B (3:06)

All right, Audio Go.

A (3:08)

What is that?

B (3:08)

Did you look at Audio Go?

A (3:10)

No. What is that?

B (3:11)

Because it almost looks exactly the same as a very small microphone just like that. I got one of those two. I just haven't opened the box. And that microphone, it syncs with an app on your phone. So what you can do is record the audio anywhere, battery operated, no cords. And then if you take the video from your phone using the app, then it can sync with that audio quality and then has a built in mixer that you can then put effects on afterwards. So very similar. I just haven't opened the box yet.

A (3:49)

Maybe today you will be.

B (3:50)

Yeah.

A (3:51)

All right, so let's start with our episode. Today's episode is very valuable. The Rapid Law Firm Growth formula revealed sharing with you a resource that we created, which is basically, it's a one page resource that it's a shortcut, it's a cheat sheet. This is literally the formula for if you're looking to scale up your law firm from zero to hundreds of clients, this is it. This is exactly the same formula that I applied to across my law firms. It's also the same formula that our program offers is exactly what we do. And if you want a one page cheat sheet of exactly what I'm about to explain, just comment me and I'll share this with you. So that's. And this, literally this. Most people would not share this, but Daniel, we have affinity towards sharing as much value. And this is like, I would say the Most, like it's the 8020 of what it takes to growing a law firm. This is it. Everything else is going to be noise. But if you apply these five steps, this is what it takes these days, especially in 2025.

B (4:58)

Yeah. And Sam, I don't want to bury the lead there because you just, you just said it and, and I think it deserves a little more amplification. Most people wouldn't share this with you. They think of this as their secret sauce. They think of this as that. This is the lesson that I've learned through all the years and, and all the dollars that I've spent learning this process. And, you know, I'm not just going to give it away. I might give you a little piece of it. You're gonna have to pay for the rest of it. You know, I think our listeners should understand that this, this is the whole cupcake here. And, and Sam is being gracious enough to share with you the entire thing. And so I, I just don't want to downplay that. I think that's magnanimous of you and it, and it speaks to who you are really.

A (5:46)

And a lot of people overthink, like there's, you know, because there's so many different ways to generate clients, but this is literally, this is it. All right, number one, let's. Let's do it. And we are live right now, by the way, on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. If you want this resource right now, just comment me and we'll share with you. Number one is creating ads. Creating ads to attract leads. We've shared this many times over the last episodes that if the fastest and most effective and most reliable and consistent and scalable and trackable way to generate clients is ads. And if anybody disagrees with me, well, I'll challenge you. You come to me with any practice type and, you know, put us in a room, give us 30 days, and let's see who can generate more clients. This is the best way. It beats everything else. Again, very explicit. Is that. Well, a lot of people have trouble. They don't know which platform, what type of creatives, how to set it up, how to create the campaigns, how to do all that stuff. Good news is our program offers exactly this. It shows you exactly how it's done, and we help you come up with the hooks, how to write the ad copy, how to write, how to create the actual creatives. And a lot of the. When it comes to this section, it's a lot of. It's basically creative focused. I know there's also a lot of talk, Neil, about targeting and things like that. It's 2025. There is no more targeting. Targeting kind of got eliminated about two years ago. Started from two years ago and completely eliminated since about a year ago. Targeting doesn't matter anymore. All you have to do is tell these platforms that I'm looking to generate clients in this state or these states or nationally. You sometimes you pick an age which now Facebook has been even removing that. But for the most part, the platforms can tell just based on what your ad is, exactly who to show it to. So little by little, they took away those capabilities of interest. Targeting and age and even, sometimes even location, as weird as it sounds and just based on that, these platforms will show your ads to the right people. And so a lot of it comes down to the messaging and the creative types and also different strategies when it comes to creatives. The strategy Neil, there's one strategy that I think 99% of people that are running ads miss. And it's the one thing that I try to hold back and leave it to our share with our, with our internal, my legal academy team. They know exactly what that one thing is and what that one thing makes a world of a difference. You know, we try to share everything but we gotta leave some for our members. But the conclusion of it is pretty much for 80% of practice types, you run ads, you do it correctly, it will generate you qualified leads to be able to turn them into clients.

B (8:36)

And the key point there, I think to keep in mind is the lesson that Sam has learned is that there is, there is a particular type of creative that works best in this scenario. And, and Sam's discovered that through trial and error, ab testing, working across multiple different types of law firms with multiple different types of practices. So there is an answer to that question. So now you can wander around in the woods, try and find it on your own if you, if you care to, but you're going to spend a lot of time and probably walk away saying this, this doesn't work. It does work, does work. You just have to know what type of creative and that works best and fit that into your, your campaign.

