What if the key to transforming your law firm wasn’t just in the courtroom but in front of the camera? In this episode, Preston Schmidli reveals why video is the future of client engagement, how it can pre-sell your services, and why it’s the ultimate tool for reclaiming your time. Curious about the strategies that could revolutionize your brand? Dive in and discover actionable insights you can’t afford to miss.

MPS: Hey law firm owner. Welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast. We're your hosts. I'm MPS.

Richard James: And I'm Richard James, MPS we have a great show today we talk to attorneys all the time about the idea of building their own personal brand and a brand for their firm and how they should do that. Using social media and why it's so important for them to take ownership in that. And today with authority brand, we're going to get into that with Preston today.

And we're going to go deep on this subject of building their brand and the brand for their firm and kind of the nuts and bolts of what they should do. And maybe a little bit of how they should do it. Hopefully we'll get a secret along the way.

Preston Schmidli: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me guys. I'm excited to be here and hopefully I can pour in to your guys audience and give them some nuggets of wisdom that I know you were saying before the, we started here, that a lot of the people that listen to this are struggling with like work life balance and stuff like that. And some of the stuff that we've, Stumbled upon over the years is about really creating efficient leverage.

So, you know, a lot of people we talked to that enroll in our services and stuff, they end up telling us and the reason I say that is because they're the best point of feedback, but they end up telling us like I really wish I would have known these things before because they mistakenly thought content had to be hard and it's like there are ways to do it to create leverage to get a massive benefit without further breaking your back.

And so, you know, my goal is within what we do. And then also bring into this podcast today. My goal is to help them make more money and get their life back. Like, I don't think they should have to choose.

MPS: I agree. And that's one of the value nuggets we're already getting from Preston and we're not even into it. So make sure to hit that subscribe button, depending on where you're listening or watching. So you don't miss content like this.

MPS: Preston, let's break the ice for them a little bit.

Why don't you tell us something that maybe not everyone knows about you?

Preston Schmidli: Wow. That's something that not everybody knows about me. I like to race Hondas.

MPS: Nice.

Richard James: You're a fast and furious guy.

Preston Schmidli: I am, I had a problem. That's actually how I learned about lawyers is through cars.

And one day, a Ford Escort, which you may not know what it is. I'm dating myself a little bit.

Preston Schmidli: Oh, I know the Escorts. Yeah.

Richard James: Okay. So Ford Escort and I passed this Ford Escort before, you know, my floorboard is you know, I'm the pedals to the metal and the speedometer is bouncing off of 85. And I think I'm flying. And this Ford Escort passes me as if like I was standing still.

Preston Schmidli: Man, that'll, that'll take your testosterone levels down a notch.

And we don't hear that a lot and attorneys don't get to hear that a lot. So it really warmed my heart to hear that that you really dig working with them from a business perspective and love helping them gain this life balance. So we appreciate you for that.

So, you know, to me, it's like I've had those experiences in other realms as I've kind of grown through my marketing journey and now working with lawyers, I'm like, I wish I would have known about this years and years ago because you know, a lot of people that I've worked with, unfortunately, I've worked, and we've helped over a thousand businesses at this point, but a lot of the people it's like their salespeople that took a 40 hour course, right?

And they got a real estate degree, a light or, not degree. They got a certificate or something. I don't know. Crackerjack box toy that, you know, insurance, real estate mortgage. It's all like you get into it real quick. Right? But it's like, easy in easy out, right? Whereas with lawyers, the thing I love is there's such a, the average is so much more sophisticated than the average of these other spaces.

It's like, these people want it to work. They just need, they need help. And I love that.

MPS: It is and so walked us through a little bit of the journey there about how you ended up here with the direct response background, but walk us through this idea a little bit of branding and authority branding, and why content plays such a big role for these law firms?

And you guys have probably been here yourself. Like, Most videos actually watched without sound on. I don't know if you guys know that. So like, you know, you might be in an elevator or maybe you're sitting in the stands at your kid's game and, they're in like a halftime type thing. And so you're just watching a video in the stand, you know, this is how we consume content.

And it's, much more engaging to the senses than even without sound. It's much more engaging to the senses than a photo or a picture. And so I think a lot of things go into this, but the platforms are incentivizing it. That's an important fact. More than anything else. And not only more, but like exponentially more.

So A, it's important for converting prospects to clients. B, it's, important for attracting more prospects. And C, the impact it makes on an intake process is huge. so that's the important thing. It's not just about attraction. It's not just about conversion. It's about the simplification of your sales process. And I personally, I've been doing sales a long time. I like selling, but you know, I like more than selling, not having to sell. I like enrolling people.

