Authority used to be assumed. Today, it must be built.

As markets become more transparent and commoditized, pricing pressure doesn’t begin with competition — it begins with perception. When differentiation disappears, the only lever left is price.

In this episode, Dennis “DM” Meador explains why founder-led visibility is no longer optional — and how CEOs who fail to build authority early eventually feel it in their margins.

Dennis Meador, Founder & CEO of The Legal Podcast Network, has spent over 20 years working with attorneys in one of the most competitive professional markets in the world.

What he began noticing five to seven years ago wasn’t incremental change — it was regression. Attorneys who once commanded premium hourly rates were quietly discounting under pressure from commoditized digital marketing, lookalike websites, and price-shopping behavior.

His conclusion:

When authority erodes, margins follow.

This conversation explores the structural shift from logo-led branding to founder-led authority, why transparency is now a leadership requirement rather than a personality choice, and how scaling CEOs must balance experimentation with disciplined decision-making.

For founders navigating growth in crowded markets, this episode offers a clear warning — and a strategic response.

Key Takeaways

1. Commoditization doesn’t start with pricing — it starts with similarity.

When positioning collapses into lookalike messaging, price becomes the only remaining differentiator.

2. Authority is the mechanism that protects pricing power.

Premium rates require perceived differentiation. Without authority, justification disappears.

3. Founder-led visibility is structural, not stylistic.

In a digital-first world, leadership transparency is inevitable — whether embraced or resisted.

4. Scaling requires disciplined opportunity filtering.

Not every exciting opportunity aligns with the company’s current stage or strategy.

5. Frameworks are backward-looking.

The only framework that works for your company hasn’t been built yet.

Guest & Host Information

Dennis “DM” Meador

Founder & CEO, The Legal Podcast Network

https://www.thelegalpodcastnetwork.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennismeador/

Jeff Holman

Host, The Breakout CEO Podcast

https://www.thebreakoutceo.com/

Welcome back everybody to the Breakout CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman, and I'm here with Dennis Metter, not meter. I wanted to say that even though you told me about it at DM. Dennis goes by DM and you're here with us today. I'm really glad to talk to you. I've got, well, welcome to the show, first of all. It's great to have you. like, we connected and I'm like, man, this is a really interesting, this could be a really interesting show because.

Absolutely.

You know, you and I connected maybe partly because I'm an attorney and I'm, you know, you've got a legal podcast network. I'm sure we'll talk about that today. So there's some crossover there, but for our audience, you know, I think about how what you're doing with your clients, I'm sure, building authority and helping them get their name out there. It translates into some things that CEOs need to be doing in their businesses, whether that's on a podcast or elsewhere, right? And so.

Not only that, but then we get to hear how you've built your own business up and some of the things you've gone through. So I think there's multiple layers here. I'm excited to talk about with you, DM.

Yeah, ready to go wherever you are, my friend. And I always tell people I'm an open book. Some people appreciate it. Some people are like, whoa, so just just know I'm here. I'm an open book. And, you talked about, you know, CEOs being able to identify with, you know, kind of the building authority. We are in a seismic shift in regards to the role of it really leadership period.

Hahaha.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

We're transitioning from an authoritarian top-down sort of, you know, and I think in a way we're seeing that crumble around us. think the long-term effects of what we're seeing happen in society as a whole, all over the world, is you've seen authoritarian sort of like top-down regime sort of mentality, and then that's broken down. And the same thing is happening in business. We're coming into this founder-led marketing sort of...

era that we're in, most people kind of attribute it with like a Gary Vee or Alex Hormozi and whether you like their sort of like, you know, I'm a pitch man sort of like persona or not. The reality is what used to be seen as throwaway marketing for insurance agents who couldn't afford to do real marketing or for mortgage agents who couldn't afford to do real marketing is now considered the gold standard, which is I'm not hiding behind a logo. I'm putting myself out there.

Yeah.

I am the face of my company. It's not some abstract logo, some little cartoon figure, some slogan. It is me, the way I live, the philosophies I have, the way I treat people. I am the person that is the company. And so I think that that is applicable to whether you have your own small firm, you're a big company CEO, that founder led mentality is really becoming, in my opinion, the predominant shift that's happening right now.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, man, we're gonna get right into it here. I love it. I'm gonna skip the politics, because I think we've probably got people on all sides of that, especially if we're talking globally. some people think things don't move fast enough, other people think they're moving too fast, and some people think everything's just going the wrong direction altogether. So that's all I'm gonna say about it. But what you said is really interesting to me with this founder-led economy that people, like you've gotta build your...

Ha ha.

yeah. Yeah.

Exactly.

personal brand and so much relates to your personal brand. did some of that come because you're working with attorneys who that traditionally has been their mode is it really is a, a personal brand to a large extent, maybe not some of the largest firms, but most attorneys, even in large firms, they, they operate. I want to call it kind of in silos around their own personal brand, personal book of business.

