We just wrapped up an incredible session with Kevin Chern, recovering attorney, the mastermind behind turning law firms into high-volume powerhouses. Kevin shared his journey from crafting a national virtual law firm to advising businesses on smart growth without compromising life goals. He emphasized the significance of non-branded third-party leads, innovative marketing channels, and provided invaluable advice for young attorneys looking to carve out a successful career.

Want to expand your market reach and attain peak efficiency in your legal practice? Tune in to this episode to learn from one of the best in the business. Remember, strategy isn't just about growth; it's crafting the life and the business that you want.

Key Topics

• 00:00 Entrepreneur and lawyer, founder of Total Attorneys, pioneered lead gen in legal space, fought for legitimacy in lawyer marketing.
• 04:45 Law firms evolved in business approach, increased online marketing in early 2000s.
• 10:55 After leaving law firm, focused on purposeful life, helping people solve business challenges, building personal network.
• 16:24 Proven lead generation for law firms, offering access to new lead sources and scalable solutions.
• 24:38Digital marketing agencies help firms with growth challenges by finding solutions to increase the average case value
• 32:11 Prioritizing foresight, planning, and discipline in business decisions.

About Kevin Chern:

After 25 years of building businesses while navigating some of the most complex paths to success, Kevin Chern founded Sanguine Strategic Advisors to lend his insight and experience to other serial entrepreneurs, small business owners and folks in need of a roll-up-your-sleeves innovator, deal maker and doer. Among his many pursuits:

Kevin is the founder and former Managing Partner of UpRight Law, the largest consumer bankruptcy law firm in the U.S., based in Chicago, built from the ground up starting in 2014. He founded and led UpRight in its mission to improve people's lives by providing the highest quality services, most effective legal strategies and world class customer service. He leveraged systems, technology, operations and the intense subject matter expertise of local bankruptcy practitioners to build America's premier virtual consumer law firm, allowing consumers to interact with their lawyer online. The firm successfully represented over 30,000 clients during his tenure as Managing Partner.

Previously, Kevin was a co-founder and President of Total Attorneys, the pioneer of lead generation in the legal industry. In his capacity as President, he was a marketing, technology, business development and law firm management consultant to 1100+ law firms nationwide and successfully fought regulatory battles across the country to legitimize lead generation in the legal industry.  

Kevin has architected five comprehensive law office CRMs and dozens of legal websites, is an expert in law practice development, having created practices in bankruptcy, consumer protection litigation, bankruptcy litigation, class action litigation, lemon law, personal injury, workers compensation and DUI.

He is a leader in the digital marketing space and is a consummate deal maker. He was named an inaugural member of the Fastcase 50, as one of the country's smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries, & leaders in the legal space. Kevin is also an inductee in The Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame and his companies have twice been on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies in America.

Kevin has built numerous other businesses over the last 25 years and is passionate about entrepreneurship and mentoring other lawyers and business professionals. Check out his LinkedIn Profile for more.

About Jay Berkowitz:

Jay Berkowitz is a digital marketing strategist with decades of experience in the industry. As the CEO of Ten Golden Rules, he has helped countless law firms and businesses harness the power of the internet to achieve remarkable growth and visibility. Jay is also a renowned keynote speaker and author, sharing his expertise at various industry events and publications worldwide.

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And what I recognized is one I really enjoyed helping people and just figuring out how to help them solve very specific challenges that they were facing in their businesses and or avoid stepping on the landmines that I'd stepped on over the years as I was building my own businesses, and also realize that along the way, the most valuable thing that I built was my personal and professional network, and I was extending it for free every single day.

