179: Charley Mann's $500,000 Referral Engine for Law Firms - Recorded at TGR Live!

Charley Mann [00:00:00]:

Part number one, two meetups per week. Part number one is two meetups per week. It could be coffees, they can be lunches, they can be via zoom. I am neutral. This is actually an important point here is when it comes to the things that we're talking about here in this system, you'll see I'm sharing with you sort of a zoomed out strategic perspective. I know what many of you would like is for me to say your meetups have to be two lunches per week in a local cafe that lasts exactly 47 minutes. And here are the four questions that you are going to ask during your time with these people. I know that's what you want.

Charley Mann [00:00:40]:

You will give up doing that method within the second meetup if I try to do that. But if I tell you the value of meeting up with people and tell you that you can do it in any way that works for you, I believe I can get you to keep the habit. And if I can get you to keep the habit, I can get you to be successful. We're going to develop your $500,000 referral roadmap. So here's the deal with this. The first thing we're actually going to explore is physics from the 1920s. I promise it will all make sense. I know some of you are about to start packing up your bags as soon as I introduce high school physics in here, but there's a term, and I'd love for you to write this down.

Charley Mann [00:01:21]:

The term is complementarity. Now here's the real challenge. Does anyone in here know what complementarity is? No. You can't phone any friends. If anyone knew what that term was, I would have given $100 to the charity of your choice. There will be a couple of charitable giveaways potentially here. No one knows what this is. This is a term from Niels Bohr, which I suppose if we're going to pronounce it the right way, we go.

Charley Mann [00:01:48]:

Niels Bohr. That's my best Swedish chef version of and. Niels Bohr was a physicist in the 1920s who talked about complementarity. And the idea of complementarity is that rather than viewing things in either or states, we can view things as being both simultaneously. True. Here's what I mean by this. With light being the ultimate example, the thing that's surrounding us right now. Light is both a particle and a wave at the same time.

Charley Mann [00:02:14]:

And the fascinating thing about light is that if you ask it a particle question, it answers as if it were a particle. And if you Ask it a wave question. It answers as if it were a wave. The reason I'm talking about complementarity is because referrals and digital marketing, depending on who you're talking to, people seem to disagree over which one you're supposed to be doing. My answer is very simple. Both. You do both. It's not that hard.

Charley Mann [00:02:42]:

Even Mike Morse yesterday was talking about even though he loves acquiring his cases on his own cost of acquisition, you know, maybe it's 2,500, maybe it's 4,500 doll per case. the same time, you heard him say, if you're a smaller firm, calling up the big firms to get referrals from them is a smart decision to make. Right, because we can do both at the same time. Both of these things can be true. He's even talking about another firm, big marketer that came into the community, and he's going to ride the wave of that big marketer, get those referrals in, increase his marketing budget. And I imagine because Mike's a smart guy, he's going to go ahead and wash that competitor right back out with his advertising question. I need to be able to see everyone. So I'm going to come back towards the stage on this one.

Charley Mann [00:03:24]:

How many of you in here identify as an introvert? Okay, so we identified who isn't telling the truth about that statement by if they rose their hand or not. Most people identify as an introvert. Usually when I'm in one of these rooms, when we really find out it's about 70, people think of themselves, 70% of people think of themselves as an introvert, and they're afraid of doing referral marketing. It sounds like, oh, I'm gonna have to go and do networking. I'm gonna have to meet people. I'm gonna have to shake hands. I'm gonna have to sound witty. Here's the fun truth.

Charley Mann [00:04:03]:

If 70% of the legal world identifies as an introvert, if you're the one introvert that's willing to step off the wall and go and say hello to someone like Ben here, introduce yourself, and have a real conversation, you have an immediate market advantage over all of your competitors, all because you decide to come off the wall and have a conversation. So here's the magic trick that we're going to pull here in just a moment. In 10 minutes, I'm going to make you at least $500,000. Does that sound fair? We'll try it again. Does that sound fair? Okay, that was better. We're going to try it one more Time, because I want to make sure the people on the outside know that they're supposed to be in this room. So one more time, does that sound fair? There we go. I appreciate you all very, very much for playing along with this.

