Chris Dreyer:
I'm very excited to announce that Rankings has officially been named the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest growing private companies for the ninth year in a row. I'm deeply grateful to the entire team for their relentless dedication, and to our firm partners who trust us every single day to help grow their practices.
Now, letting people in on a little secret, to be 100% real with you, I usually don't know a specific topic for these solo episodes until I sit down in the studio with my producer. Today, he put me on the spot and asked me to reflect on what I've learned as a leader of an Inc. 5000 company over the last decade. So we're diving into real stuff, talent acquisition, revenue growth, goal setting, culture, and what I've learned from million-dollar mistake. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, a legal marketing agency for elite firms specializing in personal injury law. Let's get into it.
What I think about immediately is talent. And for professional services organizations, even today with AI, with all these different technological advancements, still we get a lot of leverage through labor. I think it's easy to compare ourselves to Jason Fried at Basecamp. And they've been around for everywhere forever, but they have software that's been used for decades and they can generate a high amount of profit and get leverage from software. They're all coders and developers. And I think it's easy to compare ourselves to other companies where maybe AI is emerging and they're getting leverage there. But for us, it's come down to the people. It is finding top talent, retaining top talent, growing talent.
And we've really had an emphasis on this throughout our entire journey of this. And I'll tell you, I was speaking to a peer of mine that I speak to regularly about talent. I've given presentations about talent. I have on my menu, on my Chrome desktop, I have a folder of where I bookmark people that have impressed me for LinkedIn. I have their LinkedIn URL. And I may not have the opportunity to work with them today, but I may have the opportunity to work with them in the future. And at different points and milestones, I may have the capital to deploy or to hire some of these individuals because these top players are on the field. They're playing the game. They're not on the bench. They're not on Indeed looking. That's not always the case. There's circumstances to find great talent on Indeed. You can find it anywhere. Maybe an individual was in the wrong role, and they would really thrive in another role. Maybe they didn't share the values with their previous organization and they share the values with you. There's a lot of circumstances of this.
So I guess first it's finding the top talent. And then it's like, how do I keep the talent? The thing I think about is the golden rule. It's treat people how you want to be treated. I'll give you an example. When we went to choose our benefits for health insurance, I chose to do 100%. I chose the best health insurance. We surveyed our employees on what they wanted and what extra benefits and time off, unlimited PTO versus just standard PTO, unlimited time off. And I think you want to try to eliminate toxic individuals because people don't want to be around those individuals that cause them stress.
So that's like keeping the talent, providing upward mobility, which is a challenge because sometimes you need the technicians and the people that are experts at their craft. And you want to reward those individuals in the same manner as a manager because they're needed. You can be an amazing lawyer, doesn't mean you have to be in a managing attorney. You can be an amazing trial lawyer and provide value for your firm. That's keeping. And we can go really deeper on this on shared values. I just did an updated core values video literally yesterday. That's keeping.
And then it's developing your people. That's where one-on-ones are important because every individual has their own track, what they think about and what they need to grow. I lead every week a personal injury mastery session, every week, every Monday. And it's things that I learn about our avatar. It's you guys, the personal injury law firms, and what your pains are and how we can help you out. The deeper that we understand you, the more consultative our account managers could be. So we're constantly growing individuals there. We reimburse individuals for courses, for books. We allow any individual that wants to go to an event or conference, all they have to do is just raise their hand. And 99 times out of 100, I'm going to say yes, thumbs up. And it's stuff that I've never heard of.
We have a learn channel in Slack where everyone contributes about their different functions and topics and keeps you apprised on what's going on. There's our newsletter where it's about the industry. There are different certifications that we push, different initiatives that we push, and we make them challenges. Now, can we do better? I'll give you an example where we have failed. And I don't say you only lose if you quit, right? I've said that before. So I'll say a temporary failure. We tried to use an LMS. We hired an individual to run the LMS. And what we found is, we like specialized knowledge. And I think the learning management side of things needs to be, instead of crossed all departments, I think it needs to be individualized within each function. I think there's the ability to develop, people with the highest standards will hold their people to a different level. So anyways, when I think about Inc. 5000, it comes down to one thing, the people. And it is finding, keeping, and growing your talent.
