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352. 4 Steps to Your First $10M Year w/ Jim Hurley
00:19:20
Discover the 4 steps Jim Hurley used to grow from solo to $13M—and how you can apply them to scale your own PI firm.
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A
Hey there, future VIP. I'm Kinsey, your on site concierge for PEMCON. The Personal Injury Master Rhyme Conference, October 5th through the 8th. When you go VIP at PEMCON, you're getting the full experience. Luxury accommodations included at the five star Phoenician resort. $250 in resort credit for the spa, golf course or wherever your mood takes you, a private VIP dinner and exclusive access to the biggest names in personal injury. Grab your VIP tickets while you still can at pemcon. That's P I M C O n dot O r G. See you this fall in Scottsdale.
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B
I started out as a solo and we're gonna be at 12 or 13 million this calendar year.
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C
That's Jim Hurley, managing partner at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers.
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B
The firm's been in existence since 2011 and I've been doing injury law for 30 plus years in Virginia.
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C
They are better known as the car crash experts.
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B
Approximately three or four years ago is when we embarked on the car crash experts and we really started branding that concept. It's more of a rifle approach, a niche, niche approach and overall I think it has worked for our branding.
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C
I'm Chris Schreier, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, the award winning digital marketing agency for personal injury terms. In this episode, Jim Hurley and I walk through the four steps to get to your first $13 million a year. Let's go.
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B
The first couple years when we started it, not a whole lot of change and luckily we had done enough from a marketing standpoint. So the first year or two, not a whole lot of change. Year three and four and we're going into year five, year three and four, there was a definite uptick and from number of cases in revenue, number of cases increased maybe 10 to 15% and the revenue increased a little bit, but was still a little bit stable because as you know, in the world we live in, you sign up a case and our average we get paid is about anywhere from 13 to 19 months out.
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D
And you got I believe nine, maybe more offices. They're all in Virginia. What's your thought process on the expansion of staying in Virginia?
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B
What we're really looking at short term, which would be the next two to three years, is we're trying to be a big fish in a little pond as opposed to a little fish in a bigger pond. So our area geographically is kind of coastal Virginia and that the we go from Williamsburg, Virginia east and that our DMA, our designated marketing area, we're about 50 or so. So we're a mid major market for that and total in that area, we have, you know, 2, 3 million people. And right now we're one of the top personal injury firms in the area. But we're not the premier injury firm in the area. We're really trying to focus on our immediate area in the next two to three years to be the big fish. And then at that point we may consider expanding a little bit.
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C
Jim put down the shotgun and picked up the rifle. Focusing his brand as the car crash experts. By owning his niche, he grew from solo to a $13 million firm. If you're chasing your first $10 million year, you're step one.
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B
You know, you got to try to be everywhere because you really don't know where people are going to be. Cassidy Lewis is our chief marketing officer and the word she often uses, omnipresent.
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D
I love that you teed up Cassidy, your cmo, a number of individuals I think, I believe that work with Cassidy as well. So, you know, when did you decide to bring a little bit more control in house? I know, you know, look, I own a marketing agency and. But there's ways to do both. You can do everything in house and have full control or you can maybe start and work with an agency. When did you go about bringing it in house? What was the thought behind that? How did you approach that component?
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B
We brought marketing in house approximately maybe 15 years ago. And prior to establishing Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, I established early law firm and then John Cooper joined me and since then we built the firm to where it is today. But even when I was a solo practitioner Hurley Law Firm, I knew marketing was crucially important. So I actually brought someone in house on a part time basis because I didn't have the ability to coordinate everything I wanted to do and it wasn't super expensive. But when you're a solo practitioner, a dollar is much more valuable than let's say you're a bigger firm. So it was painful, but I knew it was necessary and it was less money in my pocket at that time. And then as we continued to grow then we had the ability to hire somebody of Cassidy Lewis's stature and ability. And she's been with us now for approximately eight years or so. And then through that we have three other full time in house marketers and then we have a graphic design person that works with us that's not in house but we work with her on a regular basis. And when we decided to do that was, it's a money question. We knew we had to do it. And as we got bigger and we had more money, then we could add people, the in house marketing people. One focuses on social media, one focuses on client satisfaction and gifts and things like that. And then one focus is essentially as a marketing assistant with an emphasis on the referral specialist type stuff. But again, most firms listening to this are probably smaller. I'm sure there's firms much, much larger than we are. But if you're a solo practitioner or two or three attorneys, it's like, why am I listening to this guy? You know, we're about 50 employees, 10 lawyers, our marketing budget's about $2.3 million and we do TV and various other things. Well, this guy doesn't know anything. He can't help me. But I started out as a solo and then slowly worked up with John Cooper. He joined me. So it was two of us and we slowly worked up to where we are today. And I've always said, look, you may not be able to afford in house marketing, but if you want to grow your firm, you've got to have some type of in house presence to help coordinate with a market agency like you have and or trying to do projects that you just don't have time to do.