Is that where that comes from or where does that thought come from?

Probably, I mean, I've worked with attorneys 20 years and what I've really seen happen is the erosion of the authority of the position or the profession. 20 years ago when I first started working with attorneys and it was in the digital space, but we're really just moving into digital. So there wasn't a lot of commoditization like what's really happened over the last two decades. And what really started striking me is, I talked to attorneys,

Mm-hmm.

been on the sales side, even like with this company, I sold my first hundred clients. So, you know, I got in, developed the product, developed the process, talked to people. They didn't like this. They didn't like that. This would keep them from moving and I'd, you know, make adjustments. But like having talked to literally thousands of attorneys through the years, I kind of figured out like, okay, if they're in this market and they do this, I'm looking at their branding. Chances are they charge about X, Y or Z.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

And I used to hit it spot on, but then about five to seven years ago, I started hearing something different. I used to, I, I, I'd go from like, so you're in this market doing this. So you're probably about what 425 an hour. And they would started saying things like, I wish I used to be about 10 years ago, but with how competitive the market is, I'm down to 350. And I started hearing that recurring over and over and over and over again, just in talking to attorneys.

Hmm.

And as I started hearing that, I started thinking like, well, what happened? Like, how can an industry like this have a regression for especially the small to solo attorney? there's a lot of, people could talk about the fact that there's what, two million attorneys? I've heard upwards of three million. I've heard about two million, but the reality is, yeah, yeah, too many. But the reality is that we're the most

Yeah.

Yeah. Most people just say too many, but yeah.

competitive legal market in the world. And when the internet hit, we went from advertising and local like ability to pierce through to individuals to now you can go to one place and every attorney within 50 miles is going to be listed. And now you could just start calling down that list. How much, how much, how much, how much. And then people are like, well, I'm going to build a website. And it's like, okay, so you build a website.

And they all start looking the same, right? Their website looks the same, what they're doing. It's just like, so if everything is similar, then the only point of differentiation becomes the price that you charge. And so I started thinking like, how on earth are these attorneys who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for sometimes for school and law school, who have these law practices

And yet they're regressing. How can I as a marketer stop saying, well, let me get your phone to ring. It's my job to get your phone to ring. And then, you know, it's your job to convert them. How can I get from that philosophy as a marketer to, hey, let me help you find a way to where when your phone rings, it's somebody who already has an innate respect for you, who wants to work with you and is maybe just confirming a few things. And I started getting into like,

content strategies back in maybe about 10, like seven, 10 years ago. And then when I launched the podcast network, that was really the crux of, I was like, this is it. This is the chance again, for attorneys to differentiate themselves in their marketplace so that they can restore authority, cultivate the ideal clients that they wanna work with and charge the fees that they deserve to charge because.

Mm-hmm.

You know, it's like you've been doing this 22 years, you had your practice now for 12 years and some kid three years out of college and no disrespect to young attorneys comes in and they've got to flash your website, a flash your look and feel to things and they're only $250 an hour. You can't justify $500 an hour with a flat website. You can't justify double the money. So that's where I got into that thought process of authority and attorneys.

Yeah.

Yeah, Noah, thanks for explaining that. And I don't want to get into how you built your business around that and what the struggles were with the business, but this is really intriguing sideline for me because I'm an attorney. I've seen a lot of this stuff happening. So have another question on this line of thinking, and maybe it's a pushback a little bit is because as I've built my firm, I've said to myself, you know, that may be the number one problem with our industry from an insider's perspective, not an outsider hiring attorneys all the time.

from an insider's perspective is that we, you know, there's so much siloing and individualism, whether you're in a small firm or you're in a big firm, you know, I've been in different places. And so I feel like there's maybe a tension between what you're describing as building your brand authority, your, you know, your individual presence, versus building a...

business model or a business that can eventually scale independent of the individual brand. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, have you run into that or, because I think that applies to CEOs of all industries. They say to themselves, well, I'm gonna start my own podcast. I'm gonna get out there. I'm gonna create a presence and it's gonna have benefits to my business and maybe benefits long-term to them when they, if they're a serial entrepreneur, they carry that same branding from

from startup to startup, but at some point you've got this tension between building and having individual authority, yet being able to leverage that into a scalable business that scales without depending on your authority.

So first of all, let's just take the biggest case study that's ever happened in the history of the legal market and marketing itself. I mean, I probably shouldn't have to talk too much about one particular law firm that now spends a billion dollars a year in marketing, Morgan & Morgan, personal injury.

Sorry I said it, I said it on a legal podcast. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings everybody. I'm very sorry. He's not my client. But my point is this, that's literally what he did is he built a personal brand and then scaled it to a billion dollar company. So we don't have to look at the Gary Vee's and you might say, well, I don't wanna be a Morgan. I don't wanna be a John Morgan. I don't wanna be, and you don't have to be.