How do you maintain the culture? How do you spread the culture? And it comes from the top down. It comes from surrounding yourself with people that share the same values. Our values, very simple, play to win. We want people that are competitive, that want to compete, that don't like losing in a game of monopoly. That's who we want to surround ourselves with. We want people that strive for excellence, that want to improve and be craftsmen. We want individuals that act quickly with speed. Speed is a core value. If I message somebody, I want responsiveness. I'm high D. I can't help it. I'm impatient. I want responses quickly. I want action quickly. That's my values. That's not everyone's values, right?
And then last, it's grit. Mental toughness and being able to overcome adversity and continue the grind day in and day out to improve and consistency. Consistency compounds. That's my values. That's what's contributed to us. And when I say mine, that's the shared values across the organization. EOS has this people grader, people analyzer thing that they do. It's you give a plus minus. If the employee has the value most of the time, doesn't have the value would be a minus, and then some of the time would be a plus minus. If you have too many minuses, that's a signal that maybe they're not right for your organization. It could be right for someone else's, but that is where everything starts, is the values. And I used to think this was silly. I would see an entrepreneur on stage talking about core values. And today I understand that it's everything because it creates alignment. It helps individuals row in the same direction, with the same trust ultimately, right? You trust people to share your same values.
Culture also has to be nurtured. You got to show gratitude. We have a kudos channel on Slack. We try to call out the individual things that a person has done, not just, "Hey, you're doing a great job." I myself, this is an area that I need to improve. I think everyone likes to hear, even myself, I love it when someone says, "Oh, I love this thing or that thing." And I know it, but we do have this, we do consistently get posted too. And again, we're not perfect. We're all flawed. But this is what we're trying to do to spread the cultures, spread the culture of positivity, of competing. There was a time where I put, literally, I was thinking about values and said play to win, and I crossed out win and I put dominate. And I'm like, "Eh, I don't know if that's the right signal." It is for me, but I think ultimately it's different than win. There's nuances to the words and words matter. I think those are the most important things when it comes to culture. It's surrounding yourself with people that share the same values.
I wish I would've known some of the following. Look, we've all had mistakes. I don't like their learning lessons. Yes, you learn. Everyone that says like, "Oh, your mistakes are a good thing." No, they're not a good thing. You want to avoid mistakes. Duh. You don't want to just burn money for money's sake. I think that there's a couple great books that I've been talking about lately, The Dip by Seth Godin. You're in this dip and the things suck, suck, suck, suck, and then they're good. And you got to go through the pain. John Morgan talks about when he goes into a new market, he has to spend millions of dollars for three years before he gets a return. That's the dip, folks. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, then outcome.
There is a book by Ryan Holiday. It's called The Perennial Seller. It's sticking with things long-term. That's what has to happen. You have to stick with things. You have to learn from them. I'll give you an example of things where we made mistakes. At one point, we wanted to do traditional media. We hired one individual. That person was great. We didn't support them. We undervalued the necessity of video production in-house versus using vendors and control. We didn't stick with it long-term. Now I lost about a million bucks in that endeavor, and everyone's thresholds of pain is a little bit different. And I think if I would've stuck with it, ultimately we would've got past the dip. But I made the mistake that maybe it's not right now, not forever, but not now.