So for them, for those who really are marketing novices and they're thinking about, we're trying to lay it out for them. You're suggesting that if they do a good job with creating video that's interesting for people that they would want to consume and they make sure they post that video in places that people that they want to consume it actually are. That they will create themselves a presence or maybe an omnipresence that will then support their lead generation efforts and consequently their sales efforts. And that's how you view brand. Is that an accurate summary?

And the reason that I like this is it'll make sense here in a second, but running ads just by running ads is like hollering shoddy out the window of a moving vehicle. Right? It's like, it'll work sometimes, but it's a hard sale. And I didn't get to know them. They didn't get to know me. All I got to know was the car they drive.

And I don't even know if they own it. Right? Not effective strategy. Now, if you yell shoddy at enough people as you drive by, somebody's going to go, what's that? Right. But it's like, I don't want that. I want to be an attractive opportunity for somebody to date. You can't achieve that through ads as much as I wish you could.

It hits differently when you have the brand. So, you could holler out a window if they already knew they liked you, because now they just think you're being funny. So, that's kind of the corollary between, you know, marketing and branding versus dating is like, we don't need to just be hollering out the window.

We should get them to view us as an attractive suitor.

Richard James: Yeah, and I don't, think I, so I'm with you. I don't know that I would go as far as it's black and white that, you know, you can't generate business doing ads. You can, right?

Preston Schmidli: Oh no, you can generate business. I'm just saying it's harder. You have to work more for it.

Richard James: Yeah. It make the brand makes it easier. Yeah, I agree. I mean, MPS, we see that ourselves, right? So when we have somebody that consumes our content, everything becomes easier. The,

MPS: The friction. Yeah, yeah, the friction.

So that's the difference is it's like can it work? Sure, if you like playing the game on hard mode just stick to ads. You don't need a brand but you know in this day and age YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world which has more search traffic than Bing, AOL, Yahoo, you know every other search engine combined except for Google which they happen to be owned by Google So the magic to this is if you actually nail this you get to double dip. If you rank a video in Google or excuse me, if you rank a video on YouTube, Google sees that and goes, let's put that here too.

And you know, what's cool about that is oftentimes you could have a competitor. Let's just use an extreme example, a Morgan and Morgan, right? You could have a Morgan and Morgan that's been doing blogs for 40 years or something crazy, right?

Richard James: I think it, goes to the point that. The social marketing as it stands today, and just in the last three or four years, really since COVID has equaled the playing field in a way that had never done that before. Like if somebody was entrenched with their SEO and they had 750 pages of content and they ranked in number one keyword for everything and they had 350 to 500 google reviews you weren't going to displace them in their geolocal marketing, but all of a sudden now MPS you can, right?

And we could provide a little bit more clarity on that, but Preston, I'm, curious for you because you are dealing with busy attorneys, right?

MPS: So for the ones that say but this is just too much time like how do you go about this? How do you help half of that?

Preston Schmidli: Most of our clients have tried and failed. I'm going to call it failed for the sake of simplicity. They've tried and failed at doing video content or social media marketing, which I don't like to call it social media marketing, even though it is because oftentimes social media marketing is also hiring a firm for 97 a month to give you 30 Canva templates.

It's like, how could we possibly hit the target that we're not even looking at? Like, if I don't know the strategy and I have maybe an intern or, you know, a 25 year old marketing person who's like, you got to be on video. Well, yeah, of course you got to be on video, but that doesn't mean like, you for no reason for like just random.

It's like, that's not how you go viral. People that go viral research their content heavily. They figure out what other content has gone viral. They reverse engineer it. They find the hook, you know, I mean, there's really three components of a good video hook story and offer, right? So hook is like, how do you get somebody sucked into the content?

This is the meat of the video. And then the offer is usually called the action, right? So you just had a good example at MPS. Where you push them to a resource. That's a call to action, right? So that's the offer, if you will. So, you want to follow that format in any content you're doing. But the content itself should be just a small part. You know, this is something that Dan Kennedy taught me. Most people start with tactics. This is why they fail. But tactics are actually a subset of strategy and strategy is a subset of principle. And if we're doing tactics without the strategy or the strategies without the principle, we're just making shit up.

I just saved you. Like, not only did I give you a marketing asset, I gave you something that you can copy and paste a link to when somebody asks you a question and you can save your time now. So this is about efficiency. This is about leverage. It's not just about monetization. And so that's why I said at the beginning, I don't believe it has to be, I either make more money or I get my life back.

It's like, there are ways to do both. You know, you don't have to have hard earned money. Like there are better ways.

Richard James: So let's do an exercise for them.

