How to Start a $20K/Month Business Selling to Lawyers⏐Ep. #241

Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: The Koerner Office – Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
Episode: How to Start a $20K/Month Business Selling to Lawyers (Ep. #241)
Date: October 31, 2025
Guests: Chris Koerner (host), Sam Ovens (serial entrepreneur, recurring guest)

This episode is a tactical, unscripted brainstorm on launching a streamlined, one-person business that generates $20,000/month by selling eBooks to consumers seeking legal help—particularly those going through a divorce—and then monetizing the lead flow by referring those customers to lawyers. Chris and Sam share a real case study, dissect the business mathematics, and discuss the nuances of lead generation, business simplicity, and scalable models in the legal services vertical.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 20K/Month Goal: Re-Thinking Business Ambition

[00:00–00:35]

• Chris and Sam frame the conversation around building a business that generates $20K/month in profit, which they identify as a transformative, “next level” income for many.
• Sam invokes the Pareto Principle: focus on “doubling income and cutting stress in half.”
• Both emphasize that this is achievable today with small, focused businesses—often without employees.

Quote:
"Now is like the best time to shrink your goals down and say, if I could double my income and cut my stress in half. That's the Pareto principle of what we do." — Sam Ovens [00:03]

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2. The Business Blueprint: Divorce eBooks as a Lead Channel

[01:16–04:49]

• Sam shares his play-by-play of rapidly creating and testing a digital info product—a divorce guidebook.
  • Used ChatGPT to write the book quickly (“I literally just sat there with ChatGPT and was like, write me this book.” [03:09])
  • Launched the funnel on Perspective (later on ClickFunnels for better upsells)
  • Priced at $29 for the ebook; spent $500–700 on ads in the first week; saw $400ish in sales (break-even/validation stage)
  • Broad targeting with Meta/Facebook ads, automatic placements, optimizing for purchases with a pixel on the thank you page

Quote:
"I spent like five hours with chat and made it good. Like, the book's actually pretty solid. It's 200 pages. I went to printivity… I ordered 300 copies of it. It came out to like, maybe six bucks a book." — Sam Ovens [07:46]

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3. Up-Selling, Optimization, and Print Products

[05:34–07:45]

• Introduced a negotiation “bump” offer at checkout ($17–18), 70% take rate, raising AOV to ~$42.
• Transitioned to physical print books for higher perceived value ($6/book cost, ~$8.50 landed with shipping).
• Hit a roadblock when Facebook ads classified his campaign as targeting “personal hardship”—contesting that allowed (or blocked) optimization by purchase event.

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4. Layering Revenue: Referral Fees to Lawyers

[10:01–13:27]

• Chris reveals prior research into legal referral fees:
  • Referral/consulting fees typically 30% of total fees collected ($7K–$23K avg. case fees)
  • Legal nuances by state, but consulting agreements and pay-per-lead approaches are legit workarounds
• Potential to upsell: Initial info product creates trust; a fraction of customers can be referred to lawyers for high ticket commissions

Quote:
"There's some legalities to this… But there are legal ways around this. Number one, you're a consultant that happens to refer them customers and he's paying a consulting fee. Thirty percent of the total fees that he collects, which are between $7,000 and $23,000." — Chris Koerner [10:07]

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5. High-Ticket Backends and Market Expansion

[13:29–14:55 + 21:10–23:20]

• Sam built a $300 “Financial Protection Protocol” (FTP) course as a back-end upsell for customers looking to thrive post-divorce.
• Envisions community, subscription, and additional info products (e.g., “Dating After Divorce”)
• The skills for this model (copywriting, FB Ads, basic landing pages) are readily transferable—beginner-friendly.

Quote:
"I already have mockups for the second book, which is Dating After Divorce... it's one of those things when you think about low lift stuff to get off the ground... those [skills] are applicable to every business you're ever going to launch." — Sam Ovens [12:39]

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6. The Numbers Game: Math, Not Magic

[16:01–22:03]

• Both agree: Ignore industry “averages,” focus on your own math and iteration.
• Sam: Testing creates first-party data and real answers; don’t get paralyzed in research or comparison.
• Case math: At 3% backend upsell ($300 offer), break-even on front-end, could net $900/month in profit from 100 orders (scales easily).

Quote:
"The question of 20,000 just comes down to like really figuring out the math side of that... these are easy, like one person businesses that can go and print that degree of money if you just like commit to doing that." — Sam Ovens [21:48]

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7. Risk, Relationship, and Scaling Trade-Offs

[22:09–25:30]

• Discussed options for lawyer compensation: pay-per-lead, pay on close, % revenue.
  • Lower-touch, lower-profit options are better for solo founders and avoid “babysitting” partner firms.
• The step-up in complexity when scaling from $20K/mo. to full agency or multi-employee operation is massive—sometimes not worth the tradeoff in stress.

