Alan Weiss:
There's always a bigger boat, so stop worrying about having the biggest boat. Worry about having a comfortable boat. So in marketing, you have to ask yourself what's really comfortable for me? Explore disruption and explore volatility and turn it into an offensive weapon and not just a defense of fear and leadership has to be bold.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, 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. Do me a favor and hit that follow button right now to subscribe. You'll be the first to get every new episode delivered straight to you the moment it drops, giving you the edge. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep in the conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services, and strategies to help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today's competitive landscape. This is Toolkit Thursday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let's get started. Guys, I want to do something a little different and start off by saying that I was extremely honored to speak to Mr. Alan Weiss.
I have read his book Million Dollar Consulting many, many times. He's a personal hero of mine. I've read Value-Based Fees, and I just can't get enough of his material. I think he's truly a legend in the professional services space. I was just so honored to have this conversation with him and I just want to share that just from a personal point of view. It was just really awesome to get to speak to him and he is just so incredibly packed with knowledge and I was just excited to chat with him. For those of you who may not be familiar with Alan, let me tell you, this guy is one of the most highly regarded independent consultants in America. He's worked with some of the biggest companies in the world like Merck, Hewlett-Packard, Mercedes-Benz. He's written over 60 books including the bestseller I mentioned, Million Dollar Consulting.
I think it's been inducted into the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame and the Million Dollar Consultant Hall of Fame. In short, when Alan talks, smart people listen. In our conversation, Alan drops wisdom on topics that are crucial for any attorney looking to grow their practice and build a thriving firm. We dig into things about how to generate a steady stream of referrals and word of mouth business and how to adapt and innovate in the face of constant change. He challenges a lot of conventional wisdom and pushes you to think differently about your business. He argues, in today's world, long-term strategic planning is dead. Instead, you need to be thinking about terms of sentient strategy, staying aware of your environment and being ready to pivot on a dime. Alan has a way of cutting through the noise and getting to the heart of what really matters. Here's Alan Weiss on where it all began.
Alan Weiss:
Well, when I was fired in 1985 as president of a consulting firm, because the owner and I hated each other, I called everyone I knew and I said, I'm out doing my own thing because my wife said, "Forget the mortgage, but you better be serious." And I called everyone I had known from the past and someone at Merck who you just mentioned called me. I went on to work with them for 12 years by the way. The first person who I talked to down there told me what he needed and told me to give him a proposal, and so I created a proposal. I came back and it was for $14,000. This is 1985 or so.
As I'm sitting there, I began to see these streaking lights and I perspired heavily and I thought I was having a heart attack and I said, this is not the job for me. Health is more important than this. Well, I realized what was happening was I was holding my breath and when you hold your breath for two or three minutes, you start to see things and you perspire. Anyway, after that time, he pushed it back at me and he said, "This is fine, let's go." And I said, "Oh my God, it should have been 35,000." And that's when I started to understand and appreciate value-based fees.
Chris Dreyer:
That was going to be my follow-up question, was how long it shifted from the cost plus to the value base, but it sounds like number one.
Alan Weiss:
I never did cost plus. I used to work for a training firm in Princeton. We charged by the box and by the seat and by the head, by the day, and I said to myself, if I'm going to take the risks of being independent, I am never charging by a time unit. I know your audience must love that. I am never charging by somebody sitting in a chair. I'm going to charge based on my value. And I found that sort of the holdout professions, which would be accounting and architects and legal and so forth, and I'm not counting personal injury lawyers who are usually taking a piece of the action but they don't appreciate their own value. That's the problem.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think part of it is what you talk a lot about, is mindset and leadership. So many law firm owners, they're not taught how to run a successful business. They're taught to do the work and they don't think of themselves as entrepreneurs. In your book Million Dollar Consulting, you discuss the importance of having entrepreneurial mindset. So what attributes or characteristics do you see in most successful entrepreneurs?
