← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
354. 10 Steps to Explosive PI Firm Growth (From an Inc. 5000 Firm Owner) w/ Brandon Dawson, The Thumbs Up Guys
00:29:43
Brandon Dawson shares 10 proven steps behind 279% PI firm growth and how the Thumbs Up Guys earned a spot on the Inc. 5000 list.
Loading summary
Transcript87 lines
- [00:00]
Kinsey
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.
- [00:37]
Brandon Dawson
Fall in Scottsdale, I got an email from Inc5000 in this year, almost in the top 25% of the fastest growing private companies in the US Brandon Dawson.
- [00:48]
Chris Dreyer
And the Thumbs Up Guys left nearly 600 spots on the Inc5000, placing them among the top 25% of the fastest growing companies in America. But getting there meant learning some hard lessons along the way.
- [00:59]
Brandon Dawson
I represented this guy and I worked my tail off for him. I thought, man, he will remember me forever. Well, come couple years later, he gets in a really bad wreck and he needs to hire an attorney again and he cannot remember my name.
- [01:11]
Chris Dreyer
I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO, the award winning digital marketing agency for personal injury attorneys. This is Personal Injury Mastermind.
- [01:19]
Brandon Dawson
So after that I got super intentional about today.
- [01:23]
Chris Dreyer
Brandon breaks down the 10 proven steps that took his firm from forgettable to one of the fastest growing private companies in America. Before we dive in, do me a solid hit. Subscribe. All right, let's go.
- [01:34]
Brandon Dawson
We actually started off, you know, with our four last names, Miller, Dawson, Siegel and Ward. And we went to the first ad company that we worked with and we said, man, there's a problem. This is like a lot of names. A mouthful. No remember. And they said, just lean into it. And we tried that for about a year and, you know, no surprises there. It didn't really work.
- [01:54]
Chris Dreyer
Step one, drop your ego, build a.
- [01:56]
Brandon Dawson
Brand no one can remember. Mdsw, Miller, Dawson, Siegel, Ward. And so we ended up hiring another marketing company who we still work with today, White Hart. And they had what they call their sticky brands. And they really just kind of leaned into it. It's one of those things where, you know, be lying if I told you right away. We knew it was genius, but we knew it was better than what we had. And over the last, you know, six, seven years of using it, we've realized what a great brand it is and actually how much it truly represents what we stand for.
- [02:26]
Podcast Host
Like the thumbs up, it's like a.
- [02:28]
Chris Dreyer
Positive, like good feeling. It's like a winning signal. It makes me think though, on the flip side, that Happy Gilmore movie where.
- [02:35]
Podcast Host
I don't know, maybe it's Billy Madison.
- [02:36]
Chris Dreyer
Where he gives the thumbs up, but then he does the reverse, like, hey, sounds good and then does the down. You know what I'm saying?
- [02:43]
Brandon Dawson
Like, if you don't want to do something. Yeah. So it's got.
- [02:46]
Chris Dreyer
There's a lot of ways to play with it.
- [02:48]
Podcast Host
So how are you using it?
- [02:49]
Chris Dreyer
You said White Horse or TV Outdoor.
- [02:52]
Podcast Host
How are you using it?
- [02:53]
Brandon Dawson
All of the above. Really. It's been kind of this slow morph over time of really trying to eliminate the Miller, Dawson, Siegel and Ward nomenclature and just kind of getting that out of here because it can create brand confusion. And, you know, that was some tense conversations with my partners, you know, and I'm saying, look, we have to have brand continuity. We can't be Miller, Dawson, Seagull Award. And the thumbs up guys, I've been pushing, our marketing director has been pushing over the last couple years to really kind of get rid of Miller, Dawson, Siegel and Ward and focus on the thumbs up guys. So it started with tv, heavy tv, you know, Billboard Radio. Obviously, Google has been a pain in the ass trying to get, you know, with putting thumbs up guys. And they'll try to change it. And so we've been fighting that. And then they'll say, well, we need something with the Secretary of state saying this. And I'm like, well, we don't. That's not something that's offered here. And we're trying to show we. We own the brand. And so, you know, you're always kind of dealing with different battles.