Quote:
"The jump from a one person business doing $20,000 a month to a six person business doing a million dollars a year is like, there's a lot of work that goes into that specific jump." — Sam Ovens [26:08]

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8. The Secret Sauce: "Leads in Disguise" via eBooks

[28:47–31:50]

• Chris makes a key distinction: Positioning lead generation by first selling high-intent eBooks (rather than generic ads) makes the leads far more qualified and allows for niche targeting.
• The playbook is expandable to other legal verticals (car accidents, DUIs, etc.): Write an info product per niche/problem, sell at or near break-even, monetize as leads to appropriate specialist lawyers.
• The eBook model can lower legal lead acquisition costs dramatically compared to Google PPC—a huge arbitrage opportunity.

Quotes:
"But here's what I think we might have invented… Using ebooks to generate leads in a kind of roundabout way." — Chris Koerner [28:47]
"By putting a book in the front, you're actually revenue generating on the top… Even if my CAC is $50 and my AOV is $40, losing $10 per lead, that cost per lead goes to $10. But if I'm making a hundred, right? You're still good." — Sam Ovens [30:11]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Not Over-Researching:
  "I think people get caught in that... everyone spends all this money. They go so deep into figuring out if it's a good business idea instead of just testing it." — Sam Ovens [14:30]

• On Business Building as Skill Building:
  "If you do one, then all of a sudden you've built a landing page... written copy... made ads... it's not the most complicated thing for people to learn how to do, especially if you just do it once and then you can go and apply that to any market ever." — Sam Ovens [13:06]

• On Keeping It Simple:
  "You just tried to do too much. Like, you went too deep into it. It's like, dude, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like, sell leads." — Sam Ovens [28:32]

• On the Purpose of the Model:
  "Honestly why I love this business. Because... it's capitalizing on lawyers which have money to spend. No one's crying about lawyers spending money." — Chris Koerner [22:15]

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Important Timestamps by Segment

• Goal-setting and context: [00:00–00:35]
• Origin of info-product idea: [01:16–04:49]
• Testing ads and funnel structure: [04:15–07:45]
• Problem with Facebook ad policy: [07:45–08:17]
• Legal referral fee discussion: [10:01–13:27]
• Backend upsell and business skills: [13:29–14:55]
• On benchmarks and math: [16:01–19:12]
• Compensation models and risk: [19:44–23:20]
• Lead gen vs. scaling up: [25:30–26:15]
• "eBook as lead qualification," expansion: [28:47–31:50]

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Conclusion & Actionable Ideas

Chris and Sam demystify how to pull off a $20K/month profit business selling eBooks and leads in high-stakes verticals. The formula: Launch simply, keep acquisition math in your favor, layer backend monetization and referral fees, and focus on your numbers—not averages. The “eBook as pre-qualification” is a unique twist that keeps you in control and enables targeting any legal-service niche.

Actionable next steps for listeners:

• Identify common, high-intent legal problems (divorce, DUI, car accidents, custody, etc.)
• Use AI tools to draft relevant, helpful info products
• Deploy landing pages and paid ads to validate interest; add upsells as you go
• Build relationships with a couple of motivated lawyers to sell or refer leads
• Focus on simple, low-touch models at first, optimizing for your own sanity and longevity

Memorable Wrap-Up: "Dude, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like, sell leads." — Sam Ovens [28:32]

Transcript

[Chris Kerner]

Let's say someone's listening and they want to get to 20k a month profit.

[Sam Ovens]

To me, these are easy, one person businesses that can go and print that degree of money. It's not a complicated thing. If you're the average American working for somebody stressed out on the clock, no freedom, no real roadmap to making more money. Now is like the best time to shrink your goals down and say, if I could double my income and cut my stress in half. That's the Pareto principle of what we do.

[Chris Kerner]

That's it.

[Sam Ovens]

I haven't even gotten married yet and I made money selling divorce product. Like it's.

[Chris Kerner]

I think the best way to win with this or any lead gen business is to. You ever notice how there are certain income levels that are like very transformative for people? 10k a month is a really good living in the vast majority of cities in the world. 20k a month, that's just kind of a different level of lifestyle. And I think a lot of people aspire for that 20 to 30k per month number. So we wanted to start there in this episode and work backwards and come up with some creative ideas that don't require employees, that don't require a big upfront investment of getting to 20k a month in net profit. This is probably the 15th time that Sam has been on the podcast. He's great. I wouldn't keep having him on if he wasn't great. You're just gonna love this episode.

