Greg Ward:
What I call the tipping point where then you say, "Okay, well, let's try 20,000 a month when you got the money." And if you get 20 cases then it's great. Let's try 30,000, you get 30 cases.
Chris Dreyer:
Increase your marketing spend, reach that tipping point and watch your firm skyrocket.
Greg Ward:
And we bought like a six-month contract and I said, "Well, you know what? We're going to go out in a blaze of glory." I took the four months remaining and I said, "Do it all in one month. Let's just rip the bandaid off."
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, I'm your host Chris Dreyer founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started if you like what you hear head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five star review button. And if you don't like what you hear tell me about it in a one star review, I got a big hug for all my haters too. Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry ready to dominate your market. Let's go. The Ward Law Group is one of the biggest personal injury firms in South Florida. Founder Greg Ward and his team tackle an incredible 400 plus cases per month, but the firm looked very different when he and his wife opened over a decade ago. Let's start with what they didn't have. They did not have a 100 plus person staff market domination on the radio or a healthy war chest. Guys that didn't have any of that. Like many attorneys starting a new firm, they had no clients and no marketing budget. What they did have was a mountain of debt and a ton of grit and even more determination. Greg and his wife are fighters. Against the odds they took big risks putting their community first, they came out on top. Today Greg gets tactical, he dives deep in the media buying organic firm growth and stacking the war chest. I can't wait for all of you to hear what he has to share. Get ready to take those notes and buckle up. Here's Greg Ward founder at the Ward Law Group.
Greg Ward:
I actually didn't want to be a lawyer. I grew up in a lower middle class, upper lower class family in the suburbs of Baltimore. Unfortunately, my younger sister was a heroin addict. The truth is growing up I had a lot of trouble dealing with bullies. My sister fell in a drug culture at a young age, and there were times when we have to go and try and find her and you're driving down to Baltimore. It was a tough time in my life, that gave me the fight. And you're growing up with that, you do struggle a lot, and that struggle was what makes you, I think, really good at being a PI lawyer. Because I don't bring a lot of judgment into the PI realm. When I say judgment meaning I don't judge people. I know there are good people who may be in bad situations, or there are people who through no fault of their own have been a victim of an accident or something like that, and they may not live the same lifestyle I live. And so I try not to judge that because fortunately thank God I went up. My sister unfortunately went down, but we came from the same house, we had the same parents, we had the same everything. Just she got into drugs and I didn't. Not that I'm saying my clients have drug problems or anything. But what I'm trying to say is that you have to come in and suspend your idea about the way people should be when you're addressing your clients, you've got to treat them as a human being first. And so growing up in that environment that did help me to just say, "You take people where you find them." We represent a lot of immigrants and we're in Miami, Florida and my wife is a Cuban immigrant. She came here when she was 14. So a lot of us bring into our practices the way we think people should be, but the truth is you take people where you find them. And so growing up like that with a struggle, one, you learn to stand up for yourself and stand up for your clients. And more importantly, two, is you just learn to take your client, find their story where they're at, and really just be open to them, and treat them like human beings because they may not have had the same opportunities that all of us have had. And I'm grateful to have the opportunities I have, but I know a lot of people didn't have those same chances.
Chris Dreyer:
You found your path, you went and had a legal career. And then in 2012 you founded Ward Law Group with your partner and wife Jany. So take me to that time, why did you start the firm? Why was it the right timing? Tell me about that experience.