- [03:43]
Podcast Host
That's great. I mean, the continuity and then it's memorable. It's simple. It's easy to say, you know, I kind of wanted to lean in. I just had James Helm, Top Dog on. We were talking about, like, how would you invest a hundred thousand? How would you invest a million? How would you invest 10 million in today's environment to like get these leads?
- [04:01]
Chris Dreyer
What would you say? Like, hey, here's my core stack for a firm today.
- [04:06]
Brandon Dawson
What we did early on, we had a limited budget. You have to dominate one channel.
- [04:13]
Chris Dreyer
Step two, own one channel before expanding.
- [04:16]
Brandon Dawson
You cannot spread that out across tv, radio, billboards, and in social or ppc. Right. I think you really have to say, all right, if I've got 100 grand, I need to be able to dominate. And early on, I mean, you know, this, you can't spend 100 grand on TV in one month and then go off and expect that you're ever going to get any calls from that. Right. It's just not going to work. So TV, I tell everybody, if you can't spend for 12 months, really 18 months without expecting any ROI, then it's probably not for you. You have to have that long outlook there. You've got to go to maybe some paid leads, gmb, ppc. That's really where you're going to get that quick kind of, you know, fix, you know, where you can get a case in. You can immediately say, all right, it cost me this exact amount. We look at case acquisition costs, but when you're doing tv, radio, billboards, buses, all the, you know, kind of branding plays, we can't attribute a case to any specific thing. Right. And we'll even, we'll have people come in and we talk to them and say, how'd you hear about us? And I remember before we were even doing a lot of billboards and busses, like, oh, you're on the billboards and the buses. And we're like, not really. But, you know, they think they see you everywhere and they do, and they think they see you in certain places that maybe you're not even, but it shows you that the more places you are, the more you just have to keep hitting them over the head and reminding them that you're there. So, yeah, I mean, I think that initial stack for, for that, you know, first million to 3 million is SEO. PPC number one thing. There is focus on the things that you can attribute early on and then start to scale and grow that brand.
- [05:41]
Podcast Host
I think there's so much wisdom in what you just said. I heard, you know, Guy and Conrad, they have a podcast, but Guy was talking about how when you advertise more and the brand's more prevalent, you actually get more referrals too, because you're top of mind for the referral. Have you seen kind of that impact? So not necessarily just the tv, the billboards, but like, you're starting to get more people mention and refer to your firm.
- [06:06]
Brandon Dawson
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the number 1, 1, 2 and 3, typically two of those are going to be made up of former client or current client, word of mouth, those sort of things every single month. And that certainly is a huge testament to our former clients and current clients being reminded that we are still their attorneys.
- [06:26]
Chris Dreyer
Step three, remarket to every lead.
- [06:29]
Brandon Dawson
Years ago, I represented this guy, and this is when it was just the four of us. And, and man, I took his case all the way right up to trial and we settled it. And I think the case might have settled for like 20 grand. It was there, had a lot of warts on it. And I worked, you know, my tail off for him and I thought, man, you know, he and I have a great relationship. He will remember me forever. Well, a couple years later, he gets in a really bad wreck and he needs to hire an attorney again, and he cannot remember my name. And he sees a billboard and it's my old firm that I started off with. And he almost calls them and he talks to his mom and his mom says, well, you know that guy that he did a really great job for you. And he's like, yeah, I can't remember his name. And she's like, why don't you see if you can like find an email from him. Thank the Lord, she told him. And I, you know, there was some old email and he found it and we signed it up and, you know, settled that case for a quarter million dollars. And back then that was a huge, huge case for us. And I just wonder how many of those actually happened where they never made to back to us. Right. And so it was this reminder that even if you do the best job and you think you're the most amazing attorney and they're never going to forget you, you know, if you're not remarketing to them, they will forget you. And we like to think that I'm so memorable, right? Everybody's going to remember their time with me. That's just not true. And so after that, I got super intentional about, you know, marketing to our current clients, not only through traditional means, but, you know, keeping them in text campaigns, email campaigns, mailers, even just trying to get more involved in the community. Anything you can do just to remind those people, hey, we're still out here, we're still doing it. But certainly tv, radio, Billboard, all that helps with the reminder out there too.
