Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Gold Medal Moments on Personal Injury Mastermind. This is a special mini series that highlights my favorite lessons from former PIM guests. Each of these trailblazers and thought leaders will speak live at the inaugural PIMCon, the Personal Injury Mastermind Conference. Trust me, you don't want to miss them live. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer. Over the next few weeks, we'll be sharing can't miss insights and bite sized pieces to help get your firm from good to goat. Mike Morse didn't just build Michigan's largest personal injury law firm. He revolutionized the way attorneys think about marketing and client relationships. His approach, be bold, authentic, and unafraid to show your human side. As Mike puts it, it's not about saying, "I'm going to fight for you and win," it's about sharing those goofy real life moments that resonate with people. Complementing Mike's creative vision is John Nachazel's data-driven precision.
John transformed the firm's operations by implementing what he calls the Jumbotron, a comprehensive dashboard of key performance indicators that guides every strategic decision. Too often John notes, "We're treating the symptom without really understanding the problem." Together they've written Fireproof, a blueprint for running a law firm like a high-performance business. Their message is clear. Success in today's legal landscape requires more than just skilled advocacy. It demands entrepreneurial thinking, data informed decision-making, and a willingness to break from tradition. To hear Mike and John live, secure your spot at pimcon.org, use code FIREPROOF. That's F-I-R-E-P-R-O-O-F for $200 off your ticket. Let the Gold Medal Moments begin. Here's Mike Morse and why you want to ditch vanilla and be more like Cherry Garcia.
Mike Morse:
The Cherry Garcia concept over vanilla, it's really doing the opposite of what everybody else is doing and being bold and taking risks and being funny and self-deprecating, and bringing in your pets or your mom or your kids or whatever makes you different and unique. That's what people want to see. I mean, if you look at my best posts, it's not the ones of me saying, "I'm going to fight for you and win. Call me."
I was on an island with my daughters a few days ago and my social media person said, "It's fashion ice cream day. Get me a picture with you and your kids eating ice cream." And I don't eat a ton of ice cream, but we like ice cream once in a while. Okay, so we had these little agonized cups and we took a goofy picture and my tongue's hanging out. I was like, ah, it's hundreds and hundreds of comments and shares and likes. And it was like, that's what people care about. That's what you and I care about when we're trolling the social media and so many law firms don't get it, and they just put up this boring that's never going to do anything for them. And so it's just taking risks and being different, and that's where people should... whatever they do, that's how they should do it is be different.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's shift gears to the operational backbone that supports this creative approach. Enter John Nachazel, the numbers wizard behind Mike Morse's law firm's impressive growth. As the firm's COO and co-author of Fireproof, John brings a data-driven precision to the practice that's just as crucial as Mike's marketing flair. John's about to introduce us to a concept he calls the Jumbotron, a powerful tool that's changing the game for law firm management. Let's listen in as John explains how data can transform your practice from guesswork to goldmine.
John Nachazel:
Sure. So the Jumbotron is data, it's KPIs, it's metrics, it's the dashboard, it's whatever you want to call it. We like the colorful analogy of you go to a sporting event and you see a jumbotron and it's got a bunch of numbers on there. If it's a football game, how do you know which players to put on the field, what play to call if you don't know the score of the game, if you don't know the time left, who's got how many timeouts? What's the down and distance? You just have to have that data in order to make intelligent decisions. And we found that there's still so many law firms that are playing their game without a jumbotron, and it's got to cause so much stress and it's just so much guesswork. So what EOS teaches is you have five to 15 numbers that give you clarity that you need to have access to that gives you a highlight of how to approach your business.
And we have gone crazy deep on that and turned it into really where I present about 400 unique slides a year. We have our staple of 12 to 15 slides, PowerPoint slides that I present each week at our leadership level 10. But then I'll supplement it with, here's the new interesting thing. Somebody throws out a hypothesis of, "I think this is happening," or whatever it is. And I'll do an ad hoc data analysis on it to determine the truth. Somebody suspects something and then we go figure out what it is. I'm very dexterous with large amounts of data, and we have multiple people on our staff who are as well. So that gives us the ability to properly size the problem and understand the problem. And once you've done that, then it just becomes like shooting fish in a barrel to say, "Okay, well, lots of us are good at knowing what the solutions to the problem are, but too often we are treating the symptom, not really understanding the problem, not able to peel back the onion and see where the data leads you."
And so I prefer to trust the data and trust the logic and identify the problem as soon as it emerges when it's small and you can... in the book we talk about putting... it's a smoke detector, and if you detect the problem when it's small, you can put out the fire with a little cup of water. But if you're not even aware of it and you wait until the end of the month or the end of the quarter and you meet with your CPA and you talk about these small handful of numbers, well, you're going to have a three alarm blaze before you understand what's going on. And we believe you need a weekly cadence, weekly insight of all the leading indicators that are going to eventually lead to the results that you're hoping for and tracking. But you need to understand those things that are driving that progress along the way in real time.
Chris Dreyer:
That wraps up this Gold Medal Moment with the dynamic Fireproof duo, Mike Morse and John Nachazel. Visit pimcon.org to go from good to goat. And join us live in Scottsdale September 15 through 17, where we'll conquer personal injury marketing, network with industry titans, celebrate excellence and become the greatest of all time personal injury law. Tickets are limited. To secure your all-access pass today, just head to pimcon.org. That's P-I-M-C-O-N.O-R-G. I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to these Gold Medal Moments, and I hope to see you in the winner's circle at PIMCon. For $200 off, use code FIREPROOF.
