EP111: Adam Rossen’s YouTube Blueprint – Growing a Criminal Defense LawFirm

One of the things that the way we do it, that I think is really important is, for example, in two days, we are filming a CLE presentation on firearms and gun crimes. When we do those for lawyers, it's a little different. There's a PowerPoint. We have to have a certain rubric, you know, it's there's CLE credits, where our audience is different. But when we're doing this on YouTube, our audience is people, right? And so when we're speaking to people, we get to show a little bit more of our personality, and that's, I think that's important also, because people are scared to talk to us, right? They think us, lawyers and doctors and accountants are fancy and uptight and, you know, and just unapproachable. So one of the things that we do is we really get and it's not just me, we have six lawyers in the firm, and we get to show our personalities, and that's how you you make connections with people, and that's what we're doing here, especially when, and it could be whether it's B to C or B to B, you still need to make connections with people, and video helps us do that.

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. Today, we're live with the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast and video, I guess. Adam, thanks for doing this. Yeah,

Jay, thanks so much you know for having me here. I'm super excited. Anytime I can talk to you, it's gonna be a good

time. So today, we're with Adam Rossen. He's a criminal attorney in Fort Lauderdale. We're down in the Fort Lauderdale office, and thanks for hosting too.

Oh yeah, look, it's my pleasure. We have this brand new, you know, six month old studio. And so when we were talking about doing this, I said, Hey, let's, let's come here. Let's just, you know, have you see the place and hang out in the studio? Yeah,

it's great. I got to meet the team, and he got a great team, great energy in the office. So

we do, we do. We're all very high energy people. I'm high energy. Our team is that way. That's part of our culture, for better or worse. But I think most of the part, most of the time, it's for the better. And we always love people coming in. We do a lot with tech and a lot with just zoom Google, meet different things, but we love when our clients come in. We love when our team's here together. It's just a totally different experience and a much better

culture. So tell us a little bit about the firm and a little bit about the cases you handle.

Yeah, so you know, as you know, but not everybody would know. You know, Rossen law firm. We are one of the largest criminal defense firms in South Florida, if not the country, and really it's because most criminal defense firms are small, so we're about 22 to 25 people now. It's been real steady. Well, we had some really fast growth. Within two years, we went from six to 13 to 20 people right after covid. But it's also been 20 years in the making. And so we we handle exclusively criminal defense cases, any kind of state court case, from the upper keys to about Jupiter, North Palm Beach County. And we have a federal division as well, federal health care fraud, white collar crimes, financial crimes, that is federal in nature. And we handle those nationwide.

Great. And, you know, tell us a little bit about the marketing. And I always want wonder, you know, what percentage of cases are referral and what percentage of cases come in for marketing, right? We

have a good mix of both. I love marketing. That's something that back about 10 years ago when me and my own partner split, and, you know, we're kind of starting over. We had no marketing experience before, and my opinion back then was I just needed more cases, more cases. So how are we gonna get more cases? I'm gonna learn to market so and it's it's something that, as I did more and more, I thought was actually fun. So we have a heavy focus on marketing. We have an internal marketing team. We get a lot of cases for referrals. By referrals, we have a huge internet digital presence, not just through our website, but through social media. I mean, I don't have the exact numbers. That'd be a question for Lara, our marketing director, but I know it's a really good percentage of both. And we're able to get quality, really quality leads and quality clients from both avenues, which I know, if you talk to a lot of people, they say, oh, digital is less, you know, lower quality. Well, not really the way we do things. And our referrals, we also make sure are very high quality. And I think we do a good job of staying in touch with our sources. We can always do better. We have plans to do better, but we're pretty good now.

And Adam spoke at our tgr live growth strategies for law firm event last year, and we just booked the 2025, dates, so confirmed from March 10 and 11th. And you really had some great content about video, and in particular YouTube, and that's been one of the linchpins of your marketing strategy. Maybe give a few tips for folks like, what are the things? It worked really well. Well,

first, JAMA, say you did an excellent job at the conference, especially for being your first year. I was like, wow, this is great, yeah. Oh, it really was. And some of the speakers, you know, were just absolutely fantastic. And I was like, Man, you got some big names and good people for year one. Like,

that's awesome. Came big out of the gate, and we're working hard on you too. Yeah. So

