Chris Dreyer:
Growth is deliberate.
Kyle Wright:
We've shot from the hip for so long, and it can only get you so far. Eventually, if you're growing, you need to harness that data and just start running a business.
Chris Dreyer:
At some point, shooting from the hip stops working and you have to get serious about your operations. But fixing your systems means you have to be willing to look at the ugly truths hiding inside your firm.
Kyle Wright:
We lost about a half a dozen leads in January between the time that our reception answers the call and waiting to get connected to our intake person, they just hung up waiting.
Chris Dreyer:
We all have areas in our businesses that need to improve, but sometimes it can be hard to face the problems head on and do what needs to be done.
Kyle Wright:
I knew that I reached a point where I needed to figure out how to put better systems and processes in place. When should I be hiring another associate?
Chris Dreyer:
Today, we're talking with somebody who has literally done the work. He lifted the hood on his firm, brought in outside eyes, and is making the hard pivots to scale his practice. And here's the thing, if he can do it, you can do it too.
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. Rankings get you cases.
Today, I'm speaking with Kyle Wright from Wisehart Wright Trial Lawyers in Ohio. We talk about the brutal reality of intake audits, establishing a firm cadence with EOS, and taking calculated risk with your marketing channels. Let's get into it.
Talk to me how intake's evolved, how you think about intake. Do you have a closers club for the commercial case that comes in? How do you think about intake?
Kyle Wright:
Wow. So intake right is, at this moment, is my biggest pain point. I thought that we were really good. I thought that we were doing great there. I felt that way because I really trusted my staff, I trust my lawyers. I think they're good closers, and I see the leads coming and going. And I just learned, in fact, I got connected to Dan Define who works with you. He connected me with a young wiz kid. I mean, just an absolute, just incredibly smart guy that has done a full intake audit. And we're going through the process. He's actually at our office right now. It's a 19-year-old kid, probably one of the smartest human beings I've ever met two days ago.
They listened to all 800 intake calls that we had in January, firm-wide, developed an AI to listen to all 800 intakes, give us the total breakdown, and let me know where all of our leak was. And what they focused on was the leads that we missed. And I got a report of the leads that we missed. And I reviewed that yesterday. So it's really fresh.
Chris Dreyer:
Did you get the Pepto, the Tums?
Kyle Wright:
The pain is still really fresh, and it's an open wound. So I was honestly shocked. So the feelings were, "I'm really excited because there's so much more opportunity than I realized without having an audit." And I was also disappointed too. I really was. We weren't monitoring our LSAs. They just weren't being audited in the way that, honestly, they should be, and found some waste there that's concerning. So we're going to make some immediate changes there.
And I found that our reception takes a call, and they transfer it to our intake person. If our dedicated intake person isn't available, it goes to one of the case managers or one of the attorneys. We lost about a half a dozen leads in January between the time that our reception answers the call and waiting to get connected to our intake person or one of our case managers, they just hung up waiting.
So that was brutal. That was brutal to hear that we had the transcripts, and I knew kind of the quality of some of those leads, and they just hung up. And if they hang up, it's not being measured, and so I didn't know that those losses were occurring, literally until yesterday afternoon. So it's really fresh.
Chris Dreyer:
There's so much here. Once you dig into the data, your want a conversion rate, trying to be 90-plus percent minimum. And I think for audience listening, one of the things that I've found is if you have around 800 leads, I like about 100 to ... an intake specialists for every 100 to 150. So if you're at 800, you could be at four to five if you go on that 150 range. So then basically they have more capacity because we want our lawyers at 80, 90% capacity or writers or other people, but intake, you want somebody available to answer the phone because of that reason.
Kyle Wright:
Absolutely, no doubt about it. And the more that I think about it, the more that ... I almost want just someone with sales experience to be in that role. I really do.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I think it's so important. Well, it sounds like you're on it. You got an audit going, you're making the changes. And I think it's important for our audience, you identify the biggest constraint, and you're attacking it, right? And you're fixing that constraint, and then you're going to go find the next constraint.
Kyle Wright:
Absolutely. I mean, that's the one thing I would say is that I think I'm clearly guilty of it, but we just go along day to day. We're kind of caught up in the minutiae, and you need to doing an audit of your intakes, oh, my gosh, that's like probably one of the most valuable exercises I've gone through in the last several years. I mean, I couldn't believe the amount of just leak that we had.