But the reality is that founder-led marketing is more of a cultural thing in your company than it is an activity. So it is really leadership opening themselves up to, because we live in the social media age, we're being scrutinized whether we acknowledge it or not. That's what happened with the cancel movement and the Me Too movement and all of these movements that happened is that

What we thought we could hide behind in leadership by being leaders has been stripped away. And so whether we like it or not, we are bare to the world unless we're gonna go live on an island, have no social media and just hide behind a logo. But the second issue that I see with that mind frame is we're almost, we're two and a half generations, millennial, Z and now alpha.

We are two and a half generations into digital living where people's entire social structure is not built around the bar. It's not built, and I don't mean the bar association, I mean the drinking bar. It's not built around the church house. It's not built around the Kiwanis and the social clubs. It is built around a digital world. And if you are going to lead a company,

Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

You're going to have to lead it into the digital world. And so that's the reasoning I would get that I, or that would be the pushback that I would give is in today's day and age, you are, your marketing is founder led, whether you want it to be or not. And simply because think like Ellen, think about Ellen. Ellen was the brand. Ellen had the facade. Ellen had everything out there, but then the reality came out and she lost everything. And so.

people have high expectations for leadership. And if we don't allow ourselves to be transparent, then people are going to find inaccuracies or things that they think don't look right. And if you're not an open book to start with, you're really putting yourself in a much more vulnerable position than ever as a leader.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so I think you're saying then that individual branding is the leverage. Maybe there's a tension there, maybe there's not, but it's the leverage that you need to have to be able to build. Without it, you can't build in the world today like other people would build that have that individual presence.

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a much bigger challenge because people are looking for connection through marketing, through media more than ever. In the past, it was a passive thing. It was a story you watched. Now, these are people that you follow. And that's the difference in media. When we were young, we watched TV. Now we follow people. And so,

Yeah.

Yeah.

you're gonna be if you are gonna do anything worthwhile, you're gonna be followed rather on the forefront or, you know, sneakily, they're gonna, it's gonna be discovered who you really are. So you like I said, you might as well embrace it. And then be outward with it so that when you do say fuck, like, you know, it's not it doesn't cost your company $10 million. Because they already know, yeah, that's just DM. That's just you know, he's a little salty with his language. And sorry if I just took away your

Yeah.

you know, now people have to sign in to listen to this. I apologize. You can beep it. You can bleep it if you need to.

Maybe, No worries. So did you realize all of this and say to yourself, man, I think I can leverage this into a business? was this part of the impetus of why you built the legal podcast network that you did? Or was there a different path to get to that point?

I mean, I've honestly like I had a partnership with another guy. We had an SEO agency that was authority based content interview, know, SEO scaling all of that. And then when I built this, I was like, wait, these LLMs are coming. They're query based. We're also seeing the rise of podcasting. It's reached that tipping point. It's no longer, you know, podcasters are no longer like ham radio operators. They're really seen as like stars. And, you know, just in these past two years. So was like, there's a time and a place. And I did a podcast in Austin.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right.

totally off book. was about food, music, and life. I just ran around, was goofy, but I had a great production crew, great team. We put out a great looking show and it had quite the impact. so the partnership that I was in, he executed his five-year buyout. I was five months away from my wedding. I keep a book of business ideas, just some of them I'll never do in a million years, but

One of them was born from just talking to attorneys and they would say, do you guys do anything with podcasting? Can you help with pod? They've been saying that for like two, three years. And so said to my partner, why don't we build a podcast network? Because we can use podcasting to create custom content and to endear the attorneys to their potential clients. And if we give them a track and emulate just sitting across from the desk, like I've heard attorneys tell me for 20 years, if I could just get them across from the desk.

Hmm. Yeah.

80, 90 % chance they're going to become my client. Okay, so let's emulate that, especially now we're post pandemic, people don't want to come into the office, they got out of that habit, they feel disrespected when you make them come into your office. And so how do you emulate what you consider to be your greatest skill, which is answering questions, assuaging fears, giving clarity in a moment of a situation. So we're just trying to recreate that very thing.

Yeah, yeah. Right.

that attorneys for decades have used to make themselves successful but has gone away in the way that they've traditionally done it. So that's why I started the podcast.

Yeah, and you'd done a lot of research, maybe informally, I guess, along the way. That's helpful. But I have to ask, what made you decide to work with attorneys? Most people look at attorneys, like, there's a lot of money there. I'm going to go there. And then, at least from the salespeople I've talked to, they're like, selling to attorneys is the worst. They're so slow to adopt, especially something that feels

outside their, you know, realm of comfort, which is based on stuff from 80 years ago sometimes, right? Like, was that a, did you find that to be an easy decision and an easy growth path for you? Or were there bumps trying to just sell into such a conventional, traditional industry?