A (9:19)

And the type of creatives are constantly evolving, right? Almost on a weekly, weekly basis, minimum on a monthly basis, but let alone weekly basis. And because we're managing multiple ad accounts, you know, I have at least six of my own ad accounts myself, we also manage our clients ad accounts. We can see patterns, you know, what type of, what type of creatives, what type of strategies are working, you know, how many creatives, what's the cadence of these creatives that we should have? All that stuff is really, it leads to the results that we, that it takes to be able to beat out your competitors who don't have those same strategies and those same insights that we do. So there is a system to manage at least when it comes to creating ads. And I know Neil, almost all going to put it out there. There's also, it's a big, there's a big percentage of people who have tried out Facebook ads or TikTok ads or YouTube ads and they got burned by a bad marketing company and they just give up on ads entirely. That's a mistake. You don't want to do that. And no, it happens. You don't want to let your past failure affect your future. So be very cognizant of that. If you have hesitations or limiting beliefs about these things, question these biases that you may possibly have about based on past experiences and you know, try to work with people that are kind of proven to have the winning formula right now actively and have dozens proven formulas and work, try to work with those types of companies that makes a world of a difference. So that's step number one, creating ads. Well, now you create ads. The next step is we need to qualify the leads. Qualify the leads. That means the leads come in. But for the most part I would say 80% at least maybe so it depends. But I would say probably anywhere from 70 to 90% are not going to be qualified. And this is a more of a little bit of an art and a little bit of science to systematically. And then you can use, we use ChatGPT for this. I created the framework through a GPT agent to come up with very specific qualification questions laid out in a very simple, simple problem based way to be able to filter out the people that are not qualified so that you only bring in people that are qualified because that will affect the rest of your system because if you don't then you're just going to bring in leads, a bunch of non qualified leads that are not systematically filtered out. And now your poor staff has to go through weed, you know, call, get in contact with these leads, ask them these questions, all this stuff and then end up finding out that you know, this person is not qualified at all and then should have gone on the phone call. So this qualification process, it needs to be done. Let me just break it down. How is this done? Usually it's going to come in two or three different formats. Number one is if you have a landing page wherever you ask your contact form submission questions, you also need to ask at least one to three qualification questions. That way you can filter out essentially what the problem is. Sometimes you can ask a question about statute of limitations. Sometimes you could ask questions whether they're ready to hire a lawyer for this. You can also ask them about specific services that they need or specific, you know, problems, whatever that they need. Through that you'll to kind of good systematically filter out. That's, that's one, one place. Another place is, is done on a Facebook lead form or TikTok TikTok lead forms. These are Facebook's and TikTok's native ways to be able to qualify leads. Basically you're able to ask qualification questions right then and then and systematically be able to again filter out those people. And the third place is if you have calendly or some kind of booking system then that's also where you want to ask qualification questions. But that qualification this kind of part of the process, everybody needs to do it. There's no practice type that you know, you should just let people book or become a lead until you ask them some pre qualification questions before you get them on a call. So this is the second step of the process. Qualify your leads either on your landing page, your lead forms or on your booking kind of link. Let's go to step number three. So now you qualify the leads, so now you're bringing qualified leads. Well these leads need to be integrated into your CRM. That means they automatically come into your CRM. A lot of people miss this or they do it manually, you know, just depending on or some people don't even completely miss it where they don't even have a CRM entirely. But it's a must, doesn't matter. Even if you have only get two leads per week, everybody still, you still need a CRM because you need to keep track of who's coming in, where are they in the pipeline, are they being followed up and basically what's going on with them. Because if you don't track them then they're going to get lost. But you don't want to do that manually. What you typically want to do is use a tool, an automation tool. The most popular one is Zapier. There's other ones called make and there's an assortment of others. Doesn't matter which one you use as long as you use something and you integrate, AKA you connect your leads source, whether it be from your landing page or your Facebook lead forms, your TikTok lead form or your calendar, whatever that is. Every time a lead comes in, all that contact permission plus the qualification answers are coming in along with the source. Along with the source. Let me break this down. A lot of these things haven't been discussed. For source you need at least five different pieces of information. Number one is kind of source traffic. Where basically from what platform is it coming? Is it coming from Google, is it coming from Facebook, is it coming from TikTok, is it coming from YouTube, is it a referral, is it a handoff or whatever that is? You need to define this traffic. We call it internally traffic. Number two is source campaign from which campaign on these platforms does this come from? Usually with these platforms there's three levels. There's a campaign level which is basically where you create the name of the campaign. Then there's ad set, which is basically how you set up the targeting and the type of, kind of like the what's your experiments that you're doing with this. A lot of it comes down to essentially targeting and type of ads. And the third level is ads, which is exactly what type of creative you're creating. So for each of these you want to make sure in your CRM you have properties created called source campaign, source asset and source ad. Where you're attributing, you know where this particular lead is coming from. And the last one is what I called source form from basically which form is this coming from? Because sometimes you may have multiple forms or different landing pages that you may have for a source. Sometimes it's usually just one. But just in case, you know, you want to also define that. And then if you were to add another one, if you're really fancy, you're generating a lot of leads, you could also have a source vendor. Then you know, let's just say you have two different vendors for Google. You have, you know, vendor A, vendor B, vendor C. So you know whose campaign is doing better right away, you know, as the leads coming in, all this important information, the contact information, the qualification answers and the source information automatically coming into your CRM instantly. And also at this section also is where you want to set up your automations basically as soon as the lead comes in again, as we shared, automatically added to CRM. But also you may want to notify your intake team, maybe Slack notifications that are coming in or when it comes to your CRM, making sure that they're being tagged certain way or they're being added to a workflow. So a certain workflow that automatically sends them a series of emails or texts. So that, that's the part where you do it. You set up all those things at that stage where you set up the automations to make sure all those things are done in one shot automatically.

