Corey Quinn:
As a company, we went from 100 employees to 1,000 employees in six years. You really have to be a different company to run a 1,000-person company versus a 100-person company.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Each week we examine how the best in legal industry go from good to GOAT.
I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings, traffic and cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. Here at PIM, we don't just talk about it, we are about it.
If you're ready to dominate the personal injury arena and champion your firm, join me at PIM Con, the first ever official PIM conference. Conquer marketing, network with titans, celebrate excellence and go for the gold this September in Scottsdale at the five-star Venetian resort. Secure your place among the elite. Reserve your all-access pass into the winners circle at pimcon.org where we take you from good to GOAT. All right, let's get on with the show.
If you want to rapidly grow your personal injury firm to nine figures, buckle up. From digital marketing to lead gen to communication, this individual strategy helped scale Scorpion from $20 million to over $150 million and over 1,000 employees in under seven years. Meet the man whose marketing wisdom helped fuel this insane growth, Corey Quinn.
Corey Quinn:
We were in attorneys, home services, franchise, medical and healthcare systems, which is a lot of verticals. However, we didn't get there concurrently. It was actually sequential.
Chris Dreyer:
So when Corey shares his best strategies on budgeting, hiring, and specialization, you got to take notes. Here's Corey Quinn, former CMO at Scorpion, and now the vertical go-to-market strategist.
Corey Quinn:
I was actually recruited to interview at Scorpion, who is a business that is on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The area is called Santa Clarita. LA is known for horrible traffic and when the recruiter said, "I got this great opportunity, it's a chief marketing officer role, it's in Santa Clarita." And I said, "Okay, well it's in Santa Clarita and I don't see myself driving out to Magic Mountain every day." And I actually turned down the invitation to interview two times. The recruiter was insistent on me taking the interview. I did take the interview obviously.
Obviously, the interview went great and I learned a lot about this really unique, interesting company that had this lightning in a bottle that they had built and they were looking to really take what they learned in the business they built really expanded out much more broadly than they had at that point.
Chris Dreyer:
When you started, did you see a vision for nine figures out of the gate? Or did it take some time to obtain that clarity? Did it come around? Or was it just immediate like, "Hey, my experience, I see it."
Corey Quinn:
Scorpion is a founder led agency and the founder, Rustin Kratz, he has such a high level of ambition, he probably has an 11-figure vision. This is just a stepping stone to get there. And so I joined his organization and he was the one who had this massive vision. And what's interesting I think is that at that point the business was really grown based on the local kids from his high school, his friends, his childhood friends, and so they grew people through the organization. We got our experience elsewhere. We brought it in where most of the company was sort of homegrown. And so the reason why that made sense for the company was that he was looking to do something different to get to that next level, he wanted to bring some more folks in who had different backgrounds to help get there.
Chris Dreyer:
I want to dig into this specifically because you have your team, kind of nurturing within and you elevate people to different positions, and at some point you have to create executive leadership. And the energy and time that it takes to develop people may not be as needed. So talk to me about the culture dynamics. Hey, you're the outsider coming in and how you get bought in and just that whole interaction of bringing in from the outside.
Corey Quinn:
Sure. Well, I think at any company, but certainly at Scorpion, culture is very, very important. Again, a lot of these people who worked there were best friends of the founder over the years. They were related to him in some respects. So these people had many years of spending a lot of quality time going through the trenches of building a business from the ground up. And by the time I'd been there, by the time I arrived, it was already a $20 million business. So they'd been through a lot, they'd really achieved a lot.
And the culture at Scorpion at the time was work hard and play hard. There were kegs in the office, there were a lot of opportunities to lean in and celebrate. There was this thing called Docs, which is on a Tuesday night, the whole crew goes to the bar and does karaoke and so on and so forth. So, as an outsider who that's not necessarily the thing that I would typically do. However, in order to really become a part of the crew and to really build their trust at a gut level, I had to join them where they were.
And so what that meant is I would celebrate, I would do shots, I would drink beers, I would go out and have a good time because that was the culture that I was entering into. I won't argue, it was a lot of fun and we had a great time doing that. However, what I've seen over the years at Scorpion, again, that experience was one where the culture was very, very central to the brand and working there. If that wasn't for you, if you weren't made for that type of energy, then you probably weren't going to make it very long there.
