173: Annual Business Plan Workshop: Build Your 2026 Business Plan Now with Jay Berkowitz and Ivy Slater

In 1979 there was a study done with the Harvard grads, and they asked them if they had goals for their future. And 84% hadn't even thought of the topic. 13% had goals, but they weren't written down, and 3% had clear, written goals. Then they met with these folks about 10 years later, and the 13% who had goals earned twice as much as their fellow students who didn't have anything written down. So having goals is like step one to getting to the next level. But the 3% who had clear written goals earned 10 times as much as the other 97% put together Ivy. What does that tell you about the value of doing this, planning and getting it right?

It truly matters. It's not just about ideas. It's about, yeah, in next year we're going to do this, and next year we're going to do this, it's about actually going through a SMART goal process, going through going from a vision to a goal to an action plan, and those that 3% that created the action plan and write it, wrote it down, are the ones who actually see fulfillment hands down.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time this podcast, webinar finds you. Welcome to this month's monthly live stream. We've got a great guest, Ivy Slater. I'm going to introduce ivy in just one minute. And every year we do, we cover the topic of planning, and planning is so important, and not only planning, but like executing, getting it done and then making it happen on a regular monthly basis. So we're going to talk a lot about how to plan, why to plan, but then we're going to actually give you some templates today that you can download and work with and start working on the first draft of your plan, and then how to brainstorm with your team and get it to the next level. Let me just open up. We're using new technology today, so apologies in advance if we got a couple of glitches.

And hats off to using new technology, and we look great.

Thanks, Ivy. Welcome to our annual business planning workshop where you'll write your 2026, law firm business and marketing plan. And you can grab this relatively quickly, but I'm going to show it again in a minute. So if you just want to scan this, or if you're watching on YouTube at some date in the future, just please scan this, because we've got two downloads for you. The first one is a workbook that you can work through and you can use with your team when you go to do your brainstorming. And then we'll go through this worksheet where we'll actually put some numbers to the plan and the marketing component. Now this planning workshop has been very popular. This one from 2023 has been viewed over 48,000 times. And I think all the planning workshops together are over 60 or 70,000 downloads. So you're in the right place. If you want to get your plan done, we're going to go through what components of a law firm annual budget should be. And by the way, we're going to mostly use examples of law firms, because Ivy and I work almost exclusively with law firms. But this is the same kind of planning. I'll talk about how we do planning for our agency, and Ivy will talk about how she plans with her clients, we're going to talk about having a business operating system. So whether you use traction or Rockefeller habits or many three or four other good operating systems, we're going to talk about how to implement that for your business. And if you all don't mind participating a little bit, you can put a post in the chat. Let me see if I can see the chat here. I can put a note in the chat. And if you're pretty confident, like you got business dialed in, you're like the guys on suits, give me a one in the chat if you think you've got this stuff figured out. And if you're on the exact other opposite Vinnie Boom Bots, and you've got no real plan, but you're just getting started, and you're here for planning. Maybe put a two in the chat. And if you're

somewhere in the middle, or you just don't like raising your hands at these kind of meetings, put a three in the chat, just so we have some scale. Thank you for that, but overall, congratulations for being here, because the people who go to conferences and the people who go to webinars and the people who listen to podcasts, I've seen a huge difference in my business. The people that I meet that they've never gone to a conference. They don't know any of the conferences. They've never seen me speak, they've never been on a webinar. Typically, those people are at about a half or a third of the revenue of the folks who go and learn and then take notes, but actually do something with it. Congratulations on being here. This is going to help you get to the next level. I promise. Our agenda today we're going to talk about developing your business goals, how to create your business and marketing budgets, how to develop your plan. So we'll do. First Draft here today, and you'll be able to roll this with your team. We'll develop quarterly rocks and projects, create a marketing and community calendar, and if I can, I'll just take a minute to tell you about my co host Ivy, and she'll tell you a little bit about me. Ivy Slater, welcome Ivy officially. Thank you. She calls it from bar to boardroom, her journey, and she was a dancer for many, many years. Beautiful shot. I haven't seen that one before. Then she built a multi million dollar printing company and had tremendous success, and then decided really to the grind of the printing business had become either less pleasant or not the way she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and she wanted to help business people with the expertise that she developed. And she became a consultant, really, relatively early, when there not everybody was a consultant. There's a lot of consultants today. So she's the real thing. Her first book, from bar to boardroom, and her brand new book. Best of the Best. I've been reading it and

loving it. Ivy, her success story, is the name of her podcast, which is a lot of fun and really, really had some amazing guests as well. So Ivy, welcome to the 10 golden rules webinar podcast series.

Thank you, Jay for having me. It's really it's a blast to be here. If you don't know me, if you're going to get to know me, strategic planning is my passion, my guideline. It is not just something I do in this business. It's something I've always believed in and always done. So can I introduce you Jay?

Now, I love it when you do.

Jay is the CEO and founder of 10 golden rules. He's a marketing director. He's background covers from Coca Cola to McDonald's to sprint. I can tell you, I have visited all those brands in my time. Ed Dietz brought to $60 million with the marketing that he did. He founded 10 golden rules in 2003 as an internet marketing company. He works exclusively with law firms. He's a global ambassador to see the good, and this is one of the things I about door, about Jay, he follows through truly on who he is and what he believes in. He's founder of the legal profit partners, former hockey goalie. So being married to a former also hockey player and a former coach of high school hockey, and loves doubles tennis. So day day, this is where you dip. We you and I differ. You're still in tennis. I have moved on to pickleball, but most importantly, 10 golden rules. What I can tell you from my experience of working with Jay, of being at the tent holding rules conference, it is hands down the place for knowledge, information that is going to take your law firm further and done with a great heart and great generosity. And that's how Jay Berkowitz shows up. So I'm proud to call him a colleague. I'm proud to call him a friend.

Thank you, Ivy, and great to be your colleague and friend, and we're working on a whole bunch of things together. So great to have you with us this year to take our planning webinar to an entirely different level. Tell us a little bit about one day, one table, big clarity.

Okay, so in January of 2026 I am hosting a one day intimate group experience to actually sit down and work with me and a small group of people on creating your strategic plan. It's going to include a pre call with me and a POST call, because just actually working the plan or not making sure that you're implementing it does not serve your firm, but it is something. I used to do this stuff all the time, and I have not done this in 10 years. And I said all the people I just got back, actually, from two weeks on the road for four different clients doing strategic planning for 2026 and it was so impactful that I came back and I said, there's small firms that don't do this. You don't take that step out of your business to focus on the growth in your business. So it's a gift. It's one day, it's a gift to yourself and a gift to your firm to focus on your plan for 2026 we're going to take the foundation of what Jay and I are doing today, and we're going to 10x that. So you want more information, reach out to me, awesome.