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

Well, good morning. Good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Got a great guest today. Before I run into introduce you to Kevin Chern I want to tell you a little bit about tgr live. We're doing our live event, April 25 and 26th in Boca Raton, it's going to be awesome. We've got really an amazing lineup of speakers. I'm so pleased that basically everybody I seen speak at a great conference who did a great presentation, I asked them and they all said yes, we got some sponsors we're getting we're getting the rooms filled at the hotel. So definitely go to 10, Golden rules.com or the link in the show notes and check out 10 Golden Rules live, we're going to be covering artificial intelligence. We've got some of the top AI experts for law firms. We've got marketing some of the top social media experts niche law, Dave Thomas, from law Tigers is coming anyways, don't miss it. DGR live April 25 and 26th. With that, Kevin Chern is my guest today is companies called sanguine strategic advisors. And he's one of the best people in the world at getting law firm solutions for all kinds of different things. We mostly work with him on getting leads high quality leads for our clients. He also has great solutions, like call centers and all kinds of things. And I'll let Kevin tell you a little bit more about the company. But first, Kevin, tell us a little bit about your background. You're a recovering attorney, and you've built a tremendous leads company for yourself and then evolved into this lead leads consulting business, but why don't you tell us your story? Yeah,

I feel like I'm smack dab in the middle of a 30 year identity crisis. I can't I can't decide whether I'm a lawyer and entrepreneur but really been involved in scaling. I would say high volume law firms, whether in consumer bankruptcy or personal injury or tax over the last 30 years on a number of different types of contexts. But I'm a serial entrepreneur, I founded a company in 2005, called Total attorneys, which kind of pioneered lead gen in the legal space when it was still taboo for lawyers to pay a non attorney marketing company $100 For someone who filled out a form online, seeking legal assistance, and kind of fought the good fight to go up against state bars to legitimize lawyers paying for marketing the same way that was ubiquitous across most other industries at that point, which is paying for leads. But if many of us had been around that long, remember, in 2005, it was still impermissible for lawyers to pay for leads. And so we fought a bunch of state bars to legitimize it. And

you're really a pioneer in that right?

I guess you'd call me that. Some people call me crazy. But you know, is challenging at the time. But in hindsight is rewarding, because we really got to make an impact and opening up internet marketing to the legal industry in a way that I think expanded access to legal services to consumers who now had another avenue to get educated. Remember, law firms need an incentive to go ahead and put content and information out into the universe and educate consumers. It's for the purpose of marketing to them and attracting business. And so when you open up lead gen two law firms, obviously given very strong incentive to go out and proliferate information about the availability of legal services. So we built a bunch of

work getting so hard for law firms, like was it just like a snobbery from the top firms that they didn't want the upstarts targeting clients or? Well,

you know, I think for, again, it back in 2005. I think there's been a lot of evolution and kind of what we'd consider to be more enterprise law firms that are running their law firms like businesses that have a dedicated CFO and a CEO like the you know, there's just a lot more law firms that are being run like enterprise businesses. Back in 2005. I don't think that there that was as prevalent you had a lot more of kind of the mom, PA, or under 10. Attorney law firms, and a lot of those law firms like that don't have didn't have the resources for cheap chief marketing officers or big digital marketing agencies. And so a lot of them were relying on kind of the more traditional at that point. In terms of firms that were advertising online, the more traditional directory listings like paying fine law, couple $1,000, a year for directory listing or lawyers.com. But sometime around the early 2000, you really started to see law firms really going out, and spending significantly greater money on expanding their footprint online, recognizing that that was the future.

Was it Jacoby Myers, who were the first advertisers who fought the California Bar and went to the Supreme Court?

I think that probably would be open to dispute. There's a case out of Arizona, there was a Supreme Court case that basically around the same time, right, yeah, unconstitutional for, you know, for states to restrict lawyers from participating in commercial speech, basically. So that's where lawyers started marketing. But if you think back in around 2000, you had this brand new thing called Google Pay Per Click that was opened up for small businesses as opposed to big box retailers like Best Buy right now, small businesses, for the first time, were able to get access to targeting terms like Boca Raton Personal Injury Lawyer, although back in 2002, there is no such thing as regional targeting, when you bought the term personal injury attorney, you bought it nationwide, and actually had to buy every single click that was generated on a nationwide basis. Nowadays, you can target to specific keywords and specific practice areas.

So, you know, I saw Jacoby and Meyers were nominated to the legal advertising Hall of Fame at the Golden gavel awards at National Trial Lawyers, because of that pioneering work, they didn't advertising. So I'm going to start a movement here that you should be considered for nomination one day, um, it's probably gonna take about 10 years, Kevin, till it's like, you know, the mean, and the whole, you know, lawyer advertising online category, it's like classy, you know, considered like historical ineptitudes. Classic. Great to start your nomination. Okay.

