EP107: GLM – The Great Legal Marketing Conference, Masterminds and a new Book! Law Firm Growth Strategies with Ben Glass

So when I started my practice, Jay I the one of the first things I did was I said, I called up my local pi competitors, but they were my friends. I said, Dude, it's like and again, pre internet, why don't we meet every month? We'll share the pizza cost. Bring your cases. Let's talk about cases. Let's talk about strategies. Let's talk about claims adjusters, and let's just share and so that was, I didn't even know what a mastermind group was, Jay, I actually created a mastermind group.

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules. Jay Berkowitz,

well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast. Super excited today. You can probably already tell we have a rock star of the legal strategy and marketing and legal community. Ben Glass, welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast. Jay

man, thanks for having me on. Before we went live, we were comparing air temperatures in our respective cities, and I said, it's bad, but you're in South Florida and it's got to be worse.

Yeah, if you're listening to this some, some other time it's it's late August 2024 and and we're smeltering down here. Ben has law firm, has a great conference called Great Legal Marketing, has a mastermind like multiple books we're going to get into all that. But, you know, tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you get to be a rock star?

What a great I wish my kids could hear you ask that question. Jay. So you know, I crossed over. I will cross over 41 years of practicing law. In October, around the time of our conference, I had a very typical beginning from undergrad where I played soccer on scholarship at William and Mary came up to Northern Virginia to go to George Mason Law School, which was, and this is a point for young lawyers, or young wannabe lawyers like Mason, was provisionally accredited by the ABA. Nobody knew the Mason and Jay, I gotta tell you something that will shock you. I recently found online the course catalog for the year I went. So I went in 1980 That's right, and the course catalog had the tuition. This is going to make people sick. Jay, the tuition was $1,100

for the whole year. And you probably did loans to pay for it.

I took some loans because, because I wasn't working, my wife was working for like, I think, $15,000 a year or something. That was a lot of money back then we lived, we lived in a two bedroom little apartment, or one bedroom little apartment. And I was lucky, Jay. When I was in law school, I got hooked up for for law clerkship with one of the great trial lawyers in Northern Virginia, Bill arts and and I could have like, I liked tax law in law school, and I liked this litigation stuff. And Bill was a litigator and had a good personal injury practice. And so out of law school, I joined bill and several of his partners. They were forming a new law partnership, and stayed with the various iterations of that firm, because it changed a bit over time. For about the first 12 years, had the entrepreneurial seizure. I had a growing family. Eventually we ended up with nine children, four adopted from China. But there was a time when Jay I was coaching three soccer teams near my house, and the office was not near my house in Northern Virginia. You know, the commute can be very variable. So for that reason, because I wanted to simplify my life, I said, I'm getting good results. How hard could it be to start a law firm. So I left, took some cases, had some money, had some cases for a while, and then I then I figured out, Jay, I didn't know anything about running a law firm, like I was a good lawyer, but I didn't know anything about acquiring cases, managing people, getting good talent in and so that was a struggle. Several years in I discovered, you know, our mutual friend, Dan Kennedy. I was on a mailing list. I got his product, magnetic marketing, which was for all businesses except lawyers. But when I went to the product, yeah, when I went to the product, I like, Man, I understand half the words Dan's using here. I don't understand the concepts, but I saw enough, they're like, Hmm, if I could figure this stuff out, like, this would probably change my life, because I was, like many small business owners and many lawyers, I didn't know how to differentiate myself in the market. Jay, this is, you wouldn't have had a job then, because it was a pre internet, right? There wasn't even websites. Yeah, it was. Right of the dawn. I mean, I had a CompuServe email address, like it was at CompuServe, with a whole bunch of numbers and a dot and a whole bunch of numbers after that. So

hey, believe it or not, I'm older than I look. My first job, we had a fax machine, and we were like, super advanced technology. I was with the regional agency, and our client was McDonald's restaurants, so we had to get a fax machine. Yeah, I don't know what was it like 1985 in Winnipeg, Canada. Okay.

And so for folks who are listening to this, that fax machine, you had to install a new line, and they charged you more for the quote, fax line, even though it was nothing but a telephone line. And then we went, Jay and I are going to riff here for a moment in history. But we went to we had modems, and like the 300 baud modem and a 1200 oh my gosh, you have a 2400 baud modem. You must be really good. And you had to unplug your phone to plug in your modem to talk to your computer, so AOL and all that stuff. So what Dan taught me was this is look around and see what everyone else is doing and saying to the market and try to find a different message. So I was doing personal injury cases. Of course, a bazillion personal injury lawyers back then were in the Yellow Pages. I was not on TV or on radio, but I did go to the library and I studied, because back then, in all of the regional Yellow Pages for our region, DC, Washington, DC area. And I looked at the messages, I just, and I literally, I just wrote down the headline messages. And most of the headlines were name of firm, but the other ones, you know, the other three were, hey, we're aggressive, no fee of no recovery, and, and, you know, some version of like, we're the best, right? And I came up with a USP, or unique selling proposition that was a little bit different, which was, if you've been in an accident, then before you talk to a lawyer, talk to adjuster or sign any forms, like, let's get our free book. And so that started to change the way we showed up in the marketplace and allowed me to capture more leads who are calling the office because we were getting name, address and mailing them the book, things like this. Again, this is people who are young lawyers today, as we do this in 2020 4j they can't imagine like, it's good. Everything is so fast today. You know, we've got 24/7 advertising out there, both digitally and otherwise or traditional, we've got 24/7 phone answering chat bots, and if you don't respond like you know this, right, because you studied it, if you don't respond right away, like the client is on to the next lawyer. Well, it was different back in the day. It was different, because the only way you could talk to a lawyer was basically by showing up at the office and having a consultation. So it was, it was a lot. You could make more mistakes and still survive. Then the internet came along and a