Chris Dreyer:
That's great. Well, fixing the leak and a lot more revenue ... plugging the leak, a lot more revenue in your future.
Finding a massive leak in your intake is painful. Fixing it is how you capture immediate revenue. But here's the reality, if you don't have a framework to maintain those fixes, your team is going to slide right back into their old habits in six months.
Kyle realized that outgrowing the chaos meant that he couldn't just manage the day-to-day anymore, he needed to approve an operating system to hold everyone accountable. Let's get into how he brought in EOS and Fireproof to keep his newly-tightened machine running at full speed.
Yeah, you mentioned you opened the door, Fireproof Performance. I've had Mike on, I've had John Nachazel on, but I got to tell you, I don't know much about what they do. I mean, do you have a regular weekly cadence? They just set in your quarterly raw? How does the program work?
Kyle Wright:
Well, I'll take you through why I decided I needed to reach out, that I needed help. I just felt like my practice ... So there wasn't a playbook for growing my practice within my own firm. Historically, we didn't have this huge personal injury practice, and it wasn't growing at the rate that it is now. So I wasn't like learning from a playbook that was already here. So I was just really learning on the job. And I knew that I reached a point where I needed to figure out how to put better systems and processes in place. When should I be hiring another associate? Do I need an intake staff person? When, why? What are the value? I need to talk to people, I need some resources, and I need to be able to ask these questions and get it figured out.
So that's when I finally reached out to Fireproof. And so we're in the Fireproof group, and it's like we have an accountability coach. So we have a weekly meeting. So I have 8:30 to 10:00 AM slot every Friday. My leadership group meets with Fireproof's accountability coach. And there's a playbook that they use. And I can't remember the book, but they use a proven business methodology, and we've learned it, and we've put it in place, and we've established a cadence, we're gathering data that we've never gathered before, and we're sharing resources, we're setting tasks. We set a task, and then we have to be accountable for that task, everybody on my team.
So our leadership group is myself, my wife, she manages our office, she does HR, she was doing the marketing, and then we hired the marketing specialist. I have my CFO. She's involved. She's in Florida, and then the leader of my paralegal team. So that's our weekly team meeting. We address pain points, we address wins, we identify issues, we come up with game plans, and all of the issues are tasked for follow up, and we have a weekly accountability meeting to make sure that we're hammering out these tasks.
And what's crazy about it is that it's actually really simple, the process is simple, but if you don't have that established regular cadence to really follow through on these tasks, they're going to fall through the cracks. The way that we've moved our business forward in the past, I would say, two years by being basically just held accountable and identifying tasks and working on each of them as a team, I mean, we've just moved forward at a clip that we've never had before. It's been insane.
So I'm a huge proponent of it. It's helped me tremendously. It's helped me delegate more. That was a problem for me for a long time. I've seen the value in that. I've seen the value of adding key players and key seats. So that's what we're doing. You do a quarterly and you do an annual session. I doubled down, I ended up doing the mastermind group. That's in addition to the weekly accountability coach. So we're pretty ingrained right now in the Fireproof process. It's been really helpful.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I read that first traction. I've read Mike's Fireproof book. And so our agency, we've been an EOS agency for a while, and I highly recommend it too. I think the simplicity is what makes it so great versus scaling up, and Verne Harnish's Scaling Up, it's just so complicated. And some of the complexity is nice, some of the exercises, but I think just that consistency, accountability that EOS provides, I think is so strong.
Kyle Wright:
It is. I convinced my partners to do it. And our criminal defense team, they just start ... They've filled their cup in the local market. They're so busy, and they have some really good opportunities. And my partner's in his 60s, and for him too, he has his mind made up on a lot of things, but I give him a lot of credit. He's started to do his own Fireproof meetings, and they've been moving forward faster than I've ever seen. It's amazing.
Chris Dreyer:
Operations in a tight weekly cadence, that's how you build a high-performance engine. Marketing is the fuel, but pouring expensive fuel into a leaky engine, it's just setting cash on fire. When you tighten up your operations and lock down your intake, you earn the right to take bigger swings with your marketing budget. But as Kyle found out, learning exactly where to spend those dollars and where not to spend them can come with some expensive lessons. Let's get into his marketing channel mix and how knowing his ideal client completely shifted his advertising strategy.
Television, radio, boards, social, digital, how do you think about, just big-picture, some of these channels?