Charley Mann [00:04:48]:

Okay, so in just a moment, we'll start our 10 minute magic trick. But before we do that, we're gonna set something up. And this right here, what we're about to set up, I promise you, is a writer downer. And it's a writer downer. Not just for you. It's a writer downer for your kids, for your team members, for anyone in your life. This is my four stages of value creation. I promise you.

Charley Mann [00:05:13]:

This is a writer downer. So at the top, what you're going to write is you get paid for. Okay, that's the first statement. That's our operating statement here. You get paid for in life. The first way you get paid is you get paid for what you do. Okay, that's statement number one. You get paid for what you do.

Charley Mann [00:05:35]:

That was back. You know, you come out of law school, you go into someone else's law firm. Your job is to take cases and be a processing engine, right? You're a widget in someone else's machine. You're getting paid for what you do. Then you start getting practice reps and you move to the second stage where you get paid for what you know. You get paid for your strategic brain, for the practice reps, for everything that you have gained as you did the thing that you do. Perhaps you read up, you studied, you tested, you became better at it. You get paid for what you know.

Charley Mann [00:06:08]:

Stage number three is you get paid for who you know. That's stage number three. As you can imagine, in a talk about referrals, we're going to talk about stage number three a good bit. And the final stage is you get paid for who you are. Here's the little secret. Most times working with law firm owners. And so I run a company, law Firm Alchemy. I coach law firm owners on how to grow your entrepreneurial skill sets and tool sets.

Charley Mann [00:06:39]:

I have a lot of clients and members of my organization here in this room, and they've probably heard me mention this before. The idea is that most law firm owners and lawyers, what they tend to want is to skip from stage two to stage four. They want to go from being paid for what you know, being a great strategist, to just suddenly being paid for who you are. There are very few law firm owners who are strictly paid for who they are. Mike Morris, even though he's not in the room, Mike is a great example of being paid for who he is. He's a huge advertiser, has a brand recognition. He is paid because he exists at this point. Yes, he also is a brilliant business mind, etc.

Charley Mann [00:07:22]:

But he, his name carries that much cachet. Most of us need to work on who we know. We need to invite people into our orbit, which means stepping into orbit with them. So I said I was going to mention Paul and Chris here. These are two guys who are fantastic at going around and getting to know people. As a matter of fact, Paul has gotten to know so many people that in my opinion, Paul is one of those guys who gets paid for who he is. He shows up at one of these events and he's a central node for a lot of people. But you also have to know Paul, Chris, folks like them are putting in the work to shake hands.

Charley Mann [00:07:58]:

Like if you're here, you've probably seen them socializing a lot. Maybe you've had an opportunity to meet them and they probably were eager to meet you. That's the great part about guys like them, folks in this room is they are actually eager to meet you because they're engaged in growing their network of who they know. That's how you move your wealth. There is a cap on being paid at each one of these stages. Only so far you can take getting paid for what you do. Only so far you can take for getting paid for what you know. It's about who you know.

Charley Mann [00:08:27]:

All right, let's do our 10 minute magic trick. So I'm keeping an eye on my watch here to make sure I do this within 10 minutes. This is the referral roadmap that we're going to talk about here. And since I'm going to be very strict about it, I'm going to come up here and tell you exactly what it is. So the referral roadmap comes in three parts. 10 minutes, $500,000 in value, by the way. And look, I'm already eating up some time with another tangent. This is just who I am.

Charley Mann [00:08:49]:

It's off of my clock though, not yours. When I first worked with a coaching client on this, putting together this three part system, it technically was worth $600,000. Doesn't make as good of a talk title though, does it? Like $600,000 referral playbook. Not as fun as $500,000 referral playbook. I'll say. He was a PI attorney. He had $700,000 in inventory at the time and we added $600,000 in inventory. So if you have a bigger firm with more resources, you can blow this up even bigger.

Charley Mann [00:09:21]:

There is no cap on what you can do. So here are the three parts to this system. Part number one, two meetups per week. Part number one is two meetups per week. It could be coffees, they can be lunches, they can be via zoom. I am neutral. This is actually an important point here is when it comes to the things that we're talking about here in this system, you'll see I'm sharing with you sort of a zoomed out strategic perspective. I know what many of you would like is for me to say your meetups have to be two lunches per week in a local cafe that last exactly 47 minutes.