I've made other mistakes where I've hired individuals into roles, and I saw the signals early on and I should have just acted. I should have acted, but I just waited five, six months. And I knew immediately they didn't share the values. And it's the hire slow, fire fast. I should have fired fast. It just is. It is what it is. I knew. There are situations. I think the biggest one is, let's say you're a firm and you want to create a new endeavor. Let me give you an example for your side of the coin. Let's say you've always had lawyers do your pre-litigation, and you want to move to a case manager model. And you hire just one, and you judge the success and failure off of this one and you don't spend time to nurture it, you don't support it. Of course, it's going to fail. But if maybe you hire a senior case manager and a few other case managers and they learn by immersion, there's competition, that works.
I'll tell you another failure that I had when I was doing outbound sales. I tried to outsource it. And what happened was the good talent kept getting promoted off our account. And so I would have good outbound sales, and then they would leave. And I had to retrain the next person. There are situations that, everyone has a different constraint. There's one main constraint at all times. You have to identify it, choose to solve it, make sure there's a commitment there that it's capitalized. And that is the nature of the beast.
I'll tell you another one. SEOs evolved. Our offer, I talk about personal injury returns, your contingency fee offer. You don't have to think about that. Our offer, cost plus, retainer-based, capacity-based, performance-based, what features are included? SEOs evolve. So now we do GEO. We incorporate LSA, we incorporate pay-per-click. We have to change our content strategies. It's constantly evolving. So you constantly have to change. I think a lot of our competitors, the reason that they sold is, it's very challenging to find product market fit. So when all the AI stuff happened, the AIO, the GEO, maybe, I'm not saying all of those, chose to say, "You know what? Maybe it's time." SEO is at the top, organic SEO, let I say that. "Maybe I should just sell instead of trying to go through that grind of product market fit, which could take years." That's the name of the game. You got to constantly go through the dip. There's different dips, pain points, and be willing to change, to grow and succeed.
I'm going to be a little bit of a contrarian here on goal setting. First of all, I think that the 10-year goal, the five-year goal, the three-year goal is complete and utter nonsense. I think it's bullshit. All goals are, they're guesses, right? They're hopes. You need to have a trajectory. You need to have a path that you're going towards, right? You're on this journey. You need to have a destination in mind. But I promise you, that destination will deviate and change a little bit. Do you think Bezos, when he came out selling just books, that he would think that he would be in the logistics business and have Amazon Prime and all the things that he had? No, his destination changed over time.
I think that a lot of us are wantrepreneurs, are just think and hope when what we ultimately need to do is just execute, execute and iterate. I'm a big fan of one-year goals. I think we can kind of predict what's going to happen in one year, but even that's a challenge. And I think the biggest thing is execution and creating. Look, my value, it's a competition. Last year we published 72 total podcasts. As I'm speaking right now, I think we're at like 75 with another probably 30 recorded, and it's July. So it's constantly doing more, doing better. Quality is subjective. Quantity creates quality.
The other thing I wanted to say is, we don't brag about or feel accomplished on things that are easy. Do you think that you won a tournament with three-year-olds in a basketball shooting competition? Can a three-year-old even shoot? Like, you're not going to brag about that. You're going to brag about beating Seth Curry. Very unlikely, very difficult. You're going to brag about the Iron Man. Probably not the 5K. Maybe you feel accomplished. Maybe, "Hey, I did a 5K." Maybe you have a story to tell. Maybe it's your time. Maybe you could share your time and feel accomplished. The hard things are where the rewards come. And we just have to remind ourselves the day in, day out that not everything every single day is going to be a reward, but they will occur. And part of this journey is the fun, and doing the hard things is the reward.
Money is fuel. It allows you to do more things, exciting things. It allows you to hire a bigger marketing team. And I think our marketing team is 20 plus, maybe more now. Certainly didn't start that way. So we have the ability to do things. We have specialized talent in different roles, and over time it improves. It also can be a feed the beast situation. When you get a big company, you got to feed the beast, you got to continue to grow, you got to continue to hold talent, you got to continue to profit because you got a lot of mouths to feed. It also gets harder to swing that big ship around because you got to create so much alignment on communication. So there's pros and cons. The revenue allows you to do cool things.
