Sasha Berson:
Without marketing, everything else is broken. Then it's your intake/sales.
Chris Dreyer:
Today's guest breaks down exactly how to hit those critical revenue milestones. Whether you're pushing for your first million or scaling to 10, welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, the show where ambitious attorneys come to learn, implement and get results. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere. I'm your host Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, we help elite personal injury law firms dominate first-page rankings. Sasha Berson, Chief Growth Master at Grow Law Firm has a massive vision, helping 2,000 firms double their revenue. He's been in the trenches since 2018. What makes Sasha different is he looks at law firm marketing through the lens of hard data and real metrics, something I'm personally passionate about. Lead into actual numbers behind scaling a practice from client acquisition costs, exactly how many leads you need to hit your growth targets and if you're battling it out in a crowded market, pay special attention to his insights on finding profitable niches that other law firms are completely overlooking. Let's dive in.
Sasha Berson:
Go where most people do not go. Do not go into the crowded space that are auto accidents unless you are in a smaller market than there are only three other attorneys and you go drink beers with them every Friday and you're just going to tidy up the market 33, 33, 33%. If you as a firm holder are not focused on the profit, you do not need to be in business for yourself. You need to know and operate with those numbers at least once a week, look at those numbers. Very important. We have clients in exceptionally competitive markets, where they do exceptionally well, doing malpractice cases against dentists. Things that most PI lawyers just don't think about. Like if your case acquisition cost on the marketing side or the car accident is 35%, you're not making money, you're losing money, but you can go and get a dog bite for 12%. I would take four of those over any quantity of auto accidents.
Chris Dreyer:
So I completely agree and every jurisdiction is going to be a little bit different. You got the one bite law, some markets are better than others. And what you're talking about, the cost to acquire a client, if it's super low and even if the values, there may be a gap there because the cost acquirers is so much lower where even though it's worth maybe less on average, it's still better in the long haul. You've been involved in multiple successful companies that you've scaled have been a part of and tell me about transitioning legal and this space.
Sasha Berson:
I always wanted to have a marketing company, to own a marketing company and it was a much smaller business when I joined it way back in 2018. We need to focus on one industry where we can have the highest impact and we create a checklist of all of the criteria that an industry must satisfy for us and we must satisfy for them. And legal industry just checked off all of those boxes and that's how we ended up serving law firm owners.
Chris Dreyer:
And the vision, I guess what pulled you is you guys have a big vision, you helped 2,000 firms double their revenue. So tell me how you came across that goal, that vision, that guiding light.
Sasha Berson:
Back in 2,000, this is when I started my first brick and mortar business here in the US, I very quickly realized that the most difficult aspect of the business, it was getting new customers. It was so incredibly difficult. You need to have a really well-oiled marketing machine. Everything else almost doesn't matter because it's your first building block. If you do everything else right, but your marketing sucks, everything else becomes irrelevant. I know how difficult it can be to be a small business owner operating a $500,000 company or $1 million company, a $3 million company is still very difficult to operate. So I'm like, "We're going to help 2,000 small business owners make their lives better by making their business better."
Chris Dreyer:
Let's say you got a PI firm that's trying to hit that $1 million mark, right? They're ramping up, they're bootstrapped. What type of things should they be thinking about with limited capital to succeed in this highly saturated market?
Sasha Berson:
Search marketing is fantastic because if you're good, you're very transparent, you're very accountable, your metrics are very easy to track. So to me, if you want to get that 1 million, and by the way, I can promise you because I've been there a few times, you will breathe a little bit easier once you get to the 1 million, but you shouldn't stop there. Your North Star should be somewhere 5 million plus. That should be an intermediate goal and you will breathe easier because you'll have better support at $1 million in gross revenue and you will be able to focus on growing the business.
You look at your point A, where you are today, $500,000 for example. My average case value for PI, we're here in Chicago or you're south of Chicago, north of Chicago, let's say run-of-the-mill case 15k. To get another $500,000 worth of settled cases, you need approximately 35 cases. Let's say your conversion rate, also known as close rate to the rest of the world, 25%. You talk to four prospects, you get one client. So you're going to take 35 and multiply it by four, you're going to get 140 leads. We're going to call them sales qualified leads because they hit the criteria. They're not like any lead, they are people who actually have been injured, have a case. You need 140 leads.
Where's that lowest hanging fruit where you can go get those 140 leads? I guarantee you, in almost any sizable market, it's going to be Google. And now you say, "All right, I have limited resources." Got it. Let's imagine that your bank account is a thousand bucks. How do you do this? I think you would do it about the same way as you did the law school. Whenever you went to law school, it was never cheap. It was never free for most people. You borrowed, you invested into yourself and you got to sit for the bar exam and you passed the bar. And let's say today's dollars, undergrad plus grad plus law school might've cost you six, seven years of 300k. Big investment. Now you need to invest just a little more to become quite a bit more successful.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Sasha Berson:
Go borrow 50, 60 grand, fund your marketing machine, get the 140 leads, make the money.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's say we've got a good scenario, a different firm, they've had a little success. Maybe they're a decent litigator, maybe they got some referrals, they're a relationship person. Who knows? Maybe they're a former athlete. And they're getting some referrals, they've invested a little bit and they're kind of that five to 10, five to 10 million. Your options start to change a little bit. What do you see next on channels to look at and then just how the organization starts to transition just the whole organization and the functions involved?
