Chris Dreyer:
Today, we're welcoming back the Amanda Demanda.
Amanda Demanda:
Yeah, I think since the last time we spoke, which is about a year and a half ago, we've quadrupled in firm size and attorneys and caseload.
Chris Dreyer:
Through a fierce commitment to her brand and service, Amanda has been seeing amazing growth since she opened up in 2019.
Amanda Demanda:
And our marketing efforts continue to grow and follow the vision that I spoke of from the PIMCON stage in 2024, which is brand, brand, brand.
Chris Dreyer:
I don't want to bury the lead. I'm thrilled to announce that Amanda Demanda is returning to the PIMCON stage this year. And while you need to come to Scottsdale in October to get all the best advice and inspiration, today's episode does contain a lot of actionable insights that only Amanda could provide.
Amanda Demanda:
That's what being a CEO is. You're riding like a bronco in the wilderness in the dark all the time. And if you're not, then you're not doing it right.
Chris Dreyer:
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. Today, Amanda and I talk about the brand versus lead gen divide, the Ritz-Carlton approach to intake, and tracking the one metric that guarantees maximum case values for your clients. And of course, we preview Amanda's presentation at PIMCON 2026, let's get into it.
Amanda Demanda:
Listen, I don't think there's any right or wrong way to do things. It's just what works for you. I was blessed with the name Amanda, and then I was blessed to be Cuban American in a Hispanic community where demanda means, "I sue," and things rhyme. And I changed my name and now I became a thing. I don't think I could tell anybody to recreate that specifically or have a catchy name. That doesn't necessarily work. So you really have to be true to what your vision is, how do you want to reach out to people and how you want to grow your business, because there's very profitable markets and business structures that come from a lead gen kind of avenue. I just didn't take that route, and then I stuck with the marketing one because it's the one I knew and it felt more organic and genuine to me.
And when I started on my own, I didn't have those budgets to compete in digital markets, and I was like, "I am not going to pay somebody $5,000 for a lead when I can just put that behind me doing a radio show on AM and gaining some people organically, because then I'm betting on myself." That was just my mentality. It's kind of like, "Do you buy a home and pay a mortgage or do you rent forever? And both things could work for somebody, but that's just the avenue I took. So I really tried to be efficient about it. And I could tell you the science behind that. I don't know the lead gen world that well because I don't use any. Everything I get is organic from us and our efforts in marketing. So I'm sure it works. There's very successful people that have done it that way.
So their arguments are just as valid. It's just you have to find out what's true for yourself. I do think that doing the marketing branding route like I have is very client-facing, very forward-facing, very community-facing. It does take a lot of work for me personally, and there could be arguments to how sustainable or scalable that is. But if you're willing to do it and it's something you also enjoy to do like I do, then it's not work. My life is my work. So I don't mind being in the community talking about how I can help them or guiding them and showing face. Other people don't like doing that, or maybe don't sell as well, and that's totally fine. So I don't think anyone should be scared to be like, "Man, I don't have a Facebook radio," how they say, or, "I don't like to speak a lot," or "I'm a shy person." I think there's different ways to do it, and definitely a combination of things.
Where I think, Chris, that brand really kicks in is for that repeat business, that word of mouth, the client that comes back. The client that remembers you to the point that they're going to tell their cousin and aunt to call you, "Oh, so-and-so helped me." What happens with lead gen companies and digital form fills, not that they're not profitable, but I feel like you're continuously chasing that next first lead. And branding eliminates a little bit of that mystery for you.
Chris Dreyer:
Well said, well said. And I got to say the social, you look like you're having so much fun doing it. You're always happy.
Amanda Demanda:
It's a lot of work.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. And you're speaking at PIMCON again this year. We're so blessed to have you come back. You were one of the top speakers at our first inaugural event and you're speaking on Meta-Mastery. So maybe without spilling all the beans, maybe there's this, why Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, maybe just a few tips just to maybe guide someone.