- [08:04]
Podcast Host
Yeah, that was, that was incredible. That systemic marketing compounding and all the things that you're doing there. Such a great story. Taking that all the way for 20 and it comes back around. That's awesome. We got to touch on the 1200 reviews. I mean, very rare do I see firms that have above a thousand. I mean, it's very rare. So anything in particular that's different, like, that's out of the box. Like, I know it's a combination of a lot of things, but is there something that you saw like, oh, we're doing this a little Different.
- [08:29]
Brandon Dawson
And yeah, I think it started with, you know, that mission and vision to deliver that five star client experience. And that was through exceptional client communication, you know, access to high quality medical care, and then just absolute badass, you know, lawyering. And so it starts there and the team buys in on that. Right? And number one to me was exceptional client communication. That's the one thing that people I think can tell. They don't know if you're a great attorney or not. And I think we have some absolutely amazing, top notch trial attorneys over here that are amazing attorneys. But most lay people don't know whether or not they have a great attorney or an okay attorney. But what they do know is, did my attorney talk to me? They call me, do they care about me?
- [09:10]
Chris Dreyer
Step four, make reviews your number one referral engine.
- [09:14]
Brandon Dawson
And so that to me was the number one touch point, was let's do that right on the front end. And then if we treat our team members great and really pour into them, then that's going to trickle down to our clients. And so we really started with a Culture first initiative.
- [09:32]
Chris Dreyer
Step five, and this one is tied directly to step four, put culture first.
- [09:36]
Brandon Dawson
And I think that trickle down has been a huge, huge part of that. I mean, we have people over here that are recruiting their friends and that are at other firms saying, hey, come over here. It's awesome. I think that is really kind of the secret sauce. We obviously like anybody, you know, we're out there. We're trying to encourage our team to, you know, get Google reviews. We'll do, you know, sessions on how to ask. I think that a lot of people get it wrong and they only ask at the end of the case. I think you can ask at any point in time, you know, if you had a great experience. We certainly incentivize our team where people kind of get their name in the hat throughout the year for certain acts. And it can be there's probably 30 different things that can get their name in the hat. And then at the end of the year, we'll pick a couple names out of there and then we'll send them on a five days, all expenses paid vacation, PTO and everything. And so, you know, that motivates as well. But that's. That also goes back to culture, right? We want people to work hard and to play hard. And so again, I think there's just a combination of all those things that really do, you know, go back to driving those and those real reviews.
- [10:35]
Podcast Host
It shows that the referrals, the internal referrals, Just the culture from top to bottom, and that's amazing. So congrats on that for sure. Let's talk about the intake side, the sales side, tech stack. What's your intake look like from, like, staffing perspective? Like, how do you think about intake?
- [10:49]
Brandon Dawson
My biggest baby is intake. I've loved intake. And our intake manager, she's just an absolute a player, and we would not be where we are without her. She's actually our first hire back in 2020 and so, you know, huge shout out to Haley for putting up with me. You got to be dialed in there. I think we all know that people listen to this podcast, you know, they know that you've got to know your want rate. You know, how many cases are you signing up by each vertical, right? And really making sure that you're closing, knowing that, hey, maybe I'm really good at closing a certain type of, you know, client. And you know, Chris, you might be a lot better at closing this other client and working as a team there. So, you know, we look at it obviously from an individual perspective. You know, we use in Litify can see everybody's. What's their conversion rate? What's the team's conversion rate? Is anybody, you know, not doing well?
- [11:40]
Chris Dreyer
Step six, set goals that scare you and measure your progress.
- [11:44]
Brandon Dawson
Obviously, you know, we're using AI to audit calls, and there's still a lot that can get better there. But it's helpful, right, to be able to look at a call and say, hey, did we miss something here? So Hayley's over there constantly auditing. We actually do paper audits as well. You know, they have to hit certain phrases, certain reassurances when they're talking to people. And so Hayley's going through listening to calls, having them listening to calls, grade each other, doing training calls. You know, every week they're doing a huddle, hey, how can we improve? What did we. You know, those are all the things. I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day, and he's got a 30 plus million dollar law firm. He's like, I wasn't tracking my net new. And what that means is, you know, this, but it's your signed cases, less the cases that you close with a fee and you got rid of for, without a fee or for whatever reason. And knowing are you actually gaining each month or are you actually losing cases each month? And I would say also track that by case type, right? Are you signing a bunch of auto cases or you sign a bunch of comp cases, whatever that vertical is. Make sure you know which one. And the reason I say that is because it helps with. With that hiring. Right. Having the right amount of people on the bench. If you're net newing 20, 30, 40, 50 cases a month, well, you need to be hiring like crazy, right? If you're net newing negative, you got some problems, right? Like that. That's a recession warning indicator. So I always, always look at that. Don't look at it month to month in react, but, you know, quarter to quarter, year to year, you look at that and kind of know what's going on with your firm. I think it's a really good way to kind of find some holes in there. And that's why, I mean, you know, last year we had, I think it was a 96.4 conversion percentage on the wanted. Yeah. Whoa.