And through that experience, I learned so clearly how important screening for culture is as part of the hiring process because we all know as business owners the expense in time and effort and money is, it goes into bringing someone into the organization only to find out that they're not the right fit regardless of their skill level, if they're just not the right fit, they're not going to work out. So that's a big lesson from that.
Chris Dreyer:
So budget allocation, it's not talked about, it's not super sexy, and you hear different trains of thought. Like some individuals they budget for the whole year at the end of the year. They're playing the tax liability game. And another positioning may be, "Oh, you need to put X percent in." To grow a nine figure business, what was your thought? And obviously you had to control budget from a marketing and biz dev side, what went into that?
Corey Quinn:
So, because our focus was growth for growth's sake, just go and grow and grow, that meant that we would spend a lot of money on the marketing side of the business and invested very, very heavily. For me as the head of the marketing department, having a juicy big budget with a CEO who would just say yes to most things was a lot of fun and it was a lot of flexibility.
But I think the reason why we got there was that agency business is effectively a retention business. Ultimately you sell them and you retain them, and as you retain them, you get a monthly annuity. And what Scorpion had been able to be very successful in is retaining clients for the long run. And so what that meant is, round numbers, let's say a client pays Scorpion $10,000 a month, if they keep them for 12 months, it's $120,000, 24 months, $240,000, so on and so forth.
Well, most of the competitors at Scorpion, who were competing against Scorpion didn't have at that time, didn't have the same level of retention. And so if we were able to keep a client for 24 or 36 months on average, relative to our competition who loses them at 12, we have a much larger, what we call lifetime value, the total value of a client on average. And that ability for us to take money from the future revenue that this client that we're going to close in the future and spend it now allowed us to be much more aggressive in our marketing.
So, when I talk about marketing and budgets, the first place to focus your business, especially if you have a recurring business, recurring revenue business, is: how do I build a company that keeps clients coming back month after month? Once you've solved that, marketing becomes a lot more interesting.
Chris Dreyer:
How would you flip that, say for the personal injury law firms listening? Would you think of it like a referral perspective? How would you put that same thought process to that?
Corey Quinn:
The personal injury attorneys who are thriving and who are doing the best and growing and winning big cases have "over invested" in the marketing machine. Figuring out how to drive a consistent volume of high quality cases because they don't stick around necessarily. And so that to me, given that dynamic, you really have to figure out how to master marketing from a budget percentage perspective. On average and I've seen you put out data, and I've researched this, that attorneys who want to grow aggressively will spend between 10% to 20% of their gross revenue on marketing, like sales marketing. Attorneys who want to grow at an average rate, 5% to 10% a year are going to spend between 5% and 10% of their annual revenue. And if they're not that interested in growing, they'll spend less than 5%.
Chris Dreyer:
I think those are dead on, and I think the disproportionate on the front end lends itself to more growth. And it also allows you to become better as a firm to maximize case value through volume.
One of the things I think you're an expert on is this strategy on the client journey. You have an interesting perspective on specialization within verticals. In fact, you have a book coming out called Anyone, Not Everyone: On How to Escape Founder-Led Sales. What is deep specialization? How does it relate to clients for a firm and how they think about it?
Corey Quinn:
Sure. Well, regardless of the business type, when you serve, especially in a service business such as attorneys, personal injury attorneys, when you serve too many different types of clients, if you work too many different types of cases, especially as you're coming up as a new firm, you introduce a lot of chaos into the business because you're doing a lot of things trying to cover a lot of ground with limited resources, and you end up doing things okay. And you're really never in a position to build up systems and processes.
And so, what I've found to resolve that challenging issue that a lot of attorneys find themselves in is through niching down and specializing. And honestly that's not really a surprise, but what you get as a result of taking a specific, let's say, sub niche within personal injury, trucking accidents, whatever that is for you. The thing that, there's three elements that go into success, and I call it the deep specialization strategy.
And number one is having focus, and focus is saying yes to one thing at the same time saying no to a lot of other things. So being really intentional about what you want to focus in on when it comes to who you're serving. Number two is having a strategy, which is a massive action plan built to achieve a big goal. So you have to know what you're trying to go after and put a lot of energy into focusing your effort and resources into achieving a specific goal.
