← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
383. Double Revenue 3 Years in a Row (It’s Fewer PI Cases Than You Think) w/ Trey Harrell
00:25:01
Inside a South Carolina PI firm that scaled by focusing on the right cases.
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Transcript55 lines
- [00:02]
A
Learn legal marketing and intake from the masters of Personal Injury PIMCON 2026, October 4th through 7th at Scottsdale, Arizona. Get your tickets today pimcon.org that's P I M C O N. O R G. It's easy to think you need to dominate an entire city or an entire state and take every single case in your practice area to build a seven figure firm you're chasing. You don't. Trey Harrell breaks down the actual math.
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B
You really only need a half a percent of what's available. I only needed a half a percent because in 2022 there were 51,000 and some change motor vehicle collisions in the state of South Carolina with injury.
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A
Trey owns Trey Harrell law office in South Carolina. He's doubled revenue three years in a row and he didn't get there with a big leap. He got there one step at a time. This is Personal Injury Mastermind, powered by Rankings IO, the performance marketing agency for elite PI firms. I'm Chris Dreyer, CEO of Rankings.
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B
Half of a percent of that is 256. And if you have an average case fee of $7,500, which most PI firms have a much bigger one, but of 7,500, that's $2 million.
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A
Right.
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B
That's more than enough to grow your PI practice.
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A
Today Trey explains how he turned $10,000 in savings into and a 2 million in revenue expanding into new cities and why staying hands on and intake still matters at scale. Let's get into it.
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B
We've doubled our revenue for the third year in a row. When I left the U.S. attorney's office, it was in 2020. You know, nothing was going on.
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A
Right.
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B
And I had two young kids and a wife who did not work outside of the home. And you had to figure out what you were going to do to make a living. And we just hung a shingle and figured out what we could get across the threshold. So the fact that we've been able to double revenue as a result of that since 2020 is just a godsend. And we're so blessed.
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A
That's awesome. Can I just wanted to just touch on that. You know the cash acceleration cycle for PIs is horrible, right? It's.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Best case scenario, six months. You know, most of the time it's 12 to 18 months for the checks start flowing in. Looking back, you save some money on the side, do you get some leverage? Like how do you get through that first part?
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B
When you're talking about that kind of cash acceleration, how you do it from a Bootstrap scenario. You've kind of got to look at cases, or at least the way we did, as if I write these three wills, that gets me X and I can do Y with it. The way we started and the way we did it was we had a very little savings, 10 grand. We had sold an old boat that we had to kind of set it up. But it was kind of. You had to focus on. On what you could get in the door and what you could handle. Because it's not. It's not just taking anything. It's taking something you can handle. When I say threshold, what I meant by that was we were able to do. I have a. I come from an insurance family, so I understood auto accidents pretty well. I was a U.S. attorney, so I could handle criminal defense stuff. And just being around. I was an economics major, so I kind of understood the estate planning world. So I kind of utilized those three things. If an immigration case came in the door, I. I referred that out.
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A
I was on a hermosis launch for his recent book.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And he was talking about trying to get the cac, you know, your cost to acquire back within second month.
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B
And I'm like, that's not happening.
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Not going to happen for PI. So whole different ball game because he was talking about these models. So then you get that early win and you can go deploy it back to marketing. I'm like, well, the only thing I could think of is maybe someone utilizing debt and doing an Esquire bank thing.
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B
But those banks, when we were trying to move into that, they weren't interested if you didn't have a very high amount of cases or a very high amount of revenue already. When we finally went the bank route or whatever is, I went and relationships I built over time with a local banker and got a very small credit line and then showed the revenue and got a bigger credit line and then showed the revenue and got a bigger credit line and just consistently did that to utilize it. Because, you know, in this business, you've got to be authentic and you've got to be true to yourself, and people are gonna see through it if you're not consistently delivering on your promises. Right. I mean, you do it for your clients. I know numerous folks who've worked with you and brag about you regularly and what you all do.
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A
Thank you.
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B
They stick with you. You have clients year over year, and the same clients come back because you've delivered on what you promised.