time out, like, I want to spend one minute on that, yes, creating your your personal brand message was important then as mission critical today, and I had a couple thoughts around that. First of all, you created a book, and it was like your message was, hey, you know, before you talk to the insurance company, at least get my free book. And that was a classic. Dan Kennedy, like marketing magnetism, like a marketing magnet, is probably how he called it. Was like a book. Was a great lead gen magnet as lead generation magnet, for sure. And I my 10 golden rules, which I wrote 20 years ago, which is, you know, what was it? 2002 2003 so slightly after that. But you know, the same concept, which is, create a golden rule number three, create a UVP. And a UVP is like a free book, a free eBook, a free calculator, you know, car accident calculator we have on on some some sites. And the concept is, improve conversions and get some engagement, get get people to opt in for something, get them on your list, your lead list, or your mailing list, and especially back in those days like today, we can pretty much figure out who went to our website. There are some tools that I can actually tell you who went to your website, or you can do remarketing to them. There's a lot of different, more advanced tools, but back then, you really had to give someone something of valuable like that marketing magnet, the unique value proposition, 100% so that worked really well. I'm sure you became the author, right?

Because that was the whole thing. Like, I can remember Jay, when I first saw another lawyer had written a book. He was in the, like, the estate planning space, and he had a book. I'm like, holy cow, that's really cool, like, you're an author of a book, right? And still today, Jay, most people think, if they see that someone has authored a book, they think that's pretty cool. The author must know something. Now it's tons easier to to. The right and to get books produced today than it was back then. But the point that you and I are making is that the principles don't change. You have to show up differently. So you can choose to play Jay, you can choose to play in the same pond that everyone else is playing, and in the PI space that pond is usually some version of you've been in a crash, you know, we can get you cash, and we're aggressive, no fee of no recovery still. And there's players who can win in that pond, but they tend to be the ones who can spend the most money. So the rest of us who are not number one, number two spender in a market, we just figure out different ways to get attention, to grow a tribe. Once I have your attention, Jay, I want you. I want your attention for life, because I hopefully you won't get into an accident, but you'll know people who will need somebody like me in Northern Virginia. And so that's how eventually, as Kennedy saw what I was doing in my practice. He said, You should teach this. And he was really the instigator for Great Legal Marketing, which is about 20 years old now. And Great Legal Marketing was one of the first organizations out there that was devoted to the business side of law. Again, in the very beginning, Jay, you may not even know this. It was how it was teaching personal injury lawyers how to advertise better. That really was all it was, because that's what I was. But then we attracted family lawyer, the bankruptcy lawyer, criminal defense lawyer. Will this work for me? Yeah, of course. It'll work for you. And so that was like the next generation of next version of Great Legal Marketing, and then became, all right, we're solving the lead gen and conversion and sales problem. Now, there's other problems that need to be solved in a business. How do you scale? How do you hire? How do you develop culture and processes and systems? And so that's and that's what we are today. So today, Great Legal Marketing is really for those lawyers Jay who are not spending 10s of 1000s of dollars a month on either paid digital or paid traditional advertising. They're doing grassroots marketing. They're building by and large. They're building an impact in the community, and they are nurturing everyone who knows them, so that again, Jay, we hope that you don't get an accident. But don you know if one of your friends does, and you're in Northern Virginia, or your friend is in Northern Virginia, we want to be the one whose name is top of your list to make that referral. So I think what will be interesting for people to know is we spend, almost we spend zero money on paid digital advertising. Paid ads, zero. No Facebook, no pay per click. Organic traffic is great, but more importantly, because I've been here for 41 years, and my son Brian is turning 41 because literally, Jay, he was born in between the bar exam and me getting sworn in. So we have a strong you, yeah, yeah,

sure. Income requirements, just number one, yeah.