- [13:14]
Podcast Host
That's super high. That's incredible. I've never heard it that high. Honestly, most try to hit that 90 percentile or 92.
- [13:21]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah.
- [13:22]
Podcast Host
So 96 and a half since.
- [13:23]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah. Last last year. I mean, they absolutely killed it. And, you know, and I'm over there going, hey, like, if it's a want, even if for some reason you couldn't really track them down, that's still a want, right? You know, we want to be honest. And, you know, it's like playing golf. I'm not a big golfer, but, you know, sometimes you duff a couple off the tee and you go, ah, it's, you know, I'll just, I'll redo that one. Certain ones, like, y' all did everything you could. And know that, like, not every case, you know, is going to be converted. But I've been so proud of that, of that team. And Haley, like I said, dealing with me texting, being like, hey, it's Saturday at 9am and what's going on with this case? And she's already on it.
- [13:55]
Chris Dreyer
But you got the prime time hours.
- [13:57]
Podcast Host
You know, I guess those are like your noon to five, typically. You know, I know there's some seasonality there too, but, like, how are you?
- [14:03]
Chris Dreyer
I mean, you love it, right? So it's the game for you. So you're already on the leads, too, but I mean, how are you guys.
- [14:08]
Podcast Host
Handling, say, evenings or weekends? Kind of some of those off hours.
- [14:12]
Brandon Dawson
Yes, I mean, you're exactly right. There's certainly peak hours. Right. And intake has been a tougher position to continually staff. I think you get a lot of burnout there, and we have some tremendous, you know, team members in there, but really getting people in there that can convert at the level that we want and that are able to live up to the expectations that Haley and I have. It's been hard to keep people on there. And so I think this is that culture of, like, you want to have a bunch of a players, you can't like, let anybody slide in there. We've certainly tried to make sure that we incentivize them with pay and all that at a higher level, because they're converting at a higher level. But, you know, to answer your question, we're typically, it's seven to seven during the week. Obviously that shifts a little bit with how many people are on staff, you know, so it was constantly trying to tweak that to say, all right, well, Mondays are busier than Fridays and 5pm to 7pm is actually busier than, you know, 10A to 12Pmaybe. Right. Looking at those stats to figure out when can we get people in here? And then on the weekends, you know, we're. We're nine to five on the weekends and always looking to expand that. And of course, we have, you know, rollover coverage, so there's. There's no call that's going to voicemail. You can't have unanswered calls. I think we all know that at this point in time. Yeah.
- [15:25]
Podcast Host
The other thing too, that I hear just from your explanation of intake is like, you have incredibly high standards. Right. Just everything you talked. And I've heard her mosey talk about this, like the leaders being, you know, the people with the highest standards should lead. It's because, like, no, our standards for our wanted rate is not 92%. It's whatever the target was, 95 or 96, you know, and, and, and you got it because you had like, below. That wasn't acceptable.
- [15:51]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah. It's always kind of raising that bar. Right. And you do have to recognize that you can push it too far. Right. And, and so there's this fine line of like, pushing just enough and then also saying, hey, look, I'd rather say that the target this year is 97. And if we got to 96.5, that's better than saying it's 92 and we got to 93. Right. So one's a loss, one's a win, technically, but in reality, we'd much rather take the 96. So we need to make sure that the team knows, hey, this is exceptional. And so same thing like I said earlier with how we reward on the Google reviews and do stuff like that, you know, with the intake team, we look on a quarterly basis and you Know, they'll have, you know, if they meet their goals, they'll do spa days, dinners. You really want them to kind of treat themselves.