Sasha Berson:
Yeah, I love, love getting to the 10 million top line revenue because this is where your life as a business owner operator really transforms. At $10 million, you actually do not have to operate that business anymore. You can hire an incredibly proficient person who is going to report to you once a week or once a month and they will be operating that business for you if you choose to go that route. You can build out your five main functions within the business, which is marketing, which attracts prospective clients, your intake, also known as sales to the rest of the world, your operations, your HR and your leadership. You can build out that org chart and your company at $10 million is going to be a well-oiled machine. At $5 million, this is a lot harder to reach the same level, but it's possible. You will probably be offshoring some of those key roles because it'll be hard to look in Chicago, labor cost for good people, insanely high. So at 10 million, you can afford it. At five million, questionable.
You are probably going to be still investing considerable amount of money into search marketing because this is the big thing that a lot of people don't talk about, but they think it's all worth. Chris, obviously you and I know this, but most of search happens on Google, Google gives you five or six at bats now, above the fold. If you show up it's three out of those five or six can't bat, oh my God, you're very wealthy. There are probably fewer than half a percent of law firms, even in the PI space, that actually can consistently show up for three or four out of five or six at bats that Google gives them. So even if you get close to $10 million, but you're looking consistently at the right keywords and you're not, you're not maximizing the yield that you can be getting from Google, you're not done.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's face it, being a great lawyer isn't enough. To succeed, you need to generate consistent leads. Personal injury is the most saturated niche. Competition is fierce and differentiation is everything. When the deck is stacked against you, you need a comprehensive resource to beat the competition. My latest book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing is your roadmap to consistent leads and exponential growth. It is a masterclass on marketing for personal injury firms. It's packed with actionable strategies on where to invest your marketing dollars for maximum impact. No more guesswork, no more wasted ad spend, just clear proven methods to transform your firm from good to GOAT. Grab your copy of Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing on Amazon, link is in the show notes.
I'll say this, for me personally, from eight to 10 million was significantly harder than 20 million. And filling out those leadership roles, I think below 10, it's hard because you're talking six-figure salaries for all your VPs and executives and directors and trying to hit at least a good leader in each of those areas. You hit a certain threshold where you need HR because you've got more people and you need to recruit more and all these things. So for me, and I know that sounds like, "Oh yeah, that's easy to say," but really, I've experienced it. It was incredibly hard to get there, but then it was like you figure this out.
So at 10 million, depending upon the market, there's probably not a ton of revenue to invest in traditional media like TV unless you're sniping it. Outdoor, you could do okay, you could own some markets with limited outdoor. Radio's been effective. Talk to me outside of search, what channels do you see working for your clients. Transparently, we get a lot that asks for social media, but only a small fraction, a very small percentage are doing social right. A lot of them are doing the dance, top of funnel stuff, but they aren't creating a big enough audience to really have an impact.
Sasha Berson:
Yeah, I have very mixed feelings about social for lawyers. Here's what I found through a lot of observation and some testing. First of all, it's unnatural to look for a professional service provider on social media. If you come across their content, good. But are you looking for a personal injury lawyer near me on TikTok? Probably not. Social media when done right in 2024 and beyond, it's about the video and it's been like that for the last few years. And if it is about video, guess who's going to be creating it? It will be you and/or your partners and/or your associates. Once you exhaust, once you squeeze every drop out of search, I think that in parallel, you should be doing, which is DIY, have to do it yourself, it's actually networking. I think you're going to get the biggest bang for that time spent and you have to do it in a very structured fashion.
It's not a here or there. It's, hey, I'm actually allocating budgeting on my calendar, 10, 12, 18, 20 hours a month to networking with other attorneys who do not practice in PI and I'm going to build relationships with them and over years, they're going to develop a stream of new case for me. But you're building a law firm, one day you're going to be retiring by desire or by default. If half or more than half of your business is coming through referrals, that valuation is going to take a major hit because the new owner is just not going to carry over to him or her.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, a lot of truth to that. Search is going to have the intent. I think for me personally, starting with direct response and hitting that until you can start to allocate the proper budget to really invest in brand and brand takes some time. The surprising role that I never hear and I would just like to see if you hear this, is we hear intake manager, but do you ever hear sales enablement manager?
Chris Dreyer:
To me, that's like a must have. In my space, it's one of the strongest roles. It helps with my data, my CRM, elevating my staff. Why do you think in the legal space that rule is never discuss?
Sasha Berson:
Most law firms staying small, inherently, most small businesses are going to stay very small. I think something like 92% of all small businesses will never hit $1 million in gross revenue and 0.04% will get to $10 million, so one out of two and a half thousand will hit that $10 million. I think the root cause is that, and this applies to law firms specifically very well, that just about every law firm was started by a specialist or specialists in law, not business people. What you are talking about requires a substantial business acumen and that is something that needs to be developed. So I think that people do not talk about those positions. I think that when you look at charts and overwhelming majority of law firms, the org chart is broken or there are so many gaps. So yes, marketing is your number one. It's the first layer of your foundation. Without marketing, everything else is broken. Then it's your intake/sales.
Chris Dreyer:
There were so many gems in the conversation with Sasha. If you got value from this episode, do me a favor, share it with another firm owner who's trying to scale. And make sure you've subscribed to the Personal Injury Mastermind podcast on whatever platform you're listening to right now. We drop new episodes every week with experts who are actually in the trenches building and scaling successful practices. You can learn more about rankings and all the resources Sasha mentioned in the show notes. For those of you who want to dive deeper, pick up a copy of my new book, Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT, found on Amazon. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