Alan Weiss:
In no special order, but to narrow it down to just a few, the first thing is you have to have a supremely high self-esteem. Not over the top, but you have to differentiate between worth and efficacy. Efficacy is how well you do something. Now, I can't play any musical instrument. I can barely play the radio. I'm not efficacious at music, but man, can I speak and can I write and so things important to my career, I can do well. And if I fail to get something, if I fail to get a piece of business, I fail to get a book published, whatever it is, I simply say to myself, well, what have I learned and that I can use next time? I don't say I'm a lousy marketer. I don't say I'm a lousy writer. And so self-esteem is very, very important. The second thing is you have to have a remarkably strong sense of humor because humor keeps things in perspective.
If you look at the world today, missing an airplane or not getting a project is hardly earthshaking. My father jumped out of airplanes over New Guinea in the second World War with people shooting at him from 500 feet. He lived be 100. Nobody's shooting at us. And so a sense of humor is really important for the perspective and for the relief of stress. And then the third thing is you really have to be bright. And I mean you have to be, well-read and well-traveled. You have to know what's going on in different industries and the world and the markets. You have to have a strong vocabulary because vocabulary is the tools of our trade. Anybody who thinks that AI or ChatGPT is going to take over is out of their minds. Now, I can see legal boilerplate, I can see instructions for putting up a new TV and things like that, but the fact is that in 1982, John Nesbitt talked in Megatrends, which is the first hit book of that type about high-tech, high touch. It's truer today than ever.
And so as we look at AI and all this kind of stuff, we need high touch more than ever. And one of the things that I actually like about the legal profession is that if it's done well, it has to be high touch. I'll mention this to you. In 1968, I was graduated from Rutgers University and we were poor. I had no money and I was offered a full scholarship to Rutgers Law, 45,000 a year. 45,000 a year today is equivalent to $407,000. And I turned it down at the last minute. I said, I don't want to be a lawyer.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the things you said in terms of this mindset and confidence, it's a bit different, and it's the first time I've heard it is you don't refer to it as scope creep that's typically doing the work that the client wants you to do that's out of scope, not in the contract. But what's the other form of scope? Because I think there's kind of a corollary here in terms of confidence and mindset.
Alan Weiss:
Well, there's scope seek and that's a lowest esteem position where you want to keep doing things to justify your fee because you feel like an imposter, you don't feel your fee is right. And so consequently, while you're there, you say, while I know I'm working here on strategy, but there's some teamwork issues I'd be happy to include for you. And if you extrapolate that, you wind up washing the windows. So that low self-esteem issue causes us to offer more and more value without charging for it, which is preposterous. You can't pay your mortgage with free value.
Chris Dreyer:
You have a whole series on your podcast, The Uncomfortable Truth About Profit, and that was one that really stuck out and it's eliminating that waste. A lot of individuals struggle with public speaking, anxiety, and even attorneys presenting in court, right, as a litigator, as an inductee of the Professional Speaking Hall of Fame, what have you found some techniques that you've used to improve your speaking ability to overcome any types of anxiety or fear on the stage? What are some of the things just to become a better speaker?
Alan Weiss:
Well, this is a really good topic you bring up because there's this crap that says people fear public speaking more than they fear death. Right. So on the Seinfeld show, he's doing a eulogy and he says, "If that's true, the guy in the coffin has less to worry about than I do." You know what I mean? So it's that ridiculous. The issue here is that we use these bromides, we use these things to try to give us permission not to get better at something. So people say to me, "I have writer's block." I say, "Well write a sentence." They write a sentence. I say "There, I've healed you, you're healed." And with public speaking, you have to have a single conversation with an individual. Now, there's an audience out there, whether it's real in an auditorium or it's Zoom, it's remote. You just have to have a conversation.
And what you need to do is keep in mind you are not there to be judged. I've never looked at a smile sheet in my life. You are there to help people. And if you're there to help people, you'll put your entire entity, your entire persona into it because helping is a noble cause. I came from church this morning and it's lent, right? So my wife and I go to church in the morning and both, I'm a lector in church. It was a lector this morning, read a long passage in a monotone, and so you can't really appreciate the power of the passage. And then the priest gave a sermon in a monotone, speaking very low. And my point is that you shouldn't try to bring stardom onto yourself, but unless you use inflection and intonation and energy, you can't help anyone. In fact, you hurt them because they doze off. So it's unfortunate that in seminaries and in law school and in medical school and so forth, they don't teach people how to communicate well nor do MBA students learn it.