Charley Mann [00:10:01]:

And here are the four questions that you are going to ask during your time with these people. I know that's what you want. You will give up doing that method within the second meetup if I try to do that. But if I tell you the value of meeting up with people and tell you that you can do it in any way that works for you, I believe I can get you to keep the habit. And if I can get you to keep the habit, I can get you to be successful, truth be told. And actually my podcast, they don't teach this in law school. Newest episode released this morning. Talking about one of the success advantages that you can have.

Charley Mann [00:10:35]:

I framed it as consistency to the point of insanity of doing the things most other people won't do for a longer duration than they will tolerate. Most people will do two meetups. They'll tell me that they did it one week, then they decided to skip the next week. The week after that they did one and then they forgot to do it after that. And then they wonder why the system didn't work. Didn't work because you didn't work the system. Not the system's fault, I'm afraid. So we're going to have that consistency.

Charley Mann [00:11:01]:

Two meetups per week. Next up, weekly email. Weekly email. Jonathan Hawkins, right over here. Jonathan, the lawyer for other lawyers. He has been doing a weekly email for. Is it nine, 10 years now? Long ass time. Been doing it for nearly a decade.

Charley Mann [00:11:19]:

Weekly email. How many of you are sending here? In here, sending an email, but it's not weekly currently. Is that the truth? We only have people sending email at all. There's like four of you. The number one marketing channel in the world. And four of you. Well, Jay raised his hand posthumously and he made the fifth, but only Five. That's astonishing.

Charley Mann [00:11:51]:

This is one of the best channels, one of the easiest ways for you to stay in touch with your list over a long duration of time. I don't get it. I genuinely don't. It is such a slam dunk opportunity. All the stuff that you're posting on social media, victim to the algorithm. Oh, and by the way, while I may make fun of social media in that way, you should be doing social media. I'm very much an and person our marketing that when we talk about marketing, we talk multimedia, multi channel, multimodal, multi touch marketing. It's an and equation.

Charley Mann [00:12:24]:

If right now you're making your marketing decisions using the word or you're missing the game, it is an and equation. When you build marketing, we're going to do digital and we're going to do offline, we're going to do referral and we're going to do very tightly attributed direct response marketing. And is the name of the game. That's how the big advertisers play. They're covering all the possible territory. They create omnipresence and they kick you out of the market. You have to play the same game just at your level. Weekly email.

Charley Mann [00:12:59]:

This is not that hard to do. Getting a weekly email is actually pretty darn easy. I don't care if you use Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or Lawmatics or whichever one of the programs, whichever one of the case management systems has email capacity in it, use whatever you have, just get it out the door. By the way, here's a trick to creating great emails. Stop focusing on the idea of creating and focus on curating. Okay? That's a really important differentiator there. Most people are so obsessed with like, I'm going to create the next great statement. I've got the most brilliant thing to say about time management.

Charley Mann [00:13:39]:

Now, Dan Martell already said it in buy back your time. So I'm just going to go ahead and attribute the work to Dan Martell. I'm gonna be a curator of great resources. That makes me an interesting person. My job as owner of the list is to know what is actually interesting to my people and curate resources for them. I don't need to create something new every single week. I'm gonna curate something. What's the book that you read recently? What's a movie that you went and saw? Oh, and by the way, if you really want the cheat code on this, if I know that my audience just loves pop culture references from the 80s say, and I know that I want to so this is like for my business.

Charley Mann [00:14:21]:

And I want to talk about, say, hiring. I can go to ChatGPT and say, hey, share with me three or four television shows or movies with scenes that feature something about hiring a person that could teach a hiring lesson. Cool. I've got my pop culture reference right there. Made it very, very easy. Didn't have to come out of any special notebook, anything like that. It'll tell me to. I actually did that recently, not with the 80s.

Charley Mann [00:14:47]:

And it was about hiring. It spit out the movie Moneyball. There's that scene where you've got all the scouts together and you know they're talking about, oh well, the guy can't hit because he can't see. Well, how do you know that? He's got an ugly girlfriend, right? It's just complete nonsense. Just quoting a movie here. Come on. Now we can all take the edge off. It's okay.