And then the third one is care, which is all about finding an audience that you want to serve, that you actually care about. Because we live in a very competitive market today where people are searching for niches left and right. They're throwing money here, throwing money there. And what becomes signal in the market is when an attorney really shows that they care about this audience. They may have a personal connection, they may have a familial connection to this audience, they may have other types of connections, but there's a level of care that allows them to break through the noise, the marketing noise, and communicate to that audience much more authentically in a way that stands out much better than not caring.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, and I think you get the information through the consumers and to refine your messaging and positioning and all the benefits that goes with it. I think people have these binary-type, "Well, I'm going to go after everyone or I'm just going to go after this one." In Scorpion, you had specialization in legal and home services, in these different areas. You still were vertically specialized even though you went for different areas of law. Could a firm do the same, maybe be a PI firm and maybe you say, "Hey, I'm just going to do auto and premises," and maybe just attack those. Do you look at vertical specialization the same as niching? How do you choose between that?
Corey Quinn:
You're right. We were in attorneys, home services, franchise, medical and healthcare systems, which is a lot of verticals. However, we didn't get there concurrently. It was actually sequentially. So the business was really built around the law practice. Once we had built up a great process, great client list, wonderful retention, great relationships with clients, then we began to look for the next vertical where we could take the best of what we were really good at doing and serve that different audience without having to rebuild the machine. We didn't want to start from scratch.
For example, we were serving local service businesses. We weren't doing e-commerce. We didn't have any kind of systems or processes or software to help serve e-commerce businesses. So instead of going in that direction, we found the next, we call it adjacent vertical to attorneys, which was plumbers and HVAC businesses primarily, but home services. And part of the deciding factor for us in that situation was both our local service businesses both will work within a specific service area, both will rely heavily on search volume and traffic and cases from the internet. And there happened to be a lot of search spend according to Google.
We began to carve out resources who were dedicated to legal to start working on this new vertical. And that was very intentional because we didn't want to screw with the attorney business and the good thing we built there, but we also knew we had to learn the new vertical home services. And then again, rinse to repeat for these other verticals, but it was not concurrent. It was with incremental resources. So we hired new people to go after a new vertical. We didn't force the people who are working with attorneys to just now have to work with home service businesses as well.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things too is just getting your message out from a distribution perspective. And let's say you your positioning and then how do you approach the marketing channels and choosing those for distribution? One of the things that Scorpion's known for is outbound and their tremendous gifts, but PI firms have those limitations from an outbound perspective. So how would you approach that from a firm's perspective?
Corey Quinn:
So, let's assume that you're a personal injury attorney and you've identified a niche or a sub niche that is particularly interesting. It's large enough, there's enough cases for you to focus your law firm or begin to focus your law firm, and you have some kind of connection, you have some kind of emotional connection. You care about the health of this audience, or you want to be part of that solution. That's some kind of draw to that. So assuming you have all of that and you're positioned in that regard, "We're the PI attorney for trucking cases," whatever that is for you.
The next thing that I recommend to attorneys is to really start to invest in content and position yourself online as an expert in this area. And the reason why I say that is, number one, the internet is democratized content. No longer need necessarily to get on the local news station or to pay a bunch of money and a publicist to get on these different shows. You could be as effective over time by building up your brand online, your personal injury brand online, through providing content.
The way that content works is that you talk on a specific topic, you provide helpful content consistently over a long period of time. Chris, you do this extremely well with this podcast and other things you do. It's a very similar model where effectively you're building up, "Hey, this person knows what they're doing. They have a lot of experience, they've got great case studies, and they provide a lot of really helpful content that I like to consume anyways." And so when I as a consumer have a specific need in this area, the chances of this personal injury attorney in this example being recalled in the mind is much higher than if you just relied exclusively on SEO.
Chris Dreyer:
It's a feedback loop too, right? Doing the podcast and interacting with these consumers and being forced to create content in a certain area, it actually helps you become that expert because you're going more deep on this particular topic. And we've had Joe Fried on trucking and he's speaking at these trucking associations and he's always on a panel talking about trucking, trucking, trucking. Well, it allows him to become that top 1% because he has to talk about different aspects and components of the trucking cases.
Corey Quinn:
I'll add to that. So you mentioned I'm writing a book, I also write an email, a daily email newsletter. And what writing does is it helps me to figure out how to articulate the thoughts that I have in my head in a clear way, and it helps me to sharpen my thinking, helps me to communicate more clearly. It's just a very powerful tool for that, for the ability to communicate more effectively. I know attorneys are typically great writers. My dad's an attorney, an excellent writer and excellent with arguing and communicating in those respects. But when it comes to communicating to the consumer, it's a different skillset that does get better over time.