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A
Well, I do our damnedest.
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B
There you go.
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A
Don't hit a hundred percent, but we do our damnedest. So thank you for that. You know, and I kind of wanted to lean in. You mentioned a couple words there, you know, and what I was hearing is, like, authentic. And you said the breakthrough moment was realizing you didn't want to copy the big firm model.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So how did you kind of translate that into your positioning, into your marketing?
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B
Well, I think that when you're going through marketing and you're figuring out what you're going to be and you're kind of trying to build this brand, you've really got to lean into yourself. I'm a big country music fan as well. There's a good Dolly Parton quote that says, find out who you are and do it on purpose. And so when you're trying to figure out and build your brand, you've got to figure out who you are and kind of lean into that as you're trying to grow the firm because it's such a big piece of it. Because if. If people aren't going to say that, so you. Then you're doing it the wrong way. It's so crucial that you maintain who you are and focus on your market, know your market, and go after your market. There's some people that aren't going to call me for an auto accident. I'm not going after that person. I'm going after the sliver that'll call me. And that's kind of how we've been able to grow our practice the way we grew it.
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A
You know, I. I read this book, Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall street guy, and I read his sales book, and it was one thing. Now, he was the epitome of, you know, on the extreme and cheating, all the fraud and everything. But he had a trust the company, trust the product, trust the individual. And I think that when you're being authentic, it automatically lends itself to trust. So you go to your website, you go. You listen to you, and you're telling these stories, and it makes me. Without any background. It's like you trust. You know what I mean?
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B
I. Let me. Let me tell you. Talking about telling stories. I got a great story. The reason we're focusing on PI, the way our firm ended up focusing on PI is hilarious. We were driving across 526 in Charleston, South Carolina. It's a beautiful area. You're looking out over the water. It's great. When you're going over from Daniel Line to Mount Pleasant, and an alert popped on my phone, mine and my wife's phone, her phone, or my phone, and the same alert popped on her phone where an attorney in our market had just settled a 10, 11, $12 million matter. Right? And I looked over at my wife and I said, honey, don't worry. One day we'll get ours. And she snapped back at me and said, yeah, and it ain't going to be in estate planning.
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A
That's awesome.
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So at that moment, it was kind of one of those things where you got to dial in and you got to get focus. And she knew that. She knew I preferred auto accidents. She knew that's what I really wanted to do. I grew up in a family where my dad and my grandfather were both insurance agents, and my uncle's an insurance defense lawyer. So I understood that world. And she knew that's what I wanted. And that was just her gentle way of pushing me. And it, you know, it's worked out.
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A
So you can't just throw that softball up there about the. My. My dad, my uncle on the other side, like. Like, how does the. The dinner table. How does that go? Like, do they needle you? Is it all like, hey, or they kind of get it. You know, it's. I always say this. It's the insurance job, like, to pay what they think is reasonable and to try to prevent overpaying and everything.
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B
Well, I can tell you, I get that. Asked that question a lot. What's the dinner table conversation like? And my dad is an independent insurance agent. He's an insurance broker, right? And so he consistently sees his clients get messed with and says to them, hey, you need to go get an attorney. You need to talk to an attorney. To my dad's credit, he doesn't write any more business with that provider anymore or those providers. As it happens, he moves the business around. My uncle took a pause on practice. He was leaning more to the PI world. A lot of people that are coming from the insurance world see the problems with insurance. Majority of the time, they do not care.
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A
Let's go back. So, you know, you decided to go auto PI. When you're thinking about this strategy, you think, you know, I'm gonna. I'm gonna go to pure auto truck, motorcycle, mva. Am I gonna go PI? You know, am I gonna go slip and fall premises? Cause, like, you know, PI, even of itself is a big category. Like, how did you break down like that, that conversation?