Charley Mann [00:15:04]:

I know I talk fast and throw a lot at you, but it just fed that to me and I went and found the script and used that in an email. This stuff is so easy. There is no excuse for not doing it when you have all of these AI resources. Churn it out, curate, curate, curate. On that, part number three. And this is the one that like, no one's going to do, but I have to put it in there. Cause I know it works. I'm guilty of telling you what works, not just what you want to hear.

Charley Mann [00:15:33]:

And part number three is monthly mailer. Put something in the mail every month. I'll give you the cheat code on this, which is if you're thinking, are you telling me that I have a list of maybe a thousand past clients, another thousand people who I could mail to tell me I'm going to go and spend on a monthly print newsletter to just everyone right now? Maybe you're not there yet. Truth be told, if I could get you to just mail something every month to your referral sources, we'd have the maximum impact we would get 80% of the way with 20% of the budget. 80, 20. I want you to put something in the mail every single month. For folks. It's really easy.

Charley Mann [00:16:16]:

So I have a guy up in Minnesota, Andrew Ayres. He's an estate planning attorney. And every month he sends out the team letter. And team stands for trusted experts and mentors. And he's sharing books, he's sharing various resources, things that are going on in his law firm, the latest software that he tested, etc. And he gets clients referred to him. Now he's Mostly sending to, say, financial advisors, local realtors, that sort of thing, to try and get referrals from them for you. All you should do like what my, my personal injury attorney who I told you about did you should send to Kairos.

Charley Mann [00:16:47]:

You should send to the medical providers. I know there's, there are people in this room who think to yourself, I don't want the referrals from the Kairos or they're going to expect that I refer to them. Here's what I guarantee you. You don't know that for sure until you try and have the conversation. So this attorney that I worked with, he was hesitant about reaching out to Kairos. Right now his biggest single referral source is a chiropractor. And he doesn't refer any work to that Cairo. And the reason is, is because he's the one who will take care of the clients the best.

Charley Mann [00:17:23]:

And also it doesn't make it difficult on the Cairo at the inn. He's not going to ask them to try and cut fees, all that type of stuff. He's even willing at times to cut his own before he asks the Cairo to make cuts. I know that's like terrifying right there, but you're not paying the referral fee if it's a Cairo, but you have some space to give. So the system here again is two meetups per week. Weekly email. By the way, if you send a monthly email, you get more unsubscribes than the people who send weekly because they don't know who you are. They're confused when you're showing up monthly.

Charley Mann [00:17:59]:

Even worse, as the people who are sending, somewhere between every one to 10 months, you get that email that they only email you when they seem to need something from you instead of showing up consistently being of value. That's why we send every single week at the same time. You want to be part of their lives, you want to be a damn habit for them. This is habits, right? 9 minutes, 21 seconds. Seriously, that's $500,000 in value right there. The only question is whether or not you're going to do it right now. What I'm curious about, and if you all have any questions about this is right now. You've heard this.

Charley Mann [00:18:39]:

I have minimum 10 firms who have implemented this, who I intimately know, lots of other firms who have implemented this, who I don't have the same type of relationship with. What would stop you from doing this? Like realistically, who has a good reason as to why they wouldn't do this? Too busy. I appreciate the Honesty. All right, so, Andre, you're too busy. Do you have team members who can handle it for you? There's got team members who can handle it for him. Ben was talking about delegation earlier. Right. You could easily go home and say, hey, we're going to send a weekly email.

Charley Mann [00:19:14]:

It's your job. Make sure I'm cc'd on the list because that's your KPI now. Weekly email, it goes out Tuesday at 6am Sorry, my point of curiosity is who wrote down Tuesday at 6am in that moment, thinking that it was the magic formula to make this thing work? It's not, by the way. It's not. I've sent emails Sunday at 10pm that outperformed emails Wednesday at 8am there's no perfect science to this. There is good data on when you should post on social media, but email? You're just gonna have to figure out your audience. I don't recommend you send in the evening, I will give you that much. You tend to have better results if you send before noon.