And so we have a very good foothold here in Northern Virginia in particular, in the market like we and we tell people, like our Rolodex is big, we only know two things, automobile, like personal injury cases. And really, it's only automobile and dog bites, really, because Virginia is 100% contributing negligent state, so trip and falls, sudden falls don't fly really well here. And then I developed about 20 years ago, this niche in risk of long term disability and life insurance cases, which we're a regional we're a regional force here, like nobody in the mid Atlantic, where we are files more kids and handle more kids than we do, and that's you can go verify that all on Pacer. Great. So we don't know how to do wills, but we know. We know who to send you to, and that's our that's our marketing position.

Fantastic. So I just want to we're touching our Great Legal Marketing, and it's coming up. So if you're a young attorney, a small firm, a medium sized firm, I mean, this is an awesome conference. I've been two or three years now speaking in Phoenix this year. So I'll give you the dates. It's the third and fourth of October. It's in Phoenix this year. Great Legal Marketing that we're talking about is a conference. It's also a mastermind, and I wanted you to tell us which one came first, but tell us a little bit about what's happening in Phoenix this year, for folks who still have a chance to go. Obviously, if you're listening to this in 2025 check the dates for 2025

Yeah. So here's, so this is really, it's, it's the, almost the annual reunion of our tribe by and large, it is our members who gather every year for two or three days to hear from top experts like you. Thank you to be able to Jay just get out of the office and turn off the darn cell phone at. In the laptop and think about their business and be surrounded by people, because for any problem that a lawyer has, Jay, there's going to be someone in that room. They might be the one on the stage, or they might be the one sitting next to you at dinner, or sitting next to you you know in your row at the conference, who has already solved that problem, and that's that's as big a reason like the it is the gathering of entrepreneurial lawyers who are giving, who are open to thinking about new ways of building a great life, because that's really what GLM is all about. Build a great life. Let's use a law firm as a vehicle for that. Okay, let's create wealth, but let's also create happiness and great families, right? And it is as much as that the conversations that go on in the audience as it is the conversations which are excellent, that go on from the stage we have in Great Legal Marketing, you know, several levels of membership in our two highest mastermind levels. One mastermind basically lawyers trying to get through seven figures of top line revenue, and the other one is basically lawyers who are trying to get up to about $5 million in online revenue or in top line revenue. And so they meet for in total a day like so we meet four times a year. One of those times is at our summit. Each year we've got breakout groups on one morning, so it'll be like nine things going on in three hours. So that's can be a little hectic. We record the whole event, and mostly it is a reunion because, you know, it is. It is unlike other traditional lawyer conferences, because we're not really talking about the law, per se. We're not talking about, how do you cross examine, and there's a lot of great places to go for that. We're talking about, how do you build something for yourself? How do you get a great team in there and and to a place where everybody will thrive and be happy? So that's going the one thing. I don't know when there's podcasts go out. But every year, Jay, we try to make available some space for lawyers who are like running a law firm, and maybe they're in their first couple of years of running the firm. And so we've got some scholarship money for them, particularly if you're out in the west or near Phoenix, where we'll be listening to this and wants to you know you've got a young, young firm, and you're the owner. We'd love to get you into our room, because you will be impressed again, not just by the guys and gals on the stage. Jen, you'll be impressed by the quality of the person who's sitting next to you.

Yeah, I want a couple things I'd love to mention. You know, you talked about the family aspect, and as a matter of fact, just with one of the experts in the industry. And she moved from working for a big corporate legal entity to working for a consulting firm. And she was asking which trade shows and, you know, tell me about the landscape. And I said, you know, GLM, I'm speaking, and I'm looking very much forward to the event. We're participants, and we have a booth, and a bunch of our team will be out there. And I said, you know, the nicest thing about GLM is it's really, it feels like a family. And don't, don't worry, if you don't know anyone in the family come out there, you'll probably know some folks, but everybody's, like, super warm and inviting. And it's like, it's like, the warmest of all the conferences. I appreciate that. And like, if you go to National Trial Lawyers, part of it is like, there's like, 3000 people, and it's big, and it's corporate, and it's in Miami, and the trade show is huge, you know, but Great Legal Marketing, I think, because Ben and Brian, who you all if you haven't heard the podcast with Brian or Brian also spoke at our event tgr live, and he was fantastic, by the way. So check out the interview with Brian as well. But it's that family, because, you know, you got you all are a family. And also, like, your mastermind members love you guys and love each other. And so I think part of it is like that family feel, and, and, yeah. And then the other thing you mentioned, it's like, The sessions are great, the breakouts are great. Like, I remember two awesome presentations Bill Biggs talked about culture, and absolutely blew me away. And I grabbed him right after I said, I've got to interview you for my podcast. And he went from my podcast to my speaking live, and he was a keynote on day two of our conference. And then the other one that blew me away was Charlie Mann talking about his I call it the ground game, Gorilla marketing. And he so that's another great edition of our podcast without further ado, you know, if y'all haven't been to greatlegalmarketing.com yet, go to greatlegalmarketing.com check it out. See if you can work it into your calendar. And as Ben said, There's scholarships, if you're you know, a small firm just starting out, but you've got a new book, and this is really exciting, like you co wrote a book with Dan Kennedy, one of the heroes and legends of the marketing industry. He's on the, definitely on the Hall of Fame Top 10 List. Tell us about your new book, and there's some great content you're going to share.