No, no, I, this was like 2003 that I started working with attorneys and I was in my mid twenties, I'd had a successful business and then that kind of faded out. had somebody recruit me and I'd been in like kind of more like conceptual advertising, selling ads on this or that, three, four, 500 bucks a pop. And then somebody recruited me, they're like, hey, there's this thing we're doing, it's like, it's called PPC, we buy ads on like, this time it was Yahoo.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

We buy ads on Yahoo. And then you just like go in and show these attorneys that, like, it was kind of like a legal match. You're familiar with legal match. It's kind of like a revamp of like the legal match with some differences to it, obviously. And so I went and there and I'm like, well, how much is this? And they're like, Oh, 5000 a month, we pretty much work with just mostly PI attorneys right now. And I was like, $5,000 a month. I was like, what? Like, okay, I'll try it. Like I thought it was kind of crazy.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But what I discovered in working with attorneys is for me, they love to work in logic. Now I come from a back, I was a pastor from the time I was 16 to 34. And I'm not, you know, I was like the kind of pastor that knocked on doors for a while there, went out on the street corners and talked to people like baptism by fire, if you will, was how I really learned to talk and to relate and have conversations. And to me, like,

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not the kind of person that believes in argument for argument's sake, but I am the kind of person that never shies away from awkward moments and having a discussion if I believe in what I'm doing and I believe it can help that person. And so because I could talk to attorneys and be like, okay, you don't like it, but have you thought about this? Oh, well, no. Have you thought about that? Well, no. And so I could point, counterpoint, and it was a lot different than like, if I did that with like a roofer, they would be like,

You blankety blank, don't tell me how to run my business. Attorneys are conditioned for back forth. Sometimes I would literally just say, hey, we're sitting down at the table trying to find a settlement here, trying to negotiate a place where it makes sense for both of us. so it was a very natural fit for my own personal temperament. I was the kid that had I been in a different socioeconomic situation,

You

Yeah.

and done any homework in high school, I probably would have went to law school. But I was an entrepreneur from 14 figuring out how to make money. I just wanted my high school diploma so I could get out there, get into the world and make my money. So then I kind of went back, ended up with them in my mid 20s. And now here we are 20 something years later and still working with them. Not only for 20 years, but I would say probably over 70 to 75 % of the time I've worked

Yeah.

either exclusively with or mostly with attorneys.

Okay, so you're conditioned for this. I don't think everybody has that same skill set, perhaps. Or that same sales technique, maybe more importantly, right? Well, so you kind of naturally fell into this or conditioned yourself for it over time, over 20 years, said, hey, let's start this podcast network for attorneys. You're now, I think you said 70 people, 70-ish people?

Yeah, 65, 70, it's one of those things I'm always like, oh, we just hired two more people on this department, oh, three, and so, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to keep track, right? That's what we talked about earlier. It's hard to know all their names. Well, so what's the growth been like over two years? That's a pretty quick timeframe to spin up to that size of group. And it doesn't grow without a few bumps in the road,

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and that's always been the thing. Like this is one of those businesses that I'm constantly holding back my sales. Like I could scale out and have 10 salespeople, 25 SDRs, 10 people in marketing, and we could probably sell a couple hundred clients a month if I added in the other professions, other white collar professions as well. Right now we're at about 200 clients. I think a little more than that. And so we do about

Mm-hmm.

300 or so, 350 episodes a month across, because we do once a month, twice a month, or four times a month.

So you're helping produce and do all of the backend and the attorney shows up and does the interviews, but you're handling up to everything else in that show. Yeah.

Yeah.

literally everything else. We provide a host, we provide the content plan and the questions, we do the distribution, we do all the graphics work, we do the marketing, we create. Like for example, our once a month show, it's 30 minutes in studio, about seven to 10 questions, about 17 to 21 minutes of actual talking. We take that, we break it into 30 pieces of content, 10 videos, 10 audiograms, 10 static.

We distribute those on up to 10 outlets. We're creating website content, two, three, four pages per episode, depending on some variables. So we're just taking and stacking and multiplying this attorney's time for their benefit to just make them omnipresent in many different ways, but we've just taken one slice, little slice of their time in order to do it. And I knew like, that's the key. Like, okay, so let me get this straight. I give you 30 minutes, I give you, you

Yeah.

That

X amount of dollars per month. come in for an hour every two months and you're doing a whole, you're doing all of my marketing the whole time for those two months. And that's it. Like, Hey, I'm in. so it's, and it's worked very well.

Yeah.

Yeah, and with SEO and AEO or whatever we're calling it now for AI, know, optimization, like there's just some, it's an open world out there, right? So that makes sense. It makes sense why you'd be able to grow fast in a market that is probably looking to soak this up, especially when they're competing against somebody spending a billion dollars a year in marketing. What kind of growth?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yup.

issues have you seen along the way that you've had to manage?