Chris Dreyer:
I kind of want to shift over to increasing profits, right? Personal injury attorneys listening, they want to generate more profit. And you talk about, hey, it's not the revenue, it's what you keep. You wrote this article, it's your not in the sales business, you're in the relationship business and you mentioned you can learn while you're talking. Can you kind of expound on that? What do you mean by that?
Alan Weiss:
If you have really entered into a true conversation where people feel free on both sides to interrupt each other because they're interrupting to understand things better and to ask questions. And if you're using, the reason I think you need a large vocabulary is you need command to these tools, these words we have to establish nuance to create real understanding for people because logic makes people think, but emotion makes them act. And so we have to forge these emotional ties with people both to take them on as a client and also to serve them well and to have them cooperate with us in the proper manner. So if it's conversational, you'll find that you'll get a lot better and I think more useful information from people. One of the problems in the medical field, and I think to a degree in the legal field is that people are afraid to ask questions.
They feel that they're simply not knowledgeable enough. They feel that they're going to be laughed at and so forth and so on. And so ironically, instead of being a fount of knowledge, I think professionals need to encourage people to ask questions. There is no such thing as a stupid question. There are some stupid answers, but not stupid questions. Very quick story. Two o'clock in the morning, one year, my wife wakes me up and said, "I think I might be having a heart attack." I said, "Well, do you want me to call 911?" She said, "No, take me to the hospital." I don't think she wanted 911 because she didn't feel she was dressed appropriately. So we get to the hospital, they immediately hook her up to everything because heart attacks two in the morning, and turns out she was fine.
But before that, the doctor came in, sat down next to me where I was sitting, he was the resident, and he asked her these questions and he turned to me and said, "Your wife's going to be fine. We'll keep her for observation, but it's no big deal." I said to him, "You asked her the exact same questions I asked my clients." And he said to me, "Well, of course I do. We're both diagnosticians." And so asking the right questions get you the right answers, establishes the right relationship, you get cooperation, you get commitment.
Chris Dreyer:
So on that, on the diagnose before prescribed, so we've all heard with its malpractice without doing the diagnosis. So there's two schools of thought. Some think the intake department should be the attorney that have at the top of Boone's taxonomy that can ask the more pointed questions. And then versus maybe the lower waged intake specific role that's just operating off of a script. So what's the train of thought? How do you balance that in terms of volume and profit?
Alan Weiss:
Personal injury attorneys I know here in Rhode Island I have dinner with or I speak to or we're on the same committees and so on, and some of these people have healthy seven figure TV heads. Right. They all tell me the same thing. And that is we never take on a case we don't think we can win and we don't think we can settle out of court. Okay. Now to what extent that's your audience as well, I don't know, but that's what they tell me here. I don't pretend to be a legal expert. However, having them tell me that, I'll tell you this, the latter situation you mentioned to me is unacceptable. If you've got an important claim, if you've got an important piece of distress, whatever it is, you need to have the faith that a key person is going to talk to you directly. Because if that person doesn't and you're talking to some lower level, lower paid person, you're going to assume that in the future, that's the person who's going to contact me unless I need somebody really important and there's a reason for it.
I called a bank yesterday to talk about some financing. I'm considered a high net worth individual. And the woman on the phone kept putting me on hold to talk to other people to get answers. And I said to her, "I will not do business with your bank because you should have immediately put me through to a senior officer. But your process is such that you filter everything and that's not agreeable with me." So they lost a nice piece of business. So it's your former answer that's the important one. Speak to the heavy hitter and see if that person is sympathetic and empathetic to what you need.