Yeah, I'll put it up here on the screen. It's no. OBS, time management for entrepreneurs, fourth edition. And this is, this is great. So, so Dan is my mentor. And you know, many, many years ago, I already recounted the story. So how I hooked up with him. And about 20 years ago, the first edition of no BS time management for entrepreneurs came out, and I remember Jay, I was reading it on a vacation, and I like, holy cow. Like, I didn't know some of these strategies existed. They went to the payphone because it was a while ago, and I called my office. I said, you might have to explain what a payphone is, yeah, yeah, quarters and stuff, right? Or maybe a credit card number. I punch in, and I said to them, Look, first thing we do is no no more unplanned phone calls, right? Everything is going to be scheduled. And my team said, That'll never work. It'll piss people off, and it really changed our lives, because what lawyers are paid, Jay like we are. We are hired to be creative and to think deeply about our clients, either their opportunity or their challenges with the law. And in the old days, like before I read this book. Like, every time the phone rang, it was a especially when we were very small, if it was a new lead, like, oh, here it's a someone calling about a PI case, or I was doing medical malpractice cases back then as well. Like, oh, let's just interrupt what I'm doing and get on the phone. And you didn't know, is it going to be five minute calls? It gonna be a 45 minute call. So we started to change up. Dan invited me to the fourth edition for this reason. It was just about a year ago he sent me a fax, because Dan only communicates my fax and my phone call says, I'm, I'm going to write the fourth edition. Would you like to be a part of it? And co author, and I go, I go, Yeah, I'm really busy. I'm getting ready for my conference. We're getting ready to go out to Funnel Hacking live. Uh, busy time. I said, Yeah, I can't like how much time to that. He goes, 30 days, 30 days, 30 days. So, but I did it. I immediately, I took a really close look at the third edition, and I I faxed Dan the next over the next couple days. So here's some ideas. And what I have is a slightly different angle than than Dan does. I've got a large family. I've got employees. Dan really hasn't had employees in a long time. I'm he said I asked you, because you're a busy guy, to CrossFit a referee. And I run the law firm. I'm practicing attorneys still, and run great legal work. So we get a lot of stuff done, plus the nine kids. And so it was my it was my honor to be able to to write for Dan. Another funny story is, I submitted my articles, and then he goes, Well, can you write a technology chapter? Well, I was in Orlando for our event, so I'm getting up at four o'clock in the morning writing a technology chapter. The technology chapter is going to be kind of small, because I believe that everyone else should be using technology and just letting me know what it says, right? Because I have a phone. So this is a strategy, right? There's no work email on my phone. My phone does not ding, vibrate, Buzz, so sometimes I show up at home without the milk, like Sandy says, Oh, can you get some milk? And I miss it because I haven't checked my my messenger app there. There's very few people that have that phone number can get through. In fact, if you try to call my phone and you're not on my list, it just goes immediately to voicemail. Anyway. But here's the point. Here's the point that that Dan and I make in the book Jay, is that when you're running a law firm, you are the racehorse like not only do your clients depend on you being all in but so do all your employees. I mean, you are providing jobs, they're paying taxes, they're they're getting a, hopefully a great place to come to work, and if the lawyer is all stressed out because he or she does not have a good hold on time, right? We guard our wallets, but we let people suck time right away from us, then nothing else can nothing else can run optimally. So we say you are holding the world up on your shoulders. Accept that responsibility. That's a responsibility you took on when you decided to become an entrepreneur rather than working for someone else. And there's a place for everybody in the world, right? We need people who work for hourly rate, and we need people who are entrepreneurs, and we're who are creating the new ideas in the world. And so the book is filled with a number of of strategies and ideas to protect you so that you can work Jay at your in your zone of genius, as Dan Sullivan would say, it starts with really understanding what your time is worth. And that does not mean dividing what you bring in by 40 hours a week, because Jay, nobody works 40. Nobody gets 40 productive hours a week, right? We get maybe six, but like really figuring that out, shedding stuff that's below your pay grade, shedding stuff that you're not good at, because Jay there's for anything for everything that you do, running 10 golden rules, but maybe it's a little bit below your pay grade, or maybe you think. You have to do it, but you're not really like great at it. There's somebody in the world, Jay, who would love to do that for you, to free you up to do what to creatively think about your clients, and in your case, their success journey with website, digital advertising, all of that stuff so

or quadrants in EOS?