we do a lot on YouTube, and it's something that I wanted to do 10 I wanted to do 10 years ago, but for me, a lot of it was fear based. It was oh, it's got to be perfect. And I really think perfectionism is a form of fear, and it's like, oh, we need to do the lighting, and we need to have this and all these different things perfect. And you know, here we are, 10 years later, we have this beautiful studio, we have a whole marketing team. There's lights all around. We have professional cameras. But it doesn't have to be that way. So during covid, is when we said, You know what? Forget this. We're going to start doing YouTube, which is what I wanted to do for five years. So joined a few groups, learned a lot about it, but then it was really that taking action part. And our first videos, you know, compared to where they're at now, they're not as good, but they we make multiple six figures a year from our YouTube channel, and they're just videos. They're single shot videos. Yes, they're edited. You know, we got a va, a foreign VA in Central America, who, you know, at that time, did a really good job with the editing and but it's just me in front of the camera in my office, behind my desk. Simple. The lighting was okay, the sound was was decent, not as good as it is with these professional mics, but it's good enough, and we made money. And, you know, we help, we use it as a way to get more clients so we can help more people. So one of the things I want everybody to know is you don't have to wait for it to be perfect. Starting something is better than just sitting and waiting and waiting and waiting. You know, you need a minimum viable product. Get it out there, and then you can iterate and make it better over the

years. So true. Just, you know, really, I always tell people commit to a cadence, you know, we're going to do one video a week and shoot four at a time. Yep. And the simplest thing is just answer questions, right in my take. But where do you come up with the content? And what is the content?

Yeah, well, so I've also found that when you commit to something like this, you'll naturally see that the contents there. And it's easy. I'm in the car, I'm on scrolling on Tiktok, on Instagram, looking, and then I just, I'm creative, and I'm like, oh, okay, this is a great idea. Or this is how some what somebody did. How can I make this applicable to criminal law? Or how can I make this better or different? So there's so many things in our lives. You know that we can do to make better? I have certain I have my kids play out certain police scenarios where my oldest is now arresting my youngest and he's dressed like a police officer, or I'm dressed like a police officer. And there's just just ideas that come up now for us, we have a good mix of body camera videos, which, with our clients permission, we post where the police are not making the best choices, and they're either lying to our clients, violating our clients' rights, and those are really popular on the algorithm. Now we're criminal defense lawyers, so that's kind of fun and sexy, and people want to see that. And that elevates the channel, but that doesn't really directly bring us clients. It just elevates the channel. It helps us get views, it helps us get subscribers. And then we do the deep dive educational videos, and those where we do a deep dive into assault and battery, or into sex crimes or theft or fraud, those are the ones that have a lot lower views. But when somebody's scared about their case and they want information, and they don't want to just read a blog post on your website, but they want to actually, you know, watch a video and learn we're doing those five to 15 minutes a piece. We might have five or 10 videos on a subject area, and then sprinkle in three to five client or case results. So a lot of these, these series that we do, we'll have seven to 15 videos on theft, and we'll have a bunch of FAQs in there as well. And they're not two minute videos, they're good five to really more of eight to 15 minutes, where we're it's the same kind of talk and questions that we would have with a client. And when you shoot a one or two minute video on YouTube, that's an ad that's not you know that you can't solve an FAQ, you can't give any real information in two minutes. That's an ad that's all that is. And so we go deep, we dive deep, and we have people at all hours of the day, especially late at night or early in the morning, when they can't sleep and they're worried and stress, and they want information. So that's been excellent, because those are the ones that bring us clients, and when they call us, they're already pre sold, because we're building the know, like and trust factor more than just, oh, his picture looks nice. It looks like a cool team. I read their blog post about this, or I went on the website. It's, oh my god. I watched seven of Adam's videos. You guys are I need you. You hear it all the time, right? Yeah, we do, yeah, yeah. Wow. You know, I feel like I I learned so much about my case that the two other lawyers that I talked to never talked to me about I need to come in. I need to talk to you guys. I know you guys are the best. They're pre sold, and so that's how, one of the many ways we get a higher quality of client from digital marketing, and it's free. No, no,

that's a great point. And I learned this years ago. Do you know John pankowski is a trust and estate guy in West Palm Beach? No, I don't, but I love to meet him. Yeah, probate guy. And so we did videos on 15 years ago with John, and he would tell us, you know, Monday or Tuesdays, like, you know, I got another great case on Sunday. And I was always like, why Sunday? He's like, Well, I take the intakes on Sunday, yeah. And he would always get these cases after softball, and, you know, I would say, you know, what did she say? He would say over and over that she watched four or five of my videos, and she knew I was the guy for her, right? And so I've used that, you know, a lot of times people say, Well, no, I'm not going to do video. Nobody watches video. No, you don't watch video. But people choose to consume content differently, like some people will read your website, believe it or not, right? Yeah, we write a lot of copy, mostly for the search engines, but also for the readers. And then some people will watch video. I'm a clicker, so I get impatient with a video,