I will say that people that want a lifestyle business and just pull out all the profit, today there's just so much competition. I think you have to constantly reinvest in your business. You don't have to do it for all your profits, but again, it's not like Basecamp. It's been around for 40 years. It's like times are changing and you got to reinvest, you got to reinvest in your people. You got to pay them more because of inflation and their development, which means you got to create more value for who you serve. Get higher case results. Your settlements have to increase. Your time on desk has to shorten. All the things contribute when it comes to revenue, but ultimately the money is the fuel.
What's one thing that's not said enough when it comes to marketing? First thing I'll tell you is the inputs on AI are only as good as the individual putting them in. We've had certain attorneys, even clients, they'll say, "Hey, what about this SEO thing?" Well, I don't want to say, "Hey, dumb ass." That is completely without context. And at a situation where I had a firm recently from a location, I was going to name the location. Was talking about our content strategy and what Claude said, and it was a, "consultant." It was complete shit, but I can't say that. What I have to say is, "If you do this, you are going to fail because the inputs weren't correct." I've had clients shift and change and do things their way. I've seen a traffic that.
Look, I'm not saying everyone's an expert at certain things. I'm not saying to not do that, but you have to then experience your own dip to come out on another side. Fortunately, we've had hundreds of law firms that we've worked with, and we know what works and what doesn't work because we have the scars, the battle wounds. And what I can tell you is, we are experts at marketing. We're not experts at these other things. We're not experts at the law. So that is our core competency. So what I would say is for us, we do marketing ourselves, right? And I would say we would work with a partner on the other things we're not experts in.
For you, the law firm, if you are an expert at the law and not at marketing, maybe you work with someone externally who that's their deep expertise. Things evolve, you have the capital to hire people that are experts in their craft. And at some point, maybe you want to bring it in-house, but you need to be capitalized, you need to be available to support. But I think that a lot of times just going to generic Claude or generic ChatGPT, you just have to take into consideration that first it's biased. And if you don't provide it the proper inputs, the outputs are not going to treat you properly.
Retention, ultimately, there's so much that goes into retention. For an agency like ours, it's being consultative and not reactive, not a vendor. A vendor is commoditized, and it's just you're on the hamster wheel. You have to be the guide. That's what our clients are hiring us for. You have to deliver results, you have to get cases, you have to set proper expectations. Some channels are quicker than other channels. LSA is quick. Search, little bit slower. You have to provide education to your clients to help them succeed, to educate them on the importance of reviews and how those impact other channels. And I think when there's involvement by the firm, it tends to be a better relationship when there is a partnership so we can go deeper on topics, particularly content.
At the end of the day, we do month-to-month contracts. In sales, you say we eat what we kill. We don't handcuff. We have to generate results. I think it forces us to be better. We have a shorter window. There's called the look back window. A person that sells a year-long contract only has to convince the individual to buy one time per year. We have to do it 12. So we have 12 points at which we have to provide value every single year. I think it does force you to improve. That's another reason why a lot of our competitors do 60-day notice periods, right? There's some friction there. They get a little bit of cash. They're still doing month-to-month, but do you really need 60 days to offboard a client, to detangle them from Google Search Console and hosting? Sorry, Bubba, you don't need 60 days. That's the truth. At the end of the day, a client is paying to receive value and you need to deliver value. Value is cases. Value is brand exposure in the marketing world and how we define it.
Making Inc. 5,000 nine years in a row is an incredible honor, but it's not something we take for granted. It comes down to a team that grinds every day, and law firm partners who trust us to deliver. Accolades are great, but in performance marketing, yesterday's awards don't win today's cases. You shouldn't just take my word or any badge on a website at face value. Head over to rankings.io and check out the results for yourself. Look through our actual case studies, our data, and the real numbers. See for yourself what nine consecutive years of proven client results actually look like. That's rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this has been Personal Injury Mastermind. Catch you next time.