Yeah, we talked. We'll talk

about EOS in a minute, but it's basically the top two quadrants are things you're good at that you like doing, things you're good at that you don't like doing things you're you don't like doing that you're not good at, and things you don't like doing that you're good at. So figuring out things you know you want to spend your time in that top quadrant of things you like doing, and you're good at it. And that's is that the genius zone? Is that, another way of describing really

is a zone of genius? Yeah, and look, it's when you're just, if you're just starting out with your firm, and it's you and one assistant, as it was for me, way back in the day, that's hard, but I tell you, what is easier today than it was when I started Jay is the quick availability of somebody any place in the world, who can do a lot of things that you and I probably grew up doing ourselves, because it just wasn't as easy to find somebody. So the law firm's got about 23 employees. We've now have just hired them. We have seven people working for us in the Philippines who are fantastic teammates for us, who are making more money working for us, and they would in their local economy. And though all seven are working in their zone of genius, doing things that, yeah, we could do probably, but they're better at it, and they're focused on their thing, and then we've got to

figure out their zone of genius. Like, do you use a tool? Well,

here's Yeah, no, that's a great question. The clearer you are, here's the question you asked, Jay, if this person, just this avatar, person walked into my life, what qualities would he or she have to help me do the thing I don't like doing, or I'm not very good at all? Right? And so we start there the clear that you and I, Jay are as entrepreneur leaders on what and who it is we want to see walking through our door, either as a client, right? Because that's all about marketing or as a teammate, the better it's going to be, because now we send that message into the world, and we and we, rather than running stupid ads that say, you know, wanted part time paralegal, you know, can multitask, which is like, describes every paralegal in the whole world, right? Tell them exactly who you are, what you do, who does well here? Who doesn't do well here? You're still going to make mistakes. The pool of people who apply are going to be smaller, but you're going to vastly increase the chance when you have good communications like this, that you're going to find that person who just lights you up and your work lights them up. And I'll tell you, Jay, that your law firm becomes unstoppable when people who are coming to work for you like coming to work and they believe in the work that you do and the good that you do if you don't have that, it is like running a ship through the bay and you've got five anchors hanging over. It's very hard to be the best you can be. Now, this ain't easy. It takes work, but the point that I would make is, the clearer that you are. J this is same, same point we make in marketing, the clearer you are at who your perfect avatar client is. So that when we're creating web copy, for example, we're writing to that client, the more likely it is we're going to track that client right, and the happier we both are going to be. That's the thing. Clients happy because I got a lawyer who understands what I'm what my problem is, and lawyers happy because he, he or she has the client that they're looking for. And then we should put that on rinse and repeat. And you do that for your employees too.

By the way, I had a thought a minute ago, and I just don't want to forget it, because you asked me, before we started recording, you said that everybody's trying to figure out what is the new important thing. Yep, they've got to figure out for marketing. And you were hoping I'd share that, so I'm going to give you the sneak preview. Okay, yeah, that, yeah,

let's do that, because it's last year was awesome. And I think that, you know, people come so many people, Jay, come to our conference because they they want to hear trusted voice like yours talking about the digital space. So what's what's there for us?

Well, we think we figured out an algorithm for a brand new section of Google, and I wrote one of my recent webinars. It's been really popular. Is called the six parts of Google. So the first five, we all know, right? The Google screen, local service. Says right at the top of Google, Google Maps, pay per click, Google SEO. I include YouTube as the fifth part of Google. Google owns YouTube, the second biggest website in the world. There's more searches on YouTube than there is by a wide margin than yahoo or bing. But there's a sixth part of Google, which is called AI overviews. And overviews is Google's answers like a chat GPT question. So we're starting to see them for like, you know, how do I pick a car accident attorney? So that the short version of the answer to your question, what's new, and what I'm going to talk about at GLM is, how do you get in those listings? And one of the key things is, you want your website to be helpful. You want to answer questions. So a lot of what we do with our clients is we film videos with the clients answering questions. How do you pick a car accident attorney? What do I do after a motorcycle accident? What's the difference between, you know, if I get hit by a driver with insurance or a driver with no insurance? Is my insurance going to pay for the car repairs, and if you start answering those questions and Google sees your website, it's helpful. You can come up in this brand new section called AI overviews. It's essentially like Google's chat GPT on on Google searches. You're probably just starting to see them just rolling it out. Let

me give your listeners a plus on that, something that we have started doing so we record all the calls coming in and going out in Virginia. Virginia's a one party recording state. We then run the intake calls through a chat that we have created that does two things. Number one, it evaluates my team on their the application of our scripts to the call. Number two, it listens Jay very carefully to what you just said. What questions is the prospect actually asking, because lawyers think we know, but we're usually not involved in a lot of these intake calls, right it then it then itemizes those questions, and we send those questions off to the marketing team, and we have a library so easy to do in order to help your customers move forward in this AI overview, that's awesome. So yes, people are not mostly recorded.