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D
There's different times to bring it in house to do a hybrid. I've seen the impact. I mean, you've got such cohesiveness across your brand on the website, your social profiles, I imagine your events. You know, that was one of the things that stood out to me, the consistency and the messaging and just how cohesive it was. And that's really very challenging to do with working just an agency and not having some in house capability. So I think you're doing an excellent job.
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C
Marketing gets the phone to ring the. Without a system, too many good cases slip away. Step two, dial in your intake.
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B
I always realized intake was important, but I always treated it kind of secondary. A call would come in or an Internet lead would come in. I would pay attention to it, but I wouldn't jump right on it and I wouldn't realize how important that was. And in the beginning when we were trying to build the practice, we were losing a lot of cases. So about 10 years ago, I go, oof, that's bad, that's wrong. So in the last probably three or four years, we've really focused on intake. We had paralegals and legal assistants and lawyers taking the intake. And that was a disaster because no one wanted to take the phone calls because it was interrupting them from what they were doing. And then the last few years we hired three full time People, that's all they do. And then also from teaching and training, we've been working with legal intake pros, Ms. Yanni, and she does a lot of the conferences and she's very good. And we've worked with other people in the legal intake world so we realized we really need to bring some outside help in to help us kind of like, you know, marketing and advertising agencies. That will never be a great marketing advertising agency because that's not what we do day in and day out. So we've always worked with other agencies and marketing people to help us get better.
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D
Yanni Smith, I, I hear her name get brought up a lot. Legal intake pros. I've had the pleasure speaking to her. How do you think about the like the after hours weekends? Do you use like a third party there? Do you? Or is it still in house? Like you know, you, you got the phone by the pillow for some of these reps. Like how do you think about that side?
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B
Sure. I'm smiling because it's a small world in so many different ways. We just had a conference in regards to a meeting intake conversion open with Yanni and her group and the group that does it here. And she goes, do you have any questions for me? And I said, how can we get better with non office hour intake? So that's why I'm smiling and laughing because your question was directly what we just talked about yesterday. That's one of our weak areas. You know, we define non office hour intake as Monday through Friday from 5pm to 9am, then Saturday and Sunday. And we do get a fair amount of calls that are really good calls during that time. And currently we have attorneys on call to respond to that. And then we rotate them month after month so they don't get burned out. But it's not great. We're losing cases, we're not responding the way we should. So we've looked into virtual assistants before and for various reasons we decided not to go that route. We've looked into hiring an in house intake person where their hours would be different, I. E. Monday through Friday, noon to 8 and then Saturday from 9 to 4 or something along those lines. And we haven't pursued that, but we've thought about it. And my best thing is it's unbelievably important to have a good system for non office hour intakes because there is money in those hills and it's hard to do with the current way we do it because the lawyers are busy, a lot of them are younger, they have children, they don't want to be interrupted during dinner when they're not working, they don't want to be interrupted. So it's an issue we're struggling with. And our current system is good, but not great.
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C
Half of Jim's cases come from referrals, attorneys, past clients, community connections. Step 3 Maintain your friendships.
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B
You have to have a good database. Here at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers, we call it a friend of the firm because the database is so cold. But if you tell someone you're part of my friend of the firm, then they kind of go, oh, that's nice. And it's so easy to say and it's so unbelievably hard to do and it takes so much time and effort. Not necessarily money. This is something that you can do without having huge amounts of money. But having a good database and having good software to maintain and control that database, it's the one that I could say, you got to do it. Most people have it, but they don't take the time and effort to build it and to nurture it and to constantly pay attention to it. And early on in my career I had a lawyer that's no longer with us. But this guy taught me. He goes, look, at the end of the day, your cheapest form of marketing is people that know you. But just because they know you doesn't mean they're going to refer you cases. You've got to constantly keep in contact with them and touch base with them.
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D
Foreign Most agencies sell promises, Rankings delivers proof. We've taken firms from invisible to number one in the toughest PI markets while.
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C
Others are still scrambling to figure out ChatGPT.
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We're already optimizing for AI search. So your firm is the answer the clients see first.
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Don't wait while your competitors eat your lunch.
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Visit Rankings IO and start dominating search today.