I appreciate that. Hopefully, it's not a post humous award.

Exactly. You look young and energetic. Yeah. It'll be fine. So you've evolved from, you know, you built your own law firm you wanted leads for your law firm, then you got great at generating leads, and then you, you know, fought the good fight with the Bar Association's and built a national network of folks who are taking advantage of these leads, right.

Yeah, I mean, at you know, we, we grew dramatically doubled revenue and double revenue again. By 2011, we were delivering over 80,000 leads a month to over 2000 law firms across the country built some of the first SaaS applications for case management. Our first case management applications, which is the namesake of the company, total attorneys really was started around the same time as Clio in my case, and had a 50 person call center to help attorneys nurture leads to do a better job of converting them because that was in the days before law firm, most law firms had dedicated staff, in their offices that were actually supposed to be working with weeds daily, at a BPO that we started to help lawyers do a better job of collecting documents. And we were really early on leveraging technology, web based technologies help law firms really scale. And then 2013 exited that business started another law firm, and basically is offering virtual legal services to consumers looking for bankruptcy assistance on a nationwide basis. Another alternative business model, where we allowed lawyers who had underutilized capacity, become limited partners of the law firm, and the mothership kind of handled everything that was the non legal work, the client intake, the marketing, the document collection, collecting fees, when we allow the local law firms to maintain their interest in their existing law firm continue to serve their own clients, but then also participate as a limited partner in the national law firm, and deliver service services almost exclusively, on a virtual basis through the national law firm. So that firm, at its height was signing up 3000 clients a month, across all 50 states, with a base of about 125 employees in Chicago and about 450 lawyers around the country and again, is a true platform because we were utilizing the underutilized capacity of these law firms. And we're allowing consumers to also come to this platform to consume their legal services in an environment that was more appealing to them, where they didn't have to travel to a brick and mortar location to actually start receiving legal services.

Awesome. And then how did it evolve into your current company where you're really just connecting law firms with resources? You're not? You haven't built the resources yourself?

Yeah, well, in 2019, when I exited my last law firm, I had some time to think about really what I wanted the next iteration of my life to be previously, would still start businesses based on a concept of a need in the marketplace. And it started the business and then a year into the business. It was growing, it was successful. But I looked back and I'd say, What the heck did I do to my wife. So I was trying to be a little bit more purposeful about what I wanted my life to be. And so I put put together some kind of goalposts for myself in terms of what I wanted my life to be in terms of, you know, being mobile, and having a lot of diversification, revenue, and generate, generating residual revenue streams, kind of set all these preliminary rules about what I wanted my life to be. And what I recognized is one, I really enjoyed helping people and just figuring out how to help them solve very specific challenges that they were facing in their businesses and or avoid stepping on the landmines that I'd stepped on over the years, as I was building my own businesses, and also realized that along the way, the most valuable thing that I had built was my personal and professional network. And I was extending it for free. Every single day, I was making introductions to law firm owners, they come to me and say, Hey, Kevin, do you know any lead providers? And I'd say, oh, yeah, here's a couple guys that I know are generating really high quality leads, because those law firms, the big problem is that have to test out 10 lead sources in order to find a good lead source, which is very disruptive to their business. So, you know, I realized what I was doing by making these introductions and extending my network is, I was really giving away my most valuable asset for free every single day by making all these introductions. So I started saying, when strategic advisors with the idea that, you know, I could really do what I love doing, which is helping people address whatever challenges they're facing, but also put a framework around that, that I could actually make a living doing it. So we provide alternative advisory services to law firms and other small businesses. Our advisory services are free to our clients. And in its simplest form, our advisory services consult of us asking a single question, which is what kept you up last night? What are the biggest challenges that you're trying to solve for in your business, at which time the business owners say to us, oh, I'm dealing with this headache or that headache, because we all know that that's what business owners talk about when we ask them, what's new with your business. And after they expressed to us the challenges they're facing, we're able to obviously relate and say, we faced that same challenge before, this is the way we solved it. Business owners ask us if we can execute that solution for us. At which point we say, no, but we'd be happy to introduce you to the curated solutions provider in our network that is going to be really good at solving this challenge. We know that because we've used this provider in our own business, we make the introduction. And so by doing this, our services are fully subsidized by the solutions provider. But we're saving the business owner kind of that painful, iterative, time consuming, frustrating process of having to cycle through several different providers before they find the one that actually does the job right for them.

