Chris Dreyer:
A while back, I did an episode on books and it ended up being very popular. So, we're doing it again, but this time I'm going to go back to the foundational books. The books that didn't just teach me a tactic, but actually changed how I think about business. As someone who spent most of his early life not reading business books, today I'm going to walk you through the ones that matter most, the finance books, the marketing books, and the ones on sales and intake and actually running your business. If you're an attorney trying to get better at running your firm or just any leader running a professional services organization, then open up your notes app because I've got a whole list for you. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io, a legal marketing agency for elite law firms specializing in personal injury.
Here I was in college, kind of drifting, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Ended up with a history education degree, thought I was going to coach basketball, or didn't really have a path. And the first thing that I found was Ed Dale's 30-day Challenge to Digital Marketing. That gave me the basis to learn digital marketing. Back in the day when I started, there wasn't all the training Udemy courses, school communities and all the things that existed. There was like the Warrior Forum and learn from the person, learn by doing. That is what I did to start my career.
Eventually, I'm going to fast-forward, I've told stories about where I went from there, but eventually I start Rankings. When I started, it was called Attorney Rankings, but now it's called Rankings. When I started it, I remember going to a mastermind, it was Michael Ehline, this lawyer from California. I was with Matt Dolman, Dave Abels, I was with some other attorneys and it was called the Circle of Legal Trust. It was at the same time as the Avvo Convention. Back in the day, the Avvo conference was like one of the biggest conferences, it was like a must attend back in the day before they sold to private equity.
Here's where I'm going with this. I remember being in that room and here I am, I'm a phenomenal digital marketer. Look, okay, I'm not bragging on, just patting myself. But anyways, had a lot of success as a digital marketer, being an affiliate marketer. But I remember just being overwhelmed by the business component of growing my agency. I sat in this room and I could talk shop about SEO and Google Ads and whatever. And in the room was Dan Goldstein of Page 1 Solutions. And he was a seasoned entrepreneur and amazing human.
And I remember we sat down in the suite of this room on the couch and I was just talking like, "I don't know business. What do I..." And he's like, "Chris," he's like, "You should highly consider Vistage. Vistage is like a peer group for business owners and it's different verticals, different industries, and you get to hear their business problems. You get to share your business problems. They bring in speakers, and you learn about business." And I took that to heart. He had a successful business and his agency at the time was well known. And I took it to heart, I joined Vistage, it was one of the best things that I personally ever did, because it gave me this awareness of resources that I could go to to pursue learning.
And in school and even in college, I was never what I would call a book reader. I might read a few books a year, I'm just going to be honest. And I would be in these rooms with these entrepreneurs and they would mention a book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People, The E-Myth, Good to Great. And I'm like, wow, and I remember picking up one day, I picked up The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. And I couldn't put it down, it was like I was done with it in a day. And my passion was business. I consumed that and I'm like, oh, that book was so good. What other books are out there? That led me to the path where I just started consuming books.
Even to this day, and I've said this before, it's like a competition for me. If I listen to a podcast or I have a guest on my podcast that mentions a book that I've never read, it's one of the first things I do is I write it down and I have to read it. One of the things is because I'm competitive and I don't want anyone to have an edge on me. So I feel that if there's any resources they've read that I haven't, I have to consume it. Even this would be kind of fun. I remember there was a lunch meeting me and Jason Hennessey had, Jason, a friendly competitor at Hennessey Digital. And we went out to lunch and he mentioned this book like, Who Moved My Cheese? I'm like, oh, that's one I haven't read, he's got that on me. So, I had to go consume it. But that's just how I am, thinking about competition.
But I would say these individuals, these opportunities, these uncomfortable positions, because I am an introvert, that I put myself in, like the Circle of Legal Trust, that mastermind with Michael Ehline, I'm so grateful to him to inviting me and having me there, has led me to Dan, who led me to Visage, who led me to the business book side, which eventually led me to a consistent morning habit. On the way here, I just mentioned earlier, I listened to Tommy Mellow and the COO of Alliance guy, Cameron Herold. We've put people through COO of Alliance. My president's been in, my COO's in right now, valuable resource. Surround yourself with people because immersion occurs and it gives you opportunities.