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B
It was the same philosophy whenever we decided to focus on dead on auto accidents. And that's what we were doing. It was the same philosophy as the threshold. You just kind of narrowed the focus in it where. Let's go figure out what we can do, how we can help people, what kind of model we can grow and do it. I'm of the idea that as you're narrowing down on something and focusing it, do not be afraid to refer the case out to another attorney and learn how to do it. That's how we got to where we were, is I would get a case and if it was something that was I hadn't handled before or there was some kind of little complex issue, I'd call a buddy of mine and say, hey, let's work together on this. And I learned. And then the next time I don't have to refer that case out, I got better. But as we get into complex issues and complex matter, we're quick to open up the team to help because A, it helps your client, which is the most important, and B, half of a watermelon is better than all of a grape. Right. So when you're referring and you're working this and you're building it around, you're consistently treating the client better, you're consistently growing your practice and learning and you can do it. And prime example, I can sit down and research that point of law and study it and cram it, or I can refer it, have somebody who knows how I was going to do it to help my client, and then go find two, three more cases. Right. That's kind of the way that I looked at it. To grow it in that manner, you just kind of got to niche down and niche down until you get to what you're really, really good at. And then you expand on that, you.
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A
Hear co counsel, right. On a referral, most of the time the co counsel's just ship it. Right. And then you get the check in the mail. Is this the same thing? You're co counsel and actually doing what it's intended, like sitting with them or.
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B
What if they want us to sit with them? I mean, it's. They become the quarterback, we're still a part of it, but the litigator becomes the quarterback in this scenario. But the client has built the relationship with us. And that's why a lot of people don't like lawyers when they just handle stuff off. So we've got the relationship with the client and we're able to keep and foster that relationship, which A breeds referrals. Right. Because we're still building that relationship. We didn't turn our back on them. We got them a great result because we weren't afraid to hand it off. But we're there as much as they need us. And let's be honest, a lot of really good litigators just want to be litigators. They don't want to go out and find the client and do the hand holding and do that kind of stuff. I like doing it. I like talking to my clients that, you know, they're great stories. Some not. Not all clients. Right. Some are. Some are annoying, but. But I enjoy talking to a lot of them. They've got a lot of good stories, and that's just kind of the way I've always been. And so when we hand it off, we're as involved in the litigation as much as we need to. Some of the lawyers, particularly as we've gotten a bigger firm, some of the younger lawyers we hand it off to, they don't have the resources, so we're still there to be able to finance it, and they're able to focus and do what they've got to do to get the best result for the client. Because remember, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is doing what's best for your client.
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A
That's incredible. I love that.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And it shows, right? You got 400 plus reviews and in the last few years, and you got multiple locations now, Charleston, Greenville, Somerville. Talk me through that. You decided, hey, going auto, you know, before you're talking about, you know, taking, you know, the stuff that you could work on. The threshold, I believe, is your language, you know, but how do you think about marketing? Yeah, right. That you already mentioned a big part, the systemic and the referral side, you know, to kind of compounds. But where are you deploying the dollars? How do you think about advertising?
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B
I think advertising is a consistently changing beast. And it's. Babe Ruth once said, you can't win games on yesterday's home runs. Right. And so you've got to consistently figure out how to hit another home run. Why we're in Greenville. I can handle Greenville cases from my Charleston office, but we got reached out to by. I had a handful of calls of referrals from former clients who referred us to their cousin. And they were in the upstate of South Carolina. And they said, oh, you're only in Charleston. Oh, I need a. I need a lawyer up here. So we open an office in Greenville. I mean, it's once, that happened twice. You figure out, hey, I don't want to lose these clients. I don't want to lose this opportunity. So we were able to put together an office up there. We're able to have folks in there and help people and we're able to help more people and grow our practice up there. And I look at it as the way I think about marketing is you also have to consistently know your market, right? It changes and it evolves, but you have to be tuned in and know your market and you don't need, when you're, particularly when you're a smaller firm like, like I am or you know, mid, you know, growing firm, you don't need the whole pie. That's what the 800 pound gorillas who we all know that's who they're going after, that whole pie. You don't need a half of a pie. You really only need a sliver. And I, I, I can tell you I got, I told you I was an economics guy. So I got some data to back it up. You really only need a half a percent of what's available in, in my market in South Carolina, I only needed a half a percent because in 2022 there were 51, 000 and some change motor vehicle collisions in the state of South Carolina with injury. Half of that is 200 or, sorry, a half of a percent of that is 256. And if you have an average case fee of $7,500, which most PI firms have a much bigger one but of 7,500, that's $2 million, right? That's more than enough to grow your PI practice. That's well more than enough. And so if you really figure out and focus on where you can go and who's actually going to call you, right? If you can focus on that and niche down and focus on that, you can go get that. Because all I need is a half a percent of the auto accidents in South Carolina with a small average fee to be able to make ends meet very well for me and my staff.