Greg Ward:
We did celebrate our 10th anniversary as a firm. And when we founded the firm I had had a bad spell. So my sister who had the drug addiction problem she had passed away from leukemia. And a year after that my father had been diagnosed with a terminal leukemia as well and he passed away. And my firm that I was with some other partners with was... I wasn't a good partner at that time obviously. My marriage had fallen apart, I was married before my wife Jany, that had fallen apart and just a lot of bad stuff had happened. And so when I started the firm I was sleeping on a couch, this is the truth. And my wife and I went back and at our first 10th anniversary we did a video... We started the firm with we had $10,000 in cash, $465,000 in debt. And I had basically walked out of the firm that I had started and said, "You know what, I got to be me and I got to do what I'm doing and I want to do plaintiff's work." And I really wanted to do that. And I did mostly defense work at the time. And I'll be very candid about this I had a spiritual conversion at the same time. I met my wife she took me to church about five months into our relationship and I had a very significant experience my first time I went to church and it changed my life. And at that point I started praying about it and I felt like I got really clear guidance that I should start my own firm. And in that really difficult place of recently divorced tons of debt, $10,000 cash, I said, "Hey, let's start a firm."And my wife she just graduated from law school, I said, "And I can't afford to pay you anything. I can only give you gas money, but if you come and work with me I think we could do something amazing." And she either had incredibly bad judgment, or the same spiritual strength that I had because she decided to take that really crummy job and start the firm with me. But when it started out, it was hard. I took my commercial litigation clients with me and that was good for a period of time. But she started doing the PI and she was the one who had the passion really to get that going. And she started doing it and it just blew up after that. So it took us about a year, a year and a half to get running and it exploded after that.
Chris Dreyer:
I thank you for sharing all that and being transparent, and we see where people end up and how successful your firm is, and you don't know the adversity and challenges you have in getting there. In the very beginning you didn't have the capital I assume to just go out and buy the top placement for TV, and saturate the market or whatever or do a big digital ad spend. So let's talk about how your marketing in terms of the BizDev side evolved. What was the strategy initially and how has it evolved to currently what you're doing now?
Greg Ward:
It took a lot of prayer. I'm not saying that tongue and cheek, I mean it sincerely. We were just like, "God, we do not know what to do. Help us out here. Show us." And God has always been faithful to us. My wife and I are both Christians and we believe that the whole purpose of our lives is to serve other people, so we started off there. And it's interesting because if you get to know my wife and myself, my wife has a lot of energy. She has a great story. She walked across the border at 14 with a backpack and her mom and her little one-year-old brother. She was put in foster care, her mom went to jail. And even though she was Cuban and they got asylum, presumptively, they still had the processing thing. And so she's like, "I really want to serve people," because she knew how scary that situation was. So she had this passion for helping her people. When we aligned I really think God put us together. I'm the systems processes manager like corporate guy. And I had trial experience. My wife really had no experience, but she knew she wanted to help people and she had a great story. And so how we actually started, and there's a God story behind this too, because I remember we gave some money to a church and we prayed. I call it planting a seed and basically what happened is we got a good settlement on a case I had taken with me, and then we just decided to try an advertising contract on a local radio station. And everybody told us radio doesn't work, but I was like, "Well, let's give it a try," and it didn't work for two months. And we bought a six-month contract and I said, "Well, you know what, we're going to go out in a blaze of glory." I took the four months remaining and I said, "Do it all in one month. Let's just rip the bandaid off. It's going to work or not work." We hadn't got any calls. And sure enough we quadrupled that ad and we got a call and, "Okay, we'll do the case," send the demand letter. And we get a tender back for $50,000, and I'm thinking, "Holy moly, are you kidding me?" Because I'm doing billable work at this point and nobody wants to pay billable work. Every invoice nickel and dime and I had clients stolen from me by price competition, all this stuff. And I get a check and I'm like, "I just had to send a letter. Are you kidding me? This is easy." And I said, "Let's take all that money, put it back in another advertising contract." And