If you're an attorney listening and you want to get better at running a firm, what should you be reading? This is one of those tricky questions, because I'm going to answer it a couple ways. Let's start with just the functions that you probably need to solve. Let's start with finance. Finance early on before you can afford to hire an expensive CFO, Mike Michalowicz's Profit First, phenomenal book. It gives you principles and guardrails to ensure that your expenses are covered and that you have profit at the end of the day. Actually, Mike would be, "Hey Chris, back up buddy. You take profit first, and then you pay your expenses," right? So, you ensure profitability. That's a good financial book.
I'll say The Psychology of Money is another one that's really important. I think there's a lot of books based upon leverage and understanding capital allocation. I can't think of many other finance books in that regard, but I would say those are a couple that can get you started.
Okay, so now let's move over to marketing. The first book that pops in my head for marketing is The Ultimate Sales Machine by the late Chet Holmes. I've read this book at least five times. I feel like every time that I read it, there's a little nugget in there. His daughter, I believe has taken over for the company and it's continued with his pursuit of mastery around marketing. That's where the Dream 100 list comes from. The Dream 100 concept is a focus concept. So for us as an agency, it might be the Dream 100 firms that we want to work with. For you as the lawyer, it could be the Dream 100 referral partners could be a list. Could be the Dream 100 cases that you want. There's a lot of different aspects of this, or the Dream 100 advertising opportunities. But The Ultimate Sales Machine I think is a phenomenal book.
There's also the 1-Page Marketing Plan. I believe that's the name of the book, that's a solid one. I think that a lot of the older stuff by Dan Kennedy is great, in terms of Direct Response. I think Jay Abraham is phenomenal. The OG, he's another Direct Response style, he uses leverage, very strong on the email marketing side, risk reversals and things like that. I think that there is, did I mention Ogilvy on copywriting? There's Frank Kern has a lot of great material on the psychology of marketing. Steal Like an Artist is another great book. There are a ton of excellent marketing books. One over my left shoulder here from, it's called Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing by Chris Dreyer, that guy, decent book. There's a lot of great marketing books. Off the top of the dome, those are some that come to mind.
I'm going to go over to intake, intake and sales. I got to give a shout-out to Gary Falkowitz, I think he has a short book on intake, it's very short. It hits the high note,. Excellent book on intake. There's so many books on sales. One of the books, The Wolf of Wall Street guy, right? Okay, so let's just forget about the movie and the degeneracy. His book and his methods on straight line selling and the importance of it of trust the individual, trust the company and trust the service, the lessons that he teaches around that and tonality and the different types of tonality, incredibly important. I find myself going to TikTok now more on the education side of sales. I'm sliding to the side here. If you just type in sales training and sales education, I think consuming it in clips and that medium is very helpful.
I like, on the sales books, Amp It Up. And there's a book, something about Make It Snow, it's the Snowflake books, Make It Snow: Zero to Billions. That organization, you want to talk about a sales organization? Holy cow. And by the way, anyone listening that went a little tone-deaf on this, every one of you run a sales organization because all marketing is is leveraged sales, and everything starts at the sale. You don't have a client until you make the sale. Incredibly important that you understand that.
I'm going to jump ahead, there's so much here. I'm in the process of writing an intake book. I've been working on it for about a year. I've been working with Vanessa Soto, phenomenal intake manager and leader. And I've spoken to Harlan Schillinger about this. So, that's going to be coming maybe end of this year, maybe early 2027. Draft one's done, but you know how the book thing goes, it takes a little while to get it perfect.
My side on how to run an agency, I get all kinds of stuff, right? I'd say The Boutique. I think The Boutique in general is a great book for lawyers. It's written by Greg Alexander. It talks about how to run a professional services organization. Guess what? An agency and a law firm are both professional services organizations. Phenomenal, phenomenal book. I probably read that one eight times, nine times. And I'm going to just give you just a few other books that I think about a lot.