Chris Dreyer:
I agree with that. And I think in terms of how technology's changing with vehicle safety and the collision detections and things like that, it's going to lend itself with going deeper and trying to provide more value than just the assembly line scenario. You have another, I would say, controversial opinion on just marketing. Right. So some individuals are like, it's quality versus quantity and there's different mindsets. And you speak on episode 334, The Uncomfortable Truth, you talk about how it's quantity over quality. And this is a bit different. Most people are like just focus, quality, quality, quality. But why do you think that it's more important to focus on the quantity perspective?
Alan Weiss:
A very good friend of mine, Noah Kagan, has started quite a few multi-million dollar businesses. He's the only person ever on my podcast twice. That's how good he is. He cited a study that was done where two groups were put together and one group focused on quality for innovation. And there were a few people and they focused on a few ideas. The other group was a quantity group, more people, and they focused on any idea they wanted to. And at the end of the day, so to speak, the quantity group had better ideas because they focused on more ideas. And so what I'm telling you is in the United States of America, 360 million people. In the world with 6 billion people, whatever, it's today, if you look at, depending whether you work domestically or globally, I know attorneys work basically domestically, but I don't, if you view everyone as a potential client, how could you not hit? How could you not be successful?
So I think that you have to have a wide net. And if I may add one more thing here. As I watch these attorney's ads, only one or two of them have on people whom they've helped, not actors, people whom they've helped, who are providing a testimonial for them. And even those people are too scripted. There is no better source of income than a referral, none. You say to yourself, do you know a good pediatrician? Do you know a good vacation spot? Do you know a good personal injury attorney? And so I think these attorneys should be using their clients so long as it's legal, which I believe it is, to get them referrals. I believe they should emphasize to their clients whom they've helped, talk to other people about me. And so I don't think that attorneys among other professions are sufficiently using referral business, which is also the most inexpensive way to get new business.
Chris Dreyer:
You've written an entire book on this, right? So Million Dollar Referrals, you emphasize the importance of these relationships being so powerful, right? They carry trust with them. They're inexpensive. What are just some of the tactics that the PI attorney's listening can use to maybe nurture more referral relationships?
Alan Weiss:
Stay in touch with your clients even after the case is finished, stay in touch with them. Provide them with something periodically that's not an upsell that reminds them of their relationship and talks about say, hazards today. Because somebody's going to say, I know somebody facing that hazard. I'll give you a simple example, a social proof. We have two big generators that can power this house for months. Right. In the worst case. Right. New England winters. Right. Of course, the New England winters are much calmer today, and I have these two big generators. But anyway.
The generator company gets some money several times a year by servicing them, and they come and service and they send me a bill. But every month they send me a newsletter and they tell me how to better insulate my house, how to stop leaks, how to do this, how to do that. They're not telling me a thing. They're giving me value for free. And since the newsletter goes to hundreds of clients, it's not costing them a whole lot. That's what attorneys need to do. Without offering legal advice or anything that's unethical, they need to get in touch with people and bring them up to date on some of the hazards today. Happy clients talk to people who are potential clients, and I think that's overlooked.
Chris Dreyer:
Fighting continuous value helps keep you top of mind, but how do you make that leap from being just another lawyer who sends emails and shows up in the social feeds to being the go-to attorney they think of when they're leading legal help? It all comes down to your personal brand. Your brand is a unique blend of your personality, values and expertise that makes you the standout from the crowd. It's what makes you memorable and trustworthy in the eyes of your clients and prospects. When you nail your branding, it becomes a powerful magnet that attracts new business. The key to effective branding is consistency. Every touch point, your website, social media profiles, marketing materials, everything should convey the same look and feel and message. This creates a cohesive and memorable brand identity, sticks in people's minds. So when someone needs a PI attorney, they won't just think, who is the lawyer that emails me all the time? They'll think about you even when you're not around.