right? Well, YouTube is great for how tos, you know, how to fix your toilet, but it's also great for reviewing products, and I look at it for the How to and the products. But there's a lot of people, especially more and more over the next 10 years, that are going to go to YouTube and to video for consuming information. It's just been snowballing over the last 10 years, and it's going to be even a totally different world in the next 10 years. And one of the things that the way we do it, that I think is really important is, for example, in two days, we are filming a CLE presentation on firearms and gun crimes. When we do those for lawyers, it's a little different. There's a PowerPoint. We have to have a certain rubric, you know, it's their CLE credits, where our audience is different. But when we're doing this on YouTube, our audience is people, right? And so when we're speaking to people, we get to show a little bit more of our personality, and that's, I think that's important also, because people are scared to talk to us, right? They think us, lawyers and doctors and accountants are fancy and uptight and, you know, and just unapproachable. So one of the things that we do is we really get, and it's not just me. We have six lawyers in the firm, and we get to show our personalities, and that's how you make connections with people, and that's what we're doing here, especially. And it could be whether it's B to C or B to B, you still need to make connections with people, and video helps us do that.

Tremendous. You said something else that's really valuable, so I want to sort of restate it for the learning. And you said that you do more entertaining or more interesting videos, like body cam videos, right? I mean, there's nothing. It's hard, always hard, to call these things entertaining, but certainly more entertaining than just a straight Q, A, and the entertaining does two things in the mix, right? And you said, it gets a lot more views, but the stuff that gets, like shares and comments, feeds the algorithm, the YouTube algorithm. And so when people watch your videos. They watch them through, you know, a longer time period, or to the end they like share and comment on your videos. Then YouTube naturally shows more of your videos Absolutely. And there's a, you know, I don't know about your feed, I'm sure you're gonna recognize this. If you watch even a little bit of YouTube, it gets very, very good at recognizing your feed. So I see a lot of videos about the Winnipeg Jets hockey team, Miami Dolphins football team, internet marketing and tennis. Nicely doubles tennis. Because, you know, I'll watch a doubles tennis video to the end. So it feeds me more doubles tennis videos. How is that factored into your success? Yeah.

I mean, you know, I think nowadays it pretty much everybody knows. If you're on Instagram, Tiktok, Facebook, YouTube, they know what you're what you're looking at. I mean, even just this week, my son started watching Lilo and Stitch for the past few months, there's one ad mate, I must have went on something, because I get one ad on Instagram, I think Sunday night about a stitch plush toy, and I swear on Monday, I had seven new ads from new companies about this, and I'm just like, where is this coming? They know what I'm doing. It's scary, but, you know, there's obviously reasons why they do that, so you know, but you're absolutely right. And when you're continuing to get people to subscribe and you're pushing out more of this content, it also gives you a voice. And I think it's really important for what we do, criminal law, or criminal defense, is such a passion here. It's part of our culture. You have to work at Rossum law firm. You have to have a passion of helping others through criminal defense. That's why I'm the only prosecutor currently in the. Or never, say never. But we really want people who have defended people before, not just people who love criminal law. And when you have that, and you can show that to people of how we defend people and how we call out some police officers, we put them on blast when the police report says X, Y and Z, and it's completely contradicted by the body camera video. We have those when we have a video where a cop is on body worn camera telling our client your lawyer is trying to mess you up and screw you up, to coerce them into signing a document, and then the document that they signed said that there was no coercion. They did this of their own free will, and they had plenty of time to consult with their lawyer. You better believe we're going to put that cop on blast, as long as the client gives us permission. We've had police officers show up to depositions and talk to us, either in court or out of court, saying, Hey, guys, can you take the videos off of me on YouTube? And it's no why would you want that? You know, we say to the officer, why do you want us to take it off or why? Because we called you out, because we caught you in a lie. Absolutely not, you know, we feel as though we have a duty, right? You know, we and and those police officers, we want them to think twice, and we want them when they see that we're on a case, to get scared and to get worried. Because one of our goals is to build a powerful team and a powerful law firm that can stand up for justice for our clients. So there's so many factors and why that

from lawyers all time? Reputation so important, absolutely. We're here in South Florida, and Tyree kill had this incident before the first game of the season. This is probably running two or three weeks from from the incident, but so let's talk generally about it. But essentially, Tyree kill football player on the Miami Dolphins. I'm sure everybody saw it, got pulled over just block a block from the stadium. So they right, and one of the one is speeding on

his way to work. We all do that. That's what he was doing.

And you know, he originally rolled down his window, then he rolled up his window, and the officers got upset because he wouldn't roll back down his window. I think he was on the phone with his agent trying to get it taken care of. So talk to us a little bit about, you know, what should the you do in a situation like that? You're a citizen, you're driving, how do you deal with the police? And then talk to us about what the police potentially did wrong in that situation. Right?