The AI is transcribing them and determining the questions and answers. Yeah, putting that in the library. I love

that. And judging and helping us evaluate our insight team. Did they use empathy? Did they reinforce the sale? Did they talk about how good we are, which is all part of our script, and

it's going on the website, like, are these creating question answer blogs as well? It's

that yes, it is then helping to direct. Because here's the thing, everybody has limited time and money resources, and so we're always what GLM is really good at Jay is helping lawyers. Where do I spend my next dollar? Where do I spend my next hour? So it's helping to direct both couple things, A, the Q and A that's on the Google Local profile. But B, we ask ourselves, do we have a blog or a story on this question or not, if we don't, it goes into the list, particularly if we're hearing that question more than once and again. Jay lawyers think they know what questions or potential prospects are asking, but I would suggest testing and listening like if you go the old days we would listen to the call. Now we can read a transcript. Now we can read an AI summary of the transcript, just to get that information right, and pass it on, in part to the marketing team.

I love it because I actually have a present in one of my presentations. I have a picture of like the cranky old receptionist, and I joke like her name's Griselda or something, but we put a clipboard beside her desk, and we say, you know, write down all the questions you get. But you've, you've advanced that into the AI world. So the AI is listening to the calls, summarizing questions and answers and giving it to your marketing team. I'm gonna, I'm gonna steal that one. Okay, Ben, you can steal,

yeah, we've been sharing that with our mastermind members, the exact prompt, and the prompt is a work in progress. And so, you know, when Ben shares stuff into the world, only thing I ask is that you make it better, and then you share back some stuff with me or the next person, right? That's that's another way that lawyers, especially lawyers that that serves the consumer market. This is how we make the world better? Well, I

have a rule of sharing, and it came from jokes and recipes. Do you know the rule of threes in jokes and recipes? So tell me, if you tell me a joke, I'm the first time I tell a joke and you say, Hey, Ben Glass told me this great joke. And then the second time I say, Hey, my friend, this lawyer, told me this joke. And the third time I say, I. Heard a joke, and the fourth time it's my joke. And it's the same with recipes, because, like, you make the recipe by the fourth time you've customized the jokes and recipes so much that it's it's hardly recognizable. Like, my uncle, I made him a Caesar salad a few years ago that he gave me the recipe and taught me how to make. He's like, this is not my Caesar salad. Like, what do you mean? It's your recipes. Like, first of all, there's no anchovies. Well, I don't like anto. The cheese was wrong. The vinegars were wrong. Like, it was completely different. So, so I'll be giving you credit the first time we download the AI calls and turn it into marketing content. But by your conference in six weeks, it's going to be my strategy, okay? And

it'll be better, and it'll be and see, that's the thing, it'll be better. And you'll, you'll share with somebody, one of your clients, probably, and they'll make it better, right? Because there's, there's people are just better at this idea generation than than we are.

Anyways, look, people are probably enjoying this, and if you're enjoying it, you're watching on YouTube, give us a comment and shout out and thank Ben and myself, we're going all over the place, but I'm going to transition a little bit. I want to go back in time a little bit, because you're probably one of the best people to ask this question. And I often ask this question, what are some great strategies for a young attorney, they're just getting started in business? What are lessons you would advice you would share to a young attorney.

I think the number one question to learn how to ask is, What can I do for you? First Zig Ziglar, can have everything in this world I want? If I helping up other people get what they want, I would say number two is to be very curious. So you know, when you meet somebody, you're young lawyer, you meet someone at a bar conference, or, you know, whatever it's like, stop talking about yourself. That's not very interesting. Like, if I met Jay at a conference, I'd be asking Jay, tell me how you found this work. What's your biggest problem? How have you solved this? What do you think's coming down the pike in terms of of SEO, and what we've just talked about right with them, with Google, and I would be very curious, and you, and you would walk away from that conversation, Jay, feeling really good about yourself because you talked about yourself, which human beings like to do. But I really, I just interviewed you. I interviewed you for 30 minutes or whatever to find them. And then, you know, I think, I think the other thing, the thing I did when I started and my friend of mine, we were talking, we were going historical recently on a call, we both have grown up in the law 41 years together. And when I started my practice, Jay I the one of the first things I did was I said, I called up my local pi competitors, but they were my friends. I said, Dude, it's like again, pre internet. Why don't we meet every month? We'll share the pizza cost. Bring your cases. Let's talk about cases. Let's talk about strategies, let's talk about claims adjusters, and let's just share. And so that was, I didn't even know what a mastermind group was, Jay, I actually created a mastermind group. And even today, we have in our mastermind group in Great Legal Marketing. I'm in Northern Virginia. We have now four Northern Virginia personal injury lawyers in our groups we freely share. And so my message to young lawyers is, look at the end of the day, there are no secrets, and the most important person in the room is the person you see in the mirror, right? So it's all it's all about whether you're going to go and do something, but do not be afraid to be the first to share something. You know, your life will be more fun. You will actually learn more by, excuse me, by doing that. And I believe that when you do that, the universe sends back stuff to you, that you will capture it to be able to make your life better. So there's a couple of things I would say for young lawyers. You know, the challenge today is Jay, you know, I had choice in Yellow Pages and writing a book, and, you know, starting the first website, you know, I went to a class and how to write HTML, actually, and to, yeah. And today, there's just so many choices. I think what I'm really good at, in a open to talking to young lawyers all the time is, if I learn a little bit about you, Jay and where you're trying to take the practice, I can help you figure out, where do I go spend my next hour? Where do I spend because there's so many choices, but not every choice is going to be good for you. Today,

we left a couple things hanging out there. So one of them was the difference between GLM the conference, GLM the masterminds. Talk a little bit about the masterminds. The power of masterminds. The GLM masterminds, sure.