And if by chance you're watching this like in late January and you missed the planning workshop, you can come see me and Ivy at tgr live, and she'll be a part of our annual conference, as she was last year, and we do it in a beautiful location in Delray Beach, Florida. It's just adjacent to Boca Raton, where our office is. It's March 16 and 17th. It's right on the ocean. And by the way, if you're up north, somewhere in Canada, this is the time to come to Florida. This is when our weather's like. Super beautiful. And all the people who can be anywhere they choose, choose to be in in Palm Beach and Boca and Del Rey. So we'd love to see you at tgr live some of our first speaker announcements include Steve Gersten, who's going to talk about four ways to get millions more in your case, Rob Levine, also, these are multi million dollar law firm owners. Is going to talk about AI for law firms. Stacey brown Randall has an amazing book on how to get referrals without asking. Chris Keller is going to talk about five disciplines to transform your life and your practice. And Cassidy Lewis is the CMO to the stars, and she's going to talk about cutting edge marketing from the law firm side. And of course, I'll be talking about it from the agency side. I'm going to leave this up for one more minute. If you want to grab we're going to go through the workbook today and also the worksheets, so you can just scan this or go to 10 golden rolls, com, slash 2026, dash plan, and I'll leave it here for two more minutes. Ivy, do you know any good jokes while we're doing this?

What happens when a tennis player meets a pickleball player, former hockey player meets a former dancer? Oh, I know magic is made. That's a real that's a bad Ivy joke.

Yeah, we tell bad lawyer jokes in our meetings. The latest one that this week is, what do you call a lawyer who's great at cooking, a sous chef? I like it without any more ads. Let's get into the business planning workshop. And I always love this slide, because when we start out a year, we're always so confident we're gonna have a great year. We're gonna hit our numbers. And then the reality these days is that most days in business is that we're gonna hit some rocks and some moats, and it's not gonna be a straight line to success. And these days it's even more so there's some pirates and some diseases and everything in those gauntlets. Ivy and I both love this study, and I bring it up every year. In 1979 there was a study done with the Harvard grads, and they asked them if they had goals for their future, and 84% hadn't even thought of the topic. 13% had goals, but they weren't written down, and 3% had clear written goals. Then they met with these folks about 10 years later, and the 13% who had goals earned twice as much as their fellow students who didn't have anything written down. So having goals is like step one to getting to the next level, but the 3% who had clear, written goals earn 10 times as much as the other 97% put together. Ivy. What does that tell you about the value of doing this, planning and getting it right?

It truly matters. It's not just about ideas. It's about, yeah, in next year we're going to do this, and next year we're going to do this, it's about actually going through a SMART goal process, going through a going from a vision to a goal to an action plan. And those that 3% that created the action plan and write it wrote it down, are the ones who actually see fulfillment. Hands down it goes, Jay, you and I, you. We talk books all the time, and our networking groups do talk books. Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich early in that book, it was close to 100 years ago, said, be clear.

10 times

he says, early on, write down, be and be specific. And that's what this that's what the Harvard study proves it proved Napoleon Hill's work, in my opinion, that's just my editorial on it, but write it down and look at it. I have mine literally sitting diagonal on an index card on my desk. Look at it every day. Write your intentions down. Write your goals down.

That's a great idea. I've got some key stuff here on my wall. I gotta get my business plan over here on the wall. Go ahead with the next topic.

So I truly believe a business plan is made up of four key components. So I like to align this to a car. So we just picked it like really hot looking car here. Okay, why not? How many people here? One for if do you own and drive a Ferrari? Two, if you don't, I would be a two. But when we look at a car, we're looking at the four wheels. And that's your four components. If your firm, if you're a law firm, is that car in motion? One wheel is your financial strategy. Okay, everything you do around finance that creates your financial strategy. Your next wheel is your marketing strategy, working with 10 golden rules, working with your CMO, getting out and networking in your community. It's not either or. It's and that's how we get the greatest results. Is actually showing up. Up. So your marketing strategy. The next wheel is your sales strategy. What is your intake process? How do you close sales? Do your attorneys talk to somebody else? Talk what is that strategy? And are you tracking the numbers, which we're going to talk about in a moment. And then the team. What does the team look like as we're closing out 2025 and what is the strategy behind the team next year? What are the great book seats on the bus? Right? Who is sitting in what seat on the bus that is helping that bus move forward? And then people, it's your strategy. That fifth wheel, the one who drives that car, that is the CEOs that managing partners mindset that is going to take this strategic plan forward with consistency, and then that wins that race that takes you over the finish line. Strong believers in numbers tell a story. And when I talk about numbers telling a story, I'm not just talking about your PNL, although we do love a great PNL, don't get me wrong. Okay, love looking and helping my clients understand their PNL, not that I'm a CFO, just run a business just 30 some odd years, but the numbers in your firm are more than just your PNL. It's more than just your finance.

Your numbers are your marketing. What's going on in your marketing and where things are sitting. What is working? Right? I start every meeting with every clients, with sharing a success, because when we identify what is working, it's expandable, easiest way to grow. Then you're the numbers in sales. Who's handling these calls. What is it looking like? Is it working? Is it not? What's your conversion rate? What are those numbers look like? And then the planet, and then your team, right? Do you have high turnover? Do people stay with you a long time? Do your people refer clients, right? What's all your team's numbers when you look at those four components in your strategic plan, and we look at the number story it's created, we then have the basic data and information to create the plan forward for the next year, whether it be 2627 or 28

I think I'm going to bring this up again later. But my mentor, my coach, says, what you measure gets attention and improves and numbers right at this time of year is critical. We do measure everything, and so we'll get we'll get into more of that in a minute.

And by the way, I'm just going to give a shout out. What your mentor said is a writer, what was considered a writer downer, what you put attention to, what you measure right, grows and improves. So think about where you're putting your attention. If you're putting your attention on all the problems, if you're putting your attention on the positives that are growing

very good. All right, here's a couple templates that you could use for your annual budget. This is just a very template kind of approach, but if you don't have this on paper, you definitely want to get it on paper. So here's a sample budget for a $3 million law firm with revenue tied to each category. And there's two sort of models here. So the first one is owner's compensation at $750,000 that's 20 to 30% of revenue. That would include owner draws, marketing, 10 to 20% and that would include, you know, paying an agency and your Google ads and everything you're doing in the community, payroll, 25 to 35% rent and overhead, five to 10% case costs. Now a lot of this would be reimbursed, but some of this is like operating funds that you need. And of course, we want to target some profit margin. So this is kind of one simple template I'll show you another template. So this one's kind of derived by percentage of revenue. And then this is another one that I'll show you both. And then let Ivy comment. This one is more like reality based. You know that every year you're managing with four attorneys, they average 150,000 each. So that's about 20% of your cost to case managers. Is about 12% of the cost admin and intake. And then your marketing manager and your vendors. 8% in my opinion, is a bit light, but I'm biased overhead office and tech, rent owner comp, same number we had before, 750, 25% and building in some planning for profit. So Ivy, do you want to comment on these approaches.