Absolutely. And just even to back up a little bit, we're I'm not at the point with our YouTube marketing or video marketing or social media where I can just drop what I'm doing to, you know, be that reaction video for every viral video. Because, of course, if you're friends with lawyers, you're going to see a few people do it. But, and it's good and bad for us, I want to make sure that if we go ahead and do those things all the time, then it's part of a defined strategy. There's time left open every day to do it, because just doing once or twice, you're not going to really get the traction. And I also want people to understand it took us years to get to the point where we have a studio, where we have a team, and we have all these things. And so I think it's really important for whatever social media marketing you're doing, and I don't necessarily consider YouTube as social, but whatever type of marketing you're doing, think of it as an oil rig. You want one oil rig. And to get oil, you have to drill very, very, very deep. And then once you drill very, very, very deep, and you start getting the oil right, meaning you pick one modality, maybe it's SEO, maybe it's pay per click. And once you have success, and you've mastered that, then you can build another oil rig. But if you just start taking a shotgun approach and say, I'm going to do five things and kind of half ass all five, you're not going to get any results on all five. So that's been our approach systematically over the years. And I would love to get to be that talking head and have fun on every single video, because in our field, there's something happening every single week that's newsworthy, but we're not there yet. Specifically about Tyree kill and what happened, my take on this, and we just saw the body worn camera video, I think, came up two days ago. So my thing is, I think the big thing is, the officer was a jerk to begin with. And when you have an officer treat somebody with disrespect, yelling and screaming from the absolute first interaction, it's going to cause a snowball effect. And I think that's where the officer, that's the thing that concerned me the most about the officer's behavior. Now, did Tyreek do some things wrong? Sure, he should not have rolled up the window. Okay? That was completely wrong. And from an officer safety standpoint, when you have dark tinted windows and you can't necessarily see what's going on in there, okay, I personally understand why they got him out of the car. I do. Because, look, you have, I don't know if the officer knew who he was or not, but you have somebody who's completely uncooperative at the same time, if the officer treated Tyreek with respect, professional respect for a human being, whether he knew who he was or not, because all he did was was speeding, right? Maybe he was driving a little bit like a jerk, but driving a little bit like a jerk is not a reason to treat somebody with complete disrespect, and

I don't want to get too into. Details, but they didn't have a radar. So this was visual speed. They called it visual speed of 60 miles an hour. And I'm sure it was a restricted zone because it was close to the stadium, right? But is that legal? Like well, they have visual right?

So the well, so in order for it to be a valid stop, the police are allowed to visually estimate speed, so from a legal perspective, so let's say they found, you know, illegal guns or drugs in the car, it would most likely, from what I saw there, it would appear to be a valid stop just based on visual estimation of speed. That's actually very easy for the officers. Now, if he was fighting a traffic ticket in court, then just for speed, well, you need more than visual estimation. You need either pace clocking or radar to actually sustain that ticket. But from a fourth amendment, you know, search and seizure, you know, discussion of was the stop valid? Most likely, yes, it was, at least from the limited stuff that I've seen. So, so

if they there's anything like tags off or hidden or driving. And I think a lot of times you see on TV shows or whatever, they pull people over because they do something that's, you know,

yeah, I mean aggressive driving or well, and since 1998 in the in the REN case, which is a very famous US Supreme Court case, they basically say pretextual stops are okay so long as there is an objective, valid basis for an infraction. Now, there's still many ways that defense attorneys like us can prove that there's an illegal stop, but speeding is one of the most difficult. Speeding is one of the ones where the police officers, from a legality standpoint, they're going to get the benefit of the doubt based on the case law, probably at least nine, 999 times out of 1000 if not more. But and same thing with with maybe, you know, a tag right, a tag light out, or an equipment violation. But there's a lot of other things in other areas, especially in this comes to light a lot in DUI law, where the our clients never know that their rights are being violated, and they are quite often in other avenues. But speeding is very difficult to win that one. But there's many other reasons that we can so it just, you know, it there's, it's so nuanced that it really depends. So

just quickly, what you know, if someone's watching this and they get pulled over, what should we do? Well,

you always want to be polite and respectful. The problem is, is you're not going to win an argument with the police on the side of the road. So you know, even on this right, Tyrique got, you know, he was handcuffed, he was detained. He wasn't technically arrested. They might have given him a written arrest for a for reckless driving, and if they did that, it's a technical arrest. But you know, he was detained. He was handcuffed and detained because he was being uncooperative and wouldn't get out. I always tell people when I lecture on these things, when they ask you to roll down your window, keep your window rolled down, but they ask you to get out of the car. Get out of the car. You're going to get out on your feet or your face. And we saw what happened to Tyreek. You can't win on the side of the road. It's best to just live to fight another day, right? And that's where we come in, and that's where we come involved, and we take it over now, luckily, it went viral for Tyreek, and it was, you know, within minutes, everyone was posting on social media. His teammates came out. The body camera, you know, came out within a day because the police basically had to release it, you know, to avoid a further PR nightmare. So it's a lot different when you have a celebrity like that than when we have a client like ours. But yeah, it's unfortunate. Police are jerks. Sometimes they have a power trip, and this never would have happened if this police officer treated Tyree hill like an ordinary human being with basic dignity that he deserves great