[Sam Ovens]

So I'm sitting in the. In the grow faster call. And I was talking about how there's so many different, like, verticals that you can go into. And I was talking about planning our wedding and how on Etsy there's 9 million wedding planning templates and books and like checklists that you can buy, like all of this stuff. And as I was talking about it, I was like, well, the wedding market is humongous. And at least the stats in the United states is like 50% of these Johns are ending in divorce. So who's got the divorce market right.

[Chris Kerner]

If like a handful of lawyers right?

[Sam Ovens]

You're like, dude, there's all these like the not.com, like there's all of these massive businesses built on the wedding industry. And then the dark side of that is the 50% of them that end. And so you're still having a massive market that's sitting there on the flip side. And so, you know, just started doing some keyword research, just kind of like seeing what it was. And to your point, most of the material out There was pushing to just like, lawyers. Like, all of that is divorce attorneys. And people don't really like their divorce attorneys very much. And so I was like, all right, that's like, that's something somebody should do. Somebody should go test that. Like, it's a massive market. You can run Facebook ads at it. It's a super painful problem. Like, it's expensive. It's emotional, right? Like, there's a world that exists there. I told a group of them, but I was talking to one dude specifically, and I was like, you should do this. Like, this is right up your alley. You're telling me you want to launch this thing? And he didn't for like six weeks. Then I told another person about it. I was like, dude, I think this one will work. And then they didn't do anything about it.

[Chris Kerner]

And so you know me, insert that Michael Jordan clip. And I took that personally.

[Sam Ovens]

And I took it personally, right? Same with the hummingbirds. Like, I took it like, dude, like, I'm not lying to you. Like, I promise you that this is actually, like, I see a lot of things, I have a lot of ideas. That one is very legit. Like, I think that's a move. And so I was watching some sporting event and I think Lauren went to the gym or something. And I literally just sat there with ChatGPT and was like, write me this book. And I launched the first funnel with perspective. Okay, Love perspective. We use it for all of our funnels.

[Chris Kerner]

Tell me and the listeners watchers what you mean by funnel.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, the landing page, basically, right? Like the. The sales page for it. I use the word funnel because it's two step and like, that's just the language. So then I. I built the first one on perspective, tested it out, priced the book at 29 for an ebook digital copy, which is awesome. Zero cogs. Phenomenal. Ran. I don't know, I probably spent like 500 on ads in like the first few days. I was probably know me, I probably do a hundred bucks a day. So 500 to 700 bucks in that first week.

[Chris Kerner]

Let me drill in on that. Are we talking meta ads anywhere meta wants to show it or were you only doing like stories?

[Sam Ovens]

Real super broad. Super broad. I do automatic placements. Broad targeting. Facebook is smarter than us and will dictate the spend based on what you're trying to optimize for.

[Chris Kerner]

You didn't tell Facebook at all who to show it to or on what medium to show it?

[Sam Ovens]

No, super broad. And I said, I just want purchases. And then I just kind of let it ride.

[Chris Kerner]

You used a pixel on the thank you page.

[Sam Ovens]

Yep. Yeah. And so perspective is nice because you can. You can track specific conversion events.

[Chris Kerner]

We need to get them to pay for this pod, bro.

[Sam Ovens]

I'm saying I'm already. Yeah, yeah, come on. I'm in. I'll promote you guys whenever. I'm a. I'm a happy user. Yeah. So basically it was like, all right, I spent 5, 500, 600, whatever it was in the first week probably made. I think I did, like, 400ish in sales. And so, like, not profitable, but, like, signal. It's like, oh, Yep. Like, I'm selling this thing for 29 bucks. It's costing me 40 bucks to get that purchase. And so then you just play the math game. Right? And so then I was like, all right, dude, let me transition this thing over to click funnels, because click funnels has better, like, upsell down, sell bump offers. Right. Stuff that you can do to increase your AI.

[Chris Kerner]

I know where you're going with this.

[Sam Ovens]

Right. So then I do.

[Chris Kerner]

What is. What is the monetary value of having a little edge at winning your divorce? It could be millions of dollars.

[Sam Ovens]

And so I launched the negotiation training toolkit. $17 bump offer. They add the. The book to cart for 29. Before they put in their payment details. It says, do you want to add this thing? Yes. No. I think it's like, 70% of people are saying yes. And so AOV went to. If they buy both, you land at, like, 48, I think is the math 17 plus 29. Whatever. Somewhere in there. Maybe it's. Maybe I put it at 18. I think it's 47. AOV landed around 42.