I love this. And I would actually then suggest everybody take your P L, take a look at where these figures land, and then go back to Jay's previous slide and see how, in an ideal right, where are we going, ideally, right? Where are we actually spending money, and how is that? Making us money, right? So we always want to be measuring our ROI return on investment, and that a return on investment is includes time spent. So I know a lot with personal injury and and certain other types of legal areas that you work on, contingency you work in T and E you're working in packaged, right? I still think we should be tracking time, because you want to see how profitable you are per case, so you give insights of what types of cases you should be taking. Where do you want to market? Where do you want to put yourself out there in your community? All that again, this goes back to the number story, so I love doing it the second way and then actually countering it and putting it in your first slide. And then say, because then we again, goes back to setting up goals. Oh, I see where you know, owner comma, we're really not earning that. Why not? Gives us information. Oh, number story marketing, oh, we could be spending another 3% where could it come from? Why would that be practical? Or where will we see the ROI on it? Are we doing the right things as far as rents and case costs? Are we being efficient in making sure our case costs are reimbursed and but we have the cash flow and the finances right? So you go that second way, and you see what you got, and then you put it into an ideal and that's where you lead to

and Ivy, what about timing? I know you've been doing a lot of marketing planning the last couple months. A lot of firms start now for next year, you're also going to do some some in January. I guess part of the answer is, anytime is a good time.

Bottom line, any if you haven't done it, just do it. You know, let's go to the just do it. Moment, ideally, and again, ideally. And I put that in quotes. I love to do fourth quarter is when we do the planning for the following year. There's plenty of my clients that we do it in January. We'll do it in the first quarter, and it all depends upon what does your world and the busyness of your world look like in the fourth quarter? If you're new to strategic planning and it's like, I just can't take this time I didn't plan for it, that's okay, forgive yourself. But then make schedule it for January. And if it doesn't happen in January, schedule it for February. Once you put something in your schedule, please commit to it.

But at a minimum, get a couple hours sit down with this webinar, go through the exercises. At a very minimum, we're actually booked December, 9 and 10th for our planning. I like to do it right around that because if you do it in like, October, it's too early, like you don't even know what q4 looks like. And if you do it in January, I feel like you've missed a lot of momentum, because you're really you want to kick start the year with your new plan, your nuke rocks, your new goals, and get roaring out of the gate. The next section I call run your business like a business, and the reason why is like I have a unique position, and Ivy does too. And I'll let her comment when I get through this, where I can see about 100 businesses every year, and I look from the outside in, and I see the numbers, and these are two firms that have almost exactly the same numbers. They've got 4500 marketing numbers, that is, they've got these guys have 4500 people to their website, 3300 from organic. These guys have around 4800 people who come to their website. These guys get 259, phone calls. These guys get 158, 41 forms. So the biggest difference is this firm on the left gets more phone calls. But the real difference in these firms is the one on the left has a plan, and they're extremely data driven. Every decision is made with data, and like ivy and I talked about, what you measure gets attention and improves, and every week we're looking at our numbers at 10 golden rules. They have systems and processes. They have a COO and like very detail oriented asks us all the time about numbers and report on this and testing that, and how did it work? And they're also innovative. They're the first ones. If we go to them and say, Hey, here's a new product we found that's working pretty well for a couple of our clients, you want to test it out like they're always in on a beta. On the other hand, this firm, with similar looking traction, is very weak at execution. They

have extremely high turnover, that constant change and always trying this new thing and that new thing, but they don't stick with anything long enough to make it work. And even our meetings, like we have once a month a performance meeting, I find our firms that are very successful just can have run a calendar and show up at the meeting, and then obviously we're showing them data, and they can make business decisions. So these two things sort of run concurrently. And guess what? These guys average 83 new clients. Clients a month. These guys, average 24 new clients a month. And another thing that's not on here, but it's not a subtlety, is that when you run your business like a business, you get lots and lots of five star Google reviews. You get lots of referrals from the professionals that you work with, because they know you can run your business. They know you're going to do a great job if you're a personal injury, divorce, estate planner, whatever it is, your best leads are referrals, and your best partners are going to refer you if you run a great business, right and you get great results. So the Google reviews and your referrals are also dependent on running your business, like a business, I really like traction and Eos, the book traction is hard to read. I'll talk about that in a minute, mastering the Rockefeller habits and scaling up by Vern Harnish, the great game of business, by Jack stack. You know, at the end of the day, you can run any operating system, but I highly recommend you should have an operating system. Gina Wickman says if the author of traction says, if you have 50 people doing everything 50 different ways, the increased complexity leads to mass chaos. And the beauty of Eos, the entrepreneur's operating system, is that it's very simple. Everybody in the company can understand there's five or six principles, and we just do a great job executing every week. We have weekly leadership meetings. We have weekly targets. Everyone in

the company has one number that they're responsible for, both in reporting on how they performed and putting that in a scorecard. And we look at the scorecard in our leadership meeting, and then we have group meetings called L 10s. Having being active in a mastermind is super valuable. Having a business coach, having a financial coach, a marketing calendar and an integrator, which is part of Eos, is all part of our success. If I could point to one obvious success, we made the Inc 5000 this year for the America's fastest growing companies. And I don't think without all of those components, we have that kind of success.

I'm going to jump in there for a sec. You have to have a back end start operation strategy. You must, you must, you must, us. Is fabulous. In back in. There's a lot of other whatever works for you. It's a matter of you must have something who is everything going back to is always what it comes down to. So we're gathering all this data, but then what are we doing with it? When we have somebody who is your integrator, your COO, who's seeing how the data from one component is influencing the data from another component. And then how do you course correct? How do you expand on it? That's one of the most important things as leaders and the leaders of your firms, you want to know, and you must know everybody here is a great attorney, be a great business owner, and then you will really run a great law firm.

Awesome. Well, now we're going to go into an exercise from we call it the lead gen target planner, and it's another part of building your business and your budget. So this is a worksheet that we've shared, and what you're going to do is type in your annual revenue goal. So this changes all the other numbers, like we used an example of 3 million before, if we change this to 3 million, so you know, if you're at 2.5 and you want to get to 3 million, we just divide your monthly target by 12, that's 250,000 revenue per month. Now realistically, if you're planning to grow, and I had to figure this out, because we've had this nice run of growth, where you are in January, February, March is very different than where you want to be in October, November, December. But just to keep it simple, your monthly revenue target in this instance is $250,000 your average case value. So again, you're going to fill this number in. So obviously it's very different if you're a high volume practice and you're not doing personal injury. But this is an example of personal injury where your value is about $15,000 so each month you need to sign and conclude, either through trial or settlement, 17 cases per month. So there's going to be some drop off. You're going to drop some cases. That number is going to be a little higher. But on average, you need to conclude 17 cases a month at $15,000 to do 250,000 a month. And I know this is super simple math, but so many firms we talked to don't have the basic math firmly in hand. So how are we going to get there? Basically, you're going to get your cases from two different sources, from referrals and from marketing. The. Referrals are typically the best leads. They're going to convert at about 25% and for a lot of firms, that's actually much higher, like it might even be 50% so you can put that into the calculator, let's say most firms, and including 10 golden rules and probably Slater success Ivy, you probably when you get