we did it and we started small, there was one case and then two, then three, then five, then 10, then 20, then 30, then 50. And we're hitting other radio stations now, and then we started going all Spanish. And then we started going TV, more TV, more TV, and so we scaled up. So we started off there and now we're well over 400 cases a month and hundreds of employees now. But it started small and we focused on who we were, and just told that story on a very small radio station. But we tested it and made sure that it was working, and as soon as I knew it worked... And by the way, that four month budget became my one-month budget, because I said, "Okay, I'm going to get one case, so I'm going to spend these four months." So a point for the young lawyers, I believe there's something called what I call the tipping point where if you don't buy a big enough advertising contract you will not reach a certain saturation and you will not get calls at all. But you cross the tipping point and it may just be another 20 or 30%, but you cross the tipping point, then you're actually at critical mass, you can get cases, then you run that up to a marginal return number. So you take it and I'm using some concepts here, but basically let's say you're spending $10,000 and that's your tipping point, you start getting cases. You need to get people say 10 to 15% cost per case, then you say, "Okay, well let's try 20,000 a month when you got the money." And if you get 20 cases then it's great, let's try 30,000 and you get 30 cases, then you try 40,000 a month and you get 32 cases. And you're like, "Okay, I've reached the point where I can't-" And there's some seasons and there's some timing and other things. Another little pointer out there for all of you young lawyers, media, the ads, the TV stations and radios they are vultures. Ben glass says this they're vultures and they will give you their crummiest spots. So you've got to make sure you're tracking when your spots are airing, what works for you, for your calls. You got to pay attention to all this, now I do that. So that was my natural thing, I'm like, "You got to test everything." And even the ad reps were like, "You can't track this stuff." Be like, "If I can't track it, I'm not going to do it." And so you got to be firm about that you guys out there, you got to be like, "No, I'm going to track it. I'm only going to air one spot to see if I get a call." And by the way a way the way you could do this, the testing way is that you can do a giveaway. Call a radio station and say, "Hey, I want to give away 500 bucks." You're paying 500 bucks for the spot, so might as well give another 500 bucks. And if you get phone calls, they're listening and they're responding to that radio station. So another little trick, by the way you want to talk about ad tricks. There were some people they've got a million followers on Instagram, or they've got the highest rated TV station, but their followers aren't engaged, they're just background noise. Whereas you've got some guys who are local talent, that's huge engagement. So they could be one 10th the size of the biggest TV station, but may have an avid followership. And so this is with Instagram influencers and other people if you want to start working with some of them. Some of them you have two guys who both have a 100,000 followers, one has a 100,000 followers where they don't buy anything. The other one has a 100,000 followers where you got 10,000 people who live and die by everything they say, it's not the same. You got to figure out a way to find that out. And so we test for that and that's just my evolution of things, you got to be intentional about it. Never listen to the ad reps because they'll sell you their garbage for premium and be like, "I don't know why it's not working." You gave me the lowest rated show, nobody likes the guy and they're like, "If he recommends you-"
Chris Dreyer:
"Here's the inventory we have."
Greg Ward:
Exactly, exactly, so you got to be intentional about that.
Chris Dreyer:
And then sometimes they don't even play it in those slots too.
Greg Ward:
Right. Right.
Chris Dreyer:
Geez, I have so many follow up questions here, so many follow up questions. First of all, that was super tactical. I hope everyone maybe even does a little 30 seconds and replays that what you just stated again, because there's so much power in what you said. I want to key in and ask your point of view on a few things. First of all, we just had Gary Sarner on, he does a ton of radio. A lot of times when we're talking about branding, it's measured in CPMs, cost-per-thousand impressions. How does that stack up? What's the CPMs look like in radio? What's the CPMs look like in TV? Because I've seen the OTT, the new thing and those CPMs are crazy expensive. But I know that TV and radio's been around forever, but it just seems like still even today it's a solid investment.
Greg Ward:
We work with TV and radio, we like that. We get a lot of referrals now from former clients. And we've got some other things we're doing the online stuff, which I think is obviously the future, no one's disputing that.
Chris Dreyer:
Yes, of course.