So, you know, Napoleon Hill made the concept of the mastermind popular in thinking for a rich The mastermind is really about when, when, when more. Then two are gathered together, the force that comes out of the thinking, idea, idea, Objection, idea, what if we do this is greater than any one person or any two people actually could come up with. So in a typical mastermind meeting that we are running here, and most of the meetings are here in our office, because we have a training center here. It's like, Jay, if it's your turn, you got 45 minutes like, share something good. You may be a resource, a book, podcast, okay, bring it. Give us an update. Because Jay, the last time you were here a quarter ago, you said you were going to do these three things. You were going to fire Susie. You were going to start spending more money over here this morning. Give us a report like, what have you done? And if you haven't done it, we're going to maybe beat you up a little bit. And then, Jay, you're going to lay your problem. What are you trying to solve? It could be marketing and advertising problem. How do I get more leads? Again, relatively easy. Even today, I think to to fix that problem. The bigger problems are those of organizational structure, like, how do I get my team on the same page with me? How do I find great team members? How do I build processes so that I can go and take a vacation and my darn phone isn't ringing every single day, because people need to know the answers. We record all of these presentations, Jay, and at the end of the meeting, we give you a one pager. Jay, here's here's what we solved for you. Here's the commitments you made, all right, here's the three, three things you said you were going to do. And so when you come back in the next quarter, like, Hey Jay, like, what's going on here? She's still working there. You said you said you were going to fire her. Boom. And so the mastermind is not just about the generation of ideas, but it's an accountability group. Jay, it's, it's other people who love you, who can use that word like they're not one on one competitors, although, again, like, we'll let you in, even if you're a PI lawyer. Because, until, if you're a PI lawyer, Jay, until you and I have 100% of the market here in Northern Virginia, like there's just more for us both to go and get. That's our view of the world. But you have group the whole hold each other accountable. And then, then on the other months, we're not meeting in person, we're meeting on the on the zoom right. Kind of the same format, but a little bit condensed. And then when, when something good happens to somebody, we celebrate it, right? Celebrate it right? And so there's a whole, it's kind of this whole power of the virtual community, like you write something brilliant on LinkedIn, like we're piling on to say that was awesome. And then plus it. So there's all, all of that. We have some mastermind members who've been with us for over a decade. They have grown with us from struggling law firm to, how do I sell this sucker? Right? Because that, I think that's quote, unquote Jay, one of the new things in legal is really an increased, uh, chance that when you're done practicing, that you actually have an asset that someone would want to acquire, right and will pay you for and so building again, systems, people and processes that will make yourself attractive to a buyer is something that we talk about, at least at our icon level, which is our highest level mastermind group.

So three points, I just want to sum up. Number one, if you, if you haven't experienced a mastermind, if you want to be great and you want to be a great entrepreneur, start your own mastermind. You can do it by getting folks together once a quarter, what? Sorry, once a month for pizza. And it is, it is awesome. Number two, if you want to learn more about masterminds, Ben was supposed to be on my webinar. We did, but we at the last minute, you couldn't be there because of a small surgery. But we got Adam Ross and one of your superstar success stories, who's built, you know, from nothing, and he created the mastermind from from, you know, a small firm himself and a phone to, you know, 567, 10 million He credits the mastermind So Adam Ken Hardison, yeah, we had yet another boxer. So it's on our YouTube channel. It's on our podcast. You can learn all about masterminds. And number three, I absolutely am a huge fan of masterminds. I'm in an agency mastermind with other agencies, and same experience with you. There's two other agencies in my mastermind who are multi, seven figure agencies, and they're also specialized in law, and we share with each other. One of the guys can sell ice to ask the most, one of the greatest sales person has ever met. He gives the two of us tips on sales. One of the guys is phenomenal at a particular special he does. And those guys are both asking me about the local service ads. So we're all sharing and giving. But you know, like you said, the power of that group, like, if you're able to mastermind with Ben, trust me, that's all you need. But then you've got 10 other guys in the room who've, you know, if you're not great at HR, if you're not great at accounting, if you're not great at you know. Marketing, there's going to be three or four other people in your mastermind who can help you solve those problems with real world current experience. So huge fan of the masterminds. Make it either, you know, start your own mastermind with a with a pizza party, or, you know, come to GLM and get hooked up with one of these masterminds. It's phenomenal. One

of the other things you'll do you'll appreciate this, is we talk about the agencies like we talk about you guys, and lot of that conversation is right? I'm having this issue. Who should I talk to, like, whose phone number or email should I get inside the agency to get stuff done? And so there's a lot of free flow. It's confidential, you know, information, but there's a lot of honest discussion about vendors across the legal space, whether you're looking for an out of country employee, you know, a digital marketing company, a radio company, all of these lots of discussions at that level as well, sir.