B (17:20)

Yeah, and I would also say look to your CRM itself because many of them have integrations that allow you, for instance, if you're using Google local source ads to integrate that activity from your Google account directly into your CRM. So you may have some level of integration already available to you built right into your CRM for sure.

A (17:48)

And if your CRM does not offer integrations or doesn't have a Zapier integration, that's a huge issue. It's a huge red flag. And there are some law firm CRMs that kind of close off the access to APIs or things like that. Be very wary these days. They need to have native zapier integration kind of capability. If not, it's a major issue.

B (18:13)

Yeah, totally agree.

A (18:15)

So now that you got your lead information in your CRM, who's going to set up the clients? Well, no one. Probably one of the top mistakes a lot of law firms make is setting up clients themselves. You know, the lawyer, we've talked about this multiple times, but let's just address it. The lawyer who also has to take care of the clients onboard. The clients do all this stuff on the back end, do the admin. You also want to put taking on calls with your prospects and following up, forget about it. You know, it may, may work maybe for a couple months, maybe if you're really pushing it, maybe a couple of years. But it's just not a sustainable model if you're going to be the one taking on the calls. So what's the alternative? Well, I was one of the first people, Neil, to share this and a lot of people I think like four or five years ago were using a lot of virtual receptionist services like Lex Helper, Lex Reception, all these different services. These services are also not sustainable. It's not a sustainable ideal system. Instead, what you should have is dedicated virtual intakers. Dedicated virtual intakers, that was also one of the first people to call this out. You need dedicated, they need to be dedicated to you. It's not shared with anybody else or anybody other, you know, any other organization and ideally virtual. Can it be an in house person? Sure. God bless you. If you can find somebody who's good at sales and who's good at talking, who can be in your office and close and sign up clients. God bless them. I hope. May you write that for as long as you can. But if you want something more cost effective, more dependable, less risks, less HR issues, less lot of negativity and a lot of negative reasons. You want somebody who just does what they're supposed to and does it well and can stay focused on it for a long duration of time, then usually dedicated virtual, Virtual intakers are going to be the better recipe. Neil, I share this because I've had close to like 60 in house intakers and hundreds of virtual intakers. And over time I've seen, you know, have all the different situations and problems and things that we've dealt with and over time we've seen ourselves becoming closer to more and more of the virtual intakers is, is kind of like we're what we focus on. Much easier by the way. Much easier, much faster. A lot more room to scale, easier to train. A lot of. Lot of. A lot of really tangible and intangible reasons why we like virtual intakers.

B (20:48)

I would also add here Sam that you make the distinction between an intaker and a law firm receptionist. They're not one and the same individual. They have different functions. And so you may want to have an in house receptionist or you may want to have a virtual receptionist and handles the general or specific calls into your law firm that aren't related to signing up new clients. Intake specialist is a very specific and tailored narrow focus of this virtual assistant.

A (21:25)

Yeah. And actually the next episode, Neil will address this specific point about dedicated virtual intakers and what to look for and how to increase your lead convert. You sign up conversion rates all about this. So if you want the full lowdown of how that goes, you know the, the next episode that will be recording right. Shortly after this we'll go down into, into detail. So now that you, you have your dedicated virtual intakers signing up with your clients for you last part is scaling the marketing budget to match your roi. Okay, scaling your marketing budget to match roi. That sounds like. Okay, listen, let's break this down. What this means, this was, this is.