Greg Ward:
This was before OTT there was Pandora, and let me tell you how much money I lost on that. I go to the conferences too and I hear what they're saying, "I can tell you what's going to work." You've got a vendor who's trying to sell you something that they're going to justify for you why it makes sense. I'm the guy in the trenches who's saying, "Yeah, that's going to work or it's not going to work," or test it, just test it. If somebody says you're going to need six months to get results that's a dangerous thing. I'm not saying it's wrong. There have been some TV stations it's taken us six months to get results. But you got to have the budget to be able to deal with that. The other big mistake I see people making, don't jump in the deep end too fast. Because this is a thing you can blow... I see this happens all the time, people always try and take our market share. We have an incredible war chest right now. And if I see there's a real threat I'm going to just saturate it and no one can come on and take over any of our media. And I also have exclusive relationships with a lot of the media we're doing now, and we pay a little bit more than that because we protect our space. But be careful because somebody will get a hit, they'll settle a case for let's say they get a $100,000 fee, they're like, "We're going to put all this into TV."Well, be careful, start small. Everybody wants to come and be the big guy all of a sudden, so be careful jumping in the deep end. And I'll tell you the other thing we had a 100 plus million dollar settlement recently. But I'll be honest with you if I gotten that case when I was a fifth or even a 10th year lawyer, I could not have handled it. And so some of you guys will get this big case and you'll be like, "Ooh, I'm, I'm going to kill it." And there were big lawyers out there who were saying we should settle the case for significantly less than that and I'm like, "No, we've got a war chest." I brought another law firm as well, "We got a war chest, we're ready to go. We'll take the case if we go to trial, if we have to go there."But I see young lawyers sometimes they try and get ahead of themselves or our egos get in the way and we make mistakes, so don't overextend yourself on that. And especially with advertising contracts because you see, "Oh, if I just do what Greg is doing, I'm going to get the same results." Well, we've been doing it for over 10 years now, but more importantly we're extremely tactical about what we're doing. I just recently cut a TV station because they weren't cutting it. And I had to make the decision that someone else is going to come in there and saturate that market, but I have to be a 100% sure that that's not going to work out. But you've got to be intentional with what you're doing, so just build your structure slow and steady. I swear to you if you take your time and you do it right and know what your message is, and know who your client is, and know what your core values are, and know what you stand for, take the time. Because now I'm looking back 10 years and we have 135 employees now, it took 10 years, but that seems like this. I swear to you it was overnight, but there was a time when it was 10 people. But you got to learn how to handle 20 people and 30 people and all that stuff. So what I'm trying to say is there's a lot of noise around advertising, there's a lot of noise around marketing. The truth is what clients are looking for is authenticity, they're looking for your story. They're looking for who you are as a human being. You got to be consistent with your story and you've got to be... you're messaging, you talk about branding. I'm a Christian, God has put me on this earth to serve my clients. I promise my clients, they're the most important people in my life and I've had a lot of great results because of that. So ignore the noise when they talk about these things. OTT the number is going to have to come down, it's ridiculous what they're charging for that stuff. And do the first thing of that Pandora when there's nobody else on it and I'm like, "Oh, you're the only guy here." Well, there's a reason for that and I didn't get a single client. I spent thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and it kills me, and that was eight years ago I guess when it was hot to do that. So just have some perspective and don't run and do what the crowd is doing, kind of find your niche.
Chris Dreyer:
Greg's firm is on fire, they're hiring left and right to keep up with the influx of clients. So what does it actually take to run a firm with over 100 employees? Greg breaks it all down. He explains what milestones require specific hires and how to identify breaking points.
Greg Ward:
There are certain break points in the evolution of a business. It's like a certain amount of revenue and a certain number of employees, 10 employees, 20, 50, a 100 and 250. And I forget exactly where the breakdowns are, but I'll tell you that a 15 person firm is radically different than a 50 person firm, is radically different than a 100 person firm, is radically different than a 200 person firm. And we're at 135 now, so we're jumping that chasm again. And there are certain places where people get stuck. You get stuck in revenue, you get stuck in headcount. When do you need HR? I have HR people, but my HR role is evolving as well. I am looking for specifically right now what they call an HR leadership role, which would be a person. And the way I run my firm is I have my managers, they're about 10 managers of different departments. I'm looking for an HR person who will be co-equal with every other manager, and will actually develop the career path for everyone in my organization, and make sure their training is being done appropriately, and including career paths for my senior managers, so they have a career path. And one of the challenges you have at my size is people are like, "Oh, growth, growth, growth." I'm like if you don't have a career path, growth, I can pay you more. Most people when they say growth they mean more money, but I need you to do more productivity. And there's only so much you can do as a paralegal then you have to get into leadership and that sort of thing. So there are certain key hires, at 10 you need an office manager, probably should have an assistant too. 20 to 30 you're going to probably need a controller CFO to manage that stuff.50, you're probably looking at a separate HR person at that level. About 50 to 75 and we had a marketing manager, we've got a production manager, and production's got intake and other things on it, so we have these structures. Our process or our organization grew organically, but I can just tell you some milestones. At 10 we hired an office manager and I know it was hard to keep track of everybody at 50. And we do a lot of culture building work with a lot of team building work, and it's still is hard for me to keep track of everybody on the teams. By the way, another little point, if you get a big like let's say over 50, the people who are reporting your managers they're not following you, they're following their manager. Very important for you to understand this. I am a leader of leaders now. The people who are my managers, I make sure they understand my culture, they understand my ideas, they could replicate me if something were to happen to me, God forbid, I think my managers could figure out what decision I would make in any particular situation. They then inspire their people to follow them and I have to be okay with that, that it's not my person it's Amalia's person, or it's not my person it's Giselle's person. And you got to be okay with that because you can't have the same impact on everybody. But I make sure every day I meet with my managers every morning for a huddle for 15 minutes talking about the issues, making sure we understand we're all on the same page.