a referral, it converts much better than someone who comes in off social media or something without a doubt. So this rate, technically should be higher the way the form is calculating it, it's at 25% but most firms also are going to get more of their cases from referrals between past client referrals, professional referrals. So we're saying that 10 of those 17 are going to come from referral. So if you're developing your plan, you need 40 referrals a month to hit your numbers. So now you have a number that every month you can track. And in terms of developing programs, as we get to the brainstorming section coming up, you're going to need programs. If you're only getting 20 referrals a month. You need something like we have a concierge program where we'll book meetings with other professionals for you, and you can have coffee with, ideally, two people a week and build those relationships, and then, over time, you're going to get more referrals. Having a newsletter is super valuable. Having a an attorney newsletter, different from your consumer news newsletter is another more advanced step. So you're going to build things like that into your plan, and then we're going to need seven leads from marketing. So we're going to need seven cases from marketing. We're going to need 36 cases. So the way the math works on this is the seven is 17 minus the 10 that we get from referrals, and the 36 is the seven times four, because we're assuming the 25% conversion rate. If your conversion rate is only 10% if 10% of the people who call from marketing sign up, obviously this lead number would be higher. You would multiply this by 10, not by four, and then the average cost to generate a lead, and generally across the country right now, if we look at the blended between local service ads, pay per click and lead gen, it's about $200 cost per lead and converting 25% four times 200 is $800 cost to acquire a case, or in this case that we're multiplying something

different. Here, we're multiplying the $200 by the 36 leads. So we need a $7,200 marketing budget to hit our target. Does that all make sense to you.

Ivy, it does, and we have some questions in the chat about the marketing budgets and your ideal budget. So what, as Jay is breaking this down, think about number one, what we said before, what's working expands, right? So see if you what your marketing budget is, what is in your marketing budget that is working for you, then you have room to expand on it, because you're having the ROI from that is the 10% 12% 20% Troy, whatever that percentage is, if you're seeing the ROI, it's working. So then you have leeway. So this help really helps break it down, and it breaks it down to per case value, and then you also have that check and balance make sure you're marketing in the right places based on that.

Thanks for noticing the chat. While I was talking Hunter asked, What's the ideal budget split for $3 million firm who wants to double so I don't know if the we can work the math on this one. So if we want it to double, so let's, let's do the math. So let's go to 6 million

in the formula, 500,000

a month. Average case value, 15,000 you can give us another number if you want hunter to work on it. So you'd need 33 cases a month if you're getting we probably need to that is, yeah, so I guess we're assuming the referrals would stay constant in this case study, and we'd still get 10 from referrals, but we'd need 23 new clients. So this should be a formula equals 23 times four. So we'd have to spend $18,000 to get 93 leads to sign one in four, to get 23 new leads from marketing, to grow to that rate. And then, you know, obviously it's more over three years. You'd break it down in we want to get to 4 million in year four or year one of the growth, 5 million. In in year two and 6 million in year three.

And remember, as you're growing in sales, you also have to be growing your back end and a good back end to support that.

Okay, the next part of the plan is creating your marketing calendar. The simplest way to think about this is just get it on paper. This is more for like, your social media messaging. So in January, there's MLK Day. And then the other thing I like to put in the marketing calendar is something we're going to test, something we're going to try out every month. So if you don't have chat on your website, I highly recommend intake or chat or juvo leads, the little chat box on your website is going to increase your leads about 20% because there's a lot of people who come to law firm websites and marketing websites who are not going to fill out your form. They don't want to get on an email list. They're not going to call because they're at maybe they're at work with co workers or something, but the chat is going to improve 20% so that's something that you'd plan out, because all these things take time. So February is a CRO audit, which is conversion rate optimization. March, we're going to implement email follow ons, so every lead is going to get a series of eight to 10 emails, talking about case studies and talking about your team and talking about your community activity. But all of these things take time, so we're going to plan out videos in April and website refresh in May, and then, in terms of the social media calendar, you're going to have things like MLK day in January, a VIP party in February. And a VIP party is great for maybe all your past customers, or maybe any past customer who sent you a referral. And then at the VIP party, you give everybody some of your swag. You give them VIP cards that they or a copy of your book that they can hand out to friends and family who are looking for an attorney. So this is the kind of planning that we're going to calendarize and get this on paper throughout the year.

Jump in here for a second. Things that should be on your calendar. Where are you showing up? So example, I'm going to go to 10 golden rules event in March. So I already have a list of people who are in the Delray area, an hour north and hour south, spend a few extra days, create some great meetings, right? So where are you showing up? Where is your calendar taking you, whether it be locally or not locally, and create those meetings that support the referrals.

So the next thing I want to talk about is brainstorming, and I'm sure Ivy does it different, but on a daily basis. So we've developed, over the years, a really, really great planning and brainstorming strategy, and we've evolved it a little bit with Eos, but the first thing we do is we review the objectives and the priorities, what was on our plan from the past year, in the past quarter, we look at all the numbers. So the same way we've gone through the numbers here, you're going to do that exercise, maybe with the leadership team, and then bring a slightly bigger group into your brainstorming meeting. So you'd bring in your marketing director, your sales director, your intake director, we do a brainstorming exercise for strengths, weaknesses and trends. Now, some people still like the old fashioned SWOT analysis, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, but what I find is the topics that you come up with are repeated. Your Strengths are sort of like the opposite of your threats, and your opportunities are the opposite of the weaknesses. So what we do is we brainstorm the strengths, and what we do, if we have a large group, is we pair up and put people in twos, and you give them these sticky pads, and you say, go off into a corner and creativity really blossoms in twos, because you can go back and forth and build off each other's ideas. If you have 10 people sitting around brainstorming, there's nine people frustrated and one person talking. So that's why we break up into twos. We use the little sticky pads, and then we come back and we say, make sure you write down your best ideas, come back and share five or 10 of your best ideas. So we do that for strengths, like, what are the strengths of the company? Then we repeat it again for weaknesses, and then we repeat it again for trends, because trends is talking about things like AI and AI for law firms and AI for marketing. And a lot of it's going to be AI, but it's also people

working from home, and automated driving cars and automated driving taxis, and there's all kinds of Ubers, all kinds of trends that are going to influence your business. Then we do the same exercise for projects. So we look at all the current projects. Look at all the issues carried over in our Eos, and then we do a brainstorming for new projects. And this is the most important part of the exercise, because we've now prioritized, what are all of our company's strengths? What can we be advertising and promoting? What are our weaknesses? What are the things that we should be fixing, or maybe we're not as good at video. Like six, seven years ago, we didn't really have video as a part of our solution set, so we said we've got to get great at video, and in the next quarter, we're going to do one video project for each customer, and that became our rock or our priority for the quarter. So then we do an exercise called start, stop, keep, what new projects are we going to start doing? What are we going to stop that was on the list, and what are we going to keep that was working? And we select our top five. And so basically, each quarter, most companies, I mean, obviously, if you're massive, you can break it down by department, and you can take other projects and send them to the departments, but our leadership team can do four or five and a quarter, and very importantly, we pick the top one of five what absolutely has to get done this quarter to hit our numbers and hit our goals and objectives. So that's how we do it. Ivy, you want to talk a little bit about how you might do it slightly differently.