well. Thanks for delving into that, and hopefully it's not too dated, and everybody will all know a lot more about this incident in two or three weeks. You know, you've had a tremendous amount of success with the firm, if he didn't see Adam, he was on our mastermind webinar, so that there's a whole video, and you can watch the YouTube video or listen to the audio. And masterminds have been a big part of your success. As a matter of fact, we interviewed Brian glass and Ben Glass, so for the regulars on the podcast you just listened to Brian and Ben. I think they both mentioned, you know, one of the success stories that came through the mastermind. But, you know, talk about a little bit about the mastermind and growing the firm, and with them, I always like to make tips for younger, smaller firms,

yeah. So Ben and Brian have been instrumental in my success. They're great friends, mentors, you know, and it just, I mean, so I've learned so much from both of them.

And it's the Great Legal Marketing Conference, and is the mastermind called Great Legal Marketing.

They have different masterminds. They have an icon accelerated, which is the higher level, and they have a hero accelerated group, so at different revenue levels, because there's different problems and different issues. That seem to always come up at different revenue levels. They're both fantastic. And I've been, I was a member of their groups for a very, very, very long time. And I want to say one of the greatest honors that I've had in 2024 was to be able to share the stage with Craig golden farm and Ken Hardison on that I was a late fill in for Ben because Ben had emergency surgery and Brian couldn't do it. So when we talked and you're like, Hey, Adam, your next man up. You're coming up from the minor leagues, I was, I was so excited because, because Craig is a friend and mentor of mine for quite a few years, and although I don't I followed Ken Hardison from afar, and I was just so excited to be in a group with him as well. But yeah, masterminds have been an essential, an essential part of my success. I joined GLM, I want to say in 2016 I spent so me and my old partner, we split in 2015 and it was just the two of us. We had no staff for eight years. And then 2015 I spent the whole year consuming content, learning, growing, but I didn't really take any action. I was scared. It was a lot of fear, and oh my god, I got to pay money to join this group. Okay, well, it was a few 100 bucks a month. It was nothing. But, you know, there was still that fear. So I finally took a leap, joined GLM, went to a boot camp. Charlie Mann was, was another friend and mentor of mine who was very involved with GLM back then. He was running the boot camps, and I just fell in love with it. And from there, I went to my first conference, and I know they're coming up with their conference in October of this year, and I set an intention. I said, Well, within two years, I want to be in the mastermind, you know, I want this amount of revenue, and I want to be in and I didn't think I was ready yet, which, looking back, was also kind of a fear based limitation, because I didn't know if I had enough to contribute. You know, I always want to be a contributor and not just a taker. But within two years, I hit my goal, and I joined their mastermind great and to have be in a room of 1015, 20 people with a regular cadence to The Know, you know your problems, know your issues, and just be there for one another was fantastic, I mean, and even I was in the group for two or three years before covid, and we went to weekly meetings during covid. And one of the stories that I always love telling is, you know, I had this great idea that within six months, everyone was going to be bankrupt because of covid, right? And, of course, it was a terrible idea. And the idea, you know, I went to a bankruptcy seminar, and I was like, we're gonna pivot, and we're gonna do bankruptcy law I know nothing about. I brought it to the group, and I wrote out, like, this mini, mini, very crude business plan. And they tore me apart, and they were vicious, but it came from a place of love. But they were just very honest. And they said, Adam, it's high to make any money in bankruptcy. First of all, you know what you're doing. Second of all, you need to have the marketing down path. Third of all, you it's high volume, low fee work. Fourth of all, like you just we don't even know if this is really gonna happen or not, or if this is, you know, or what's going to happen with covid. So when they tore me apart, I really they said, Adam, you know, criminal law and the firm was different than there was. Only six of us, two lawyers, three staff and a full time marketer. They said, Adam, just go deep, deep, deep in what, you know. And I took that and we weren't having trials, you know, Florida opened up pretty quickly. But we still had a pause on court, and then we had zoom court. So I said, I told my entire team, I said, we're going to band together, and, you know, everybody's going to become a marketer, and we're just going to do anything we can think of, all the projects, all the ideas we're sitting at home, we're just going to do them and do them now. And we did, and Florida opened up pretty quickly, and we just exploded from that. So I like to think I had a great idea, but really it was, was a mastermind calling my BS and, you know, encouraging me to reconsider. And they did, and it was a huge, major turning point in Ross and law firms history. So