Chris Dreyer:
Finding those A players and getting them in places is essential for the growth of any firm. And D players have to go, when it comes to firing Greg takes his lead from Jonah Hill.
Greg Ward:
So we're trial lawyers, we're very empathic. We want people to do their best. It's very hard for us to fire people. I just encourage everybody to go watch Muddy Ball, Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, see how Jonah Hill is forced to fire these professional athletes, that's my firing speech right there, it is it. You sit with your back to the door of a conference room, you bring the person in, "Sorry it's not working out. Here's the severance, your phone da, da, da. I appreciate it. You need a letter of reference, 'I'll give it to you.'" And then I get up and I walk out because it's like I swear to you if you do anything more than that, it's going to be a waterworks fest or a fight. Watch Jonah Hill, Moneyball, great movie. I have all my managers watch it, that's how you can fire people. But more authoritative than Jonah Hill was because he was very tentative.
Chris Dreyer:
I have found during growth even for my own agency is calculating capacity. You can track hours. We had Mike Morrison was talking about how his different pod teams, some case managers, some teams could take 60 cases, another one could take 90. So how are you forecasting it when you know it's time to hire?
Greg Ward:
When you are thinking about forecasting just track past performance. And then before you roll anything out, we're big fans of KPIs. Before you roll anything out ask your team members what do you think you can handle? Many times they will give you more than what you're going to assign to them. But where I messed this up is, and I was telling the story today, I went back and I looked over six months and every case manager was doing let's say 20 demands a month. He said, "Well, that's going to be the new KPI, 20 demands a month." It was met with such rebellion. And I said, "Guys, we're doing 20 demands a month. 'We can't do it. We can't do it.'" And so I was stupid because I didn't ask them their input, shame on me. And had I gotten their input they may have said 25 and at least they come up with a number, and then you monitor that if they can realistically do that or not. But I had visited it upon them and I got a lot of resistance, and so I'm never going to do that again. I always will have the team members involved in the setting what the goals are. Now to answer your question Mike is right, there are people, some guys are here and some guys are here. And you know what I do with the guys who are here? I pay them a lot of money. And the guys that are here, I try and coach them if they have my heart, if they share your core values you want to try and coach that person up, because it's hard to find people who share your heart. You want to try and train them, give them the tools they need to at least be a B player. If they're a high performer and they don't share your values you got to have a plan to get rid of them. And if they're low performers that don't share your core values just get rid of them, that's easy, you let them go immediately. And so that's a general framework of hiring and firing processes.
Chris Dreyer:
Those high performers that don't share the values, toxic and lends itself to all kinds of issues. And then the other thing I like is what doubling down, like you said, is like, "Hey, you're top performers. I'm going to spend my time there and rewarding them." And you give the training and support as much as you can to the lower squad, but you're going to get more out of your top performers.