I always tell tell people how I met Kevin and it was the it was like the first month of COVID shutdown. And like, if you all remember back, it was like this was the shutdown shutdown where we were all even afraid to open our door like nevermind leave our house and, and get in our car. And nobody was driving into each other. There was no car accidents because no one was on the roads for at least the first month until we started desperately looking for toilet paper. And then we had to go on our cars again. Right. But you know, that first month, one of my clients, you know, it was Jeff McDonald in Richmond, Virginia and they're like you We signed like 30 new cases, I'm like, how did you sign 30 new cases? They're like, Oh, it was saying wean or something. And I'm like, What's the saying wean? And I was like, trying to figure out? Where did 30 cases come from the middle of the shutdown, the next month? Like, you know, oh, yeah, we signed like 35 cases, you know, it was still pretty much shut down. And I'm like, you know, everybody else is really hurting all across the country. And you guys signed 35 new cases, you got to introduce me to the saying sanguine. No. And then by then they could pronounce it correctly. So I got on with Kevin. And he explained that, and there's attorneys are always frustrated with leads, because most lead providers, including like the big, the big networks, like the find laws, and not picking on anyone they have, you know, they'll typically, if someone calls out a lead form on those sites, they'll send it to three or even 10, attorneys. And so generally, there's frustration with the lead sources you pay for these leads. And if you find out they've already hired an attorney, that went to 10 other attorneys, but one of the things that I've really recommend to my clients, and Kevin's now probably worked with 20, or 30 of our clients, is that the leads that Kevin provides are unique to that law firm, that doesn't mean that someone didn't go out on the internet, and sign up for another service. But that all your services will only sell the lead to the attorney. So a little bit about how in

to be clear. Jay, these are not my my leads are third party providers. What we're doing is you're, we're curating them. So first of all we do is we take them through a series of questions just based on our breadth of experience in buying leads, selling leads, generating leads, etc. You know, we've been on each side of the dynamic in terms of, we've run law firms where we're buying leads, we've generated our own leads with arbitrage leads in my past businesses. So what we're doing is we're just leveraging our experience and understanding what methodology supports a provider generating good quality leads and an attractive cost of acquisition for a law firm. If the lead provider kind of passes that first set of questions, we've got some guinea pig law firms, right firms that we've built very strong relationships over a long period of time. And they don't mind throwing five or $10,000 at a test to see if the leads are actually good quality. So we'll test it out over a 4560 day period, and get disposition reporting from those law firms and these law firms or what you'd consider to be enterprise law firms that have very sophisticated lead nurturing frameworks in place. In other words, if these law firms cannot convert the weeds, no one's going to be able to. And if we, these law firms can convert the leads, leads, firms with similar sophisticated frameworks in place are likely also going to be able to convert them will get the dispositions back after about 45 to 60 days, let's say the lead provider says, we see that the providers generating cases under $2,000 cost of acquisition for a motor vehicle accident case, will go back to lead provider will say congratulations, you've actually proven to us that you do generate good quality leads. And because you have now we will open up access to other law firms in our network that have requested from us that they want to be introduced to new lead sources. So that's kind of the way it works. And we do it not just with weeds, but with a whole variety of different types of solutions that can help to scale firms. I would also make this point, if you are a law firm that's been burnt over and over and over again, because you tried third party providers, you know, you're losing out on a segment of the marketplace, that is fine getting their access to different media through different media channels, to personal injury lawyers. In other words, if you're in the mindset, I'm never buying leads, again, I've been burned on him before, I'm just going to do traditional SEO or I'm just do my own branded pay per click. The reality is there's a certain segment of our economy that is consuming media through YouTube, or Facebook, or Tik Tok, or Ott, or whatever it is, they're consuming their media, and they're advertising in different channels. And if you don't have the internal sophistication to execute that, and you're not working specifically with an agency that is buying media in those channels for you, then an excellent way to access that segment of the market is by buying non branded third party leads by providers. But you need to know which providers to work with. The mistake that many firms do is they just go buy leads from anybody, and then they get burned. And then they say this is a problem with the industry in general. Rather than saying, hey, you know what, I never received formal training on how to properly vet out the right lead sources generating Personal Injury leads to YouTube marketing. And that's really just decided doesn't work and they give up. Yeah, and you know, most of the firms that we're working with that are continuing to scale, and having kind of felt like they've maxed out their branded market marketing. So in other words, they haven't become kind of stagnant in terms of their month over month growth, or going out and getting at least 15% of the overall volume of their leads through third party, non branded sources.