Alan Weiss:
What a brand really is, is how people think about you when you're not around. And so when you've suffered a personal injury, right, you've got to say, wait, I need a personal injury lawyer, but you're not thinking of that person otherwise. Now, that's counteracted by some of these massive commercials that we see by the trade. Now, some of them, like you'd have a C-level actor, a washed up actor who you can tell is doing 1000 of these a day. They appear all over the country. It's the exact same thing, call, and then they put in the name and the rest of the pitch is the same. Nobody goes for that. But the guys who are more local and the women for that matter, I shouldn't say that, who are more local and who are recognizable and who are on boards, who sponsor charities and sponsor arts groups, these people are a lot more believable when they're involved in the community and they're knowable.
So I think marketing is largely despite these millions of dollars of TV buys, and I won't argue on the ROI if people wouldn't do them, but for a lot of attorneys who can't afford or don't want to make million dollar investments in advertising, I think marketing is really about showing up. Marketing is about your name being associated with good works, being associated with good causes, being associated with good people. And consequently, you can make more networking at, oh, I don't know, a Rotary club or a Chamber of Commerce meeting or a political fundraiser or an arts group, I think than you can doing something that has to be in the media.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's lean into that. I'd love to explore that. So you have mass distribution where you get a ton of impressions, say TV, radio, digital versus getting belly to belly and shaking hands and individuals, and there's this different type of trust component. So how do you feel, because you're maybe reaching one individual as opposed to thousands on the radio. So maybe expand on your thoughts on that.
Alan Weiss:
Logic makes you think and emotion makes you act. There's nothing so strong as a personal meeting. There's nothing as powerful as seeing someone and hearing from them. Not in a scripted situation, not in an artificial situation. I mean, some of these people, they put on trench coats and they put on hats and they have four generations of lawyers with them and so forth. Okay. But it's a facade. And meeting someone who's simpatico with you, when you need that talent, you'll remember them. There's a pretty strong psychological connection here with this in management consulting. Leaders who want to promote people tend to promote people, even if they all have the same talents with those whom they see regularly, they see personally, they see regularly, they're more comfortable promoting them, they're more comfortable with them. Remote work has really damaged that. Some of the things we advise people on is how to get yourself known and seen and not just be a Zoom potato.
It's not as effective. And I think the same thing with the law. I think that people have to see the attorney as a human being who has interest outside the law, who is pleasant to talk to, who isn't trying to sell them anything. And then when they're needed, they'll be highly regarded. But one of the drawbacks of TV is that it becomes a competition into who's putting the most money into the production. And I have a phrase I use with people who just use money as a metric, and I tell them, "There's always a bigger boat." I don't care how big your boat is, there's always a bigger boat. So stop worrying about having the biggest boat. Worry about having a comfortable boat. So in marketing, you have to ask yourself what's really comfortable for me?
Chris Dreyer:
That's really good because I think some of the big TV advertisers I've had on are, you got to saturate the market, right? You got to be at the top, and that would be a different approach is what you're saying. The other thing, the Zoom potato, we noticed after Covid that in the legal space, which has been slow to adopt technology, finally started to push technology and you got Zoom depositions and things like this, and you have your most recent book, the Sentient Strategy. Can you give us a top level view on that book in regards to how it's different and thinking about strategy?
Alan Weiss:
Well, I think it's important for the legal profession among others, and that is this, I respect the hell out of Peter Drucker, but the late Peter Drucker, but he invented strategy 70 years ago, 70 years ago, over at GM with Sloan. I've been thinking for a long time that it's ridiculous to try to look 10 years out today and spend weeks and weeks trying to do that because the world's too turbulent, disruption and volatility and so on. And that was pre-pandemic. When pandemic hit, I said, okay, enough. And so I devised a strategy that basically looks at two things. It looks at what is the degree of awareness of the environment in which you're operating for you and your company, for you and your practice, and then how conscious are you of the impact of your actions? And if you look at those two dimensions and then you look at strategic factors that can propel you forward, I advise people to look 12 to 15 months out. That's it. And I advise them to set strategy in one to two days. That's sentient strategy.