[Chris Kerner]

Average order value.

[Sam Ovens]

Yep. And so that's. On the first turn the ads back on. Made some new creatives basically running at break even right now. Like, it sits at 40 to 45.

[Chris Kerner]

On the CAC customer acquisition cost.

[Sam Ovens]

Yep. This thing's done, you know, five or six grand in sales at this point. Right. Like, and. And basically broken even all the way through. And I started getting some support emails. People being like, when does my book ship? Right?

[Chris Kerner]

Okay.

[Sam Ovens]

Geez Louise.

[Chris Kerner]

Dude, it has, like, it's gotta go to space.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. I was like, dude, email, check that. It's all good. The book also, like, V1 was. Was not good. Like, it was very much a slop. Just, like, placeholder. Hey, let's. Let's do it. And so at that point, I was like, all right, cool. I bet you I could increase my conversion rate if I ship the books. Like, if I actually printed real copies of this book. And so I spent like five hours with chat and made it good. Like, the book's actually pretty solid. It's 200 pages. I went to printivity, I think is the. Because Printify is. Is print on demand for clothing and stuff, but I think this is printivity. And I ordered 300 copies of it. It came out to like, maybe six bucks a book.

[Chris Kerner]

Okay.

[Sam Ovens]

Ish. So landed to a customer. You add shipping in there, and so you're probably at like eight and a half. And so ran those ads, turned them on, and recently ran into a Facebook ads issue, which is. It got classified as targeting personal hardship, which is in, I don't want to say the no fly zone with Facebook, but what they don't let you do is they don't let you attribute purchases back to your pixel.

[Chris Kerner]

Ooh, that's a.

[Sam Ovens]

So super annoying.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

And it won't optimize based on the purchase event. And so I've turned the ads off. I'm waiting to hear back on Facebook. I understand that claim or that, like, categorization. I'm a little frustrated that that happened right after I spent 3,000 bucks or whatever it was on these books. And so without having the optimization in place, really challenging for me to beat, like a $50 cac. It still gets purchases, but I can't. There's no line of sight, really, for me to be able to optimize that all the way through. And so I turned them off for now until I hear back from Facebook. But all of that to say, like, again, another one of those examples of, like, yo, you can just, like, figure out a problem, wrap a solution in the book. And, yeah, you can just do things and you can start to sell them. Lauren might not be super pleased that there's 300 copies of a book called how to Win youn Divorce in our garage six months before our wedding. But.

[Chris Kerner]

You know, one wasn't enough.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, you know, it's like, no, I really. I'm really soaking up the material. No, it's. But, yeah, I think, again, it's. It's one of those. The other piece of that, too is I was just using ads to do it. I think there's worlds where, like, I could go and launch theme pages around divorce or crazy divorce stories or, you know, any of those things that. That would allow for me to get through that inventory for free.

[Chris Kerner]

Let me get this out, dude.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

First of all, I did a little prompt as you were talking. I asked our friend Chad GPT or as the boomers call it, chat, which I kind of like.

[Sam Ovens]

I like, I like it. I'm in.

[Chris Kerner]

I didn't at first because it was like they're saying it wrong and then it's like, doesn't matter. That's cool. No, yeah, it's three less syllables.

[Sam Ovens]

I'm just going to hit chat.

[Chris Kerner]

I mean, I've tucked chat, so also they own chat.com now, so.

[Sam Ovens]

So good.

[Chris Kerner]

I asked how much do lawyers make from divorces and do they pay referral fees if I bring them customers and if so, how much in referral fees is industry standard? So first of all, I've looked into this industry before. I almost bought the domain name international lawyers.com because I was going to have a directory or you know, programmatic site where I brought leads to lawyers. But there are some, there's some legalities to this, right. Certain states allow you to accept referral fees. Certain states require you to be a lawyer to accept a referral fee from another lawyer. Just like in real estate. The same is true. But there are ways around this. There are legal ways around this. Number one, you're a consultant, your consultant that happens to refer them customers and he's paying a consulting fee 30% of the total fees that he collects, which are between 7 and $23,000. The average divorce attorney charging 270 bucks an hour. So these little books now it becomes a tool for you to have a zero dollar, you know, break even customer acquisition. And you can make this a high ticket where 5% of people that buy your book, you refer to a lawyer that you just Google.

[Sam Ovens]

Yep.

[Chris Kerner]

Hop on a call with beforehand to say, hey Mr. Lawyer, I've got this customer.

[Sam Ovens]

What can I say?