if you haven't been in a mastermind. Whatever your business, whatever your niche, I've been fantastic part of my success in my career, I'm in a great mastermind with other digital marketing agencies, and it's called seven figure agency, and it's been really fantastic. And like you said, there's different levels. So I was invited to the Titans, which is the highest level in the group, and that room is the smartest room I've ever been in. There's about 20 of us. And the amazing thing is that, like, I've been doing this for a long time. We we just had our 20th anniversary as an agency. But there's incredible young, younger agencies, you know, 567, years, who are doing multi, seven figures. And they know, some of them know so much about like operations. They have standard operating procedures they show us in the room. And everyone in the room is like, oh my god, can you share that with me? And so the power of the mastermind is, like, someone's great at finance, someone's great at training, someone's great at hiring, someone's great at planning and strategy. Yeah. And so the power of that room is unbelievable, absolutely.

And as long as you're in a good group where everybody puts their ego aside, everybody's vulnerable, and is able to trust one another, then exactly, it's one plus one equals 10, right? And one plus one plus one, you know, equals 1000 Yeah? And that, that's the beauty of it, and it's just, it's so it's been such a key part of my growth. People under like Adam, I've invested multiple six figures in the last, I don't know, seven years in coaching and groups and everything. And I can't even calculate how high the ROI is. It's, it's got to be a 1020, 30x ROI. It's awesome, yeah, and I'm developing as a as a human being and as a business owner. I went to law school, nobody taught me this stuff, right? So you come in with an open mindset, and it's also just, it's a way to develop mentors, right, you know? And now I have so many friends and mentors in the industry that also think like me. I don't go to bar events because it's it's just a bunch of curmudgeons who aren't self aware and who don't get it. And I don't want to be in those rooms. You know, they can be in those rooms. I want to be in other rooms with forward thinking, progressive people, and that's

awesome. I feel like this is the Greatest Hits webinar, and you'll never so next up, let's talk about Eos, all my favorite topics. So how long have you guys? Eos, the entrepreneur, the operating system. We have another great webinar if you want to swap that one, Mike Morrison Gerardo escalano, tell us about your Eos journey and what it's meant to the firm.

Right? On, and Mike and giardo are amazing. So, you know, I read traction. I think in 2017 or 2018 we were three and a half people. And actually, I remember being on a mastermind call, not in our meeting, but in a mastermind call with Ben van glass, and he was reading traction, and he had just implemented, started implementing it around then, and maybe he was doing it for six months. And I asked him, I said, Well, you know, we talked about, I said, Ben, the book's great, but I can't do this. We got three and a half people and, you know, and he said, Adam, you can still do pieces of it. You can still come up with some core values. You can still, you know, have a one in three year, you know, a five year plan, you can still do some basic needs. It was, you don't have to tackle everything right away. And of course, I did nothing because I said, no, too much work. I'm not doing it. I can't I didn't say, I'm not doing it. I said I can't do it, which was all fear based. BS, so in 2020 when I could see that there was the trajectory of growth maybe about September, October, I said, and we had grown to six. I said, Hey, we're doing this. So I actually remember John Fisher had a had a one day zoom seminar where he had Mike Morris and John von Hazel on right after they wrote fireproof, before they even started doing their own fireproof coaching program. And listening to it, my takeaway was, there is no way we can self implement and they weren't offering their services at this time. And I said, so we need to do it. We need to hire a professional implementer. Went to Eos, got a few names, asked Ben for you know, his person, interviewed four or five people, and we just had a natural connection with Caesar. Caesar capero, you know, out of South Florida, the profit recipe. So I made Gerardo our partners, and we just had an absolute natural attraction with him. He fit our firm. He fit our, you know, our culture. And we started, I think, in February 2021, and it's easily been one of the top three decisions that I've ever done in the firm. We're on our on our fourth year of it, and it's just it's been so amazing when we have issues or problems, we just go back, what are the core values, right? What's the one, three and five year plan? And you know, the answer is, do we do it or not? And it just magically comes when we analyze it from a perspective of core values and our mission and our vision, and that's it. So I think it's above all. I think it's a system for consistently making good decisions. Obviously, having the team fully running it and having the meeting cadence is great, but the purpose, the why behind it, is so that we as a business can consistently make good decisions.