Amanda Demanda:
You know what I say? Why not? I think that people get stuck in like, "Well, I'm not a big attorney unless I have a billboard." And that's not necessarily true. If you don't have a strong brand, like spending money on billboards ... And what I mean by strong brand, I mean something that's intentionally thought-out and the logo going colors and the feel and the touch, then you might be wasting money because it's not like you are being intentional about your messaging there. But we do all mediums. And once I added in PPC through Google and the digital and the Meta, things did change. We get leads across the board, but I think it's really such a low threshold to start with, that you don't have to have such a big media buy to make an impact and correct along the way because the data is so good. It's easier to adjust and start with a lower budget, see what works, see what doesn't. And if you layer that with branding, then it's explosive.
Chris Dreyer:
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. When someone starts, a lot of times they put so much pressure on an individual channel. So they'll do pay-per-click and they want a below $3,000 a case. When you're going into Facebook Ads, are you thinking about the long game, like TV? Like, "Hey, even if I'm not getting the CAC that I want at a certain time, it's still building the brand." How do you approach it from that perspective?
Amanda Demanda:
Yeah. I think I'm blessed to have ... Again, this is one of those things that just happened to be my story. Blessed with a background in marketing and a degree in broadcast production. That was my first bachelor's at University of Miami, broadcast production. And understanding I don't have to be sold on marketing. I don't have to be sold on advertising. I already know it works. It's just a matter of set it and forget it and not feel like, "Okay, I'm going to do billboards for six months and then I'm pulling them down." Well, that's not how it works. Marketing is a long-term game. And I think that attorneys are so stuck on even understanding that concept, that it's counterproductive. It works against themselves. You can't start something, you can't be hot and cold, hot and cold, because you're not giving the brand a chance, the messaging a chance, the channel an opportunity.
And I just think you really have to hold your breath and believe in it. And that's, I mean, easier said than done because you're the one that's bleeding the money out at some juncture in that story. But it really does give. And it's really about just overcoming that fear and believing. And I know you go to these conferences and there's so many vendors and you feel attacked by all of them, but genuinely these vendors do help. Just hear them out and try them out. And if you do commit to anything, don't do it for a month or two or three. I would say six months at minimum, because that's when you really will start seeing returns on anything. That's just my advice, but I understand being a solo. I understand having the fear of having to pay certain bills and being like, "Do I hire someone else or spend it on marketing? How do I scale this?"
And the truth is that if you are successful in this business, you're never going to be caught up because you should be growing almost faster than you can scale it if you're successful at it. That's what being a CEO is. I don't know who said it best, but it was like, "You're riding like a bronco in the wilderness in the dark all the time, and if you're not, then you're not doing it right." It's just a wild ride.
Chris Dreyer:
Well said, well said. And you've got the background in the marketing. When you started though, deploying capital and started marketing, there's that temptation to do lead gen to get the cases immediately. So you just always just out of the gate, like, "Hey." Most people, they'll say, "When you start, do 80% direct response, 90%, and then do X amount of brand."
Amanda Demanda:
It depends on your markets.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah.
Amanda Demanda:
I'm in this little market called Miami, which is very cutthroat, where fraud is king, and staying above that is very hard. And even though there might be lead gens here that give you a good lead and you're willing to pay for it, there's that scare of, how did they get it? And well, it had been solicited at some point down the stream and it come back to bite me in the ass because I'm the one with the license and I'm the one that's client-facing, and I'm the one that has to respond to the bar. So I was very fearful of that just because of the very nature of where I'm from. And I think that that's market specific. There's some markets that are not as competitive. I mean, personal injury is competitive everywhere. There's some markets that are not as competitive and there's some pockets of your community that are not as competitive.
I know where I come from and I know what I was up against and I knew that I had to stand apart, and I knew that those guys were never going to be like, "Well, now she's made her own money, she's going to do her own thing." I knew that if I fell into that, they keep you so well-fed that you just become used to it and it's hard to ever peel away from that. And I made the decision to take the hit early on and build it and then set a standard of life or income from my firm that then was going to be hard to walk away from. And I'm not going to say I didn't try some of them. I've tried some of the more national people and the digital forms and all these things, but the quality of cases I get from that do not compare to the quality of cases I get from someone that is looking me up, that is calling my face. It pales in comparison. And my cost of acquisition is a third of what the average market is in car accident world.