Chris Dreyer:
What's interesting too is I was talking to an attorney recently and they were talking about their content, and I was talking about the Flesch Kincaid readability score and where they needed to be at a ninth grade level, but their content was too advanced. And yes, I understand that you want to show your expertise, but you also need your consumer to be able to understand and comprehend it, and you learn all those different nuances.
One of the things I want to shift back to is the labor. You've got your messaging, you got your budget, everything's firing on all cylinders and you just need bodies, right? There's software capabilities for leverage. How did you approach forecasting for hiring? Talk to me about hiring for a lot of bodies, not just the occasional one a quarter.
Corey Quinn:
Sure. Well, as a company, we went from 100 employees to 1,000 employees in six years, and you really have to be a different company to run a 1,000-person company versus a 100-person company. So, I would say that I was not nearly as gray back at the beginning of the adventure there. Obviously there was a lot of growing pains. We learned a lot along the way.
We would obviously try and find ways to get talented folks who were eager, who fit the cultural mold, I would say. So there was a couple roles on my team where we needed to bring in interns. We didn't have the funding to bring someone on. Put the word out and we got a handful of, I think five interns, and frankly, we put them to work. I would say we grinded them a little bit, just because there was a lot of work to be done, there was a lot of ground to cover, and not everyone made it. Not everyone stuck around, but what ended up happening is the folks that liked it and did the work and dug in and added a lot of value, they ended up getting great jobs. And some of them are still there in middle management roles now.
So, I'm a big fan of creating opportunities for junior folks without a lot of experience, but who are very eager and want to learn, putting them in positions to really win over time.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, that's excellent. I love the internship model because you get people that need the experience that have the energy.
When you look at going from 100 to 1,000, obviously at the 100 mark, you already got the HR team, or maybe not. I've heard some rare exceptions, and look, it pains me. That was a tough hire, and I know Jillian that's listening has been instrumental, but that was painful because it's like that non-revenue generating, direct generating. But then it's like, "Oh, I need to go hire eight people. Who else is going to do it?" Because then you take away from the revenue generating activities. So how did hiring that whole team, that admin side look like going from 100 to 1,000?
Corey Quinn:
Yeah, I would say a big hire was hiring an initial leader in that regard in the HR space. And that again, is an interesting position because there needs to be a great alignment in the culture, specifically how you communicate to the employees the rules, the dos, the don'ts, and so on, so forth. And doing that in the wrong way can really damage the company culture. And so that hire is extremely key to find the right fit.
I think the way that we approached it is we took our time in really rolling out very comprehensive programs and rules and regulations about how to hire, what to do, how to fire, and so on and so forth. Along the way, there was a lot of mistakes, but I think we learned through those mistakes versus trying to artificially bring in a bunch of, I'm using the word rules, but it's basically a lot of regulations that didn't fit, didn't feel right.
And so, because this was a founder-led business, Rustin moved, I would say, relatively slowly in that regard in a way so that we could really build something that matched our culture. You don't make perfect hiring decisions all the time or the people who are making hiring decisions, and so there's risk in doing that. But I think at Scorpion specifically, my experience of it was that we were willing to take on some of that risk in exchange for not having a rigid culture around hiring and training.
Chris Dreyer:
COVID changed the game from a technology perspective, from a remote working capacity, and it's my understanding that Scorpion has a big brick and mortar, has a big facility. You mentioned at the very beginning our call of our interview that, hey, you weren't looking forward to this commute. Do you think the Scorpion would've had the same ability to grow and the same success had they operated from a remote perspective? Because many firms are trying to make that decision.
Corey Quinn:
Scorpion, in the case of Scorpion, I don't believe that it would have grown as quickly because, frankly, there was a lot of late nights, overnight working sessions with the pizza and the beer, and it was definitely that crunch time in the early days to really get the business off the ground, that you just can't do when you're hiring folks who you maybe met in person once. I find it very difficult to be able to produce that same result that Scorpion did.
That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or can't exist today, but I think it just, that's one of the key aspects of what made Scorpion, put it in position to really grow in the way it did was the locality of it.
We actually, I'll give you a quick example. We acquired a company out of New York, and we flew out there a couple of times and to build up the culture and to bring in the team that worked for the company that we had hired, and they didn't have that same all out type of culture that I was referencing. And as a result of that, over time, a lot of those folks just, they ended up finding other companies, other places to work because they were remote, number one.