Yeah, it's very hard to dimensionalize and explain it. Why it's so great. We just had a great l 10 meeting this week, and I called out the entire leadership team in our Slack channel for the entire company, and I said, you know, thank you so much to the team for one of our core values, which is expect excellence, because there's so many things now that they're handling that I used to have to handle, because it gives you an operating system for a business. And it used to be just, you know, whatever was in my head was how we ran the business. Now we run the business on a system. Everybody has common language, and it's even hard. To dimensionalize it. The other tip I always share, and if you listen to this podcast over and over, I apologize, there's this a second book by Gina Wickman called Get a grip. And many of us who are the visionaries. If you're a visionary for your business, meaning you're the CEO, you're you're the Rainmaker, you bring in most of the business, you go to the conferences, you build the strategic relationships. That's the visionary role, and you're the visionary, yes, yeah, typically, the founder is the visionary, but not always. Sometimes you're more of the operations person, which is called the integrator. But if you're a visionary, and you read traction, sometimes it's a little hard to get through it. I had eight or nine or 10 years ago, and I just couldn't get I kept hearing how great it was, and I kept trying to read through it, and it didn't really resonate with me. Then I read, get a grip and get a grip is told in a fables story format, and it just locks in better for the visionary, maybe I'm not smart enough for traction, but you know, then I really got it, and we did the same thing as you. We started self implementing for two years because we didn't really have a leadership team. We had seven, eight people, but once we had a team, in January of this year, we went all in. We hired Gerardo, we did an implementer, we did the four meetings. We got everything rolling, and it's been just fantastic. But for a couple years we did quarterly rocks, we get a scorecard. We ran, you know, sort of weekly meetings in the LTN format. We didn't really know what we were doing, but it was miles ahead of doing nothing, right? And

you're now in 2024 I can say I truly, fully believe and understand in the value of investing in an implementer and investing in some of these things. But when we were still starting in 2021 or end of 2020 and then making the final decision in 2021 I had to really convince myself that this is an investment. So, you know, that's been part of my evolution. And EOS has helped a lot of things. Masterminds have helped. Personal Development has helped. But luckily for me, I looked at it, and I kept telling myself, Adam, you have to believe. You have to trust. This is an investment. It's an investment in the in you and myself. It's an investment in the business. You can't look at it as a cost. Oh, I don't have money or ox, you know, because you we're going to talk ourselves to death and to never take action. And that's why core value number three in the firm is take action, and we have five core values. Everybody in our team knows our core values. We talk about them every single day. We do shout outs every single day. We have awards based on our core values. So it's a real thing. It's not that BS corporate culture where you know you're not living it, or it's there on a wall and nobody references and nobody really knows it is a real, living, breathing thing. And when we talk about culture in a law firm, that's so important,

I love it. I remember, I used to work in an ad agency, and they had the core values outside the elevator, and nobody knew them, and it didn't resonate. And so I when I first heard about the EOS core values, I was like, Oh, that's not sense. That's not going to work, but it really works. Oh,

it absolutely does art. We attend summer interns in our we have a formal internship program that's highly competitive every summer, and they all know them, and you know, it's just, it's really cool, and it makes it fun. And when you're competitive, you can gamify it. That's why we have prizes. We have award we have a Minnie Mouse pin from, from Frontierland. I think it's frontier it's from Pirates of the Caribbean. She's dressed as a pirate, and we got it Manny. Manny and I, we went to a seminar at Disney about the Disney Institute and Disney service, and he pulled this up, and it says, I never surrendered. He says, I'm buying this, and we're going to start a new tradition at the firm, Manny's the managing partner and the integrator of the firm, and we've had this now for three years. And every week at our staff weekly meeting, we give out the Minnie Mouse, never surrender pin, and it's great. And it travels around. And, yeah, it travels around. And you know, our when our VAs win, it's so exciting. And we have a background for them

when you bring it home, yeah, pretty much

exactly. And so they have it on the background, and different things. These

things really live in the firm, and we get competitive. And

Manny and I are always like, wow, we're not getting it enough, you know, and stuff. And so, yeah, it's, it's just, it's a great part, but our culture is one of hard work, competition, you know. And so it just, it's another way to gamify our core values and what we do.

I'm gonna steal that, because I actually bought some. There's some animals in the one. I'm thinking of a squirrel. And a squirrel is when you go on a tangent right from the movie Up. I think it's like the squirrel would always like it, or the dog would get distracted by the squirrel, but I'll find some of the more positive things and give those out as right, yeah. So, you know, just to bring this to a close, we both got a couple things to get get to today, otherwise we could go on for hours. And so I always for years, 10 or 12 years, I've been asking people. Are there any apps or personal productivity tips that you'll share with the group?