So I bet on my brand a lot. I'll give you this snippet. We started doing PPC, and we really started doing PPC only because other big law firms, the biggest law firms in the nation start buying my name. And I'm like, "Well, I must mean something so I should buy my own name, because now they're piggybacking off of my traditional media." But we start buying my name and then obviously the key terms, car accident and Spanish and all that stuff. But still, from the PPC leads we get, 42% are because people are looking up my name, and that I attribute to traditional mediums and branding. So that goes to show a lot.
That's why it's like you have to end up doing a little bit of everything, and it's hard to become a master of all these things. And it's hard to do that while you're also trying to run a firm, manage people, try a case, show up at a hearing and talk to the lady that just lost her son in an accident. It's hard. That's just what you got to do though. There's no easy way to put it. You just got to do it.
Chris Dreyer:
Building a dominant brand gets the phone to ring, but what happens when they actually call? If your intake process is broken, all that marketing spend goes down the drain. After experiencing such massive growth, Amanda didn't just build an intake department, she built a hospitality engine. After hearing what she and her team have been up to, you'll see exactly why her hospitality-driven intake has been such a massive part of her success.
Talk to me about the intake. Like, evolution of intake. How has it evolved? Do you have a RevOps manager? Do you have an intake attorney? What's the team composition look like now that your volume's really increased?
Amanda Demanda:
We have about eight intake specialists in person here in our headquarters in Miami, and then we have another staff of like 10 in an offshore office that is bilingual, speaks Spanish, and we have a supervisor of the team. Then we have a intake manager and then an intake director/supervisor. So there's different things they're all doing besides just answering phones, but like everything, you don't know you have a problem or a need until you're there. So you're signing up one case. You start off, you're just getting one case a month. Okay, then you go up to five. "Okay, maybe I need an assistant. Okay, maybe I need ..." And now you're at thousands call volume. Problems present themselves that you didn't know you needed something to patch that or fix that. So we've changed phone systems.
The tech stack gets crazy. And then how that talks to your clients' profile systems and things like that, and how you make that seamless for your team so that they're not spending that much time on the phone and that they're actually converting, becomes a whole science and a whole thing with training. So I mean, we can talk about any one of those things in detail and how that's evolved and become more robust. But just know that every one of those little things will happen and will require attention. And there are people out there and vendors that help with that, but ultimately every firm is built out different. And I think that we've been very focused on our client journey because people are calling, because they saw me on a commercial, or because they clicked on my direct link on a Meta buy or ad. It's different than if they're coming from a digital form field where it's a nothing or no one.
So we always try to train our people in intake. I think the biggest thing to be, "You're the first point of contact for that client journey of the brand." And we send out a gift to them. We send out a little Cuban coffee maker with two little cups of coffee so that you can just like, "Hey, sit back, relax. We got the rest. Have a coffee." That's a very cultural thing for the Hispanics to do. And that's really part of intake. But it's marketing. So how then you have to ship out these coffee mugs and these cafetera is what we call them, and make a whole mail department for that. That's part of intake. So it's really grown, but we think of the idea, we try to launch it as best we can, and then trial and error, Chris. Just trial and error.
Chris Dreyer:
We're so cheesy. We do gifting of coffee too and we say, "This sounds like it's grounds for a meeting," or something like that of that nature. I'll have to show you a picture of what we do too, but that's from the prospect.
Amanda Demanda:
I love it though. I eat that up. I'm like, "Oh my God, I love this." There was an attorney that their marketing is business to business, so it's B2B. And I appreciate this because I obviously send out a lot of leads and referrals here. They just brought me something and then in the back it has, "Thank you for trusting us during this difficult time. May this coffee bring you comfort as we take care of the rest." And it's just nice because it's tangible and people love it and they post about it. And you don't forget this. This will live in your house forever, and then when somebody else in your family has an issue, you remember this. So that's marketing.