Sure, a couple of things, then I think I'm going to give you guys an example. Okay? Because real life examples always help. My team comes together once a quarter for a few hours strategic planning. I work with companies. And Jay made a really good point, when you have a lot of bunch of people at table, you have 1012, people at a table. And I actually did this with eight people last week, with a leadership team, bring in a facilitator, bring in somebody who is not part of, is not vested in the conversation, so they can make sure everybody has heard all ideas are out there, if not. I love the way Jay is expressing team up in twos and brainstorm you want everybody and it's the quiet people who are ruminating on their ideas that really you want to make sure they come out vocally. So as I said, Slater, success adheres to this once a quarter back in I could tell you, 27 teen came up with this idea break in from one of our strategic plannings of a podcast, and divided it up into actions, right? Everybody had a different piece of responsibility. And it came back at that time that the technology was much more complex than it is today, for the person living in an apartment in New York City with a lot more equipment than we were ready to sacrifice a closet for we put the podcast out. Come back the following year, technology advanced. It came back to the table because it was still in the project category. Jay, it was still there. It just wasn't actioned. And we then said, Wait a second. What do we need to know now? And how can we do this? We again broke it down into various components. Tech components said, Ivy, you can do this on Zoom. You could do this with a ring light. You can do this right? You don't need to take an entire closet out of your New York City apartment, which is a lot of real estate here, to create a podcast. And it literally in the matter of less than six weeks. Q4, 2017, the idea was in our Q form meeting. We're like, let's do

this. We launched January of 2018 and been consistent with 52 episodes a year, because we created a system with people. And that's all how this happened, and that's why I thought it would be helpful for our listeners here to not just take conceptually, but how we actually implement this.

Now, where I thought you were going with that story was you launched your podcast, you were successful, and then things changed, and you had to do a video podcast and wait.

And we're now exploring new platforms. Like you're using a new platform today, we're exploring new platform. We're in ever evolution. We've explored series based on our strategic planning meeting. We've had various series. We're in the middle of a nonprofit series, which we do it during the holidays every year. Not that we're in the nonprofit market. I just believe the holidays are about giving and receiving. All this is developed during our strategic planning quarterly sessions.

So one of the things I really love about EOS and the book traction is that Geno Wickman didn't try and change everybody else's terminology. If something's really, really great, he'll just embrace it and he'll use it. And one of the ones that I really love is the quarterly rocks and. And we started doing this about 10 years ago when I read mastering the Rockefeller habits by Vern Harnish, and he was stealing from the success that the Rockefeller companies had. And so what you focus on and measure improves. We talked about that earlier. And so each week in our management meeting, we look at the rocks and we define our top five in that brainstorming exercise that I talked about earlier. And then the top one of five is like in Super Bowl. And then every individual department has their own rocks as well. And so each individual person is responsible either for one of the company rocks or for different things that they're responsible for in their department. And just to give you an example of what came out of a brainstorming meeting a couple years ago was we had our account managers doing social media, and it was four or five years ago, and that was sufficient. We were basically just posting all of the clients blogs and videos on Facebook and Twitter, and that was sufficient at that time, but the game was changing, and video today is so important, and the viral videos, and so we set out to hire a social media manager, and Brianna was in charge of that, and we decided in that quarter, in the next three months, that was the most important thing we had to do to move our company's capabilities further ahead in social media. Then we also decided, okay, we need that we only work with law firms. Our website needs to be updated to say that, because we used to work with everybody, and so that got assigned to Maria, we wanted to develop more roles and responsibilities, which is the accountability chart in Eos, and Laura our COO

took that responsibility. We wanted to reposition 10 golden rules as law firm strategy. So obviously that's in conjunction with the new website, and we opened our new office in Atlanta. So those were our top five that we felt would move the ball forward, and we successfully hired diamond, who's still on our social media team, as our social media manager. We got the new website done. It wasn't exactly done in, you know, in three months. It took four or five we've developed our growth strategies in addition to our internet marketing as a part of our positioning 10 golden rules. So that's an example of how we focused on the top five projects. And the top one of five has to get done no matter what. And you look at it every week in your management meeting, and you know, a lot of times where planning falls flat is that you don't look at it and you don't get the stuff done. But when the management team sits down every week and we look at our rocks, and somebody's responsible for each one of those projects, like you saw, we had one name on each of those projects, then you know what you focus on, gets attention and improves. There's proof positive. Ivy, what do you think?

I think one of the Golden things you're saying, and you've been saying it with consistency. Is law firms need a weekly team meeting. Okay? Not Yes, on running at the firm, on the marketing and on the sales and all of that. Running your cases, where is everybody on each case? Is somebody overloaded? What's your support system that gives you insight on team that piece of communication is vital and truly helps long term growth and consistency growing quickly and then not having the consistent systems in place is not productive for that long term growth. So that weekly team meeting. Jay, that you've referred to several times. If you're not doing it, get it on your agenda. I'm a strong believer in a Monday morning meeting. I'm also a believer in Money Monday and financial Fridays. So if you're running your firm, you should be looking at your numbers, Money Mondays and financial Fridays, your financial cash flow, your marketing, all the numbers that are going on in your business, give yourself that gift.

Explain that again, Money Mondays and financial Fridays.

This goes back to running my printing company. This is not a consulting like, Oh, this is a piece of consulting brilliance. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but this is the habits of ivy, first Rockefeller, simple as that, for years, I ran a printing company. I was in the industry over 20 years, okay? And on Mondays, I wanted to see what was in my sales pipeline, who I should be following up with, what my actions are for the week where we are financially in our cash flow. And I wanted to finish the week we used to invoice and Bill. I wanted my numbers complete. All invoices went out on Fridays. I looked at all bank accounts on Fridays as well as Mondays, to see where we were and positioning and. Again, with an eye on cash flow, where we were on sales, what was working that week, what was not? So I'm setting things up for the future, next week, Money Mondays, financial Fridays. And you're all going to say, Well, I did what. That doesn't make sense, because, you know, you end on a Friday and you're looking at it again on Monday. I was like, that's okay. Don't worry about it making sense. Just it's one of those just do its awesome.

So this is an example of another financial measure, and this is an example of a simplified version of the EOS scorecard. And in your scorecard you want to have all your key numbers. And we look at this like we look at our scorecard every week in our leadership meeting. So in this example, one person is responsible for each number, and maybe in Mark's department, four people are responsible for each one of these goals. So our goal for cases currently in the firm is 345 the running four week average is 342 and we see that we got from 313 up to 325 333, 40 and we're by the end of the year, we're very close to hitting our goal. A new cases signed per week is seven. That'll get us to this number cases settled per week is five. And again, the greens this week in the management meeting. And there's a software we use called 90, and spelled out the word n, i, n, e, t, y, I think it's ninety.io, and we see here that this number is green because we're ahead of our goal, and this number is red because we only settled four cases this week, the average value of the cases. So we actually had a bad week. We didn't hit our average value or our number of cases. Now, Caitlin's responsible for marketing, and we want 1000 website visits a week, so she's been doing a good job. She got us up from eight, 900 website visits to 1300 1200 the number of prospect calls, the number of chats and form leads. And these are the three things every law firm should know in terms of leads. How many calls did you get? How many chats on your website and how many form leads? How many professional referrals again, what gets attention improves. What you measure gets attention improves. So you measure your professional referrals, your past customer referrals. We look at new Google reviews for all of our clients and the Google star rating. So when we look at this data, every single week. And every week, a new week is added, this data gets pushed out. We're looking at the four

week average, so we have sort of a monthly feel for it. Ivy, what do you think of this type of reporting?

