197: Jurassic Marketing Founder Justin Miller on Direct Mail That Actually Gets Results

There's so much less mail today that when you send direct mail it really stands out. So, what say you?

Yeah, so the reason why.. well, there's less. It helps. There's no like for disc jockey services and stuff. Like, there was no competition, right? Right. But this is true of most services. There is declining volumes, and I just saw the last report, and the USPS continue to decline across all mail categories, and part of that's because they've had five price increases in three years, which there's more to come, by the way. So,

yeah,

double-edged sword. Again, I'm like, okay, for our clients this works for this is good news, because it just knocked out the ones that you know, weren't maximizing the value of those leads. Bad news, as a mail provider, because, of course, we want volume going out the door as well. So, yes, there's little competition. The other thing is, it's tangible, so there is a trust factor inherent to the media that we don't get in other media. The fact it sits around and it's real, subconsciously the recipient knows that you spend some money, and that this is probably a real business, so earned or not, you beat the trust hurdle.

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, good evening, whatever time this podcast finds you. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast. Great guest today, and we'll get to Justin in just two seconds. We want to talk a little bit about our YouTube channel, and our YouTube channel has been fantastic. Thank you all, so much. We have over a million views on our YouTube channel. We just passed a million. A couple great new videos on there that I'd love you to check out. The first one is, we just did our annual planning webinar. If you haven't written your business plan for 2026 or if you're listening to this at the end of 2026 and you haven't written your business plan for 2027 Please check out the annual planning webinar. There's a workbook in there you can download, and the spreadsheets to do the financials. So it's just a great functional business planning tool that you can use to write your annual business plan. We also just had a fantastic panel talking about AI and technology. We had some of the leading new technologies for law firms and legal marketing, and we just did a webinar on local SEO and Google LSAs, the Google screen local service ads, so great content there. It's all available for free on our YouTube channel, and by the way, if you like it, just do us a favor, give us a subscribe, give it a like to the videos, because that's that helps more people like you find it on our channel. So, with that, Justin, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast. Our guest today is Justin Miller from Jurassic Marketing, and if you're listening on the audio, you can't see a fantastic background that Justin has with dinos and Jurassic Marketing. Justin, why don't you start with that? Why do you guys have such a cool name and cool logo?

I wish I could say that it was a stroke of genius on my part. It was not. This company was actually originally called Profit 911 and I needed a catchy theme for a presentation on direct mail, which is often a boring topic to business owners and entrepreneurs. So I was scrolling through the PowerPoint templates, and I found this nice dinosaur one with rotating animated dinosaurs. I'm like, yep, that'll do it. Yeah, entrepreneurial ADD is going to love this one. And then I'm like, yeah, it's kind of makes sense, though, because dinosaurs evolution - everyone thinks direct mail is extinct, and like the play kept going and going. So we tested it. Genius Network was the testing grounds, actually. I don't know if they know that was the first time the presentation had that theme, but it hit. The presentation was called All About Dinosaurs and about Direct Mail, and I tested it again, and it hit again. And then I'm like, okay, game on. Let's have some fun with this. So, if you were to walk through our office now, we have like camo netting on the ceilings, we have a Jurassic Park pinball machine as close to a theme park as I can be, while making sure work gets done here.

That's awesome, and you guys do a great job at all the legal trade shows. I know you probably go to some other trade shows, because you work with professional services, but at the legal shows, you guys really stand out, because you got the dinos everywhere. As a matter of fact, you guys were nice enough to give us a gold dino dinosaur that we were able to host in our booth recently at GLM. So, thank you for sharing a little bit of dino magic with us.

I think we had our like theme park animatronic puppet one there too, that was in there, but I'm pretty sure the gals had that.

That's awesome. Yeah, so that you do a great job with the marketing. I love it, and it really immediately sticks in my head. That's a key lesson here for marketing. What's something you can do that can stick, and you guys, when someone mentions, oh, we'd like to do a newsletter or direct mail, or you know, what do you think about direct mail? Oh, you got to talk to Jurassic. I've met half a dozen folks who claim to do what you do, but you guys are number one branded and burned in my brain.