Chris Dreyer:
Did you get that? Have you submitted that to Golden Gavels? Because we got to get that submitted.
Amanda Demanda:
I don't know if we did or we're going to.
Chris Dreyer:
That is legit. I love that. Can you send me one? Can your team send me one?
Amanda Demanda:
Yeah, I'm going to send you one for sure. Once they called us, they're pretty much converted at this point because they're doing it from a trusted branding background and foundation, not just like a form-fill with an AI persona or agent. And we do try to keep them happy. And I always say this, my favorite, I guess marketing and brand is the Ritz-Carlton because they do a great job of touching your five senses. You walk into one of those rooms and it's what you feel. You're going to be hearing the TVs on with waves or whatever resort you're at. It's mimicking that. You're going to smell something. They're going to have something for you to touch and they usually have a chocolate or something for you to eat. So they're touching all five senses as soon as you walk in. And people don't remember those details, they just remember how they felt, and that's very important for us. So we try to lead our training with compassion and making sure that there's patience when the clients are showing some frustration with what they're going through.
Chris Dreyer:
That Excellence Wins, this book that, "It's our pleasure." It just makes you feel good when I go there. It's like, "Oh, they care. And they go an extra mile of taking you somewhere as opposed to, "It's around the corner." And all those things add up to how you feel and the experience, the memory of working with you.
Amanda Demanda:
Yes, no question, because I wouldn't necessarily say, "I care more about you than the other attorney." I never dog any other attorney. We're all here trying to do our very best. And I'm sure we're all qualified attorneys when it comes to the services, but does that person feel connected with you? Do they trust you? And what perception they have of you really is what creates the difference in the working of that case and then what comes after. Are they going to recommend you to people? Did you make an impact on them where they remember your name? And many times, I think lawyers that use referral or lead gen companies get into the group of they got the client, they did a good job for them. But that client might not call them back. Even if they did the best they could for that client, it just doesn't impact.
Chris Dreyer:
So you brought this up earlier about the systemic referrals. You mentioned that several times on the brand and the memory of working with you versus the lead gen. After the client closes, does the firm have strategies to stay in touch? Maybe it's a birthday, maybe it's ... How do you stay in touch and nurture those relationships after the case is closed?
Amanda Demanda:
Our client journey is throughout the life of the case and even after they're no longer our client. But for example, from the inception of the call, the scripts that we have for our intake team, and then from the gift they get, but then they immediately get calls by the case manager on the case. We try to have an attorney call within 30 days. Sometimes sooner, but absolutely. And in the first two months of a case, they're getting a call every week, if not more, from a case manager to get an update and make sure things are going as they need to go. And then there's tickers on depending what type of case and depending the urgency of the case, the nature of the case, etc. And that's all built into our system through task flows.
But aside from that, on their birthdays, we send them a birthday card and we send a $2 bill with it. And then at the closing of the case, they get a big swag bag with a bunch of things and we have a swag room where they can shop in if they want to. And after they're in our database but they're no longer our client per se, we do send out sometimes mass mailers throughout the year, usually around Thanksgiving time, and then we send it to the whole bunch that we have. And people like to get back, and it's a reminder of something nice. And Thanksgiving's a great time to do that because you're saying thanks. "Thanks for having trusted us. Thanks for letting us be in the community," whatever you need. But you just put it into your calendar and you just do it a month out before Thanksgiving and be like, "Hey, we should send cards to our whole past clients." And just do it. Just order them on Shutterfly. It doesn't have to be anything fancy. Just get it done. And it really does make a difference.
Chris Dreyer:
Cuban coffee, birthday cards and swag rooms, these touchpoints build a fortress around your brand, but at the end of the day, attorneys are in the business of winning. A great client experience must be backed up by the financial recoveries, and Amanda is laser-focused on a specific metric to ensure her team keeps those case values as high as possible.