The one thing I'm going to say is all reporting is important, and then looking at the numbers and learning from them, we want to know what cases come in every week. We want to know the ideal value of the case. The greatest thing we can do is assess it quickly. So who on your team has that skill set that like assesses something quickly? Right? So we don't spend a lot of time because that again, time and productivity. I think it makes perfect sense. It goes back to what we were talking about Napoleon Hill before write down your goals. How many cases you want in each week? What are you looking for? Have you written them down yet? I hope you're writing them down right now. What are you looking for? We're looking for 10 cases a week that has a value of blank. We're looking for that that multiplies out to what and then we look then we can reverse engineer that business plan to achieve it.

The other data we're looking at is marketing data, and we send this to our clients. This was like one of the summaries I sent over the guys who had the 81 new cases. And the two data points we look at from a top line in our marketing is the year over year traffic and the month over month. So basically, this number is compared to a year ago, and these guys are up 45% the organic traffic. So solely from like Google and Bing, organic is up 27% and month over month. So this is November. We're looking at versus October is up 13% and the only thing that's down a little bit are phone calls and form fills on the month over month, but year over year, where everything's going in the right direction. And that's the big number I look at. Obviously, if you start month month, you're going down versus the prior month. We also look at trend lines in this reporting as well, and then we look at lead tracking. So we want to know how many calls we got in the month, how many were of those calls were retained, and what percent, how many chats, the percentage, and then the total cases. So we see these. Guys went from 3435 cases to 4351 and that's the kind of direction we want to go in. You need a call tracking software, like a call rail, or what converts, as I mentioned before, everybody should have chat, and then you've got a case manager. Software is really good, a lead docket, and then somebody has to do the lead disposition. So with this form, we actually send all of the calls, all the chats, all the forms, it's in a tab in the spreadsheet, and somebody will disposition those leads, meaning they'll say, Yes, we signed this lead. No, we didn't sign this lead. And that's how we get these numbers. Ivy over to you, track.

Track, right? It goes back to that early slide of numbers. Tell a story, ladies and gentlemen. This is a story book, you know, as opposed to, if your shoulders are starting to reach your ears, like, Oh my God, how are we going to track all these numbers? It sounds like a lot of pressure. Take that breath. This is a storybook. It's like it's a little chapter. This is a chapter in, like, Okay, how many calls are coming in? How many are converting? What is the case value? And follow that bouncing ball in a great in a fun time karaoke. And let go of the stress around this and look at the knowledge we're getting from it, because that old expression is knowledge is power. Knowledge gives us the ability to make good strategic decisions. And if you're going to be like, Well, I'm not quite sure if the right decision, because I've heard that comment a lot, let go of right make the decision, and then you can course correct the decision, but staying in a decision doesn't move any firm forward. That's my wisdom on leaning into your numbers. They're a gift.

The other thing we do is we do a deep dive competitive analysis, and this is really good to track quarterly and annually to see how you're doing. Any data that you can pull is advantageous. Obviously, it's the marketing agency. We pull a lot of the marketing information, so we would look at the firm's SEO results. So this is telling us how many keywords they're ranking for on page one and two of Google. We'd look at a number of competitors as well. This is the actual keywords that they're ranking for. We look at this for ourselves for 10 golden rules. Then we'd look at their competitors in their market, how many backlinks they have, so very important for SEO, how many other sites are linking to your site? Again, we're going to look at all the competitors. We're going to either put these screenshots or into a spreadsheet. We're going to look at who's in the top 20 in the Google screen local service ads. Look at the local map results. How are we doing? What are we averaging in our overall map results? So this means at their address, this firm is number three in the Google Maps listings for the search term personal injury lawyer, and we see that they're generally on the top 345, throughout the marketplace. But that could definitely be improved. They're a little better for Car Accident Lawyer, and then a phenomenal result. This is our client, Stuart Stewart. They're number one in this entire 10 Mile grid out from their location. We also look at how many Google reviews they have. And again, we're going to get all this in a spreadsheet and track it over time, and we're going to track some of the Facebook numbers. The Facebook followers don't really make a huge difference, but we definitely want to see how we're doing versus our competitors. So each, each of these folks would have a sheet, and we'd look at how we're performing over time and how our competitors are doing, just to make sure we're keeping up with the Joneses Ivy. That's the end

of the formal section, but I'll certainly

jump in for a second here. We want to be tracking. We want to be gaining this knowledge. And Jay, when you said something just before about Google reviews, right? And I'm sure you work with your clients, make sure you have a back end system, right? This is your ops piece people of how you're getting your Google reviews, watch your SOP, watch your system and process. We want it known. We want it being implemented. Everybody's like, yeah, yeah, we have Google reviews. But what's your process every time you close the case and the settlement happens? What happens every time you complete whatever it is with the client? What is your SOP, your systems and procedure in that make sure those kind of things are documented within your organization, because people do leave and evolve, and so we want things in good systems and at a formal handbook as as well as with videos. So. So it however. People learn. They lean into whoever your next, whoever is taking on this piece of responsibility, they can adapt to it quickly.

All right. Well, we're happy to take some questions, and maybe to start out, Ivy, I'm going to ask you a trick question. Yeah, what's one of the best trick question at all, but tell us a planning success story. Talk about developing a plan for a client and how they kind of got to that next level.

Okay, so I can give you two different opposite stories. So here we go. When I had dinner with this client last week, wow, time's fine. Literally, last week we go back probably a solid six years. I was brought in to work with their law firm. That law firm did had some great things in place, but the right people weren't in the right seats on the bus. Okay? So we did some reconfiguring there. We cleaned up some inner systems, and this law firm owner had a dream of a second business, and she went back to Vistage and a few other groups mastermind she was in, and they kept saying, no, no, you can't do that yet. You can't do that yet. And I saw her steadily getting unhappy, because everybody was kept staying with I can't. So one day, we're in a meeting, and I was like, Okay, let's create. We have this strategy going here in the law firm for growth. Now let's go and create a strategy of what this business would look like, and just say you might not even like it. So why are you waiting? Let's see what we can do. Jump forward several years, she is running two multi million dollar organizations. She has coos in place in both of them at this point, and has just started her third business. So that's a strong thing of stepping into possibility and belief with plans and actions behind it. Another client who I was with earlier this week, I was brought in a few years ago to do a succession plan. We have partners in several different generations, so we were brought in for succession planning. That first one got executed very well. They invited us to stay on for then strategic growth planning, and we did that firm, based on the meeting this week, is hitting the biggest number it has ever hit. We are hiring again for them and guiding through that and then creating strategic plan for 2026 they're on with very high level consciousness around the generations within the leadership team, and making sure there is succession and continuity and legacy going on at all

times.