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A
That's great. I love that mentality. I love the data component. Thanks for sharing that. Of those 810 in your market, you got sync, you got joy. You know, do you build relationships with them? Do you, you know, get cases from them or, and refer to them. Like I heard Dan Morgan, one of the things that he said at my last event that I found really interesting was they started taking their turndowns and send it to another firm and then they started getting some checks back in the mail. And I thought, well, that's pretty good. Like a lot of our firms just turn them down and they just don't even give a second look. But maybe you send all your turndowns.
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B
To who Knows, hey, that was another reason of how we started growing was I built relationships with guys I went to law school with. One of the big guys in my market was my roommate in law school. And. And I went to him and. And I was in his wedding. He was in my wedding. We're, we're very played. Actually played high school football together. He's speaking at pimcon. Brandon Dawson and I went to him and, you know, we were talking. He was like, yeah, that's what you're focusing on. We'll give you these. They don't send them to us as much anymore because they've kind of started handling the smaller cases themselves. But it's kind of that scenario that, yeah, that's what we did. And if I had something that, that I thought we might need more resources for or something, I'd quickly send it over to them. You've got to build relationships, particularly in the legal community, particularly in the PI community, because a lot of times, you know, what's best for the client is most important. A, but B, it's the PI world versus the insurance tort reform world. And if we're not working together, if we're not doing the things we've got to do, if certain lawyers aren't staying in their lane, you're going to get bad law. And if you get bad law, that's bad for the client. So you've got to work with other folks in your area to make sure that you're doing the things you've got to do to fight the good fight on all fronts.
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A
That's incredible mentality. That's the half glass fool. I think that's so fractured on the PI side. Right. And that's where they have a lot of these issues with tort reform. I mean, there was a major threat in Texas recently, and, you know, they luckily kind of staved it away. And you saw what happened to Florida recent, you know, year ago.
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B
We had a fight last year in South Carolina. It was. It was terrible. But, you know, folks realized that it's better to let a jury decide, a jury of your peers decide, than a group of legislators in Columbia decide. So, you know, they kind of followed, you know, the seventh Amendment. It was kind of nice.
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A
What's intake sales tech stack look like? What CRM? How do you think about sales and intake?
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B
Intake is crucially important. If you're trying to build a PI firm, you have to have it dialed in. You have to. You use intake accelerator with lead docket, and it is crucial to what we do we use case peer for our case management. They speak very well together and it's very clean. But I learned early on that intake matters because if you can get a fish on the line, if you can't get them in the boat, it doesn't matter. Right. You've got to focus on it, you've got to do it. And when you're growing and when you're starting, I remember leads would come in at 9 o' clock on a Saturday while Gamecocks were playing football and I'd pick up the phone and call that lead and try to sign them up right there. I have a very understanding and patient wife because we'd be at dinner and a lead would come in and I, I'd go take it. When we first were starting out, my cell phone would ring in the middle of the night and you know, it wasn't who's calling, it was get up and go answer the phone. Like it was those kind of things. And so when you're looking at it from a sales perspective and you're starting out, you've got to do everything to make your intake fluid and flawless. Because if you don't get that fish into the boat, you know you ain't gonna eat.
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A
Yeah. You know the intake accelerators, I hadn't heard that. I've heard lead docket and case peer. Do you have like the in house staff are using like third party.