Talk to me about the legal side, the extending case values, working up the cases, because you have put some massive numbers on the board in terms of these recoveries for your clients and taking it all the way. So talk to me about how your firm's evolved with the volume, but still putting up these big numbers and trying cases.
Amanda Demanda:
Yeah, it's hard because ... And it's funny, I say this all the time. I'm an open book and I hang out with all these guys that we're all trial attorneys. And they're like, "No, I just do catastrophic cases. Amanda, if you get a big case, you could just send it to me." I'm like, "Okay, sure, buddy. I've been mining for this diamond and now you just want me to hand it to you because, what, you're a better lawyer than me? Come on." But we have good lawyers in our team and we really handle all the cases as if they're going to be tried. Also, because in Florida, in 2023 we had our tort reform situation, they changed some of these things, so right now is when all those battles of where the law is going to land is happening right now in cases that were litigated. And maybe they're not super high-value cases, but it's very important that the judges do rulings and interpret those statutes in a favorable way to the plaintiffs. Because if not, we're going to lose access to court, and that is my biggest fear.
So we really treat every case because you never know which case might be the one that ends up having to go to trial, just because they didn't want to pay the $10,000 policy and it's a catastrophic injury. So I'm really passionate about what I do and I don't lose sight of this mission and vision. And I feel that because people do call my face, I have that extra, I don't know, pressure on myself that I need to deliver, and we really treat all the cases like that. So there is no different workup in cases in my office because it's a small impact motor vehicle or because it's this or that. We spend equal amount on the client journey. I'm not not sending a coffee maker to a client that I don't think is going to be a big case. We don't play those games.
Anyway, that creates more auditing nightmares in-house for you to be like, "Oh, these are the cases that we treat this way," or, "These are the cases we don't." So we just treat them all the same and that's how we get top dollar on all of them. What we call a tender in our industry of car accidents is getting the maximum policy amount as recovery for our client. And what we focus on is not how many demands you send out or how many point of contacts you have with a client, but how many tenders you get, because that means you've maximized for the client. And that's one of our core values. So we really are trying to look under every place we can and see where other coverages exist.
So we send out letters of representation to the insurances, to every entity on the police report, from the witness that was standing there potentially, to the driver, to the passengers in the other car, like, "Are you repped? Are you not repped? Do you have pictures? Do you have anything to add?" Because I want to know the totality of the evidence in this case to really have the best positioning possible for our client. And if there are some bad things in there, we just absorb them and we work around them. We don't try to hide them, but I'd rather know about them. And I think getting ahead of those things makes a difference when you're talking to an adjuster and opposing counsel and they're trying to be like, "Oh, your meds are too high." "Oh, but your guy was on the phone." I said, "Okay, my meds were too high. I compromise. I agree. What do you want to pay though?"
So if you go disarming them, you need to have the information to be able to do that and we're very aggressive in that front, and I think that really helps and makes us stand apart.
Chris Dreyer:
That's great. And look, I'm not an attorney, so that's the first I've heard of the tender. Is that something that you track as a weekly leading indicator? Is that a monthly lagging indicator? What type of percentage should a firm target for tenders?
Amanda Demanda:
We incentivize the tender because that's getting maximum policy, because there's limited policy in car insurance, and in Florida, you have zero. That's an exit case. And the person, we ask them to fill out a financial affidavit. They don't have anything to their name, we look them up, they only own their homesteads, there's nothing we can chase there. But we track that because if you leave it up to your staff, it could seem like a great recovery on a case where you're like, you can justify it. But then you're like, there was more money to go after for that client and you didn't because that client did want to get that MRI, and they were recommended that MRI and they didn't go get it because they thought maybe they weren't going to get that paid for. But they could have gone that, they could have been properly diagnosed. They could have done the medical procedure that were recommended.