You know, I've been very fortunate. Our production has always stayed fairly like on point, at least an A, you know, and sometimes we can keep it up to like an A plus. Every once in a while, just like anything else, something slips through, a customer gets mad, but then I spend time with them, we fix it and we're good. But the biggest issue that we had to learn was communication through the process and really making things simple. Like right now, we're just like,

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

spending a lot of time through our onboarding process because we want to make sure that we can get them into the studio as quick as possible because what we've learned is the faster we get them into the studio, the faster they see their first podcast, the faster by the end of our four month contract, they're bought in. But the ones that are like, I forgot this. Let's just reschedule this for next week. And we, you know, we don't have everything in a row. Then a few months down the road, you know,

Yeah.

Right.

we might lose that client not because they weren't happy, but because they should be three months into the process and they're three weeks into the process. And so.

Right, right. The progress isn't there for the length of time they've been committed or the length of time they feel like they've been committed without committing.

Exactly.

Exactly. Exactly. So that's been the biggest thing is just like the client process, client communication, bringing them along, making them feel like this is very easy, very simple, because a lot of these law firm owners, I mean, they're entrepreneurs and lawyers. And so like me, if you hand me three things, you say, which one? I'll say that one and I can move on.

If you say, here's 30 choices, my brain locks up and I go, I'll look at that later. And then I move on and I forget about it. And so we're trying to look at every granular step of the process for our attorneys. So they always just feel like, just take another step. Okay, now I'm taking another step and making it very linear, very simple, very, you open-eyed. We use an internal phrase, better, faster, less friction.

We want that for our clients, we want that internally, we want that for our processes, we want that for our interpersonal relationships with each other in the company. We wanna do things better, we wanna do them faster, and we wanna do them with less friction. And so we're pretty relentless about that.

That makes sense. Along the way building this, what are some of the big bets that you've made or maybe some of the irreversible decisions where you said, hey, if I do this, there's no going back. Have there been any of those as you've built this?

Yeah, I've got I've got two of them right now. So I, I didn't launch a legal podcast. So it's funny, because everybody like, I'll check out your podcast. I'm like, I don't have a podcast, but I have 200 that I do. And I'm on a bunch of podcasts, but I don't have my own podcast. So like, I want to do my own podcast. Well, I firmly believe that the future of podcast is twofold. One, that we need to raise our production value. Two, we need to raise our entertainment value.

Yeah.

Now, couple that with AI and everything that's going on and the fear of slop, but I really believe that AI can elevate if we use it correctly. So I just launched and we just did the launch here a few weeks back. It's been this month, a show called BAM, Building Authority Through Media. And it is a 90 Saturday morning superhero cartoon inspired AI animated

Okay.

narrative podcast where I'm band man and I bring on other marketing experts and we journey through the land of LinkedIn and we fight against cloutress and like, kind of like a little campy, but also like entertaining. And so it's like, you know, part of me is like, why am I making a show cartoon for lawyers? Like how is that?

Yeah.

Yeah, help me see how that fits in. don't know if I got the connection for it yet.

Well, I think ultimately there's a few reasons why I feel like it work. One is it's reminiscent. know, most lawyers 40s, 50s, they established a lot of my clients, the ones that are gonna need tech help. You're 20 somethings, 30 somethings, they're probably with small law firms gonna try to do it mostly themselves until they realize how much time it takes and then they'll come to me anyway, which I'm fine with. That's how we get the younger attorneys. We're just like, okay, you go ahead and do your podcast.

We'll either see a zombie podcast in a year that has three episodes or we'll see in six months and we get a lot of clients that way. So the demographic, there's going to be an affinity to it. Number two is it's good content.

Wait, I have to just say, you mean there's an affinity because they're like me and they grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and there were like six shows you could watch over and over and over. I mean, I'm just, yeah, you're putting me back into my childhood. Saturday morning on the carpet in front of the TV.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. So I'm bringing something that feels familiar but is not overdone, right? Which is always a sweet spot to be in. feels, it brings back good memories, but it's not like, another AI superhero cartoon marketing podcast, great. You know, so I knew that there was that. But then like I said, we really give good content. I have in like,

Yeah.

LinkedIn influencers and you know people that you know, like I just shot an episode this week with Carrie Barrett who's like an Emmy winning TV anchor who helps attorneys with on-camera presence and we talked about like, you know, how do you battle these, you know, like freeze the freeze up the freeze up Phantom and you know things like that. So while it is a little campy It's not a waste of time And so if I can provide an experience that isn't wasting your time

then I've really shown you something even more. So then my hope is that I will have a, not a ton, but an occasional attorney who comes up and goes, how do I get a show like yours? Like, I want animation. I want to do something just weird and out of the box. Now that's a whole different tier of working with them. So I'm not doing it so I can sell it, but I'm doing it to show people what's possible. And I'm doing it to show people that, wait a minute.