Charley Mann [00:19:52]:

But we don't have to be religious about it. I have a client who actually sends two emails every single week. One is to referral sources, the other is to the general population. It goes out every Tuesday, give or take, around 11:00am it's estate planning. He regularly gets referrals off of it. Another client who just recently restarted his weekly email was furious at me because he said charlie, and I'm quoting him here. Why didn't you make me restart this sooner? I've been telling you to restart this. That one's up to you.

Charley Mann [00:20:21]:

So his marketer got this restarted. They're three weeks in. He's already reignited some conversations with some referral sources that had tapered off. Could easily be worth six figures in business. And we'll call it returning business, not necessarily new business. Returning business to his firm. There's a thousand and one things that distract us every single day. It's your responsibility to stay in touch with these referral sources, to not only reach out to them, but to get in touch with them.

Charley Mann [00:20:44]:

Great place to find potential referral sources. LinkedIn. Right. So we have Frank over here. Frank's a financial advisor to law firm owners. Frank is an active guy on LinkedIn. Chris, early active guy on LinkedIn. I know quite a few of you in here are Quite active on LinkedIn.

Charley Mann [00:21:02]:

I'll share. Paul Faust cheat code real quick as well for meeting and getting to know referral sources. Facebook works. I don't know why more people aren't sharing and posting and finding potential referral sources and making friends on Facebook still works, by the way. My favorite thing is when lawyers say, oh, but no, other lawyers don't use Facebook. I see you all posting on Facebook. You're clearly using it. Another thing for I don't have time, which I'll pick on this just a little bit here, Andre, but it's actually the number one reason that people say that I'm not going to be able to do this.

Charley Mann [00:21:38]:

I see how often you are on email, I see how often you are on social media. Therefore I know you have the time to do this right. If we're being realistic about it. That extra 45 minutes that you were doom scrolling on some short form video feed, could it have been used more productively? And yes, I know you closed your door and it was supposed to be deep work time at the office and all of a sudden you're an hour and a half deep on TikTok. It happens. I like the nervous laughter. People are looking around like, am I the only one who screws that up every day? You're not. Don't worry.

Charley Mann [00:22:12]:

Plenty of people do. Is there any other reason besides time that you think you can't do this? Can't figure out what to say. So here's my recommendation for that and I appreciate the question or the statement there. My recommendation is on the flight home or maybe while you're here, write down five things you love talking about. And if we really want to have a framework on this, I'd say write down five things that you know. If I came and woke you up at 1:37am which don't worry, I'm not, but if I came and woke you up at 1:37am you could get out of bed, hit a stage like this and talk about it. And you would love talking about it for some people, by the way, that's gonna be like fitness, it's gonna be time management, it's gonna be movies. I don't care what it is.

Charley Mann [00:23:05]:

Because what we have found time and time again is what people are really interested in is you being interested in stuff that is outside of the law. Now we can find ways to weave it back to the law. We can sync it all up together. We can get a great call to action at the end of all of it, which by the way, all of your emails, you should have some type of call to if you're trying to get more views on like your YouTube videos. So you know, Jeff was talking about building up your YouTube channel. You want to send some views towards your YouTube channel and start feeling better about it and feeling motivated. Email, that's a great way to take people on your list, drive those extra. Look, it might be another 17 extra views, but let's be honest, it's better than the six views you're currently getting on your videos.

Charley Mann [00:23:49]:

Right, 23 is a little bit better. It's a start. So write down those five ideas and then you can go and plug them into AI. Right. Hey, I'm going to be writing a bunch of emails about these subjects. Here's my target audience. Can you give me a bunch of inspirational quotes? Can you give me a bunch of pop culture references to help me write these emails? And then we can take it a little bit farther. I personally, I write all my stuff.

Charley Mann [00:24:16]:

I don't use ChatGPT for any of it. You shouldn't do that. I have made a bad decision in life. You should use ChatGPT to write your stuff. I am just precious as a writer. It is my own folly. So you can use ChatGPT to crank all of this out. So my emails and really so for my clients, most of their emails are going to fall in the range of about 150 to 300 words.