Sure, one thing that I think has really been tremendous for us is using ninety.io to the software to manage our EOS. It's we were using a different software before that software was good, but it wasn't great, and we recently switched to 90, and 90 has been absolutely fantastic. So I highly recommend. There's about three big softwares. But 90 is by far that's

with or without EOS. By the way, I was talking to someone this week. They're using 90, and they had no clue what EOS well, they're probably

doing their own version, you know. And you don't have to be a strict constructionist and follow EOS to the absolute T that's another thing that I think lawyers right the perfectionism stands in the way a lot, too many times. Why do this every single way? We still modify and break certain rules as needed. But 90 has been fantastic for for that aspect. It really has it. So yeah, if you're on it, or even if you're not, I highly recommend that next

one, what's your best business books that you recommend? Oh,

there's been so many, you know, I still think, as far as classics go, E Myth, you know, just because that was something I think that most people read fairly early on in their journey, and that had a huge impact on me. I don't reread it every year, but I try to reread it maybe every three years or so, developing business systems, right? You know, and the fable of Sarah's pies, it's just, it's so good, and it's such a good explanation, because that's my dad. My dad's a dentist. He's very technically sound, but he never grew it into a business besides Him. And so I'm always resonating with that, and we've been able to grow this into a real firm and a real business, where I'm out of production, and I love being out of production. I still love being involved, in some case, strategy and things, but I can do a lot of other things, like be here and drive the business forward. And of course, those things now for me, excite me. If it doesn't excite you, then you can hire other people to do that. So but building a business is really important.

Blogs, podcasts, YouTubes, what do you subscribe to? And when it hits your feed. You know that's your go to

so obviously, any stuff that you do is fantastic. I love Charlie man's podcast. They don't teach us in law school. Charlie, he's a friend, a mentor, and he he's just really good at interviewing people and and being on their

content. And Charlie's been on this right podcast and webinar. I really

like Brian glasses. I think Brian's done an excellent job. Our friend, my friend, Tom Tona in New York, you know, he has, he has a podcast that I've been on a few times, and his is really good. There's so many people out there. I happen to think, you know, ours is success in South Florida. It's more local. It's not really here for lawyers, but we do have some lawyers, and that's obviously fun for the local people. And there's a whole different reason why we do that. I mean, there's just so many things. When I see it, what I do personally is Sundays are my two hour block, and people, some people either think I'm brilliant or some people think I'm crazy, but I have a five year old and a two year old, and Sundays are my day. When I go to Costco, I meander up and down every single aisle I do shopping for the week. I have my earbuds in, and I just listen to podcasts, sometimes music, but most of the time, that's when I consume podcast content, and I just go slow meander, and that's just a little bit about me time. And it's so funny, because I've even talked with Charlie. Charlie is not a fan of Costco, and he's like, Wait, that relaxes you all those people and everything. I'm like, Well, I got my earbuds in. I have the noise cancelation on and and my two boys are a lot more rambunctious than the 1000 people at Costco. So that's just my time, the little bit of me time, maybe that's kind of a sad statement of my life, but I enjoy it and it's fun. So that's what I really consume a lot of

my car. Yeah, hey, if you're listening to this podcast, shoot me a quick note and let me know where and when do you listen to podcasts. Because I'm I'm like, whenever I'm in a car, whenever I'm in the gym, whenever, you know, I'm almost always podcasting. Someone asked me this week, what's your favorite song right now? And I could give him like six of my favorite podcasts, right? Yeah, I had trouble coming up with a song, yeah, but I did hear a good song on a podcast.

Girls are players too. No, no, but it's it is very true. So for everybody watching that, that's true. So

this is something I teach for my networking group. What's a great introduction for you? Who would you like to meet?

So for us, it's we. I mean, everybody needs us most. You don't know when you need us until you know perhaps the fan and you need us, and you need us right now. So for us, it could be anybody, but what we really want to do is be around centers of influence. So it can be attorneys, because a lot of attorneys are centers of influence, but it can also be just group leaders. You know, it could be members, you know, pastors, rabbis, members of clergy. I mean, just anybody who is an. Influential member in a group. We love to do speaking engagements. We do a lot of marketing to therapists, whether it's drug and alcohol abuse, mental health, marriage and family, because they're centers of influence for people as well. So really, but I mean, I talk to anybody, because you never know when something like this is going to happen. So we kind of keep ours, ours broad, and

when the proverbial S does hitting the fan, how do they get in touch with you?

Yeah. So we're very easy. It's Rossen law firm, R, o, s, s, e n, 2s is we're I like to think that we're everywhere. I hope that we're everywhere between social media, our website, you can just Google us. You know, our website is rossenlawfirm.com our main number, we have probably, like 15 different numbers, but our main number is 754206, 6200, I love to meet and connect with people personally. So you can connect with me on Instagram. LinkedIn. I'm trying to be a lot more deliberate now on LinkedIn, whereas you know, that's a new oil well or oil rig that I'm now trying is starting to, over the next few years, develop, whereas three, four years ago, I paid no interest into it, and now I'm starting to as well. So yeah, anywhere or you can email me, adam@rosslaw.com

Adam, this is great. Thanks for your time, of course. Thanks

for having me anytime.

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