So I'll tell one quick planning success story. One of our first law firm clients was a probate litigator, and he hated the networking like he said, I really want my marketing to start working so I don't have to go to any more Bar Association events and Chamber of Commerce's. So we did this planning exercise I talked about we brought together all the numbers his financial team. Brought together the financial numbers he got on a business planning platform, not Eos, but one of the other tools. We looked at all the projects we were working on, and we did our brainstorming. We brainstormed the strengths, the weaknesses, the trends. Then we brainstormed projects. One of the projects was to buy a building because they were paying a lot of rent, and another was to add practice areas, and they eventually brought on a couple partners to build the different practice areas. This law firm went from one attorney with an elderly attorney who was working part time and retiring to now multi attorneys. They ended up buying a building, but it didn't work out, because the gym who was there, I guess they extended their lease, so then they ended up buying a second building and putting a brewery restaurant in the first location, and the law firm's now in the second location. This gentleman owns a vineyard and has a really nice lifestyle business where he doesn't have to work 80 hours a week anymore to have a very successful run. So getting that planning right is a huge win. So we've got questions coming in from different places, and Elizabeth has one from Kendrick on LinkedIn for a firm that feels stuck at the same monthly case volume, what's usually the first place you look to find real growth potential? So that's one's kind of marketing. I'll go first Ivy. So I mean, the first thing we do is we would do an audit. I showed you some of the audit slides we do, and we look at where their holes in their marketing plan are, if their SEO is going in the wrong

direction. Typically, that's what we see with firms that are stuck. Their number of keywords that are ranking on Google are going down, or they're flat. Their Google Maps is not performing. So those two things are joined at the hip, the SEO overall and the Google Map SEO. Typically when they're going up, like we look at the reports every month, when SEO is going up, guess what maps is going up, meaning the calls you get from your Google Maps, the people looking for directions, of people reaching out directly through the maps. And so if the SEO is an opportunity that gets on our recommendation, if they're not running the Google Local Service ads if they don't have chat on their website. These are all marketing things that can move the needle. The bigger picture if you're stuck at the monthly case volume, is the case study I shared where one firm that has similar website traction has 83 cases a month, and one firm has 20 cases a month. If you seem stuck, you've got to fix operations, and you've got to have, I recommend, EOS or a business operating system leadership meetings, getting your numbers in place, like basically everything we talked about here. Because if you get all the principles in place, you're going to start checking off all the boxes and everything else is going to improve, right? You're going to be looking at the numbers. You're going to be tracking the numbers. The management team is going to be looking at the numbers. You're going to be improving. The things like that scorecard I showed you, those are the eight or 10 most important things that law firm determined they need to look at the eight or 10 things we look at the 10 golden rules are our management team's expertise for the 10 things we need to look at. Then you develop your projects, your quarterly projects, either to emphasize the strength, you know, advertise something you're really, really good at. We're getting really good at the AI search now, AI overviews. So

I'm doing webinars about it. I'm speaking on stage about it. I just wrote a blog post about it. We're going to talk about the things we're really good at, weaknesses I mentioned five, six years ago, we weren't very good at video. Now we're very good at video. We hired a new social media manager. We started doing video for Q and A videos for SEO. We started doing landing page videos. We started doing social media videos for ourselves and our clients. So I think if you feel stuck, first you got to fix the foundation, and then you've got to look at developing projects, quarterly, projects that are going to either emphasize the strength, fix a weakness, capitalize on a trend. I was going

to jump in immediately with operations, operations, operations. So if you have the same amount of cases coming in all the time, my first question is, goes back to what we said now numerous times, what is working and expand on it. So if you have the same county cases coming in, are they the cases we want, right? Do they have the case value we want? How can we expand on it? Maybe, okay. Where are these cases coming from? What in our local networks? Where could we be out building community and our local networks that supports the other marketing, which is vital, right? It's a win. Win, not an either or. And if you're back in operations, if you can't take your case in, run it efficiently, that goes back to, I know everybody hates me when I say, Oh, we don't want to track time. How long are your attorneys spending on it? How long are your people getting medical records, spending on it? What is the internal team? What does it take? Hence, how profitable each case is. If we can expand on the profitability and efficient literacy internally, it's a win.

Yeah, it's so true operations, operations, operations, because you can't hide failed operations. And what I mean by that is, like in this day and age I talked about this earlier. Are you getting five star Google reviews or the firm on the right was about 3.4 stars. In that example, where I showed two firms with similar trajectories, and one has 83 cases a month and one has 20 cases a month, the firm with 83 cases is 4.9 Google stars. The firm with 20 cases has 3.4 Google stars, 3.4 out of five. Guess what? Your clients aren't giving you a high rating. Lots of people are complaining, and I mentioned earlier that the most important referrals are equally important to pass client referrals are your professional referrals. So all the professionals that you work with other attorneys, if they send you a case and the person calls them and complains like, I can't get an update on my case, which is the number one bar complaint, that guy's not going to send the case next month when someone else gets injured or somebody else is looking for a divorce or a trust in state or whatever, operations, operations, because, obviously, happy clients, happy business partners, is going to build your business, but you can't do it without

it and in your operations, look at your customer journey, break down your customer journey within your firm, and understand who's your first touch point, your second touch point and your third touch point. And. The customer service, the etiquette they've been trained with. How do they talk to customers? How do they build the relationship that has that customer the second they sit down with, to Coffee with or a meal with a friend, they're like, I have to tell you, I spoke to blah, blah, blah, who's handling this case. They are so fantastic, and they're not trying to sell you, but they just got off the phone, but they're left with that glowy feeling that whoever that whatever they're doing next, they're taking it forward into that customer journey piece within a firm is vital to look at, and you increase the experience by 10% in each person in your firm, that's exponential growth.

Next question is from Karen on Facebook, what are the most effective ways to track return on investment? Roi, for different marketing channels, eg, billboards, TV, ads, online, PPC, content marketing, to make data back decisions. I guess I'll go first. It's marketing. Go first. I've interviewed well over 100 people over the last 10 years for a job at 10 gold girls. And the first thing I do is, or the last thing I do in my final interview is, I give them a math test. And everyone's always Oh, math test. And I remember one girl did it in her head in about 30 seconds, and we used to do it at the desk, and they could do it on paper, but it's pretty straightforward. The numbers are a little more complex, but it's basically like, we spent $1,000 on Google and we got 100 leads. We spent $2,000 on Facebook and we got 400 leads. And the question is, what's the cost per lead for each channel? And what's the cost per lead blended. If we spent $1,000 in Google and got 100 leads, was $10 a lead. We spent 2000 on Facebook and got 400 leads, it was $5 a lead. And then you add up the columns, and you do the same map, and you do the blended. Basically, it's a similar thing on Google and Facebook and online. It gets a little bit trickier with tracking things like billboards and TV ads, and your best bet is to have phone number, like a trackable phone number, and a special URL website address. So if it was 10 Golden rules.com/tv for the TV ads, it's not going to be perfect. And all the years I've worked in marketing, and you do market research, and you ask consumers, where did you hear about the firm? The number one answer is TV, whether or not the firm's on TV or not. And when they come in through the internet, it's Google, but they can't tell you if they clicked on a local service, AD, Google Maps, pay per click. SEO, as we've said, about 50 times, like more tracking is better than no tracking, and you'll be directionally correct. It won't be

perfect. Just to complicate matters on the internet, most people are going to search four or five different times, and they're probably going to come to your website the first time through a paid ad, the second time through SEO, and then they might sign up on an LSA. So there's multi factor attribution that Google Analytics will give you, and most important thing is to know that exists, like 1020, 30% of people are going to reach you multiple times. And so it's not the data is not perfect. You want to use it directly to make fact based decisions.