[Chris Kerner]

Well, I can't. Are you a lawyer? No, I can't. I'm a consultant. I don't need a referral fee, I need a consulting fee.

[Sam Ovens]

Pay per lead, baby. It's all good.

[Chris Kerner]

What are you talking about?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, it's the same. And so the other piece that I did was I added on back end offer. So they hit the, they pay for the book, they get the bump offer. So that pushes AOV up on the top, then on the back I put it live like a couple of days before I turn the ads off. So I didn't get any purchases on it, but I put a $300 program on the back which is very much. It's the financial protection protocol. Right. Divorce is one of the most expensive things. Yeah, the FTP for sure. And so it's one of the most expensive things that people go through in their life. And so it's all like very targeted messaging towards, like, how to come out of this not financially destroyed and have a plan for building wealth post divorce. There's also, to your point, like so many monetization models on the back of that, you could pretty easily launch like a support group with an annual fee. You could, you know, I already have mockups for, for the second book, which is Dating After Divorce, right? And like, you know, there's like, dad, dad. And so there's, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of problems within this macro market that people can solve for. And so it's like, again, it's, it's when you think about low lift stuff to kind of get off the ground, sure, there's a learning curve with some of the skills that you need to be able to do it, but those are applicable to every business you're ever going to launch, right? Copywriting, landing pages, getting comfortable in Facebook, ads manager, right? Like, all of those different skills. But like, at its core, you can apply that skill set to anything, right? Like, and that's why I always just push people to go do one. Because if you do one, then all of a sudden you've built a landing page before and you're not scared of it. You've written copy before, you've made ads, you've ran ads. Like, it is not the most complicated thing for people to learn how to do, especially if you just do it once and then you can go and apply that to any market ever.

[Chris Kerner]

Dude, we talk about this every time you come on.

[Sam Ovens]

I know.

[Chris Kerner]

Like, I'm like, just every episode for good reason.

[Sam Ovens]

I'm like, guys, like, just go do it. Because like, I promise you, the next idea that you have is always going to be like, there's a problem that needs to be solved. How do you convince somebody and get attention? And it's like you write a landing page, make ads that speak to the problem. You run the, like, that's that same skill set all the way through. And like, it turns literally every. Like, I haven't even gotten married yet and I made money selling a divorce product. Like it's. You know what I'm saying?

[Chris Kerner]

Like in the sizzle. Real.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, dude, that's not like you just can apply it to any market like without a problem.

[Chris Kerner]

Let me ask you this. How did you go from the nexus of this idea, which was just broing down in your community, saying divorce, yada, yada, yada. You never thought of it before. How did you go from that to I have enough data points now to put. To invest three hours into this. Like, did you do much research? Do you look at keywords or Google translations?

[Sam Ovens]

No, because I think, I think people get caught in that, right? Where it's like everyone spends all this money. Yeah. They like, they like go so deep into like figuring out if it's a good business idea instead of just testing it. It's funny. It's. It's another one of the conversations that's a recurring theme in the grow faster community. And it's like there are best practices within business, Right? Like, there's an average add to cart rate in E Comm brands. Sure.

[Chris Kerner]

All right, I want to pause here just for a second to tell you why I've used beehive for two years and I just actually sent my 100th newsletter edition. I love Beehive. And you see emails different from other platforms because social media platforms own your audience. In fact, YouTube just banned me for a week because they didn't like one of my videos, even though it was perfectly compliant. If Instagram changes their algorithm, your reach tanks same with TikTok, Facebook and anything else you're building on rented land. But with Beehive, I own my list, I own my audience. I'm not at the mercy of some nameless, faceless algorithm. Every time I hit send, they just get my emails. And Beehive makes this simple. Growth tools, monetization and a free website. And I can't get enough of their analytics. And the data I get from Beehive, this is data that I can actually use and share with potential sponsors. It's everything you need in one platform. The smartest creators out there are the ones that own their own audience. So go to Beehive.com Chris to get 30% off your first three months. That's B E E H I I V.com Chris, and start building something you actually own. What would you say that is?