B (22:05)

What gave me, you know, heart palpitations when I talked to you for one of the first times because it was, it blew me away until you know, I listened to this argument and now it makes total sense to me.

A (22:18)

So let's break it down. Neil, number one part of this is knowing your numbers. The most, simplest, most rudimentary form you need to know how much does it costs you to acquire a client. Your cost per acquisition. That should be the first number you should know for your law firm. And probably it's by far the most important. So how do you figure that out? What I look at is your ad budget. How much are you spending on ads? I don't necessarily look at my how much I paying the vendor. That's not the point. That's not what I'm looking at. The reason is I'm looking to look at the variable, not the static number of how much I'm paying. Is that part of the equation for like knowing my true cost? Sure. But when it comes to scaling, I only want to look at to know if I'm increase this variable which is how much I spent. How does that affect how much more Do I make? And if so, like, how can I be able to continuously do that until I could kind of taper off? So let's just say I spent $5,000 on ads. I need to have clarity at the minimum on a monthly basis, how many clients they generate. Me. If I generated five clients for $5,000, amazing. I'm very clear that it cost me a thousand dollars to generate a client. If so, next question is, well, how much do I make off a client? Well, on average, from these five clients, you know, some that I sold for 3,000 and the other one was 6,000. There was 10,000 average out to about 5K. Okay, so send a 5. 5 clients at 5K, that's $25,000. And I spent $5,000. That's a ROI of 100%. It means for every dollar you're putting in, you're making $5. That's amazing. And what we try to do is get very clear on what our cost acquisition is across all of our sources. And we're always asking ourselves, is this above our threshold? Which are for us, our threshold is about 200%. Am I making $3 back for every $1 that I spend or $2 profit? If I am, then I'm looking to continuously increase the marketing that I do from that source. And the other thing I look at is I compare, I compare the different sources. Well, this, the cost position for this is a thousand. This one is 1800. So maybe can I rotate some of that money into this or sometimes both are profitable. Even if my cost position is 1,800, you know, I could, you know, increase this, but I could definitely increase this by a lot more. And we got really critical on figuring out this number. We used to do this manually, Neil. At minimum, again, it was done on a monthly basis. I mean, started looking at it. Look at this on a weekly basis. And then we'd be all. We brought this all into a live dashboard. Live dashboard that shows us exactly for every single campaign ad set and ad for every single one of our sources. Exactly. What's our. How many, first of all, how many leads? What's our cost per lead, how many qualified leads? What's our cost per qualified lead, how many signups and what's our cost position? And even, even the signups and the cost position is broken down into, in period clients that were signed up. That means how many clients did we sign up that particular. From that. From that particular month's marketing. And total, total sign up, which is, you know, it doesn't matter whether they came from the previous months. How many do we sign up from that source? And now we have two cost acquisition numbers. One is again our in period and the, and the total. And we look to see does that fall within our range. And if so we're always looking to scale up our marketing budget. And that's how we've gotten to a million dollars a month in ad spend just through this very systematic looking at our numbers and scaling based on or ry. So let me just read the description. Calculate your cost. Requisition your CPA and your customer life lifetime value. For example, if it costs to acquire a client for $1,000 and if the client is worth $5,000, invest as, as as much as you possibly can. Invest up to one third of the expected revenue to acquire new clients. Consistently analyze ROI and reinvest to scale profitable campaigns. Scale a budget on high performing strategies to maintain at least this should say 200, not 300, 200% ROI. And you know when you have this kind of approach that that's when you really blow up your pro, your profits and you blow up your law firm.

B (26:43)

Yeah. The thing that I find that's interesting here Sam, is you are increasing your ad spending for campaigns that are working and you are decreasing your ad spending for campaigns that are not working. Now that sounds trivially simple, but having the data to make that decision is what's key. And your live dashboard is the penultimate development of those numbers to the point where you have this graphic and visual tool that allows you to answer these questions in real time and it makes the decision point a lot easier. You know exactly what is producing qualified clients that are meeting your cost objectives and what isn't. And so keep investing, increasing, increase your investment for that which is working and, and don't for that which isn't. Sounds, it sounds really simple. Getting to that decision point is, is, is the challenge.

