legwork to get them to follow you, you're not getting in front of them anymore. Now I would say the advantage you still do have is if they follow you, they know you. And if they follow you, you can retarget them. And so you have to have some type of paid Social strategy on top of that organic social strategy. So I think the right firm at that $10 million mark probably is doing some type of content and is doing some type of paid social. But it's probably not their focus. Their focus is probably on these other big brand channels that you talked about.

[A]

I agree 1000% and I think that's, you know, typically what I see is, you know, the stale, you know, social media posts, the holiday posts, this is. Aren't going to get it done right. Like maybe there's some value in the social proof like you know, validating a consumer's choice when they saw you on a different channel. But so James got a little bit of that. Gary Vaynerchuk, Holy ghost entered his body on the interest targeting by. But. But I.

[B]

You took a step tough stance against social. I'm always going to, you know, back up my baby. That was, that was how everything began. So I had to at least offer the other side.

[A]

Let's talk about on a close like and we could go a little bit more if you want to riff. But it like what's the biggest waste of money that PI firms make? What do you think? Where's like the waste?

[B]

Let me noodle on it. Why don't you get us. Where do you think it is?

[A]

Well, I think, you know, originally I was going to say organic social and you're killing me. We just countered. I think, I think if you're.

[B]

Dig your feet, dig your feet in. If that's like I was saying, it's not a waste of dollars though. It's a waste of time. Well, I could, I could see that argument. It's a waste of time. It's not a waste of dollars.

[A]

Yeah, my thought, I guess all these channels, it's the same thing. It's like are you going to commit to being great at the channel? Like you can't do SEO if you're not getting reviews and if you're any of my clients listening that you go check your reviews and you have one or two in the last month, I mean please, for the love of God, just help Elba brother out, get some more reviews. Helps the lsa but it's like in the same for the creative on radio or tv. So I guess I'll flip it back to your side. If you do commit to organic social, you do the hooks, you do the video production, you understand how to get attention, then it could work.

[B]

I think you hit the waist. So I think the waste is the creative like you're gonna spend, you know, on let's take TV as an example. You know, you want to be a top five advertiser in the market. There's some logic to like, okay, if you're going to do tv, might as well go all the way in. What does that look like across different markets? Maybe in a big metro, like a, you know, Philly's the fifth ranked city. Like a Philly, Houston, Phoenix, Vegas, those type of markets. You're probably spending at least $5 million on TV to be kind of in that, you know, top bucket of law firm spenders on TV. Chris, I'm going to take $5 million on TV and I'm going to create the most boring commercial ever. That is background noise that nobody ever remembers because I'm just standing in front of a library saying the same echo chamber stuff that every lawyer says. That to me is a huge waste. You're not standing out at all. If the game is to get attention, why is your commercial so vanilla, so generic? The same thing goes for a billboard where the only legible thing is like injured, for example. Like, I don't even know what firm that is. Like, I see a billboard that's injured, but I don't, I don't know who you are. You know, I'm not dialing that little number in the right hand corner to figure it out. You know, if you're going to spend money on brand dollars, then make your brand stand for something. Make your brand stand out in some way. Make your brand memorable in some way. Have that theme. Be consistent. Have people feel an emotion when they think of you. Good or bad or funny or serious or you know, scared or happy. Like make somebody feel something when they see your content.

[A]

I think that if I could like triple double stamp that. I completely agree. And it's also like, you know, look at your market and like, what are the types of commercials people are doing? Are they doing the aggressive. I'm the best attorney. Can you introduce some humor and be a little different? Can you? You know, I've talked about Amanda Demanda a lot and she's like embracing the femininity, the, the pink color, the high heels. When the market's mostly male centered, they're using every PI attorney practically on the planet using the color blue. You know, so you just. And she stands out and like it's memorable. What about, what do you think on the underrated channel? So like a final question on this marketing mix. What do you think about a underrated channel today?

[B]

I think there's a transition underway from TV to streaming that you, you Hit on. Like, I, I think there's still a ton of dollars being spent on cable tv. And the thing I've always been waiting for, whether it's streaming or whether it's paid social or whether it's something entirely different, when are the TV dollars going to start moving from cable? Because we see the viewership data, you know, the cord cutting has done happen, right? It's already happened. Everybody knows that the cords have been cut. You know, I don't have cable, a lot of people don't have cable. But I think if you look at the data on the amount of money spent on cable, it's still going up by legal advertising. So I think what I want to know is like, when is that moment where we're finally going to see legal advertising dollars into cable TV fall off and then what does the redistribution of those dollars look like across other mediums?

[A]

I love every bit of that. Look, I'm the same, like I don't have cable, right? I've got YouTube TV and the Netflix, the whole suite of them, right? Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, they got me on those subscriptions. But like, that's just the way it is. I think the most underrated, I think it's podcasts, personally, in my opinion, I mean, look at what happened. And I'm not getting political, but look at the political landscape and the distribution component of these podcasts. The challenge is if you're a single market firm, it's hard to find a podcast that like just appeals to Philadelphia, like you said. Right. But if you're a multi market practice, the distribution cost is very low. And depending upon how they do their ads, if they're dynamic or static, you could get some, you know, in the archives you get like this permanent listener base that go back and listen to old episodes. I mean, we talk shop all the time about founders, podcasts or this podcast or that. Like if they're not changing out the old ads, you know, you get those and they kind of compound. So not only do you get the immediate distribution from a CPM perspective, you get like the past too. So it just dries down the cost. So I don't think that a PI firm is doing podcasts. Correct. I haven't seen it. I've seen Morgan and Morgan on a couple comedy shows, the YouTube channels, the look, I just saw him on the School of Hard Knocks and I applaud all that, but I just, I haven't seen it from a podcast. So I think that's the underrated channel that someone needs to figure out.

[B]

Let's go. Well, I appreciate you having me on. It's always fun to jam out. Is this the third time now? If people want to listen to the past episodes, the first one I think we did was I told my story and we did a marketing episode. The second one we did, I think my favorite episode, it was the legal intake episode. Right? Because. Yeah, you know, you talk about where the biggest waste is. It's in the intake department. And so I kind of went step by step how we think about running our call center, the different technology you use, if folks want to listen to that. And then this episode is awesome because hopefully we got to hit every person, no matter where you are in your marketing journey. And I'm excited to hopefully meet some listeners at pimcon this year. It'll be fun.

[A]

Yeah, absolutely. And James is keynote in day two. So super excited about that. And James, for our listeners that want to get in touch with Top Dog, get in touch with you, have questions about this or want to, you know, potentially talk about partnerships, how can they get in touch with you?

[B]

Anything works. You can send me an email. James Helmopdog law.com. we also have Cameron Cochran, who is our network. She does our business development, sets up our law firm episodes. Submit a form on the website or call the office. We'll get it to the right place. We'll get it over to Cameron. We'll reach out and see if you guys are fit to work with. Obviously, we are in a bunch of different markets and are always looking for.

[A]

New firms, Whether you're at 100,000 or 10 million now, you know what actually works? This is personal injury. Mastermind. Subscribe for more conversations with the people actually building the biggest firms in the game.