Charley Mann [00:24:41]:

It doesn't have to be long and oftentimes it helps if it's very personality driven. So you do have the time to take stories from your life and share those. So this client who I talked about who's actually down here in Florida, he's very good at sharing and he's Cuban and he shares a lot of Cuban traditions in his emails and he's very good at it and he relates them back to his practice somehow and it's been. He gets referrals every single week coming off these emails. He gets direct business off of these emails. And I understand estate planning. Little bit easier to generate the direct business. Right.

Charley Mann [00:25:13]:

It's a proactive. I can convince you to get your estate planning done rather than reactive. I need you to have had an accident for you to come in. But still, if you're not out there sending those emails, mining the list, being the person who's available to have cases referred to, you'll never have the opportunity. Yeah. So he asked what systems are we using to manage the contact data? Actually send all of them if you don't currently have one. ActiveCampaign plays well with a lot of other programs, including whether it's hooked up through make.com or Zapier. Zapier Or Zapier.

Charley Mann [00:25:46]:

Zapier. Okay. I always get it wrong. So make.com or Zapier, you can connect that to just about anything, which is the reason I like it. It's not the best email platform, but I need it to sync up with your case management system so we get all those contacts moving over there as well. And double check with your whoever you use for case management to see if they have one that they're very friendly with and like for sending emails. Yeah. So in terms of keeping the addresses.

Charley Mann [00:26:14]:

Yes. Using a VA 100%. That's the person who should be scraping through it. Now. Look for your referral sources. By the way, the easiest win that you can have on that monthly mailer is go home, have a VA, research 50 to 150 law firms near you, and then press send on your monthly mailer. If you don't already have that list made. This thing's going to cost you 25 bucks to make the list.

Charley Mann [00:26:38]:

Gonna cost you a dollar and 11 cents for each piece that goes out the door. What is your average case value? It's high. If you use chat GPT to create all this stuff, we're talking about 15 to 45 minutes of your time every single month. Because also have a VA who is managing the list. Find a good mailhouse and just have the VA be the point of communication. You don't need to be the point of communication, any of it. Your job is to create the system, step away and let someone else run the system. Yes.

Charley Mann [00:27:05]:

Yeah. Awesome. Last question, Grant. Okay, so the question is, if you're publishing a regular blog or article or whatever that is, should you be sharing that in your email? Truth be told, I dropped that into the PS because no offense to the content, about 5 FAQs after you need to know if your personal injury or after a car accident. Not the most scintillating email that I've ever read in my life. So we're going to possibly tuck that into the PS and say, oh, by the way, we recently published. That way we can drive some people there, make sure that people know what we do. It's a good reminder of it.

Charley Mann [00:27:41]:

But I'm so focused on I want to build that connection because if I'm going to get the referrals from you, it's not just about being remembered as the attorney, about everything else that you're remembered for. Okay, so we have Mike back here. Mike is memorable from the commercials that he does. So he also has this additional brand. I bet if Mike were sending out emails featuring sue in them. As a matter of fact, if Mike just sent a weekly Email from Sue he'd probably kill. People love receiving the recipe from Mike's mom once a month, at least for every download. He said of the cookbook that they gave away with 10 recipes from Sue, a dollar to charity.

Charley Mann [00:28:19]:

You guys, these wins are right there for you. What this is, this is a platform for you to take so many of the ideas that you've heard and distribute it out to your list and build that list even bigger. If you want more details on how to write those emails, what can go in that monthly mailer, how to have great conversations when you are out networking that URL right there, go and download the full referral playbook. It'll give you everything else that you need to take care of this. This is easy. It's only a question of whether or not you will start and keep the habits, which and I'll tuck this in as the very last bit here if you want to start and keep those habits. I've heard it reflected in many people in here. When Ben was up on stage earlier today, for example, you could tell that there came that point with the intake where the entrepreneurial identity of being an owner really kicked in.

Charley Mann [00:29:17]:

We're going to solve the problems endemic to the business, not just endemic to the work we do for the client. When you shift your identity to be entrepreneur first, attorney second, it becomes infinitely easier for you to keep those habits. If you wake up every morning thinking about what case you're working on today, you're losing to the person who wakes up every morning and asks, how am I building my business, my law firm today? They will grow faster as they're asking those big questions. That is the $500,000 referral roadmap. Go and download that online right now. I appreciate you all very, very much. Jay, thank you for the stage today.