Greg Ward:
Let me give you another nugget here too, because this is another thing you just hit on that made me think of something. A lot of times people will say, "Okay." You have a meritocracy and they say, "Oh, Greg's playing favorites." Well, I see the data, so I know that the people are higher performers. Here's a very dangerous situation to be in by the way. And that is you have somebody who is maybe a good performer, but then you want to move them into leadership, but they're not quite there. And then you move them into leadership prematurely. Well, first of all, you can never take them out of leadership. And then secondly if they fail in that position as leader, you're going to lose that person, they're not going to be happy. And so you've got to be very careful about that. And then other people will witness that and they'll say, "Well, all I need is the title of manager and I can improve productivity."And the other nugget I will share with you is a title will never ever give somebody the authority to drive results in your organization, it just doesn't work. You can know who your leaders are by seeing who's, one, getting great results, and, two, motivating other people, helping them out, those are your leaders. Every time I've given somebody a title and they say, "I need the title to do the job." And this was early on, bad idea because it just doesn't work. The title never gives any magical power, it's whether they have it in them or not. Now you may need to train them how to be leaders, but these are just some big mistakes I made early on that I'm trying to keep other people from making. You got that paralegal, you're like, "Maybe I should put them in charge of the other paralegals," and you're not sure, man, go with your gut. Don't do it. Because once you put them in charge, you can never demote them and then you're stuck with whatever that is, so make sure you're sure about that.
Chris Dreyer:
You want to give individuals these opportunities. You talked about career pathing with the HR leader, and you never want to put a ceiling on them where they feel restricted. But then like you said it's like sometimes they're just not ready and you can't take them down and demote them, so how do you have those conversations?
Greg Ward:
I give them special projects, this is a limited time. Anytime I'm unsure about something, I'll say, "Hey listen, we need this to be done for the next three months. It's limited in scope, let's see how this works." And I tell people, "Look, there will be opportunities to do special projects in the organization, and those are things that will help you enter into a leadership role. But sometimes the special projects suck and we need somebody to do them and just get it done. Because by the way, if you're doing something that I don't have to do that I don't want to do, that's a big plus for me. That's more valuable to the boss than say if you do something I can easily do, it's not such a value. But if you're doing something to take it off my plate, 'Oh man, thank you.'" And so we have special projects and temporary assignments and say, "I want you to take this team of people, you'll be the pod leader for the next three months," and put an end date on it. Because you can always make it permanent after that and say, "Hey, you know what it's really worked out. I think we're ready to make this permanent," or six months however long it is, make it temporary. And then you can see how it works out, because you'll know within a month or two if it's going to work.
Chris Dreyer:
I've heard, I can't remember, I think it was Dan Sullivan said something like procrastination is a signal that maybe you shouldn't be doing it and someone else should be.
Greg Ward:
Oh yeah, yeah. And I am a big procrastinator on just about everything. Another point, so talking about another nugget, I hope I'm giving good value here. But as lawyers we often think we're the best at every job in our firm. And I love all my lawyer friends, but we are not the best at every job. And we are pretty intentional about, for example, with our intake people we hire people who are very empathic for the people who are doing negotiations in my firm, the attorneys. I want people who are stone cold. And so we try and find that out and see is this a good fit in this? And I find somebody oftentimes who's in the wrong department, I'll move them into another department and say, "This is a better fit for you." But when it was me doing everything I used to think I was an amazing negotiator. Now I've got some negotiators in my firm who negotiates circles around me and I'm the guy, I'm Ward, I'm the Ward of the Ward Law Group, they think, "I want him to negotiate my case." Listen, if it's a monstrous case and you need somebody who doesn't care about how much money it is, "Yeah I'm fine, I can handle that." But on a day-to-day with an adjuster, man, just knocking it out, I'm not going to be your best guy. So we got to get out our head space that we think we're the best at everything, and get people who actually will be better than us in the right seats.
Chris Dreyer:
This has been so helpful, so educational. How can people get in touch with you and what's next for Ward Law Group?