So they're gonna have to work all day Sunday and they're just burned out and they're wondering why they got themselves into this and they want to weigh out and there's lots of things they got to focus on, but they decided what they want to do is they really want to focus on developing this brand so they can, you know, have less challenge of attracting the right type of client.

They don't have to take several different types of cases, all the things that brand will do for them. They're not ready to hire an agency. They want to dip their toe in and start on their own. What's the first two, three or four things you would tell them? Do you said certainly to make it more efficient. So I'm assuming block out some time. Is that a fair estimate?

Preston Schmidli: Yeah, I mean, so we're kind of getting outside of content here. I mean, I would say, you know, cause I do a lot of consulting, like private client consulting and you've done this with Dan, right? So like you're familiar with the structure. And oftentimes we talk about things that have nothing to do with marketing or sales directly.

It's like, and you feel like, you know, every time you put a fire out three more spring up, like that cycle of anxiety is partially due to the fact that you're unstrategic with your time or you're not ruthless enough with it. Right. And so, nobody else will take your time seriously if you don't. So that's the first thing is like, you have to just. Set boundaries like firm, right? So this goes beyond content, but you have to deploy that same thing in your content, right? So like my thing is you get four hours a month, you know, and this is the you show up to me this is a decade gym workout. I don't care how you feel. I don't care what happened you got it on the calendar you show up and if four hours ain't enough, that's fine.

Let me see my frame here. You're super stressed. And then, you know, you do another four hours and now you have twice as many assets. And now you're this stressed. And then eventually when you've already prerecorded all of the things that come up and the client journey and the questions that they have, you've gained efficiencies there. You can gain efficiency with your team on this stuff cause they can use your content as training to an extent, right? You can feed the content into ChatGPT to create like a bot of you to answer questions. Like there's all kinds of stuff you to create efficiency.

Here's a, B, C or D just, just order one, you know, here's how to be good on camera. Cause that's, I think the biggest thing is people, I've seen is if a lawyer who's working 80 hours a week, let's just go extreme 80, 90 hours a week. Let's just say it's stupid. I mean, their marriage is at risk. Their health is at risk. Their relationship with their kids is at risk, right? They're 80, 90 hours a week consistently, I think in their brain. Now I could be wrong, but I think that if they knew, if they could look forward a year and have a conversation with themselves and their future self said, Preston, if you just do it for a year, everything will be better. You'll actually be at the dinner table at five with your family. You will actually be at the games for your kids. You just have to do it and you have to keep doing it.

Richard James: That's great.

MPS: It is Preston, what's got you uh, fired up and excited today? I mean, you've dropped value bombs all throughout this episode. What's, got you fired up and excited today? Could be business, could be personal,

Preston Schmidli: Dude, I, we just picked up a client. That's the biggest PI firm in Iowa the other day and spending like a hundred and I think it's just shy of 150,000 a month in ads, which just gets me all kinds of just, oh, I'm pumped. So that's fun. Other than that, you know, we're working on, some other YouTube strategies for paid ads on YouTube.

And it's like, if everybody's fighting over the same old SEO strategies, the old, same old PPC strategies, I mean, we're all just fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting. And that's, it's like having an opportunity to give somebody a real different chance without breaking their back and having to spend a stupid amount of money to do it. I don't know. It just, that really excites me. So I think that's probably my thing is creating a new way to do business as a lawyer. That doesn't have to be super expensive and is highly leverageable and efficient.

Richard James: And so the fact that you've brought that message to them and dropped the value bombs you did, I, we really appreciate you stopping by today. We appreciate you delivering the message that you did, but if anybody want to learn more about you, where would they go?

Preston Schmidli: Yeah. And I'd be happy to answer it, Richard, but I actually want to point back real quick to you know, you had mentioned early in the call about like somebody who has 750 SEO videos and you, how are you going to compete with that? So this is why I love it. If you've already gone through the legwork and there's research tools to where I can figure this out.

Richard James: It's an arbitrage for sure.

Preston Schmidli: Oh, for sure. So how can people reach me? If they want to learn more about our business, they can go to AuthorityBrand.com and we also do, I lead a weekly workshop if they want to learn more about trust scaling and how they could deploy this in their firm. It is specific to law firms. I do this every week unless it falls on a holiday and then I do it on Friday.

But they can go to AuthorityLawyer.com to register. It's completely free. And I just pour into them and, you know, try to help it make more sense.

MPS: Amazing. Well, Preston, thank you for sharing as much as you have today. This was cool. I honestly enjoyed having the conversation and just listening to your thoughts on this today too. And to the law firm owners, obviously tons to pull from. Make sure to hit that Subscribe or Follow button depending on where you're listening or watching and show some love down in the Comments below for Preston.

Otherwise, that's the pod.