So we're down to about five minutes if you're running and commuting and and you wanted this to last 20 more minutes. I'm sorry, real quick. Give me your top two minutes on Eos, one of my favorite topics, the Entrepreneurial Operating System.

So EOS. We discovered this through the book traction. EOS is really the way I've discovered you're hiring a business coach to come in to help run quarterly and annual meetings to teach you the structure of running business operations in your law firm. It we were good before this, right in both of our companies, we got a ton better when we adopted the discipline J of 90 minute leadership meetings every week. When I first heard that, oh my God, I don't have time for this. But actually it reduces the time that you spend you have to spend hands on in the business, because you are building structure into the business. That's number one, right? The other thing is, when you have a good leadership team, and, you know, one of our challenges was getting the right people on leadership when you have a good leadership team, Jay, that you can have honest discussion with hard discussions bring up issues because you trust each other. I mean really, really hard, sometimes hard, hard issues that you debate and you decide, but when the meeting is over, you are aligned. That is a superpower, much like the superpower of having other team members who love coming to work for you. I mean, this is not like who can spend the most on advertising. This is who can build an organization that likes to all row in the same direction with you and is willing to row long and hard to make all of you successful

if you're a business owner or membership member of the leadership team, EOS has been spectacularly successful for our business as well. But my tip is don't read traction. If you're the business owner, read this book. Get a grip also. Quickman, and the difference is traction is sometimes hard for the the founder, what EOS calls the visionary, to read. It's a more technical book, but get a grip, is told as a parable, as a case study of a real actually, one of Gino wickman's first client. So that's my hot tip there.

I agree with that 100%

so I got a quick couple quick one liners. We've done this on the podcast for like, 15 years. So what's one of your favorite apps or techniques for personal productivity?

Time blocking, we talk about that in OBS, time management. So every every event has a start and end time from writing a brief start and end time, you'll screw it up at the beginning, but you'll teach your brain How to Schedule correctly, and you'll teach your brain how to focus.

Best business books,

well, get a grip is a great business book. I also like Cal Newport's deep work. That's a that's an annual reread for me, and almost anything in the in the no BS series from Kennedy. And I would say this, the no BS time management book is the most it's the book with the highest sales of the no BS here. Oh,

congratulations. That's awesome. What blogs, podcasts or YouTubes that you subscribe to and they come into your stream and you immediately switch over to that

one. I love Conrad Sam and gees on digital marketing, I have to almost look at my phone. Obviously. When Brian posts something, I like to I like to hear who he is interviewing. I've got not so much blogs anymore, but it is the the guys and gals who are coaching in the legal space that I like to listen to, and then outside of legal Built to Sell John Warlick is a great fundamental fund foundational podcast about what we've been talking about here for almost an hour. It's like, how do you build a business that someone would. Want to to acquire. I subscribe to a number of publications. I get a I get a newsletter from Kennedy that isn't publicly available, is hardly ever advertised. And it is, it is, it is like the newsletters I read 20 years ago from Dan. So it's not

when that comes in. You stop everything. It's

not what you get from Clickfunnels or Funnel Hacking live. You know, this is, this is Dan, yes, when that comes, we stop, we open it and we read

it. Who's your NFL team or soccer team?

So it's interesting, Jay, as you know, you probably know I have referred soccer for over 50 years. So of course, I follow D. I don't follow football, hardly at all. DC, united, United States national team. But mostly, if I'm watching the game, I'm actually, I'm weird. I'm watching the referee team. Yeah. And if you want to go watch some cool stuff on YouTube, on YouTube, there's, there's some programs where you can hear the audio that the referees are talking to the video assistant review room. And here's what you hear. You hear calm, you hear authority. It's really cool. So any of those miked up rugby, miked up soccer, those are cool videos to go watch. Yeah,

love it. Last question, Where can people get in touch with you?

So I'm very active on LinkedIn. If you Google Ben Glass, lawyer, referee, sportsmanship. Great Legal Marketing. You'll find me, benglaslaw.com, greatlegalmarketing.com and I'm happy to like, I like talking. I've got a program called Lunch with Ben. So if people go to lunch with ben.com, you can schedule some time with me. I'm going to eat lunch anyway, and the fee for that is you just make sure that the salad gets delivered to my office and we'll chat. It's really easy, but lunch, dot lunch with ben.com. Has the details on that.

I love it. Ben, thank you so much. This has been really, really great. We could have gone easily three cars. And thank you so much for your time. And I hope everyone enjoys. We're looking

forward to seeing you out in October. Jay,

thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n golden rules.com you.