[Sam Ovens]

Add to cart rate? Yeah, this is the question, right? It's so dependent, right? Because like, are you selling a $6,000 sauna or are you selling, you know, like, are you a fashion brand where people are adding and kind of like keeping stuff in cart and just like saving stuff. Right? Like, it's so varied that it's hard to be like 22%. Right? Because it's like, dude, Tesla's add to cart is not. But their conversion rate from add to cart to purchase is way higher because no One's reserving a Tesla without wanting buy it, right? And so it's like, there's all of these metrics that like, are very unique to each business. And like, you might find ad accounts that are doing better at getting cost per click down that you're beating that, but you're not beating your, you know, like, there's so much nuance there that it's hard for me to sit there and be like. And with a straight face, be like, these are the numbers you should expect. The only way that I look at good versus bad is really comparing it against past owned performance, right? Like, did I improve my cost per click? Not is my cost per click good or bad based on the industry? It's like, yeah, do. Can I make this math work for myself? Like, when you ask somebody what they're seeing, take it with a grain of salt because it's not your business. There's different variables, there's different pieces. Go test something so you get first party data and can make your own decisions based on the data that you are creating. Of like, if I drop my cost per click by 30%, this should be profitable. Then you know what you need to do, right? Like, so get in the game.

[Chris Kerner]

There's so much beauty to ignorance because if we start doing all this research, we're going to read some AI generated blog article that says, like, what does cost per click average in the e commerce industry on Facebook ads? $42. And then you start your Facebook ads and you see your cost per click is $7. And you're like, oh, this doesn't work. It's like, bro, you're selling $6,000 saunas, right? It's totally different.

[Sam Ovens]

Totally, totally different.

[Chris Kerner]

Like, so that research kind of did them in.

[Sam Ovens]

It's funny. It's the reason why everyone's like, what podcast do you listen to? What? And I, like, I don't really.

[Chris Kerner]

It's the Kerner office.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. Like, yeah, I only listen to one and it's you when I'm on it. Obvious, right? And so it's like, like I'll watch them every once in a while. But like, I'm not, I'm not taking what people are saying as like, oh, to compare against myself. Like, dude, he couldn't get it to work with this. Like, no. Like, here's the problem I need to solve for my thing. My AOV is this. My conversion rate is this. My cost per click is this. I know what I need to do. I don't care what the other E comm brand's doing. I can see my numbers. And so I think that piece of it is like it's again, it's why we have this conversation every single time, which is like, no, I didn't do that much research. I asked chat GPT basically the same question as you and how many people I was like, how many people a year in the US go through a divorce? Cool. It's like two point whatever million or whatever it is. And it's like that's a big enough market. That's interesting to me. Like that's fine, I'll play that game. And the markets are so big that it's like, dude, even if there was competition, it's like, I'll still try to compete. Like that's fine.

[Chris Kerner]

Let me ask you this. Let's say someone's listening or watching and they want to get to 20k a month profit, okay? 250, 240 a year profit. Let's use your idea, plus my tweak of it which is like referral fees to lawyers. Let's back end into that. So let's say you're breaking, you're selling these ebooks. Let's just say it's only ebooks. To keep it simple, you're breaking even on your ad spend. What do you think a reasonable conversion rate is for someone that buys a book and ends up going to the lawyer that you refer to them?

[Sam Ovens]

No idea. So you get 100 purchases on the book, right. How many do you think end up working with with the seal? And I would probably. There's a risk level that's involved with what I'm about to say. One is you say to the lawyer, you're only going to pay me when somebody signs to work with you. Right. And the value of that is much higher. Let's just for easy math, let's say on a, on a signed contract they will pay you $1,000, right? Sweet. Or you go to the lawyer and say, hey, I'll send you every single lead that comes from the state of California. And each of those leads you pay me $100 less risk for you, but you get paid less, more risk for the lawyer, so they pay less. Right. And so you can you figure out where that math works. But then you start sitting there and you say, well I've sent this guy a hundred leads and eight of them converted, right? He's paid me ten grand. And of those eight, if he were paying me a thousand, I'd make eight grand. Sweet. I'm gonna keep paying him, I'm gonna keep selling them 100 leads left, right and center. Right. But if that number has changed and it's like 16 close and I could have made 16 grand by selling him closed deals, then you go, I don't sell this anymore. You call three more attorneys in California and say, hey, like for every hundred leads that I send, 16 of them end up signing up to work with somebody. I charge 1200 bucks, whatever it is.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

And so you just go deeper into it to figure out the math. I think like the question of 20,000 just comes down to like really figuring out the math side of that. Right. Like similar with like a take rate on that 300 purchase. Right. So like if your take rate is 3%. Right. And on that one you're breaking even top of funnel. 3% take rate on the back at 300 puts you at 900 bucks a day in profit. Right. And so you're like a month. Right. And so you're sitting there with a take rate of 3%. Meaning cool. I need to spend enough money on ads to push 100 orders of this book. Easy.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

Right. Like that's it. To me, these are easy, like one person businesses that can go and print that degree of money if you just like commit to doing that. Right. Like, cool, I need to get this to 3%. Like it's not a complicated thing.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

It's like I need to improve conversion rates and I need to run better ads. That's what you're waking up doing.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. There's a third option and that's like, give me a quarter of your revenue once. Like every time you invoice them, give me a quarter of that. And the risk there is that lawyer could run away. Lawyers don't exactly have the best reputation for being honest and upfront. Right. Which is honestly why I love this business. Because it's not capitalizing on people that's getting a divorce, dude. It's capitalizing on lawyers which have money to spend. No one's crying about lawyers spending money. Right.