Kyle Wright:
Yeah. So I know where my cases are coming from. Right now, currently it's Google organic right now is the highest percentage of my cases. That's a good thing, but I know that we need to pay attention to other areas.
Second highest is attorney referrals, so cases that are close to lit, or it's a complex case. I have a lot of attorneys that I work with that refer cases for us to litigate. That's what we like to do. That's where I'm at. I've got an associate that's dedicated that just solely helps me with all my lit, and we can really dig in, so I enjoy that.
But at the end of the year, we look at the data, we do a snapshot, and we double down on where things are working. And ultimately, I think there's an element of like, you have to take some risk.
So if you haven't done radio or if you haven't done television or if you haven't done billboards, there isn't any data in-house to support whether that's the right investment or not. So the only way to do it is to try. And your chances of hitting the first time you do it is probably pretty low. But if you want to take the next step in marketing, you have to take that risk. You've got to invest, you've got to pay attention to it and be willing to pivot if it isn't working.
One of the biggest mistakes I learned early on was I bought into the idea that you needed to be on television and you wanted to do ... So I did some radio ads, big local news network. I had like a $75,000 budget for six months, which was, at that point, three, four years ago, was an insane amount of money in my marketing budget, it was huge, but I wanted to explore it.
Well, in six months, I got one lead that we could directly attribute to television commercials, and it was a nothing. And so I realized if you're going to get into that game, you better be ready to at least budget a million bucks for a year and be ready to wait it out. That's the long game. Same with billboards. It's more of a branding piece than anything. I don't feel like, for a while, you're just not going to get direct calls from it.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I've heard Morgan say things like, "Hey, he doesn't even break even till year three." So that's some conviction on the board, especially at those spends.
Kyle Wright:
Absolutely. So right now I did, at the end of the year, I was like, "All right, I have profit, so let's figure out how to reinvest in marketing. We're going to reinvest in our team, and we're going to reinvest in marketing." So at the end of the year, I talked to some people, some consultants, and then we divided up how to spend down, basically, for 2026 to just reinvest. I look at the marketing dollars I spent at the end of 2025, and I'm going to just really consider that as a 2026 investment because it was year-end, literally days before the end of the year.
And so this year, the new thing we did was radio, and we chose 92.3 The Fan in Cleveland. That's Cleveland Sports Radio. It's the largest sports radio in Northern Ohio. I liked it because it seemed to match up with who our clients are. We have a large statewide workers' compensation practice. They're injured workers. And frankly, they're men between 35 and 60. So that's who's hiring us, 35 to 60-year-old men. That's our largest demographic.
So I talked to some people, and I thought about it. Well, where are those people going? There's a lot of guys who are interested in sports radio. I am too. So that's where we went. And so I bought the largest ad that they had available on 92.3 The Fan to start the year. And frankly, I've been really pleased with it. It's kind of exciting.
Chris Dreyer:
That is exciting. And that's great that you know your ICP, your customer so well, that it helps you pinpoint and be selective on your marketing as opposed to the spray and pray. It's like, "Hey, this is where my audience congregates. Let me get an ad there."
Kyle Wright:
Exactly. We've shot from the hip for so long, and it can only get you so far. Eventually, if you're growing, you need to harness that data and just start running a business. It's more than just being a lawyer. I've had to learn that recently, and so I'm a little bit more focused there than I've ever been.
Chris Dreyer:
For an audience that has a case in Ohio, that wants to reach out, has questions about the pod, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Kyle Wright:
Yeah, absolutely. So by email, kylew@ohattorneys.com, my cell phone, (419) 366-7392. Always happy to talk to like-minded people, anybody that wants to work on a case in Ohio. Always happy to jump in and even brainstorm cases, whatever it is. I think it's really important to just communicate with people and help people wherever you can.
Chris Dreyer:
Fantastic. Kyle, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Kyle Wright:
Yeah, appreciate it, Chris. Take care.
Chris Dreyer:
Kyle's story is the perfect reminder that you can't shoot from the hip forever. Real growth means having the guts to look at the ugly truths hiding inside your business, like a massive leak in your intake process, and actually doing the work to fix them. But once you patch those leaks and lock in your operations, your machine is ready to scale, and that's when you need the right fuel.
At Rankings, we partner with elite personal injury firms who have their house in order and are ready to dominate. We don't guess with your marketing. For us, it's proof over promises and excellence is the standard. If you're ready to stop shooting for the hip and take over your market, head over to Rankings.io.
I'm Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. We'll see you next time.