Right, right.

This guy isn't just another marketer. This guy's thinking forward and trying and experimenting. He's out trailblazing. If I follow this guy, I'm probably going to follow him to the promised land because he's got stars and sprinkle dust behind him that show that some good things are happening. He's got clients raving about him. He's got a company that's growing. He's got people, you know, like he's got all this great stuff happening. So if he's going to do a silly podcast, I'm going to watch it and I'm going to learn from it. And that's who I want to work with. So that was kind of my thinking behind it.

Yeah, it sounds like you're on the front end of this still. So maybe results are still to be determined. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm curious the decision, the internal decision making and maybe this is easy because you're just like, hey team, we're going to do this. And the team says, great. But do you get any pushback? Do you have any team members that are like, hey, you know, and maybe it's not that they think it's a bad idea or whatever. They just say, hey, we've got, you know, we've got these things we're developing. We're putting systems in place. So there's just competing priorities.

That's it's a risk. Exactly.

Yeah.

Does that happen in the decision making process for you?

No, I have eight directors. have one who is just AI. He's actually a young man that I recruited and lived across the street from me here as parents ran a restaurant sitting there early 20s. And his mom's like, can you talk to him? he, you know, he's kind of listless right now. And, and so I kind of sat down and he was always quiet and on his computer. And I was like, you Hey man, what are you doing? What are you, what are you thinking about? And he's just like, you know, like if I could be like, and he's from South Africa, so I won't try to do his accent, but you know, you know, he would be like,

Okay.

you know, if I could do something on the computer like you, like I know you do marketing, that would be really cool. And I just simply said to him, I said, if I were 20 something right now, I would learn AI. And this is about two and a half or two years ago, right. And he's like, Okay, like I'll learn AI then like a month later, I went back to him and sitting at the restaurant again. And I was like, hey, how's everything going? He's like, I'm good. He's like, Do you have any AI courses that you would recommend? And I was like, Well, have you taken any yet? And he's like, I think like about 10 or 12.

Wow.

And I was like, do you want a job? And he goes, yeah. So I brought him on. I tried him here. I tried them there. But eventually I just found that all I do is like, I'm like, Hey, do you know this AI program here? I'm seeing this program. Is this any good? Is this, and he just like tests and tries. And now we have another person on his team. do automations, AI integrations, and they just play for lack of a better word, in this realm so that what they're doing doesn't disrupt everybody else.

you

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

So my team just needs to give me a half hour a week to do this little side project. It doesn't really mess anything up. And then we just throw it into our ecosystem of marketing. So there really isn't any, now I will say that I do have a team, that eight directors, where when I have a decision that I know will affect the company in a major way, I do go to them and I do respect their opinion. but they know like,

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

If they're gonna tell me that they don't like what I'm doing, they better have a dang good reason. Because if I'm excited about it, like, yeah, like I'll listen to you. But if you don't convince me, like at the end of the day, if this thing fails, no one's gonna say, well, his director of CS really wasn't very good. I've lived by a motto, everything rises and falls on leadership. And so I definitely take into, I just had one thing I was like, hey guys, had a chance to,

Yeah.

Basically, like some people that are involved with Ted X were like, hey, you could do this, you could be, we want you to talk about this subject. And it really wasn't on point with what we're doing. I didn't think it would move the business, but it was like a great personal opportunity. And I went to him and I was like, hey guys, this is the opportunity. This is what I would talk about. Really won't benefit us, but it'll benefit me. What do you think? And they were all like, maybe when we get bigger, but we're so focused right now on what we're doing.

Mm-hmm.

We really need to just focus on that and keep pushing these initiatives. And you running around the world on TEDx talking about something that can help people, but doesn't help the company, maybe might not be the best idea right now. And I said, okay, team, you're right. Like I know I get excited about things and I see opportunities and I'm just like, but I've learned throughout my career that just because you have an opportunity doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. And so I really try, cause it did.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

you when you're moving and things are happening, like, Hey, will you buy this company? We you could just bolt us on and hey, here's this product you could just like, you know, and there's all this stuff that comes at you. And it all sounds good and great. And especially if you're a visionary, you find a way to make it work in your system of what you're doing. Yeah. Exactly. So you have to have those people that are just like, and that's why I tell them like, Listen, guys, I don't want sycophants on my team.

Yeah.

You justify it, whether it's good or bad sometimes, right?