It's relatively inexpensive. I've certified about 70 people globally. It's being done in several, well, three continents at least. We have to get away from this hubris that says, we know what's going to happen. Nobody forecast the internet and it rules our lives today. Nobody knew that Covid was coming, but I'll tell you something, I have three different investment advisors, and when Covid hit, I called each one of them and they said, "Do you have cash?" I said, "I have cash." They said, "Then do nothing." And I said to them later, "How could you have been so sort of sanguine about this?" And they said, "We all knew there was going to be turbulence. We didn't know it'd be a microbe, but we knew it'd be something."
And I think attorneys have to expect there's going to be new forms of litigation. You have to be agile. See, I think you need to actually explore disruption and explore volatility and turn it into an offensive weapon and not just a defense of fear. If you look at AI and what it might mean in terms of plagiarism, I mean, there are already claims that you can't copyright anything done on AI. It's not an original human creation, right? So where is this going with personal injury? I mean, I don't think you have to be a genius to start to look at some possibilities. So I think that's what the legal profession needs to look at, and I think that's the impression that we need to lead with people, that they're leading edge.
Chris Dreyer:
I love every bit of that. And that's completely different to your Verne Harnish, your Gino Wickman that are saying, hey, the five and 10 year outlook. We're an EOS traction based agency. I like the simplified framework of regular meeting cadences and things like that. But I always had a problem with, what's your vivid vision five and 10 years? I don't know. Who can really do that?
Alan Weiss:
It was hard to do 10 years ago. It's impossible to do now. I mean, Verne Harnish and those folks are good people, but if you're trying to look more than 15 months out, you're kidding yourself. You're kidding your clients. You have no idea. For example, I can make a very, very strong case, I won't take the time here, that this whole movement toward electric cars is going to fail. We're going to have a rotting electric infrastructure. It will not have improved the carbon footprint, and people are on the wrong bandwagon. Now, I'm not going to go farther with that right now. When I say that in front of the right audiences, people come to me quickly and they want to know, tell us more about that. What does it mean with my business?
Chris Dreyer:
You work with GE and Jack Welch, legendary leader. You have so many different styles of growth and growing an entity. What's your thoughts on how GE grew with mergers and acquisitions through different industries and sectors and things? And then it just seemed like after he wasn't at the helm, it just kind of fell apart, just completely off the cuff. Just kind of wanted to hear just your opinion, just to riff on that a little bit.
Alan Weiss:
Well, I used to watch Welch what they call the pit at the Croton where managers would drill down questions like the gladiators are reading, and you'd answer them. The fact of the matter was that, and yeah, we need to forget this servant leadership crap and all that. We need strong leaders, right? Nobody's ever yelled for a humble consultant, right? They want somebody who can do things. That's me. Nobody ever said, get me a humble attorney. They want an attorney who thinks he or she can win every case. Nobody wants a humble surgeon. And so GE went from the last of the conglomerates. It owned a locomotive manufacturing place. It owned appliances, light bulbs, it owned NBC, it owned a credit place, and Welch made it hugely strong. When he left, the succession plan was awful, the bench strength was gone. And now GE is a wreck. They're three different companies, they still have 65 billion in debt.
And so leadership is everything. And leadership has to be bold. It has to be innovative, it has to look toward growth. And so to make this, my summary here would be this for anybody, plateaus always erode, always erode through the laws of entropy. Nobody ever coasted up. The only way you coast is going down so you don't want to coast. So the secret to life is constant growth, and the secret to growth is constant innovation. And GE did that. They said, if you're not one or two in the market, we're going to sell you. Last of the conglomerates. But today, we don't have that kind of strength in a lot of places.
And so IBM had to go outside and bring in Gerstner to save the place, and he did. He was from the food industry, but he knew how to lead. And we don't have enough leaders in government particularly and in the private sector and in nonprofits, and certainly not in academia as we've seen, to really lead boldly into a very uncertain future. And if any of these people try to look 10 years out, they're going to trip over their own shoelaces and fall on their faces.
Chris Dreyer:
Jack Welch was firing the bottom 10%, and now it's more challenging to do that. You need the driver. You need someone that makes the tough decisions because it impacts the whole business as a whole.
