Chris Dreyer:
Why do some law firm owners get stuck working 80-hour weeks for the same revenue while others scale to eight figures while barely stepping foot in the office? The answer comes down to one word, leverage. Today we're breaking down the four specific types of leverage you need to stop grinding and start scaling.
This is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite performance marketing agency for personal injury law firms. Usually I'm sitting down with the heavy-hitters to unpack their massive growth blueprints, but today we're back with another solo-cast. Every single year, I reread the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Naval is an elite investor and philosopher and his framework for building wealth relies on four distinct types of leverage, labor, capital, code and content. Today we're getting into the nitty-gritty of how to take those four principles of leverage and apply them directly to your personal injury firm so you can maximize your output. Let's get into it.
So the first one is collaboration or labor. This is the oldest form of leverage. It's why your mom asks you how many employees you have at your firm or your business because it's the easiest to understand. The goal of collaboration or labor is the more labor you have, the more output you have essentially. It's also of the four types of leverage, it's the most challenging, the most complicated, the most difficult, but it is the easiest to understand. So to give you a simple explanation, you have a big pile of boulders and you want to move that pile of boulders from one location to another location, you just get more humans to do it and you can do it faster. And at our company, this is how we think about output for the most part. And I'm going to talk about other forms of leverage, but this is the most common, right?
You can think about how to encompass this in many different ways, and I'll give you a few. So the first is you always hear you want to hire A players. Well, no crap, right? Because an A player has more output, they have more collaboration ability, they have more output ability than a B or a C player. That's why. They have the ability to do more when you pay them. Your lead attorney, you don't want them drafting every single demand letter. You want them focused on the highest leveraged activities, the high level strategy, the highest scored cases with the most potential. But really, it's more people can do more things and better people could do more things. It's a reason why there's so much nearshoring right now. And nearshoring, it used to be a huge pricing arbitrage opportunity where in the US, you go hire a paralegal or an assistant in say South or Central America or the Philippines because you could get this big discount.
Well, now we're becoming more interconnected. And what you're seeing, the Hire With Near, the TalentCrosses and all these different organizations is those prices are increasing because we're more interconnected. And it's the reason why the paraprofessional position was created, the paralegal, to do some of the activities at a cheaper cost than the lawyer. That's the reality, right? These are the things that people don't talk about. And it's if you want more output from your top performer, get them an assistant. Maximize their ability to enhance their throughput, enhance their output. This is the most challenging. It takes many years to become a good leader. That's why there's so many famous books about leadership from Lencioni or The Motive and this book and that book. It's because it's the most complicated of the four forms of leverage.
A lot of times too, when I look at businesses and I see businesses that don't scale and I think, "Oh, that individual's really sharp. Why did their business hit a certain cap?" A lot of times it's because of the founder. It's not somebody that you want to follow. They don't lead by example. And to understand this and to really have a lot of leverage, you have to be someone that people want to follow. And that's just reality. So that's why I think some of these A-holes, we've all had these A-hole clients in the past and you see their small businesses, because nobody wants to follow them. They're a jerk. But number one, the form of leverage is collaboration or labor. It's the biggest things that you can think about is hiring A players, training your people, identifying the highest value activities of your high cost labor and putting them on those activities. Think about the paraprofessionals, the assistants, and just essentially getting more labor. The way that you would look at this from a scorecard perspective, it would be utilization.
You would track utilization, how much activity they have. You want to be that 80, 85 percentile unless they are an intake specialist because you don't want them on the phone that much. And then you could also track from a metric perspective, you could track revenue per head. You want to be in at least that $200,000 per employee range. That's if you're optimized, if your company's really optimized by headcount and not by code and some of these other forms I'm going to talk about in the future, that's the number that you need to be at is around 200,000 in order to be profitable.
The second form of leverage is capital. So the goal of capital is to use money to buy time and to buy market share. How you do that is in the PI space, there's a lot of different methods, but litigation finance. You could get capital to speed up your marketing deployment. For example, you could borrow against your case inventory with a company like Esquire Bank. Look, I have no affiliation with Esquire Bank. I'm just telling you, of my clients, what I see them doing, I see Esquire mentioned quite frequently. There's a book called The Seven Powers that talks about scale economies. And with capital, you can get more distribution for cheaper. For example, if you buy in bulk or you buy over long periods of time. Capital also allows you to buy wisdom. And what I mean by that is when you have enough capital, you can afford C-suite talent, a COO, a CFO, a chief strategy officer, maybe a managing attorney.
Capital buys time. And that's why you see these businesses throughout history utilize leverage outside of just you don't pay tax on debt, but it is a very important or strategic component of leverage, and that's capital. And if you look at some of the biggest PI firms, they're using this lever very wisely. Maybe they're utilizing private equity, maybe they're utilizing their case inventory or they're doing traditional financing, but this is a component. The Rockefellers used it. This is why you look at overfunded whole life insurance of a component of using this as leverage, assets, maybe purchasing your law firm building, borrowing against it as a hard asset. There's a lot of strategies that goes into this. And if you can understand capital, it allows you to buy wisdom and a top talent, which we know that goes hand in hand with the first point of leverage being collaboration or labor.
The third is code or software. This is a new form of leverage. We see this in the PI space. There's AI intake. There's AI chase agents. We got CaptureNow from an AI intake. We've got Neato from a chase agent perspective. There's automation, CRMs, power dialers like Aloware, Texting Connect, EvenUp for medical chronology and demands. And now you've got AI agents. So agents being essentially replacing humans, the labor component. I was shocked and I sent a few of my friends, I sent James Helm a text on this. I talked to Anthony Johnson about this.