- [16:34]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [16:34]
Brandon Dawson
You know, a lot of times people don't. Yeah, if you give them money, they're going to, you know, not a lot of times people won't spin it on themselves. And I think this is a good excuse for them to say, I'm like, no, I'm not. Yes, we're going to pay you over here, but we're also going to have a treat yourself day where we're paying, you're doing, and you get to go do that. And so that's been a fun one. I think they've really enjoyed that.
- [16:57]
Podcast Host
I think that's going to be my top takeaway just for myself. So I'm going to take that as well, because I agree with you. And, like, people, like, want to share the experiences of what they happen. Not the. Not the bonus check. Like, they're not going to tell their friends about the $100 bonus, but they will tell them that. My boss sent me to, you know, a spa.
- [17:14]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, yeah. Got a full massage, nails done, facial, all that. Like, you know, there's not many firms doing that, but yet I think the second or third year in a row that we've won best places to work, and that's a huge hr and, you know, really trying to focus in on what is it that our team wants. Sometimes you can listen to them, what they want. Sometimes you kind of have to read the room and figure out, you know, and it can be as simple as adding pet insurance and adding gym pass. You know, we have a younger workforce and they love gym pass. I think that costs us like 1000 or $2000 a month. I mean, it's not an insane number at all, but they love it. And, you know, there's a lot of ways you can do stuff for not a lot of money, but with a lot of intentionality. And I think that's really been one of the things that we've always tried to do is just be super intentional and show up and listen.
- [18:03]
Chris Dreyer
Quick pause. Chris here. Brandon's got so many incredible insights. You can hear them live and in person on stage at PIMCON, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference, October 5th through 8th. It's not too late. He'll be there with some of the fastest growing PI firms in the country. Get your tickets today@pimcon.org link in the show notes. Okay, let's get back to it. Step seven, Hire to fill your weak Spots.
- [18:29]
Brandon Dawson
Hire your weaknesses. There's some things that we absolutely hate to do. And you know what we do? We avoid them and we put them off to the side. They never get done. And you know this from bootstrapping your own business early on. You have to do all the crappy things. You got to take out the trash. You got to write every SEO content blog. And it might be things that you're good at, but you don't love. You know, hire those weaknesses as fast as you can and free yourself up to do the things that you love. And I think that's really. Those are some things that are really, really propel your business.
- [18:57]
Podcast Host
Super smart. I mean, I would want to work for you, work with you. I mean, you're so right, though. I mean, in so many levels is like. And you kind of get refreshed. That'll probably help with like the burnout and stuff too. And Absolutely.
- [19:09]
Chris Dreyer
What.
- [19:09]
Podcast Host
So talk to me about the team. Talk to me about, like finding great talent, keeping great talent. Obviously the keeping great talent. We've hit on it. I guess it starts with that five star, like people are your staff's referring other good talent. Like, like, how do you approach that side?
- [19:23]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, that's absolutely the best way to find talent is referrals in house. So, you know, we paid some headhunters a time or two, and that's expensive.
- [19:31]
Podcast Host
Yeah.
- [19:32]
Brandon Dawson
And so I would rather pay somebody in house, maybe give them a bonus to say, hey, you know, if you recommend somebody that you love and you want them over here, those have been our best hires, you know, hands down. And, you know, we're happy to pay in a thousand, $2,000, you know, if they're here for a year, six months, you know, that sort of stuff. So those have been the best hires we've had.
- [19:54]
Chris Dreyer
Step eight, always be hiring.