The other way I find that works really well is some of the competitive markets like we've clients in New York and Florida, and Texas, and California, like the cost for the best click on Pay Per Click on Google is like $300, for a car wreck attorney near me, a search done on a cell phone and a call coming on that cell phone. Right? The challenge with that is like, and I always explained to people, you've got to tell Google, you need three, I want three of those Day, a day. So three times 300,000, a day of doing rough math, and 30 days is $30,000, in most small firms can't wrap their head around spending 30,000 on Google. And then by the way, if that works, here's what works generally looks like. It means you might breakeven to spend $30,000, you might get, you know, if you're lucky, like 15 cases. So it's like, very, very expensive. $1,500 a case, and you might break even, you know, a lot of those are soft tissue cases. And then what you're trying to do is get one or two big cases every month or every quarter, that pays for the whole investment. So you've got to break even at like $30,000 a month to try and get a couple of big cases. And so what I love about the lead sources that you provide to our clients is a lot of that a lot of the spend like they're they're spending a lot of money like two, three $4 million on Google. And what that allows their algorithms the Google algorithms to do is really maximize against those best keyword terms, and use the term arbitrage before so your leads, lead providers actually spending like $4 million, and then they're, they're dividing those leads up all across the country. And they're, you know, they're selling a lead for round number $200. But it costs 150. So or it may cost them 190. There's making $10. So

when you know what lead sources can do, and again, you have to find the good quality ones. But what you realize is that your biggest competitor is not the guy who's marketing against you on Google Pay per click. It is the aggregation of all the third party lead sources that are going out and running national campaigns and things like that, and buying marketing at scale with Google, right. And Google's giving them preferential treatment, because they've AB tested multivariate tested when they have ads, they're highly optimized, they get high click through rates, Google is rewarding them by giving them more impression share when someone does a search for a personal injury attorney in your area. And what what's so what ends up happening is because they have economies of scale, and because they're aggregating the demand across many markets, and a much higher volume of clicks, as opposed to your limited budget, what they're doing is they're getting a lower cost. And then that's what allows them to arbitrage and then sell you that weed for say $300 apiece. And remember, so that's one thing to remember is your biggest competitor is not the personal injury attorney down the street. It is the lead aggregators, right? Because they're getting the lower costs, because they're more sophisticated marketers, and they've got the benefit of scale. The next thing to remember is, like you said, this is a game of numbers, right? If you can buy a higher volume of well filtered leads, right at a lower cost. It's a numbers game. If you buy three leads, it's a one out of three chance that, you know, hopefully, you're going to pick up a nice case out of it, your chances of getting a much bigger case are going to be greater if you buy 100 leads, right, which you can do through a third party provider, you're only going to be able to get so many branded, first party generated leads to your Google Pay Per Click, because you're paying for each individual click, whereas you're going if you find the right lead providers, you can get volume. Thirdly, like I said before, you're getting access to channels of media that you're not going to get through your own first party branded marketing. I caution everybody, I say to people, Look, you may be getting a cost of acquisition of say $900 or 1000 or $1,200 with your own first party branded marketing, right? You can't go and buy leads from third parties and expect that your cost of acquisition is going to be exactly the same. In other words, different channels can end up costing you different amounts of money. And you can't you can't compare apples to oranges, you can't say, Well, I'm getting, I'm generating cases at a cost of acquisition of $1,200 to my own first party branded, this source is generating cases at $1,700. Therefore, it's I'm not going to do this because it's not as good as my first party branded. Now, it's apples and oranges. It's two different media channels. And if you had unlimited marketing dollars, right, let me put it, if you had limited marketing dollars, you're only going to spend your budget on those marketing channels that are generating the absolute best cost of acquisition. But if you're looking to expand your market share, and you feel like you become flat in terms of your grow, and you want to start expanding market share, guess what basic laws of supply and demand, sometimes you have to actually pay a little bit more in a cost of acquisition in order to grow your volume. And third party non branded sources can provide that very easy to flip the switch on and off, one month, your lawn cases, flip the switch, turn on some third party non branded the next month, you got plenty of what you need, lower your spend on third party non branded, young law firm that hasn't developed your brand, or your SEO is waiting to kind of build up, go out and buy some third party non branded leads until your marketing campaigns, you feel like you're flattening out, go out and buy third party. And those are really the two circumstances where I see firms most ordinarily going out and buying the third party leads is their newer, their brand isn't built a marketing campaign isn't as sophisticated and they need the volume to kind of see their portfolio of cases or there are more mature firm, and they're starting to see diminishing returns on their branded marketing. And they're looking to supplement it or create a little bit more stability in the flow of cases. And they go out and buy third party non branded. What