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When your network starts to grow, you need the tools to keep up the right software with automations, reminders and integrations. Make sure no contact slips through the cracks. Step 4 Use tech to track and manage your database.
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B
I'm old and I'm not a tech guy, so CRM I know is the term we use. I still use software or database. You've got to pick one that works for you. Currently we have File, vine and lead docket and that works relatively well for us. Well over 50% of our business is referral based, both a number of cases and revenue derived from that. So what we've done is that we had a segment or have separate databases for each and every characteristic of that role. So the five main ones are that we have obviously current clients and then we have past clients. We have attorneys and we have a whole campaign trying to get business from other attorneys. And then we have what we call business contacts, which essentially is anybody we know that doesn't fit into those other ones. And then we have intake. Intake are people that have called us. We can't help them for various reasons, but we get their basic contact information, we put them on the database and then they get mailings from us and email blasts from us and social media from us and various other things. Three years later they call us because they've been hurt in a car accident. And we say, why are you calling us? And they go, well, I don't know why, but I keep getting information from you all and I know you do car accident stuff. So that. And we never realized how valuable that was until we did a deep dive a few years ago into that. So those are our main big five that really generate vast amounts of business for us.
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D
And then staying in touch with them. Are you doing like a monthly newsletter? You said you mentioned some print. Like you've got the list right and you're using lead docket in the segmentation. So how do you stay in touch with the individuals and not, you know, you don't want to annoy them, you want to provide value, you want to be known. So like, how do you, how do you keep that reputation and stay in front of them?
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B
We do still do physical mailings, newsletters, postcards, things like that. And we try to do not every month because our friend of the firm is so large now, but we try to do at least one every quarter so they actually get something in the mail. Older generations still look at that, younger generations not so much. But we still have to cater to both. We try to do email blasts maybe once a month. And the hard thing is you want people to know about you, but you don't want to bother them. And then we do a lot of social media and we view social media more as a branding as opposed to direct marketing. And then part of our social media is raffles. So we have a raffle essentially every month, doing various raffles for interaction and things like that. And then we have various, what I would call community events or sponsorships, community involvement. We give away to local schools approximately, I think it's now 15 or $20,000. And we have all our friends vote on the local school and then we have vote for a cause again, I think it's like 15 or 20,000 where all our Friends say, this is my favorite charity, and whoever gets the most votes gets a big cash prize. So we try to touch bases, kind of not directly. You're hurt in a car accident, call us. But more in an indirect way.
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D
Let's just zoom out. You know, think about the future. You know, you've had a goal, I believe 12 million, you know, 70, 80 staff by 20, 26. What do you think needs to change to get there or not? Or is it just doing the same things?
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B
Sure. Not everybody knows this, but our new goal is to get to 20 million gross revenue by the time I'm 70. So that would be approximately in four years. We're currently going to probably be at 12 or 13 million this calendar year. So it's a substantial jump. And then obviously that I believe we can go over 20 million as well. But that's a realistic goal. So what can get us there? I've been doing a lot of thinking on that. And the two main things that I think we have to do is we're at the stage where we got to break stuff. Under the theory what got us to 50 employees and 11, 12 million gross is not going to get us to 75 to 100 employees and 20 to 25 million gross. And that's a little scary because of the fact that when you break it, you don't know whether you can put it back together better than it was.
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D
So true.
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B
And then the second main thing is we've got to get much better what I would term human resources, which is finding good people, keeping good people, teaching and training good people, having people believe in our vision and our values. And we're not even close to getting there. We have an awful lot of really, really good people, but we still have a long way to go. And I've always believed you're not going to get to where you want to go unless you have the people to get you there.
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D
I couldn't agree more. And I think if our audience was listening and being honest with themselves, I think they'd agree with those points as well. And, Jim, this has been so much fun. First of all, thank you for your transparency and sharing. You know, it's not often that we get into the details in your. And we have this type level of conversation. So, first, thank you for that. You know, for our audience listening that wants to get in touch with you, that has that case and Virginia that they want to refer to you or just have some questions about the podcast. What's the best way to get in touch with you?
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B
Sure. And we're always willing to help in any shape, form or fashion. My email, and I tend to be an emailer, is jherleyperhirley.com h u r l e y Cooper Hurley all one word. Our phone number 757-3333-3333 and then obviously our website. You can touch base on the website. We're happy to help in any way we possibly can.
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C
From solo to 13 million and now chasing 20 million. Jim shows exactly what it takes to be the biggest fish in your pond. Want more strategies like this? Hit subscribe so you never miss an episode.