- [19:56]
Brandon Dawson
I think you also have to always be hiring. Right. You're always looking, depending on your size. And that's something that Kyle is always doing. We're always trying to keep somebody in the pipeline, you know, for the longest time. And in our business, you know, this cash flow is the biggest issue. Right. See, all revenues for vanity, profits for sanity. And cash flow is king. And it's easy to sit here and say, well, I can't afford this person. Right. And you're trying to stay as lean as possible. And you could, hopefully you can get to a point where you can have a little bit excess. And Bill Biggs, a buddy of mine, I'm sure you know Bill, he was like, brandy, you always need to have somebody on the bench and whatever position that's in. Because you never know when somebody you know is going to leave. Right. Just like in sports, any team, they're not running 11 volts, 11 in the football team. They have backups to backups. And you know, you never know when somebody's going to get hurt. You never know when somebody's going to, you know, have to take a leave of absence. And that hurts. That hurts a lot more when somebody leaves and you don't have any bandwidth to take on those cases. It's not good for your clients, it's not good for your team. And so we've really tried to be intentional about having, you know, one or two people on the bench and we're slowly bringing them along and. Yeah. Is that more of a bleed on cash flow? Sure. But we're bringing them up better with those younger attorneys. We're able to train them so they're not getting kind of just thrown right into the deep end, you know, same thing on the case manager paralegal side. We're able to home grow a lot of paralegals, take them from that case manager side if they want to go do litigation and send them to different seminars them work with the experienced lit paralegals that we have. You never know when great talent's going to come across. You so soak it up when you can.
- [21:28]
Podcast Host
I think that's a great piece of advice. And then the immersion of the, the, the less experience, like in how you're nurturing that development. I went through that same thing with the recruiting side. It's like you hit these like, inflection points where you need a lot more bodies and maybe even if you have a bench, because we've been tried to be intentional about that is. And I went through a round and it was like, geez, I just paid a full salary for a recruiter if I had it in house on like three or four hires. And I'm like, what am I doing?
- [21:56]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah. And it's a rough check to write.
- [21:58]
Chris Dreyer
It is, I think everybody, I think.
- [22:00]
Podcast Host
And you know, that pain happened and.
- [22:02]
Chris Dreyer
Now I've solved it. It's like just one of those things that aren't talked about a lot.
- [22:05]
Podcast Host
Have you thought about the. The capital side? I guess Esquire bank is probably the leader there. They legit have a monopoly on the financing side. Have you thought about using any of.
- [22:17]
Chris Dreyer
That, like to maybe pace it up? Because now you got the model, you got the brand new.
- [22:21]
Podcast Host
Anything on that side?
- [22:22]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah, we, we use Advocate Capital Just for case costs. You know, after a while you start to realize like, hey, I'm loaning out, you know, a million dollars in, you know, non interest bearing case costs that I may or may not get back. And so that was, you know, another way back to that whole cash flow is king is freeing up cash flow. Obviously you have to do that within your state bar rules and figure out what's got to be in your contract, all that sort of stuff. But that's been a great way for us to, to free almost an extra six figures every month in cash flow that we're not having to front, load and carry for that whole time. But in terms of growth, we haven't leveraged at all. We have not borrowed any money. It's all been kind of bootstrapped. Not to say that's the right way to do it, but at this point in time we've said, all right, if we're going into a new market. So we went into Columbia, so we're in Charleston, South Carolina. Columbia is just up the road a couple hours different dma. And we said, all right, do we have enough money to basically just, just eat, you know, a couple hundred grand every month? And we said, we can do that. Right? Go and go back to that TV conversation earlier. You've got to be in it for 12, 18 months to see any ROI. My hope is that Columbia will start to be able to feed itself and then we have, you know, two revenue producing markets and then we can kind of say, all right, well, if Charleston is what we're kind of living off of, you know, I know you're a big real estate guy, use that Columbia market to then be our cash cow to go fund another market or another market. And so that's kind of the vision that we have internally. If we can avoid having to go borrow a bunch of money, then, you know, self finance. But there's certainly a great case to, to make. I mean, if, you know, if you know your numbers. I've certainly said that as well. Like, man, if we can borrow for X and we can get an ROI of, you know, you know, 20x, like, all right, well that starts to make sense. And this year, the last probably year, we've really tried to scale up internally, you know, with the cfo, a controller and you know, doing some other stuff there to really look at those sort of pieces. Because, you know, it's. At the end of the day, I like to think I'm pretty smart, but I want to be surrounded by much, much smarter people. And you Know, I've been really blessed to hire some tremendous people around me that can help us scale up. Yeah. You know, I remember when we, we.
- [24:28]
Podcast Host
Hired our cfo, and I never thought in a million years I would have a procurement policy, like, what the hell, you know.
- [24:35]
Chris Dreyer
But no, I, I agree with you on the.