So one of them, before I pull up this list of books I've referenced in the past, is Ready, Fire, Aim. Me and Michael Mogul are buddies, we text each other and he's on the pursuit of mastery and has a different vision for his company and where he wants to go. And I remember he recommended it in the past, Ready, Fire, Aim, to me by Michael Masterson. That's a pen name for some billionaire, you can look it up, probably figure it out. That's an incredible book. That might be, if I'm going to say one book that has been dead on, that I want to deviate and kind of push back on, that book has been incredible. It's a long book. Ready, Fire, Aim hits on everything from marketing, sales, to service, everything. Capital allocation, that is a killer book, Ready, Fire, Aim.
All right. Let me just a few others here. Traction, Beyond. Okay, if you don't have a business operating framework, Traction's a great book, so is Scaling Up, so is Fireproof. Definitely need a business operating system, so if you don't have a business operating system, read Fireproof, read Traction, read Scaling Up. Seven Powers for You Big Boys. If you're a big boy and you're wanting to dominate, you want that monopoly. Seven Powers, that tells you about the seven competitive advantages, scale economies. Marketing, you could talk about Seth Godin and Purple Cow. He also has This Is Marketing. The thing is, everything is marketing. It's the principle of This Is Marketing, but also Purple Cow. I've heard John Morgan and Dan Morgan, one of Dan Morgan's episode on our podcast, he talked about the Purple Cow meeting that Morgan & Morgan do to try to stand out and get earned media.
I think Hug Your Haters is solid, in terms of continuous improvement by Jay Baer. It allows you to take information that's negative and turn it into a positive, and you want to be thankful for people that have pointed out specific things that are wrong with your organization and how you do things so that you can improve, as opposed to them giving you the silent treatment.
So, there are other books I would say that you can pursue. I think anything with Lencioni, Patrick Lencioni, all of his books. Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And basically, even Jim Rohn has a lot of good stuff on culture, rowing in the same direction, alignment. Cameron Herold's Vivid Vision really hits on a lot of these topics. Culture is so important in sharing your values. I used to think it was a little fu-fu in the past, but it's everything.
There's Jack Welch from GE has this exercise that he uses, it's on the Y-axis, the vertical axis. Let's do a quadrant, right? Four boxes. Results, up, 0 to 10. Okay? Then on the bottom, the horizontal, the Y, you have 0 to 10 on values. Okay? And here's what you do. Let's say that an employee, you score all your employees on this, on both results, can they get the job done, and do they align with your values? Let's say hypothetically, it's low on results, low on values. That's a clear exit signal that you don't have the right person at your company. Right? Then let's say that very low on the results, but high on the values, they share your values. That is a situation where they either need training or they need moved into a different role. They have the values, they have the work ethic, whatever it is, that's a signal to move them.
Let's say super high results, low values. That's an exit for most organizations, that's the toxic employee. I'm not going to name names, we have had this year a couple of those. Frustrates the shit out of me every time that I have to eliminate an employee. It just bothers me. And people want to come to work and be happy. They do better work when they're motivated and positive. And anywho, so you got to eliminate those people. They infect the entire organization. They create a whole bunch of vision blockers is what happens, and friction. You want to eliminate friction.
Then you got high results, high values. Those are your yay players. Feed them, keep them hungry, train them, be good to them. Right? They're the people you want to keep with you. They're the people, by the way, that you enjoy being with because they share your values. Those are the types of things that come to mind when it comes to culture.
So, how do I consume the material? When I say read books, most of the time I'm listening to audiobooks. I'm just being transparent because for me, you can make time for anything. Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time, you could make time for things that are important. And for me, I've just created a routine where when I get up in the morning every day on my commute to work where nobody's really on the road, I'm trying to find a business podcast or a business book. In the past seven years, I think I've read two non-business books. One of them was a challenge by my team, it was fucking awful. Not the book itself. It was painful, I did not want to spend that time reading. It was a sci-fi book. It was a fine book, a Will White book, a younger adult book.
And there was a period of time in college where I read like 30 or 40 sci-fi books, and Dune, Dune's phenomenal, and Enders Game and Armor and this and that and all these. And those are great books. This is me, my passion is business. It consumes me, I am obsessed. There is an obsession for this relentless pursuit of mastery, obsession. It's going to be a sad day when I don't have that. That is why I can't sell my business. Well, how can I possibly sell my baby? What is my passion and my purpose worth? What could you pay me for that? And the answer is, you can't pay me to get rid of that. And I think that's why a lot of people that sell their business, it's like, "Well, what the fuck do I do now? What do I do?"