A (27:56)

Exactly. And it is simple. As soon as you get clear on your numbers pretty much and also allows you to get more data. Now once you start, you know, spending more now you can experiment more, create more campaigns, more tests more tools that you can sign up with, spend more, do more. And now you get more data. And you know, little by little these little micro tests, micro kind of open yourself up, opens you up to even higher ROIs and also even more ROIs across different things, different things, you know, different niches. And the last step is Neil, very easy rinse and repeat nothing else at that point. You know, usually the challenge is just staffing up, you know, fast enough, which is Something that our directors pretty much focus on at that point because the marketing is already doing its thing. We got the system down, and I'm in charge of the marketing for all these five. My law firm side, this is my game. But once it's running and it's doing its thing, and especially if you have a system for creating ads and that's doing its thing, it's doing its thing, there's nothing to do. A lot of times I know I found myself like, okay, what else have I got to do? I'm like, honestly, this is very profitable sometimes also, if you tweak things too much, you know, then, you know, you might shake things up too much. So sometimes just sit back and, you know, let the processes do their thing. And that's just.

B (29:19)

Just by way of example. Sam, when you, when you create a ad campaign, do you have like, kind of like a minimum run time run period that you let it go before you start actually diving deep into the numbers? Three months, six months, or three weeks?

A (29:36)

Good question. So it's in steps. So it's in steps. So first thing is, when you launch a new campaign, is first of all, is it generating me leads? That's the first thing to look for. Number two is, is you're generating me qualified leads, and if so, what's my cost per qualified leads? Then the next step is, out of these qualified leads, are they being signed up? A lot of people get stuck on this step, which is the marketing is working. They're generating, let's say, 30 leads. Five of them aren't qualified, but they don't sign up any of those five, and then they blame the marketing. Well, if you're joining five, at least minimum 10 to 20% of the qualified leads should be signed up. If you're not, then you have a major intake issue.

B (30:17)

Intake problem.

A (30:17)

Yeah, yeah. So you take it one step at a time. On the platform side, it's relatively quick. Within. I usually give it like 24, 48 hours, and I, you know, I leave it alone. Then I come back. Let's just say if I launched, you know, like a typical thing is, you know, four to eight ads that I'm launching in one at once split into two different ad sets. Each one has four ads. Give it like 48 hours, and I come in. Usually one ad is popping off per ad set, depending on different numbers, different things that's going on. Which one is generating the most leads? I let that one run, pause the ones that are not generating leads, and then I kind of let it run for about 30 days. Then I go look on the back end. I look at our CRM, we have a live dashboard again in our CRM to know which campaigns, assets and ads are joining the actual clients. So a lot of times this is part of one of the strategies and a lot of times people miss out on this is if you don't know which campaign asset and ad is actually generating you clients, a lot of times it's misleading. So let's just say on your Facebook ads, it shows that this ad is doing amazing and event viral. It's being shared, has a lot of likes, it's generating a lot of leads. And I call these viral organic. We actually have a type called viral organic. And we found out that actually, no, even though it is generating amazing numbers, amazing clicks and amazing number of leads and cost per leads on the back end, it's horrible. It's five times worse. And then, and then we had a meeting about this a couple weeks ago and I'm like, wait a minute, it's working for a competitor. Why is it working for us? I mean, realizable. They're not tracking their back end, but we are. So even though this viral kind of thing, everyone thinks it's like the viral, you know, whatever that works, you know, doing those interesting hooks or whatever, all these different things you could do, assure you, you know, those people are not tracking the back end.

B (32:10)

So there's a difference between traffic and traffic generated and clients who are signed up, who are paid a retainer.

A (32:20)

Exactly, exactly. And that's the perks of step number five, tracking with numbers. Because you're not wasting money, you're just generating, you're spending money where money is being made for you.

B (32:30)

Yeah.

A (32:31)

So amazing, Very simple. Again, if you want this little cheat sheet, it's one page, very straightforward. Just comment me, I'll be happy to share this with you. And if you. Even more important, if you want this exact system that I just explained, implementing your practice, and you want to have make 2025 your best year ever, where you don't have to worry about generating more clients and having an automated system that's doing its thing, then just go to mylegalacademy.com, mention that you came from the podcast, so we know you're coming from these podcasts and these shows. Mention that for us, we're focusing hardcore on our. We really have the best implementation team, Neil, that has not just the winning formulas, but actually cares and is dedicated to making sure that you're successful with this. So if you're again, your lawyer you're looking to generate clients, just go to mylegalacademy.com so we can help you set this exact system up for you. We appreciate you next episode. Neil it's called the Law Firm Intake Conversion Checklist. If you ever struggle with signing up clients, this is the episode. And if you're watching us right now, just stick around. We'll be going live in about three minutes to be able to start this new episode. We appreciate you and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Law Entrepreneur. If you found value in the show, please rate, review and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you're listening. And don't forget to share the episode with a friend. It could help transform their life. To get access to a treasure trove of exclusive free resources for Lawyers, go to joinlawyerclub.com Again, that's joinlawyerclub.com we'll see you on the next episode.