And number two, the remote piece, I'll go back, is they didn't feel connected, and we definitely didn't do a good enough job of that, but we would celebrate in Los Angeles and we would also give them an opportunity to celebrate in New York. Well, they didn't really celebrate because that wasn't who they were. And so there was definitely a gap when it came to the location, but then also just the culture of acquiring a company, bringing in a different culture that takes a lot of work to merge the two cultures together in such a way that everyone feels included.
Chris Dreyer:
Thank you for that. That makes a ton of sense. And just easier to connect in person than it is. I mean, Slack and Zoom and all the things have improved, but there's still just that personal connection that you talked about, reading body language. And sometimes you read something in Slack and you're like, "I think they meant this," but you don't really know. There's a different tone and emphasis on different words.
Corey Quinn:
Yeah.
Chris Dreyer:
You believe so deeply in the vertical specializations. You've lived it. So do you think that it is the path in this day and age is vertical specialization, as opposed to being the generalist? Or can the generalist just with enough capital attack everything? Just what's your thoughts there?
Corey Quinn:
For the personal injury attorneys who want to really grow and be expansive and really make a big impact, I believe that the model that we took at Scorpion, which is you get really good at one niche and then you bring on another niche and you go that way, I think today is the best way to grow a law firm.
There is just too much chaos, talking to attorneys, too much chaos trying to do everything and trying to get there by being a generalist. Everything is changing more rapidly today. Innovation is increasing speed and, as a result of that, being able to be effective as a generalist is becoming harder and harder. So you're better off, in my opinion, because that's only going to increase velocity, that you're better off finding something, a niche, a sub niche, a group that you really care about, and becoming the brand name in that niche, in your category, in your location. That's a far better way to grow than otherwise.
Chris Dreyer:
Couldn't agree more. And Corey, where can our audience go to connect with you and learn more?
Corey Quinn:
Sure. So I have, as I mentioned, a daily newsletter that is all about taking a niched approach to using the concept of deep specialization. You could sign up for that. It's five days a week, a one-minute tip. You could sign up for that on my website, coreyquinn.com/newsletter. I would love to see you on the list. And I'm also active on LinkedIn, so you can also find me there.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Corey for sharing his wisdom today. Let's hit the takeaways, time for the pinpoints.
Grow, baby, grow. You're here each week listening to PIM because you want to grow. To see your firm scale, you need to budget accordingly. Now, budget allocation may not be sexy, but it is necessary. Invest heavily in marketing, test and refine your approach.
Corey Quinn:
Attorneys who want to grow aggressively will spend between 10% to 20% of their gross revenue on marketing, sales and marketing. Attorneys who want to sort of grow at an average rate, 5% to 10% a year are going to spend between five and 10% of their annual revenue. And if they're not that interested in growing, they'll spend less than 5%.
Chris Dreyer:
Coach up your hires. Hire people you can train, coach them up through your firm. This will keep overhead low and ensure that people will grow with the firm and have the soft skills you need, and share the culture you want to maintain. Take time to build the needed structures and processes to hire, evaluate, retain, and fire. But you shouldn't do all this on your own. If you're serious about scaling, bring in help. Make one strong initial HR leadership hire is critical.
Corey Quinn:
I'm a big fan of creating opportunities for junior folks without a lot of experience who are very eager and want to learn, putting them in positions to really win over time.
Chris Dreyer:
Be the master of one. Being a generalist can work when starting out, but if you want to increase case value and profits, get narrow. Thoroughly master one specific niche. Concentrate on perfecting your client targeting, intake processes, litigation systems, and delivery of exceptional service, then add resources to expand into a second niche down the road.
Corey Quinn:
Once we had built up a great process, great client list, wonderful retention, great relationships with clients, then we began to look for the next vertical where we could take the best of what we were really good at doing and serve that different audience without having to rebuild the machine. We didn't want to start from scratch.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, y'all, that's it for today. But before you go, I want to extend a personal invitation to PIM Con, the official PIM conference, September 15th through 17th. I would love you to join me to learn how to conquer marketing, network with titans, celebrate excellence, and take your firm from good to GOAT. We've got early bird pricing for a limited time lock in your spot with the PI Elite at PIMCon.org. That's P-I-M-C-O-N, dot, O-R-G. Link is in the show notes.
Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. See you next time.