are some of the other categories that are most popular for you that you're helping folks? I mentioned call centers, but you tell me what else? Yeah.

So you know, digital marketing agencies, you know, everybody, we say what are the challenges, challenges with growth, right, that's a big area of assistance. But we're also helping firms identify ways to expand the value of their average case by finding solutions in the marketplace that are working really well. Increasing average case value, because you can attack you can attack growth in scale on a couple of different ways. Right? One, you can go out and get different marketing sources, right. Which sometimes requires you spending more money on a per case acquisition costs. While you can either take more of your profit margin and dedicated to buying leads or buying media, or what you can do is you can expand your profit margin by raising the average value of your case. How do you do that? Well, for instance, we have a provider that will do neuro psych evaluations on to uncover traumatic brain injury when an initial investigation or an initial ER visit didn't uncover it. Now, if you go ahead and have that TBR, that neuro psych evaluation before you send the initial demand letter to the adjuster, now they're setting their reserves on that case, much higher once they sit those reserves going in and trying to get the adjuster to modify those reserves is exceedingly difficult may stretch the settlement time and out several more months, and may impair your ability to get a much higher value. So working with third party providers that can help you enhance the value of your cases, guess what a few more profit margin, you can afford a higher cap cost of acquisition. And He who controls the supply by being able to spend more money per lead is going to control the marketplace. If I can afford to pay the most for every single case. I can take a bigger market share of the gains that are

great. Got a little time pressure here. So I want to get into my some of my favorite questions. Sure. This is normally my last question, but I'm for you. It's got to come first. So I know you're a big white sox guy, right?

Cubs cubs

story? I'm sorry. Oh. And also, you know, I'm a hockey guy. So you've got a great young superstar in Chicago named Connor but art Yeah, in color. And what's the buzzing? Oh, there's

a ton of buzz. I actually got a quite a few games every year. And he's just a lot of fun to watch. And, you know, it just is just recently, Patrick Kane was here for his return to Chicago. Right? Yeah. Chelios just had his his jersey retired. So yeah, great time to be a sports fan in Chicago. I go and you know, the Cubs there's a lot a lot of youth and a lot of exciting players and I'm a lifelong diehard Cubs fan and grew up in the 70s here in Chicago listen to watching the cops on GN and and hearing Jack Brickhouse announced the game. So

awesome. The question I always love to ask people, what apps are you using? Or what personal productivity tools? Are you? Can you share with us? Yeah,

you know, I will tell you that I am an avid Chet GPT. User. But I think more than out

of us, give us a couple examples.