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B
I've got a dedicated intake coordinator and she's phenomenal. She started as our receptionist, moved up to a case manager and then we moved her over to intake and she's just been phenomenal at that. And so she kind of oversees it and if we get calls and the other thing, I'm not afraid to hop on the phone with a lead if we get draw over because again, if you can't get the fish in the boat, nobody's going to eat. Right. And so you know, we've been doing that. My marketing director was my first hire who actually I think set this up for us. And she hops on the phone regularly. Ally, she's phenomenal. We've got a team who's very focused on getting the, getting the fish in the boat. I hate to say that over and over again, but that's the easiest way to think about it is getting the fish into the boat and, and understanding that sales fixes everything right. And so when you have a dip in cash or when you have an issue like that, if you're signing up a bunch of cases, you're comfortable leaning out on your credit line a little bit, because you've got those cases, you know, that. That you're going to be. Get. Get paid in six, eight, ten months.
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A
Well said. Yeah. And I think it's smart to. One of the things you said, hey, I'm answering the phone day, night, you know, at the beginning, and then first hires the marketing director. I think a lot of times people go the opposite side and it's like, well, you got to. What is it, the chicken and the egg? You know, you got to. You got to get the leads first before you can try them and have those opportunities. So I think that's super smart. What's the future look like? What's. What's like the vision, what's. I can. I can bring you back on in a couple of years and we could say, hey, you know, what are you thinking about?
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B
Yeah, I hope I'm still running that. You know, it's just the consistent growth that we're able to have. I've been blessed to build my practice to where I can spend time with my family and with my wife and my kids. And I have the ability to let my staff take time off when they need to take time off. I don't want to shy away from that as we grow. But, yeah, you know, like any business owner, you don't. You don't want to stay stagnant. You want to keep moving forward. And, you know, whatever God puts in front of us, we're going to. We're going to keep going, going after and keep doing it. And that's kind of the goal. I look at things, as my grandfather used to tell me, get to the next step. Think of it like a staircase. You want to get to the top of the stairs. And I don't know. I think I know what the top of the stairs is. Right. A massive mega firm, all that. But in order to get to that point, you've got to get to the next step, and you've got to slowly focus on that and have singleness of purpose to get to that next. And so for me, I think the next step. I don't think we're going to double revenue again this year because it's. That'd be ridiculous. But maybe another significant growth in revenue because as long as we can do that, we can keep going. Another aspect that would be very important to me for what the next few years look like is maybe not having to refer out as many cases, having the staff in that we're able to do things and utilize it and work it all in house. But, you know, you got to be smart enough to know what you don't know. And as long as we have a question or a hiccup, we're going to hand it over.
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A
Very well said, Trey. This has been amazing for audience listening. Maybe as a case in South Carolina or wants to get in touch with you, talk shop, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
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B
We'd love to. You can find us on any social media at Trey helps. You can find us online at tread. Com. You can feel free to shoot me an email@trey attorneyherald.com but I'm happy to talk about anything, happy to go through it, give any advice. And, you know, it's funny. I'm so glad you have lawyers who come on your podcast, give out their email addresses and whatnot, because I have taken advantage of that and it's helped me do what I've done. So don't, don't be afraid to reach out. Let me, let me end with this, right? The one biggest piece of information and advice that I received came from my father and my grandfather. It was don't ask, you don't get. All right, Always, always, always ask the question. Take the shot. Try to figure it out. It goes to anything. If I didn't ask my buddy who I went to law school with to send me referrals, my practice wouldn't have grown. If I didn't ask my wife why she's standing over in the corner all alone initially, I wouldn't be married. You know, it's those kind of things in life that you have to focus on. So always, always, always don't be afraid to ask the question. Because if you don't ask, you don't get.
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A
Boom. That's the pod. Thanks, Tre. You don't need the whole market. You need the right cases handled well with systems that can support the next step forward. That's exactly how we think about growth at Rankings. We help personal injury firms build the demand that they can actually handle and the markets that are ready to win without forcing scale before the foundation is there. If you're serious about growing your firm with control, hit me up@ Rankings IO. Thanks for listening.