And I think the greatest goal we could all have for when somebody answers the phone and like, how did you hear about us and say, oh my god, like you're everywhere that it might be the radio, it might be the billboard, it will be the the Google review, it will be, I saw you on Facebook. Wherever it is, the greatest response is everybody knows you like that's where. That's the ultimate goal, and that's when you know you're doing things right, because you're not just doing one thing. And because they heard about you through a friend who had a great customer experience, they saw you here, they noticed you here, they targeted you here, and you are the common denominator. That's the win win. That's truly your golden win, as opposed to golden rule, it's the golden win.

Jay, so we have two operations questions. Thank goodness we get you can lead with one of them, but I'm actually going to defer the first question, because we're almost at time, yep. How do we incorporate emerging technologies like AI and automation into our practice? And I'm going to refer you to the webinar we just did with a panel of experts almost as good as Ivy, or just as good as Ivy, and we did AI, and I talked about marketing AI, and we had four different experts talking about emerging AI technologies. And you can find all of our webinars on the 10 golden rules YouTube channel. And we got a great brand new webinar on AI and automation and implementing that into your practice. So the next question and. Final question from Errol, and this one's for Ivy, what type of client intake and case management software is the best for tracking leads, managing client communications and ensuring no potential clients quote fall through the cracks?

It's not the software, it's the system for using your software. There's great software out there. I'm not going to recommend, like you have to be on this one versus this one. Okay, I'm not. I don't endorse that. I am not endorsed by their platforms. Thank you so much. Maybe it might not next lifetime. But here's the thing, it's not about which platform you use. It's about having your people trained up to use your platforms really well. Track the efficiency of it, look at the data and the numbers and lean into it. The worst platforms you can use are the platforms you're not using and paying for. I know it sounds a little bit like common sense, but you just there's so much. Jay and I are out at so many things, and people are selling this platform best. That platform, should you use this or should you use that? You should use what your team is going to use, what is easy, accessible, if AI is a system within it, great. Understand that you should have an AI policy. Understand that you should have an intake policy with a great platform. You should have a great policy and support in answering your phones. It matters. Okay, which one is, quote, unquote, the best, the one that you're actually using and tracking. And I didn't mean to be a cop out on that.

No, it's good, and I'll answer the question as well, what type of client intaking case management software is the best for tracking leads, managing client communications and ensuring no potential clients fall through the cracks. So most of the case management software is pretty robust today and will integrate with a lot of tools, and if not, we build a zap there's a product called Zapier, yeah, and you can connect your calls software to your case management smart advocates, pretty advanced in this area. And file vine is a case management software, and they bought a product called Lead docket. Lead docket is most integrated with file line, but it's integrated with most of the other case management softwares a quick side story. For years, I worked with our local Chamber of Commerce, and I was the chairman of the technology committee, and every quarter we would hold an event. So we do like SEO one month and websites the next month. And then I'm like, Okay, I'm going to branch out a little bit, and I'm going to do CRMs, customer relationship management software, relationship management software. And so I got an expert from one of the biggest CRM companies, and I got an integrator who were very good at getting all your data integrated into a CRM and helping firms move from one to another. And I forget we had a small startup that had a CRM, and I chaired this panel, and I talked a little bit about the importance of CRM and some high level concepts. And then each of these experts made a presentation, and I was sitting there, and I was thinking, for all this fancy stuff, we tried some of the bigger CRMs, and they were just too much for where our company was at that time. And I said, guys, the funny thing is, at the end of the day, I got to be honest, we're using a shared Excel spreadsheet that everybody can access. Or today we use Google Sheets. And I said that it works really well for us, because we can look at one sheet of all of our current

leads, we could have another tab that's all our follow up, and we've got the company name, the person's name, and detailed notes about it, but the status of each lead, and all three guys in the panel said, you know, that's funny. You know, every project starts with Excel. For us in these days, it was earlier before Google Sheets, and they said you can get super far with Excel, Google Sheets, on most CRM projects and our fancy tools basically evolve it from there a couple other tools I mentioned, lead docket is, is the file von product, and then for tracking calls, almost everybody uses call rail. Or the second choice would be what converts and basically every phone call gets a different number, and you have about 10 numbers in your pool, so you know exactly what calls came from Google, what came from Google Maps, what came from SEO, Facebook, etc. And we track the chats and the forms again, most of that goes into Google Sheets, and some of the data I showed you here today comes from Google Sheets.

But anyway, one more thing Jay sure, as we come to this close, we started with talking about budgets. So make sure you have your technology in your budget, and make sure if you're onboarding new technology, you have a piece of that budget to have. Somebody actually help onboard it, so you're not losing space within your team, or unless you have space within your team to actually learn it and then teach it. So have somebody, have some sort of consultant, have some kind of budget space for them to integrate everything onboard it, get everything up running well, and that your teach your team know how to use it, because technology not used is technology money wasted. Great point.

So one last mention for 10 golden rules live event, which is March 16 and 17th in Delray Beach, Florida. We've got amazing speakers. We'll have about 20 speakers and panelists. We've got, we're almost our booths are almost sold out already. We've got some amazing sponsors, and we're doing the first ever tgr all stars of law band, and we're gonna have a jam band playing at the party, which is on this roof, roof top, just over here at the opal grand Delray Beach, Florida. And Ivy has a great live event also coming up. Go ahead, Ivy,

for those of you who want to take this and actually start implementing, come join me on January 8. We're going to spend one day. I'm literally doing this into as very, very into there's a handful of lawyers and law firm leaders who are going to be at this table with me, and we are going to actually create the strategic plans. You'll have places to brainstorm, places for input, for from lead, from key leaders, and insight that actually gets your plan going with an accountability proponent. So come join me in New York and come see Jay and I at teacher alive, because I know I'm I'm coming, Jay, I told you that when I saw you in in October in Boca, I'll be there.

I'm humbled by how many people have already bought tickets, and how many sponsors have signed on, and how many people are just coming back because they had so much fun, like we it's really not just a conference. It's a real we create a very interactive networking environment, and you get to meet 150 or 200 top lawyers and top professionals who work with lawyers in a super fun environment. And it's not so bad that it's right on the beach in South Florida, right? Exactly. All right? Well, Ivy, this was a way more fun doing it with you than doing it on my own. So thank you for joining me this year. Everyone. Please reach out to Ivy or myself if you haven't started your annual planning. And with that, I'll bid everyone adieu and we'll see all in everyone.