Greg Ward:
So people get in touch with me. My website is 855-D-O-L-O-R-5-5. And for those of you're like, "What does that mean?" Dolor is the word pain in Spanish, so 855dolor55.com, that's my website. My email is gward@gwardlaw.com, gward@gwordlaw.com. What's next for us? Growth man. We had always planned on going outside of the State of Florida where there are Spanish speakers. My wife is extremely passionate about serving her people, who tend to be immigrants and Spanish speakers because honestly they get the worst deal when dealing with insurance companies, truly. So geographic expansion is probably next. We're doing all auto and slip and fall, going to go to New York for sure. We already have an office lease and we're going to be rolling out to New York for sure. And then maybe New Jersey, maybe Texas, maybe New Mexico. I've got to look at it and see what it is. And I'm already admitted in Massachusetts, in Maryland, so we may start doing some stuff there, but where there's a need. But we're probably stay focused pretty closely on our Spanish roots, because that's the clients we like to serve the most. And everybody in my office speaks Spanish. Well, I have two attorneys now who don't, but I really want to stay close to my client's roots. And by the way we're hiring people in Nicaragua and offshore to help out too. We have back office support that is from Latin South America. So we're going even one step further by doing these Vas, where we're hiring people offshore and that's something that's pretty new to us, but we've grown that pretty fast too. I will definitely tell you the mistakes I've made because I don't want anybody to have to go through some of the bad stuff I went through, and I can give you some advice but the truth is is everybody is different. Let me say one thing in final where I do see lawyers getting into trouble. If you don't have your inner working sorted out, and by that I mean your faith, if you don't have your faith or your understanding of the world, and it doesn't have to be my faith. But if you don't know who you are when the success comes, the Bible talks about it as you'll be the house that was built on sand, not on a rock. Figure out what you stand for and if you do get some success and you haven't done that, it's like the rockstar thing when you're going to burn out, you can hit drugs or alcohol or women or gambling, whatever it is. I believe the devil's got a lot of plans for us that if we're not ready to deal with that level of success it's going to hit hard. So please take some time, look inside yourself, figure out why you're doing this and hopefully you have a faith experience like I did where I know why I'm doing this. But you definitely have to have your insides worked out, because your firm will be a representation of you. And what John Maxwell says I'll finish with this is the Law of the Lid, your organization will only get as big as you as a person. And so if you got to be doing everything you're going to be at 10 people.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Greg at Ward Law Group for everything he shared today. You already know what time it is, let's hit those PIM Points. PIM Point number one, saturate, saturate, saturate. You have to saturate a marketing channel to be memorable. When people need your services, multiple impressions and a ton of repetition will keep your brand top of mind, that is what builds a brand.
Greg Ward:
There's something called what I call the tipping point where if you don't buy a big enough advertising contract, you will not reach a certain saturation and you will not get calls at all. But you cross the tipping point and it may just be another 20 or 30%,, but you cross the tipping point then you're actually at critical mass, you can get cases.
Chris Dreyer:
And PIM Point number two, build up that war chest. Have a stockpile of funds from past efforts will help you make tactical decisions instead of emotional ones. Look, we can't know what the future has in store, but to keep your foot on the gas and maintain you need to have a financial bedrock.
Greg Ward:
We had a 100 plus million dollar settlement recently. I brought another law firm as well, "We got a war test, we're ready to go. If we go to trial, we have to go there." But I see young lawyers sometimes they try and get ahead of themselves or our egos get in the way and we make mistakes, so don't overextend yourself on that. And especially with advertising contracts because you see you like, "Oh, if I just do what Greg is doing, I'm going to get the same results." Well, we've been doing it for over 10 years now, but more importantly we're extremely tactical about what we're doing.
Chris Dreyer:
Last but never least PIM Point number three go for geographic exclusivity. It is so powerful if you can control the distribution and keep competitors from moving in through top channels. Build those relationships with media advertisers to help gain advantage. But remember, if a vendor gives away exclusivity too freely it might be a red flag, it could signal that they are turning over clients and not providing enough value.
Greg Ward:
People always try and take our market share, but if I see there's a real threat I'm going to just saturate it and no one can come on and take over any of our media. And I also have exclusive relationships with a lot of the media we're doing now, and we pay a little bit more than that because we protect our space. But be careful because somebody will get a hit, they'll settle a case for let's say they get a $100,000 feed and they're like, "We're going to put all this into TV." Well, be careful, start small. Everybody wants to come and be the big guy all of a sudden.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm Chris Dreyer, thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far it's time to pay the tax. No, I'm not talking about taking your cash like Big G. I'm asking you for a five star review on Apple or Spotify. Leave me a review and I'll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome and thanks for hanging out. Come back for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. Catch you next time. I'm out.