Alan Weiss:
You don't run a company through its comm system. You don't run it through its HR people. And so things are tougher today, but good people, smart people get through that. I mean, attorneys know it more than anyone. There are more rules and regulations and this and that, but attorneys know how to work the system, and I don't mean that negatively. That's why you want a really smart attorney who will take prudent risk let's say. Same thing with consultants. We can't sit back and say they won't let us. When I hear somebody say, oh, they won't let us. I don't know who they is, but I do know the person I'm talking to is weak.
Chris Dreyer:
You're a constant writer, right? There's no writing block for you. So what upcoming projects are you really excited about and where can our audience go to learn more about you?
Alan Weiss:
Well, you can go to alanweiss.com, A-L-A-N-W-E-I-S-S.com. There are free blogs every week. There's a free video every day, A Minute With Alan. There's a free video every month. So there's a lot of free stuff in all media. Also, my next book, which is due out in June, and I'm about halfway through right now, it's called Building Dynamic Communities, so legal people might be interested in this, and it's about how you build a dynamic community who become evangelists for you and therefore help each other, help themselves and help you. One of the things I got a big kick out is the first viral marketer was really St. Paul, and he did it without electronics, right? This is building dynamic communities in the for-profits, the nonprofits, doesn't matter, certainly in any profession. I would urge people to join me. My podcast is every Thursday, as you mentioned, very kindly, The Uncomfortable Truth. And I post on social media all the time, so I'd welcome you to follow me, and I'd welcome you to disagree with me too. That's what this country's about.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much to Alan for coming on the show today. Let's recap. Stop making excuses. Start taking action. We all have those little voices in our heads telling us why we can't do something. I'm not a good public speaker. I don't have the time to write, whatever it is, but here's the thing. Those excuses are holding you back from reaching your full potential. So identify what your excuse is and start taking small steps to overcome it. Want to be a better public speaker? Start by recording yourself and watching it back. Want to write more? Commit to writing one paragraph a day. Little by little, you'll build momentum until that excuse no longer has any power over you.
Alan Weiss:
You have to have a supremely high self-esteem, but you have to differentiate between worth and efficacy. Efficacy is how well you do something. And if I fail to get something, if I fail to get a piece of business, I fail to get a book published, whatever it is, I simply say to myself, well, what have I learned and that I can use next time? I don't say I'm a lousy marketer. I don't say I'm a lousy writer. And so self-esteem is very, very important.
Chris Dreyer:
Quantity and quality, when it comes to marketing, you need both. You want to show up consistently on platforms where your ideal clients are hanging out, whether that's digitally on social media channels and streaming services, or in-person at community events. It's not just about being everywhere. It's about making genuine quality connections with people who do become your clients. Really take the time to listen to them, care for them, and wow them with your service. That's how you turn them into raving fans who will send you more business your way.
Alan Weiss:
There is no better source of income than a referral. Stay in touch with your clients even after the case is finished. If you view everyone as a potential client, how can you not hit? How can you not be successful? So I think that you have to have a wide net. If you've got an important claim, if you've got an important piece of distress, whatever it is, you need to have the faith that a key person is going to talk to you directly, because if that person doesn't and you're talking to some lower level, lower paid person, you're going to assume that in the future that's the person who's going to contact me unless I need somebody really important and there's a reason for it.
Chris Dreyer:
Embrace change, look for opportunities. The world is changing faster than ever, and as PI attorneys, you can't just rely on the old way of doing things. Be proactive and think about how tech like AI could impact our industry. Staying curious, stay aware of what's happening around you. Be willing to adapt. Don't get caught up on the long-term planning. Focus on the next 12 to 15 months and be ready to pivot when needed. Remember, if you're not growing, you're dying. So keep pushing yourself to innovate and improve.
Alan Weiss:
You have to be agile. See, I think you need to actually explore disruption and explore volatility and turn it into an offensive weapon and not just a defensive field.
Chris Dreyer:
All right everybody, that's it for today. I hope we had a few more tools to your kid. For more about Alan, head on over to the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button. I sincerely appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, Founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I'm out.