I don't need a bunch of like, what I tell them is I am not creating an echo chamber of my own awesomeness. I need somebody to be like, wait a minute, that doesn't quite make sense. And so I'm very thankful for that group of people because it is a scary thing to go to your CEO and go, no, what are you thinking? But I really welcome that. And actually I try to reward that.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And there's a ton of value in that. mean, that's the process that I see when I'm helping clients through acquisition deals or larger partnership deals and their board level deals. Maybe they've got consultants or observers or advisors who they bring in. And those guys are brought in specifically to push back, right? So CEOs don't always have that at every level, but if you've built a, and it sounds like you have built a culture where that's...

Yeah.

invited and maybe expected to give pushback when it takes things out of alignment or maybe just detracts a little bit from the place you're headed with the resources you have.

Yeah.

And perspective, you know, I see things from some angles, but not every angle. And so it's always nice to have, you know, this person who is a little bit younger and has this worldview and this person who's been in the media and production industry and has this view. I mean, it's good to be able to and that when they present their perspective, you're like, I didn't think of it that way. So you've got to have those people.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Now, I think you might have said that you had two experiences and I'd be happy to hear the second, but I want to make sure we have time also at the end to talk about a little bit of application, maybe help some of the people who are further behind you on the same journey to travel that path with a little bit, maybe fewer bumps along the way.

Sure. So the second one, very simply, and again, this one is we're hoping to, it should be launched the end of February. We're launching two streaming network channels. So you can download them from Amazon Fire or Roku or Samsung or whatever. And one of them is called LPN Life. it's basically, I have about 20 shows of people who serve attorneys, marketing companies, fractional CFOs.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

mental health people, coaches for like mental resilience. I have one lady who does like dress for success as a woman lawyer. And we have, know, so we have this, the stable of shows that we've been able to create relationships with and we actually produce their shows. So we're going to take and create a channel for lawyers to just like learn and watch and grow and just have a source. And then we have LPN answers, which is from our lawyers to the world. And that is like,

Yeah.

I need a divorce in Georgia. Here's three podcasts of divorce lawyers in Georgia. Now I can watch their podcasts, get to know them. I can look based on questions and what the, in each one. we're, because if you look like podcasting is going to the big screen, not the movie channel screen, but there's a whole section now on Netflix. I just looked at it yesterday or a couple of days, just this week, sometime.

Right.

I saw it. was on Netflix. like, I don't think I'd noticed it until just this week. I'm like, yep, I think I'd heard it was coming and there it is.

Yeah. Yep. So, you know, there's that Apple now takes video, Spotify takes video. So there's a big movement towards like podcasting becoming a mainstream media source. But the good thing about that is, you know, it's like, I can create now, in essence, a niche cable channel. If the whole world is now, you know, the media outlet.

Yeah.

I can create a niche media channel for the legal industry and then a niche because we also have the authority podcast network and the expert podcast network, authority being national, international, expert being more on a local level and basically just creating these engines that are content good, highly produced, purposeful content that adds value that are paid for by the companies that are providing them.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So there's that, I'm not trying to sell commercial spots, which is a friction point for people anyway, especially as Netflix goes, well, you only want to pay 14.99. Well, now you got to have commercials. And there's that bump up of adding commercials. That's what everybody loved about streaming. So I feel like I can kind of sit in a pocket of saying, okay, here's great content, ad free.

Yeah.

Right, right.

It's generated for the specific purpose of answering questions or helping and educating you while trying to be entertaining, while trying to help you make informed decisions.

Yeah, it sounds like you're adding full meaning to that word network in your in your business name.

yeah, I mean, we're launching what we call now LPN ecosystem. So it's just eco. And I've been every year launching a new version and trying to treat it like a iPhone update and just, or a new iPhone. So we went from LPN to LPN 2.0. Now we're launching LPN eco, which is a whole ecosystem. Cause we're audio, we're video, we're every screen, we're every social media outlet. We're omnipresent.

Yeah.

you know, outlet agnostic and we're just going at

Yeah. Well, that's a fun place to be in a business. We work with some businesses like that who, you know, as they have their niche, they develop products or service offerings and they kill it, right? And then they're like, well, we can expand here, expand there. And all of a sudden they're like, you know what, I think we actually have three companies. We need to actually formalize the ownership or the, you know, the stakes and the...

how stuff happens and who's involved and this one needs investors and these don't. And you start to blossom into this ecosystem or network or portfolio more than a startup or a single company. That's a fun stage to be in. So congratulations for getting to that point. So let's say if someone's coming behind you, whether they're trying to start their own podcast agency network, whatever we want to call it, or they're

Yeah.

Thank you.

a CEO of an e-commerce company or a SaaS company, what's the takeaway lesson that you would leave with them to say, you know what, I can make your path just a little bit easier, here's what I would do.

I would say first and foremost, excuse me, make transparency a core value that you hold to internally with your team, with your clients. There's been so much smoke and mirrors, especially if you're gonna try to sell it, whether outbound or through marketing or whatever. If you're not gonna just passively sit there and not offend anybody by saying, hey, I can help you.