I mean, I just my favorite use nowadays is actually real language formula creation for Google Sheets and Excel, Excel spreadsheets. So rather than me, you know, not like a guru in Excel, right? I know how to write a basic formula. But sometimes I, you know, use if then statements are what are called nested if then statements, which use multiple cells as variables. So we have to say, if this cell says this, and that cell says this, then this third cell should give you a particular result or multiply to other cells, right? Using Chet GPT, I can go in there in real time in real language, and I say, if so a one has a one or two. And so B six as a three or four, then cell C, C seven should reflect this, and I can say, write a formula that will execute this for me. So rather than me having to go back through like five or six times trying to figure out how to write the correct, excellent formula, or how to create a pivot table, or how to create a graph, I can actually go right into Chet GPT, and write it out in real language, what I want, and will actually write the entire formula for me. That's awesome.

I love that one. Yeah. So if you're young Kevin, and your young attorney, and you're starting out today, what would you recommend to your young self?

Um, you know, I think, like, if you have the right intellect, in Drive, right, and passion for what you're doing. I'm a believer that you can be successful in whatever you set out to do. I encourage people to be very thoughtful, not jump at the first opportunity. But really think about how doing what they're anticipating doing from from a career standpoint, is going to impact their happiness. Like I said, Too many times I would start businesses. And because I was hard working, and I persevered in the face of adversity, I was able to find a way to make the business successful. But it didn't always translate into me really enjoying what I was doing. And so I guess my biggest piece of advice is, try and be intentional and purposeful, in designing your career path to, you know, to create happiness and satisfaction in your personal life.

You mentioned that exercise you went through where you sort of you were at a transition point, a pivot point in your life, and you said, you know, here's the things I want, I know that one of the beauties of your business is that you don't, you know, like you said, you don't have a product you don't have, you know, you have some staff, but you don't, you're not running a law firm. And part of that was intention. So you could travel so that you didn't have to worry about a big payroll, and you were held just all

10, I didn't want to have a bunch of employees to, to manage 1099, I didn't want to have a bunch of partners that I had to share decision making authority with, but then it had to live with the product of their bad judgment. I don't have a bunch of business partners. I want it to be mobile, so that I was going to be able to travel, I wanted to be able to determine what my schedule was for the week. And that has

to do with that is did you use a book? Or did you use a consultant? Or how did you? Or what's just experience to say, hey, look, I'm gonna craft my life based on the forehead.

No, it really was just, it was a product of just my you know, we're all a product of the collection of our prior experiences, as they say. And it really was just a product of realizing the mistake that I had made before, which was coming up with the idea and executing it before I thought about what the impact of the business model was going to have on me six months from now or a year from now or two years from now, right? So it's about being a little bit more thoughtful and trying to look out a little bit further to see where the business is going to bring you but most importantly, it's understanding as you're going in and before you're developing your business. What you want your life to be and setting that definition most goalposts and being very disciplined about not doing things within the business that will violate or fall outside of those goalposts.

Congrats, that's awesome. Do you have a couple of best business books that you'd recommend?

I mean, one that I recommend a lot is to the extent you are hiring employees is there's a book called who it's available on Amazon. It's by a guy by the name of Jeff smart, really great book in terms of thinking about how to build profiles of the people that you want to hire to support the growth of your business. And it really has been an incredible tool throughout my career, since I first read it in probably 2007. Really gives great direction on how to build a team.

Are there any blogs, podcasts or YouTube that you subscribe to that are your go to is

I like medium. It's a subscription based one, it's about $5 a month, but it provides a lot of really current information and a very breadth of articles about AI and current technology trends. And, and I really find that it's applicable across a lot of different industries. Whether you're a lawyer or an you're in a different industry, it makes for great daily reading. There's always a couple of nuggets in there.

Great. Last question. Where can people get in touch with you?

The best way to reach me is to email me my email is Kevin ke vi n at sanguine sa n g u i n e s a strategic advisors.com

Same as the ssa.com Yep. And you

can also find me and linkedin@linkedin.com forward slash Kevin Dasher.

Awesome. Well, thanks for doing this. Hope the Cubs have a great spring training and and season and hope the Hawks do great except for when they're playing my Winnipeg Jets.

Oh, I was just at the game the other night so I'm for you guys beat us in overtime. Hey, thanks for having me to speak with you. Great.

Thank you for listening to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 Golden rules.com That is podcast at t e n Golden rules.com