That makes me think of another book by a Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, incredible book. I remember at one point, Victor Frankl, I was reading that book and I couldn't help but think of my dad, and this is kind of sad. My dad had tremendous purpose as the breadwinner of the family. He was making over 100K, killing himself, working every hour for overtime as a mail carrier. And he eventually retired and that purpose just, he struggled for a time and I could just see it. Didn't really want to get out, gained some weight, wasn't as happy. And me and my mom had a conversation. We got him a dog, so gave him a little purpose to take care of this dog. And then eventually, he found his purpose. He found his purpose as a grandparent, as a grandpa, and he just lights up seeing my son and equates it. So, he's found his purpose.
Okay, so I'm back guys. Went down the rabbit hole there. How do I consume the material? Morning habit for me. Audiobooks, business podcasts, also when I go home. Although when I go home from work, a lot of times I call employees that I want to. So it's like 5:00, here comes the call from Chris, or 6:00 or 7:00. But I'm like, who would answer right now? Sonya Palmer, COO? James Helm, you listening? It's two hours earlier on the PST. Who am I going to call? And I just love to just talk business. And Zach Williams from Venveo is an agency owner I call a lot. Sean Schmidt. I call people that love to talk business, but on the way home, if I'm not doing that, I'm listening to a business book or audio.
Now that said, I think the best way to retain is to listen and read. I've heard Hormozi talk about this is like, listen to the book, but have it open and flip, follow, and let your more senses consume the material. I also think that writing down is incredibly important. As soon as I got to the office after listening to one of the business podcasts today, I went and immediately wrote down some items. I use Notion as my repository, it's like where I put my list. It's titled Quantum Leaps. So I'll put everything at the top. What could actually create a quantum leap that has a really good return on investment if we solve that? So every idea has a return on investment. Some, small ideas, low return, but some take a huge capital on that requirement. So, maybe their return isn't as... So, what can get me the best return on investment from an idea? I got this from Cameron Herold. So, that's what I do, check it off.
And then I'm also trying to, I know we're on the book train, but actually I got this from another book to be honest, okay, so let's go there. So there's this individual, Brad Jacobs, he wrote How to Make a Few Billion Dollars, I'm slightly butchering the name. He's wrote this book. One of the things that he's most known for is surveying his employees and to consume and get information from other vectors.
So, I'll give you an example. The thing that I sent out, and I'm going to read this, the thing that I sent out on Monday, August 24th, I said, "All hands, email me by Friday. I want to know what's broken." I'm asking every person at Rankings to email me by the end of the day Friday, not a form, not a survey tool, email. I'm going to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, here's the six questions. "What's the stupidest thing we do at Rankings? Process, policy, meeting tool, be specific." The reason I ask, say the stupidest, is I want people to be a little unhinged and unfiltered. "If you ran this company, what's the first thing you'd change? What's one idea in our lane we should be doing we aren't? What's slowing you down day to day? What would make you twice as effective? What do you hear from clients that leadership probably doesn't? What's one thing we should never change?"
And let me tell you, when you got 180 employees, that's a lot of emails to read and consume, but I am committing. In fact, when I got to the office, the first thing I did is I answered three of those, and it gives you information to improve. So, that's what it looks like. That's why the obsession with reading books, with learning, it is the pursuit of mastery. And the fun thing about the pursuit of mastery is it never ends. It's the ultimate game.
So that's a list, but here's the thing, none of these books matter if they just sit on the shelf. You got to consume them, write something down, and go apply one thing. That's how a book becomes a result. For me, this never stops, the reading, the learning, chasing that next goal. Now I know I rattled off a lot of titles today, so don't worry about scribbling them all down. We'll pull the full list in the episode description so it's all right there for you. And if there's one book that changed the way you run your firm, come find me on LinkedIn and tell me about it. I'm always adding to the list.
If you want to be the firm injured people call first for auto and product liability cases, book a complimentary growth audit at Rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer, thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. See you next time.