Mm-hmm.

If you're going to get out and be aggressive and do what you think is right in growing your company, then transparency, I think, is more vital for that type of individual than ever before. That would be the first thing that I would say to them. The second thing I would say to them is I would say that being willing to look at things from different perspectives and try them from different perspectives, like

For example, one of the things we do is when we bring in, especially if they're Gen Z, I don't hire positions as much as I hire people. And when I hire Gen Z, when I hire people, I do what I call sandboxing. It might be a term that's out there, it's just what I say. And I basically just bring them in and I try them in this task in the department that they're on paper supposed to be a part of. Then I try them with this, then I try them with that, and I try them with this. And then I try to find that thing that fits

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

hits the sweet spot of they're great at and they love doing it. And if I can find something, you know, the highest score there, then what I'm doing is I'm building a team of people who are taking ownership, enjoying what they do, and are staying in their in their strong place. And so I and that just kind of came from me because I wasn't hiring any Gen Z, but I knew I needed to. Because I'm like, we're a tech company and everybody's like over 40. Something needs to change here. Right? So

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Ha ha ha.

I start bringing in these younger people and I right off the bat was just like, can't just, I know this top down, hey, do this sort of thing isn't going to work longterm. So I started doing that sandboxing approach and it's worked really well for us. And so I would say, be willing to be open to do things different instead of being another 40, 50 year old who complains about Gen Z and the workplace and we just can't find anybody good. I have not had to fire one Gen Z yet. They're my

They're some of my biggest assets in the company. Two of my eight directors are under 25 years old.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah.

my director of AI and my director of content. She's a second generation copywriter with a master's in whatever you're supposed to have a master's in for that. like be open to experimenting, understand that the playbook or what's the other framework and all that stuff. Like it really only, there's only one framework that works for your company and it doesn't exist yet. So that's what I.

Yeah.

What do mean by that?

Well, I think that a lot of people, you know, they try to build things, emulating what other people have done. And life isn't a Lego set with instructions. We're given a big bucket of Legos and we've got to build something beautiful out of it. But everybody's trying to build this thing. They're trying to build, you know, whatever it is with in life. And, you know, they're trying to build this like national speakers company, but yet

You know, they want to be a nationally renowned speaker, but yet because, you know, they bought this kit in this system, in this framework, and yet they can't get in front of a room of five people without running out crying. You know, so you've got to be willing to come into this thing open to learning, open to trying in a protected way, but open to what's happening around you because society as a whole has changed so much in the last 20 years.

Yeah, yeah.

And is the rapidity in which it continues to change is only accelerating because of what we're seeing with AI, because of what we're seeing in the world culturally and politically and blah, blah. Like things are changing rapidly. So for us to hold on to frameworks and instructions and ways of doing things just for the sake of holding on to them, because that's how grandpa did it. Like, I mean, you're entitled to do things how you want to do them.

But if you're asking me what I suggest, I'm suggesting coming into this thing with an open mind, willing to experiment and learn as you go.

Well, that seems seems aligned with what we've heard already on the show today. You've gone in and you've aligned yourself with attorneys who apparently are open to doing things a different way. They're not stuck in the conventional ways. And you've found that you've found that market and you're making it work, which is which is pretty cool.

Well, I would say I try to, for attorneys, I try to just make it seem as natural as possible. So I'm not necessarily looking for the renegades. I'm looking for the ones who are going, I was supposed to have a website and I waited and that really didn't work out too well. And then I was supposed to have SEO and I waited and that probably wasn't.

the best idea. And then I was supposed to do social media and I just said, no, I'm not going to do it. you know, I saw guys and girls who did really well with it. Now they're telling me I need to be, you know, founder led marketing or a personal brand or I need a podcast. Maybe this time around, I'll listen. And that's the thing. Yeah, exactly. Like there's

Yeah, let me make a few phone calls.

There's so many lessons that have happened in the last 20 years for the legal industry and really all professional industries that for somebody right now to go, just won't work. I don't want to work with you anyway, buddy. Like if you're going to literally just walk into something and say, there's no way that will work, you're right. Let me talk to somebody who'll say, maybe it might, let's give it a try. And let me overcome your doubts with results. That's what I look for.

Yeah.

Yeah, yep, you've already.

Yeah. Well, I love the balance. I find the people that'll do it and you know, no win better is good enough. I think that kind of brings us full circle back to what you were saying early on. You know, the frame, the perfect framework. I think what you were saying is the perfect framework is out there, but it's in the future. You'll never achieve it. So no win, no win better is good enough. Right. So, well, DM, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your insights with us. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

Absolutely, I've enjoyed it.

Yeah, thank you. And to our audience who's joined us today, thanks again for coming and listening to the insights here. Hope you took something away that you can apply in your business and we'll talk to you next time.