[Sam Ovens]

For sure.

[Chris Kerner]

And if you can genuinely help someone that's about to be divorced, find a great lawyer, then you're doing a good for the world. Right.

[Sam Ovens]

For sure.

[Chris Kerner]

But in any lead gen business there's going to be a trade off between hand holding, how much you have to trust someone and the potential profitability. Right.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah. And you just gotta find where that line is.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. I think the best way to win with this or any lead gen business is to really just develop a good relationship with like two to three lawyers. That's that you feel good about that's willing to pass all the data back to you. So. So you know what's closing, who's closing? Because then you can leverage those two to three relationships into a pricing model that works for lawyers you don't know very well and you don't trust very well. Because at the end of that three month relationship or whatever it is, at the end of the first three months, you're going to know I'm just making this up.

[Sam Ovens]

Wow.

[Chris Kerner]

Just selling these leads for 100 bucks a pop is amazing. That's the best and highest use of these leads for me. Because anything outside of that, I'm having to only find lawyers that are great at closing deals. And most lawyers aren't great at sales. I don't want to have to care if they're good at sales. So I just want my money up front. Maybe they'll make a little more than the other scenario, maybe not. But you've gotta be like really ingrained with their business and be relentless about asking them for how it's going. How's it, did that, did that deal close? Did the lead close? You know?

[Sam Ovens]

Yep.

[Chris Kerner]

Et cetera.

[Sam Ovens]

And, and there's the, the degree of how much work you want to put in, right? Like if you don't want to deal with all of that, you don't want to have to, then it's like, yo, cool, I'm just going to run it off this like pay per lead model and like, I'm not even going to worry about it. Like, they can close who they want, not close who they want. The only part of that that impacts me is if they're not good at selling, they're going to ask me to stop sending leads because they're paying for them. Right? Like, cool. And then you have the proof and you can go to every other divorce attorney in the state and say, let's go. Like, I'm doing this, this is fine. I think it applies to every industry under the sun. Right? Like, I mean we, to be blunt, like, we made a massive bet on the pay per lead model. I spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on a domain pay per call IO based on this of like, we will go generate the calls. People calling your business. You pay me for the call. You close, you do it. We debated doing, do we do pay per appointment, meaning we pick up the phone and we put it on their service, right? Like, are we doing that work? And the answer was no. Like they, and they would have paid us more money if we were to say, hey, we're pay per appointment. Yep. Right. But like we didn't want to sign up for the headache of managing a call center or. Right. Like we didn't really want to get that ingrained. Was not where we wanted to live. And the nice part is like a lot of these million dollar conversations and these big business things. You don't even have to worry about any of that stuff to make 20,000 bucks a month. Like you don't even like all you really need is like a good offer.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah, yeah, right.

[Sam Ovens]

Like it's a much simpler setup that you really can run as a one person shop if you find the math and the offer that makes sense there to like make 20 grand a month. It's like not. Yeah, it's not easy, but it's way easier than making a million dollars a year by like orders of magnitude. You've seen it. Like you've been at all of those levels. Like the jump from a one person business doing $20,000 a month to a six person business doing a million dollars a month or a million dollars a year is like, there's a lot of work that goes into that specific jump. You're changing what the organization is like, that's a hard thing to get through.

[Chris Kerner]

It's four times more revenue for maybe two times more profit and like six.

[Sam Ovens]

Times more work, 100% stress work.

[Chris Kerner]

It's a messy middle.

[Sam Ovens]

It's a lot. Right. And like we, we found ourselves in that slump for, you know, 12 months where we really were like, dude, we've doubled revenue. But like, I'm not making any more money because we had to commit to like, I'm going to make way more money 12 months from now if we continue the growth curve. Because then all my, like that's when I will win bigger.

[Chris Kerner]

The compounding.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, right. And so it's like, I think more people should like take a step back and be like, what am I actually trying to achieve here? Really easy to get impressed by the yachts and the Ferraris and the private jets and the Rolexes and all of that stuff. But like, I would gamble that. Like if you're the, I'm going to say an average American, right. If you're making 120k a year working for somebody stressed out on the clock, no freedom, no real like roadmap to making more money, I think now is like the best time to shrink your goals down and say, yo, I'm really only trying to get to a quarter million dollars a year. If I could double my income and cut my stress in half. That's like, it's the Pareto principle of what we do.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah.