And that then forces the case manager not to be so focused on, "Oh my God, it's been three months. I need to send out a demand letter." The demand letter is only going to amount to proving up 50% of what that policy insurance is and not the true value of your client's injuries, then that's not ready for demand. You got to go back, instruct the client, let them know. How are they feeling? And do all those things. And we look at that metric constantly. We have little bells. And as a joke in the office, if you hit like a small tender, it's a little bell. Then we have a cow bell for the hundreds or more, because it really is a feat. Because the way the insurance companies look at personal injury cases is not at the true value of the injury, but instead how much they could save off of not paying that full policy out. And to us, it's an accomplishment when we get them to pay out that full policy, get the tender, because that means that we proved up the case to its maximum value.
And a lot of people don't see it from that lens, and it's easy to get trapped into, "How do I move my case managers to just get stuff out?" So you're tracking, how many demands did they send? How many calls did they make? But are the calls substantive? Are they talking to the clients about the right thing? Not just like, "Hey, I'm just calling to say hi." No. "Hey, did you go to treatment? How are you feeling? Did you do that recommended medical procedure?" Whatever it is. And I think that really looking at it from if every case would go to trial, what evidence you really need in front of a jury, what story you're going to tell the jury, looking at it from that lens all the time is what gets you maximum dollars.
Another core value of ours is excellent reputation. And I think it's Warren Buffet that said it, "Use money for the firm and I'll be understanding, but lose a shred of reputation and I will be ruthless." That's how I operate. I'll take a shave if I have to, but my God, my reputation better not hurt.
Chris Dreyer:
I love that mindset, and like that reputation, it has so many intangibles that could play into this. And just that head hitting the pillow and being able to sleep at night knowing that you did everything to get the maximum value for the client. That's the first time I've heard that, but that seems like an amazing metric to track. What's one thing you see other PI firm owners wasting their time and money on right now that they should think about differently? And that's pretty broad. That's throwing it up to you.
Amanda Demanda:
Yeah. I was going to say, listen, maybe I wasted all my money and things I did in the inception, but it wasn't really a waste because I needed to step on that stone or that mistake or bleed that money to then change or pivot or learn something. I'm a very optimistic person. I don't look at anything as like, "That sucked. Why did I do that? What a waste." And I would encourage most people not to think like that, because if not, you can just get down on yourself. I don't know. I focus on what my competitors are doing as far as positive things. I don't know things that they're doing that might not work.
I think one thing I can give as advice to other attorneys, that before just launching an ad campaign, before just launching Meta Ads, before ... Just sit down. And I talked about this when I was on stage at PIMCON last time. Just sit down and give yourself the benefit of really building out your colors, your logo, what the messaging is. So whenever you start dishing out money, at least it's coming from one centralized vision and you're not just throwing it out, because then you will have missed opportunities and you don't even know it. Messaging is so important. So I would say a way to save money and get ahead of maybe those losses that later you'll look back on, is giving yourself that moment to really do that exercise.
Chris Dreyer:
So wise. Thank you for sharing that. Amanda, this has been amazing.
Amanda Demanda:
Oh, thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm so pumped.
Amanda Demanda:
You're such a hype man, Chris. I want to come on here. You're like, "That's great and that's amazing" I don't get that from my people here.
Chris Dreyer:
It's great advice. I love it. And I'm so pumped to have you come back to PIMCON this year, October 4th through 7th, and you're going to crush it, and we're just pumped. So Amanda, thanks for coming on the show.
Amanda Demanda:
I'm excited. It'll be fun. Thank you so much for making time. And whatever you guys need, you can call me.
Chris Dreyer:
Awesome. Thank you.
Amanda Demanda:
Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:
Amanda is showing us how you operate at the absolute highest level. She's built a massive brand by prioritizing long-term market share over short-term leads, treating her clients to the Ritz-Carlton experience and relentlessly tracking the tenders to ensure every single person who signs on the dotted line gets maximum value. Excellence really is the standard over at her firm. If you want to surround yourself with top-tier operators like Amanda and get the exact strategies they are using to scale, you'll need to be in the room at PIMCON 2026. It's October 4th through 6th in Scottsdale, Arizona. Commit to growth and get your tickets at pimcon.org. I'm Chris Dreyer. I'll see you in Scottsdale.
