Chris Dreyer:
Every time you look at a problem in your law firm and ask yourself, "How do I do this? " You're automatically slowing down your growth. How relies on your linear time, your limited energy, and your specific skillset. But what if you stopped asking how and start asking who? Today we're talking about the exact framework to multiply your firm's speed and take your time back.
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. Let's get into it.
And a lot of this originates from Dan Sullivan's book, Who Not How, but I'm going to give my own spin on it and things that I've learned. So how is linear. It's limited by 24 hours a day. It's anytime you're asking yourself, how do I do this? It's your time. Who is exponential? It taps into other people's time and expertise.
I'll give you a common example and I'll really try to simplify this and then I'll do a legal example. But a common example is let's say that I was going to mow my own lawn. The how approach and it's my time, right? I've got to find the best lawnmower. I've got to figure out what time I'm going to mow the grass. I've got to figure out how to do it properly, not put the shavings out on the road, make the lines perfect. Or you can ask yourself the who approach, right? It's exponential and faster. I can hire the lawn care expert that comes over. They already got the lawnmower. They got the 360 turn. They know how to do this. They got a consistent cadence. They're going to come back every Saturday. That's the who, not how approach.
You could also think of this, take something like intake. If I'm thinking about how am I going to improve my intake? Well, I've got to learn about intake. I've got to go read Gary Falkowitz's intake book, which I just read not so long ago. Great book, Gary. You got to think about what are the metrics? What am I speed to lead? Am I answering the phone within the first 10 seconds and not letting it ring two times? What about the routing system? What about Lead Docket, or Salesforce, third party overflow captured now, or a third-party intake? All these questions that you're asking yourself is the how approach.
The who approach is now that there's three ways to approach this from a labor perspective. You could hire the employee to start the build out, you could hire the subcontractor, you could hire the agency. There are many ways to approach the who from a faster exponential perspective. And I want to break these down.
When we're looking at making a decision on who we're going to hire as the who. Sorry, that's a little bit of a mouthful. But you need to look at it from a control perspective and a speed perspective. Let's start with the employee. The employee is high control but low speed. Now, when I say low speed, I'm comparing it against other options for who. So high control, meaning you could get the individual to do whatever you want, whatever things that they're hired and they've accepted the responsibility to do, but it's lower speed, right? You've got to maybe head hunt this individual. Maybe you have in-house talent acquisition or recruiter, or maybe you can hope and pray on Indeed and don't advise that.
And you go out and you finally hire someone after a few months and maybe you have enough knowledge to understand that this is an A or a B player. Obviously you want to try to hire As as much as you can and an A now maybe a B in the future, but you start there, right? So it's slower, you find the individual, but then you've got to support them, you've got to give them training, you've got to give them resources and it is faster than doing it yourself because it's not your time. But from a speed perspective, it's a slower option.
Next you've got up the subcontractor. You've got medium control, medium speed. So medium control because typically they're on a marketplace and someone else can just hire their utilization. They typically work for multiple individuals, whoever pays them the most and gets the most attention. But then from a speed perspective, it is faster than the employee because you can read their reviews from the marketplace perspective. You can fire quickly. You don't have to worry about getting sued and they're at will and you can make decisions quickly, right? But it is still medium speed because, quite frankly, they could be hired away and from an integration perspective it's more challenging.
The third is an agency. It's low control but high speed. So low control because they have their own ways, processes of doing things. They have many employees that they've got to manage and oversee, but it's really fast because they have a proven method of getting results. You can plug right into them. They know how to do the craft. They are experts at the craft.I think the problem, and this is me being an agency owner, and I think there's places for each of these in your business, right? And I think a lot of times if you're going to bring something in house, just be cognizant that you have to be capitalized properly.
Take SEO, for example. If you were going to try to bring that in house, it would be very challenging. First, you have to understand what is the criteria of this individual that they need to hire. But then one SEO specialist can't do all disciplines. It's very rare that you find this super unicorn that can write content, do the link building, do the technical SEO, do the data analytics, do the local SEO. It's very rare. Even at our agency, we don't have a full cycle SEO specialist. We have technical SEO specialists. We have link builders. We have content writers. It's multidiscipline.
So when you're thinking about this evolution like, yes, if you want to bring SEO in house, you're probably better served with an agency if you're startup to maybe a growth stage. But if you have a ton of capital and you hit a big case and you want to build the full team out, that's when it might make sense to bring it in house where you have the full control.
Where I've experienced a lot of issues with clients that we work with and there's some probably listening is where the firm wants to tell us what to do to get results. And quite frankly, I've been doing SEO for 20 years. We work with 200 plus PI firms. We know how to get results. We do it this way for a reason. That's where the friction comes in is if you start deviating from processes and try to ... It ends up where the agency's a vendor and not a partner. That's where things go wrong. There is a case for a vendor. If it's just pure, "Hey, I need links, I need content." There are scenarios for that, but if you're trying to generate outcomes and results, then you're looking for a partner or an agency.
Again, I think there's a place for all of this. Another little tactic is you may hire a subcontractor, you can do this at Upwork, you can do this at TalentCross and some of these other companies and then you can pay their fee to bring them in house. There's a fee that if you want to stop paying the supplier, the talent cross, you can just purchase the individual to hire them full-time. So you can turn those subcontractors into an employee. It's a good way to test the water. Quite frankly, it's cheaper than most recruiting fees. A lot of times those are 20% of the salary. You're looking at a $200,000 role, you're paying 40k when a lot of times these opt-outs on these subcontractor platforms is less. Anyways, kind of went on a tangent there.
But I think when you're asking yourself, how do I do this? Again, it's your time when you could be looking at a who. So if you're looking at an employee, you want to build out intake. Maybe you hire the head of intake that's been there that knows how to build out an intake team that works. And for each one of these, there's A players and employees, and B players and Cs and Ds, and then there's A players for agencies and there's Cs and Bs and Ds there as well.
So obviously we want to hire As in everything that we do, but just like you don't hit about 100 or about 1,000 for hiring employees, it's the same thing for agencies. You need to find the agency that fits for you and your goals. And I kind of wanted to just summarize my perspective on choosing your speed from a who perspective. And here's the thing that you got to ask yourself. If you want to go fast, you need to find a who. It's exponential and fast. Otherwise, it's linear in your time. The thing that I would challenge you to do is look at you to do list this week, pick one item you're currently asking how about. How do I do this? That's the wrong question. Ask yourself, "Is my need for control stopping me from having speed?" Stop working harder, start finding the who that makes the how disappear.
So if you've got your homework for this week, find that one thing on your to-do list and replace how do I do this with who can do this for me? And listen, earlier in the episode, I talked about how complex it is to bring a full cycle SEO team in house. It takes specialized riders, link builders, and technical experts. If you want high speed and proven outcomes without the headache of building your team yourself, then you should head over to Rankings.io and let us be the who that scales your firm.
I'm Chris Dreyer. This is Personal Injury Mastermind. See you next time.