[Sam Ovens]

Like, yeah, that's it. And so I think, again, with that prompt is like, there's a handful of those businesses that you can go and make $20,000 a month on profit running it just you. And if the emails are slowing you down, go hire a VA for 1200 bucks a month. And, like, you could run a very smooth operation and make that money.

[Chris Kerner]

Yeah. And I feel like if someone is about to launch something like this Legion business and they have to choose between the higher touch, maybe potentially higher profit option and the lower touch, lower profit option, I opt to go for the lower touch, lower profit. Because if you get burned out on the harder version, then you'll never even see what could have been.

[Sam Ovens]

Right.

[Chris Kerner]

If you start with like, all right, you know what? These leads are worth 300 bucks easy. I'm going to sell them for a hundred bucks because it's easier and I don't have to babysit these lawyers. I don't have to trust them. They're going to pay me on day one where they close or not. And then after three months, you're going to be like, wow, these are. These are closing a lot higher than I thought. Like, I don't even need to ask the lawyers because I'm asking the divorcees and they're telling me, yeah, he's a great lawyer. I used him. I'm good. Thank you so much. These are now $150 leads, or these are now 30% referral fees, I'm sure double my money. But if you start with that, you may never find success.

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, it's. And it's like, yeah, people biting off more than they can chew and then being like, it doesn't work, and it's like, no, you just tried to do too much. Like, you went too deep into it. It's like, dude, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like, sell leads.

[Chris Kerner]

First of all, we both know that, like, the lead gen business for lawyers is huge. Right. We're not inventing it on this podcast. But here's what I think we might have invented, which is mostly credit to you. Using ebooks to generate leads in a kind of roundabout way. Because if I go to a lawyer that's been buying leads for a decade, he's going to roll his eyes and say, your leads probably suck. All these leads suck, Yaddy. They're burned out. Right?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah.

[Chris Kerner]

But if I go to him and say, I don't just use Google Ads or Facebook ads, for that matter, for leads like you're used to. I sell books. And these are very targeted books. It might not even be how to win your divorce. It might be how does a mom of four win her divorce in New Hampshire? You know, for all I know, like something very, very niche where your, your conversion rate on 10 of those books might be 20% and your conversion rate on 100 of the more general books might be 2%. You know what I'm saying?

[Sam Ovens]

Yeah, 100%.

[Chris Kerner]

That could be the whole model. You can make a book for what to do after your car accident. What do I do after my slip and fall? What do I do if I'm in a relationship with domestic abuse? What do I do if I just got a dui, right, and take all these leads and give them to DUI lawyers, to domestic abuse lawyers, you know, like, that could be a whole business that just starts with divorce or starts with the UIs or whatever.

[Sam Ovens]

Dude, you just, you write a book called erase your dui.

[Chris Kerner]

Oh, where's that domain?

[Sam Ovens]

I'm sure it's available. You know what I mean? And it's like you go make a mock up on Canva, you run some ads, you had chat GB write the book. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's, it's all, it's like not that complicated. It's like, what is the thing that people want to pay for? You know, the pay per lead model. All you're trying to do is arbitrage it, right? And so like you have a CAC to acquire that lead. And the, it's funny, when we talk about it a lot, we think about wholesale retail, right? And so like, if you can get the retail buyers that are willing to spend a hundred dollars a lead, but you can go and get leads for $60 wholesale, whether it's self derivative, right? Like you can figure that out. Then you're like, oh, how do I create more margin? And by putting a book in the front, you're actually revenue generating on the top. Meaning that like, even, even in this model, let's just say like what I have, Even if my CAC is $50 and my AOV is $40, losing $10 per lead, that cost per lead goes to $10. But if I'm making a hundred, right, it's like, you're still good. That's what I'm saying. You're.

[Chris Kerner]

Dude. Because the legal cost per click on Google is like the highest of any industry. You might need to pay like, like if you, if you're looking for, like, a trucking accident lead on Google Ads. You might spend, like, legitimately $5,000 for that lead. Right. But if. If I can sell a book with $100 of Facebook ads and my average order value is $20, I lose $80. Like, that's an $80 lead instead of $1,000 lead or whatever. What are we talking about?

[Sam Ovens]

I know, like, someone can go and do that pretty easily.

[Chris Kerner]

All right, what'd you think? Please share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.