When I saw that Meta acquired Manus, oh my goodness, I don't think many people listening have an understanding of how huge that is. I mean, that just completely puts them in the game from the agent perspective. Just as an example, I was on a retreat in Tahoe last year and how I use Manus at rankings is I just will say, "Hey, I need to recruit this individual and give them a criteria," and it will build me an entire database for my talent acquisition specialist of the people, the contacts, the names, and if you had an individual do that without code or software, it would take a tremendous amount of time.
So code or software is the new form of leverage. What's interesting is from Naval's explanation of this, everything starts out as software at some point. To the degree of oil, in his explanation of software, he would place oil and even tires and things like that into this category of leverage. I know it doesn't fit nicely, you don't think of it as code, but essentially he's just talking about tech or enhancing things. It's moving from the farmer that has the big sheer doing everything by hand and moving to the combine. It is the future. And I think that those that freely adopt and take chances and utilize automation are going to be the ones that have a chance. I think that's where you see companies like Clio. Clio is really a law firm. I know people don't want to say that, but that's what they are.
They are a law firm. They are a law firm of the future. I think the definition of them, people put them in this tight box of a CRM or project management software, but they're a law firm and they're utilizing code. It's just something to look out for. And also, one of the indicators of success when you look at these companies, when I was talking about companies that are very, they utilize labor, when you use it from a metric perspective, you're looking at 200 to $300,000 per head employees, code-based or companies that use code or software as their leverage component, you're looking at a million dollars per head plus. That's why when you go look at how much staff versus the revenue for Google or Apple or Facebook, they're almost all of them at least a million dollars per head. It's because they're utilizing technology for leverage to buy output.
The fourth form of leverage is content, it's media, it's distribution. I talk about this a lot. You guys have probably heard me say this, and I sound like an asshole when I say this, but I don't do a lot of speaking engagements. And the reason is it's not worth my time typically from a distribution perspective. A lot of times, you'll go to an event and they'll have a lot of breakout sessions, so maybe you have 70 people in the room, or maybe you're a keynote and you have 200 or 300 people in a room. And look, there's other benefits and intangibles of the personal relationships you develop. There's a lot of reasons to go to events, but from a distribution perspective, you're one to 200, one to 400 maybe, if you're lucky, versus a podcast.
Why I love a podcast, why I'm speaking to you right now, I'm talking to thousands, thousands of people, all from my little office, a little cubby hole podcast booth, and I just like it from a distribution perspective. So that's one form of content media distribution. Once you start to identify its value from a leverage perspective, you start to look at things a little bit differently. So I just gave you the explanation of the podcast versus say an in-person presentation, but then you look at things like social media, and don't think of social media as just where people congregate and kind of chitchat and send memes. You look at it from a distribution perspective, TikTok, Facebook. And then you have to think about, well, how do they monetize? Well, in the beginning, they need adoption. They need network effects. So they get everybody on the platform, everything's free, you get a ton of distribution, and then they crank it to you, right? And then you got to pay for distribution.
It's funny because when you started TikTok, you got a ton of views for your videos. Well, now there's a lot of people on it. Now you got to pay unless you really have something that hits from a viral perspective. You got to pay for distribution. It's the same for Facebook ads. I mean, you get basically zero reach from organic distribution unless you just have something that's fire that really hits from a hook, viral perspective. You got to put ads behind it. Broadcast television, that's how Morgan & Morgan, a lot of these biggest firms in the state, that's how they grew and they still use it today. If you read John Morgan's book, You Can't Teach Hungry, I believe that's the book, he talks about his marketing mix, and if he had to pick one, he'd pick TV.
It's because of the distribution. It is the amount of people and eyeballs that you can get on your business and on your brand. And I think when we're looking at each of these from a metrics perspective, when you're trying to gauge attention, the thing that you want to attract at the top level at the top of funnel is going to be CPMs. It's going to be cost per thousand. That's why in the PI space, the cheapest cost per thousand gets you the most distribution. So that's why I like Facebook ads, broadcast television, even today, radio, billboards. From a B2B perspective, podcasts. That's not from a conversion mechanism that would be totally different at the bottom of the funnel. Bottom of the funnel being, of course, your capture, your search, your Google Ads, your website components, your CRO. But once you start to understand the four forms of leverage, it's like when you want to buy the red SUV or the new car and then you start to see it on the road.
So once you start looking at things from a different purview, so first the collaboration being a labor-based leverage component, then capital and how it can be deployed to buy time, and then code, how it can be deployed as an alternative to labor-based leverage, and then content from a distribution perspective, it helps you make decisions to grow your firm. It helps you identify opportunities that your competitors aren't taking.
That's it. Once you start understanding these four forms of leverage, labor, capital, code, and content, it completely changes how you view your firm. It's just like buying that red SUV. Suddenly, you see them everywhere and you start identifying growth opportunities your competitors are completely blind to. If you haven't read the Almanack of Naval Ravikant, definitely pick it up. I read it every single year and it's absolutely worth the investment of time. And listen, if you're loving these solo-casts, I want to hear from you. If you want to jam on these leverage concepts or talk shop, track me down on LinkedIn, shoot me a DM and let me know if you listen to the episode. Link is in the show notes. For more resources on how to dominate your market, visit us at rankings.io. I'm Chris Dreyer, and this is Personal Injury Mastermind. I'll see you next time.