- [24:37]
Podcast Host
I'm bootstrapped too. And I think, I think that's the way to go. And you also, like, respect the dollar. Respect too. So wanted to touch on the attorneys, though, like your attorneys, nurturing them. Like, like, talk to me about the, the attorney side, the legal side to, to. To kind of develop the talent on the attorney side and kind of just that piece of the coin.
- [24:55]
Brandon Dawson
Yeah. So we've always had a core value of, you know, always be growing was. It's kind of like the ABG is what I called it. Always Be Growing. And what that meant was, man, if you want to go to any seminar, if you, you know, whatever it is, if you can say, hey, this is going to make me a better attorney, we're going to send you. We just had a bunch of people out in. Aha. You know, we're going to send a bunch of people to, you know, Trial Years Academy. There's all sorts of things we're always like sending people to. That's. That's one thing you can do to grow your team, but also hiring great talent in house to help train.
- [25:28]
Chris Dreyer
Step nine, match the case to the right closer.
- [25:32]
Brandon Dawson
So we have pods, we have mentors inside of there. So, you know, every attorney has a mentor that they're going to go to, they're going to talk about their cases. Every case is going to get ranked right as soon as it comes in the door. You know, in Chad Dudley, it's pretty reach this for years. You know, you rank it as a B under the Pareto analysis, you figure out where that's supposed to go. And it can only get moved down with supervisor approval. You can always move it up. Anything in that a bucket is going to get roundtabled. You know, we've gotten to a point where we're large enough, where, you know, we have our A minuses, our A pluses and our stars. The, you know, A minuses kind of have a separate meeting because it can get a bit tedious when you're having, you know, hundreds of cases, trying to get talked about with those big cases where. Or focus grouping our top cases. And, you know, those are cases where you really make your hay. You know, you could say, all right, well that's great, we got $5 million for that case. So what? That's a, what if it's a $25 million case, right? You okay giving up a $20 million case? Like, no, absolutely not. And so you really, really have to get dialed on those, you know, top 1% of your cases and make sure that you're maximizing value there. Because I think that's really what separates, you know, the best from kind of everybody else. And so just trying to identify those early, get those in the right hands and then, you know, taking those cases, you know, to trial. You know, most of our, we've had a couple seven figure cases here this year, I think six or seven. And pretty much all of those have resolved either, you know, right on the doorsteps of trial or the week before trial where for whatever reason, we were finally able to come to a number. But they're sick. That number is significantly higher than, you know, what they were being offered. But I do think you really have to make sure that you're, you're not settling anything early, that you're, you're going the extra mile and putting your best cases in the best attorney's hands.
- [27:22]
Chris Dreyer
Step 10 Lead with a vivid vision.
- [27:26]
Brandon Dawson
The other thing that I think is huge is, is doing a vivid vision, Cameron Herald's book, Vivid Vision, and then work backwards, right? If you want to be a $30 million law firm, well, what does that look like? Does that mean you need, you know, 80 people and how many attorneys and what's your staff make up, how many cases you need to be signing? And then work backwards and go, all right, where am I today and how do I get there tomorrow? It's no different than when we're driving from here to Columbia. I put it in the gps. I know where I'm going. I know the turns I have to make. You know, make sure that you have a roadmap for where you're going. Don't just say, oh, I want to. I want to be a 30 million dollar offer. Like, that's all well and good, but like, how, what does that look like? How are you going to get there?
- [28:02]
Podcast Host
Couldn't agree more. I think that's incredible. And then that is the top 1%. Like a type of mindset too, you know. Brandon, this has been amazing.
- [28:09]
Chris Dreyer
I got one final question for the audience that has questions about the pod, wants to connect with you, wants to refer you a K case.
- [28:15]
Podcast Host
What have it. How can they get in touch with you?
- [28:17]
Brandon Dawson
Shoot me an email. It's just my last name. Dawsondsw legal.com you can visit inpain.com is probably the easiest way you can track me down there. Give me a call. 843-885-8000.
- [28:29]
Chris Dreyer
Brandon Dawson and the thumbs up guys exploded, leading them securely in position. As the fastest growing firm in South Carolina. You've got the 10 steps. Now it's your turn to fit the North. If you got value today, hit subscribe.
- [28:42]
Brandon Dawson
Catch you next time.