It's memorable. Now it's double-edged sword, Jay, like dinosaur shirts that I wear now, they find me online, targeted, so my Amazon algorithm is all off, and probably three to four times a week someone emails me something about actual dinosaurs. I don't want to say I don't care about them, but they're a tool for us. Yeah, I'll never escape it. But

well, congratulations on on a win, whether it was intended or not,

every once in a while

for me was was almost a little circumstantial, like I wrote a presentation called the 10 golden rules of online marketing 23 years ago, spoke at the Direct Marketing Association, and a bunch of people came up to me and said this is great, I hear this Google thing is going to be big, I want to hire you as a consultant, and I'm like, okay, I work like 80 hours a week@a.com but let me consult, and 10 Golden Rules became my name circumstantially as well, because I originally just set it up as a DBA, you know, just to do some consulting work, and here we are 23 years later, so tell us, I know your journey didn't start with being a Jurassic direct mail marketer. So, tell us a little bit about your journey.

My journey started in the entertainment industry, actually. So, I was a disc jockey, I owned a high-end disc jockey wedding production company, and I started that at the age of 14. Actually, believe it or not, I won't film like every year between here and there, but of notice, I never attended a school after middle, after elementary school, that didn't pay me while I was there. So I don't know how many people can say that, but no, I ran that for a couple of decades and consulted into that industry eventually across paths with, well, a man named Dave D, first, who ultimately led me to Dan Kennedy, who's one of, like, the ogs of direct response marketing, and started buying his books when we were on road trips with the family, go to Borders or Barnes and Noble, and read it in the car, and I had a profound interest in learning about marketing and how to influence and make things happen, and I applied all those in my own business, that's why I was learning, I wasn't trying to learn to teach anyone, I didn't really care about that at that time, and it worked, and there were some differentiating factors along the way, my business actually started as a digital, what you would call now a funnel agency, not at the time we didn't, right, and we devolved to direct mail because it was one of our tactics we built into those funnels, so organizationally it made sense for us to do that internally, but also it was one of the tangible pieces that had an outcome consistently for our clients, and just like the dinosaur name, you know, you only got to be hit on the head so many times before the universe tells you kind of which direction to go in that business, one of our key things was the print newsletter, which we'll talk about a little bit here, but I ran a print newsletter in the wedding industry and figured out the math to where it worked, you know. This is not like a repeat client industry, someone gets married and hires out AV services once, maybe twice.

We did get some of those, but primarily once, but we would mail them the newsletter forever, until they disappeared, and we couldn't get their new address, or they did get divorced and didn't want to be reminded of their first wedding. The math worked out to where if they sent us one referral every 40 years, one referral in 40 years, it made sense to send the newsletter, and it built relationships, and what would happen is, if you see me out in public, like at a conference, and I'm not on a stage or in a forced situation, I'm not extremely outgoing, like I'm not going to go work the room, right, but what the newsletter did was build those relationships, so when I walked into a room and I met with other vendors, they felt like they knew me because I was sharing things about my life in that newsletter, and we were able to continue a conversation that didn't really happen. It happened via the newsletter, so that was one of the critical things we did. And there, we, of course, did a lot of digital marketing as well, and follow-ups that, in that industry, it was kind of unheard of. It's a cottage industry, low barrier to entry type thing, it's become more sophisticated over the years, but did that. I talked to that industry, we stripped back the services we offered. I sold that company, I don't know, probably almost 10 years ago now, and then ultimately just dialed in our service offerings here around predictable direct mail, mainly built around referrals. Which is also a bit of an anomaly in the direct mail world,

that's awesome, you know. I think one of the things we all say, and maybe you can put some data around it, is there's so much less mail today that when you send direct mail it really stands out. So, what say you?

Yeah, so the reason why, well, there's less it helps. There's no like for disc jockey services and stuff, like there was no competition, right? Right, but this is true of most services. There is declining volumes, and I just saw the last report, and the USPS continue to decline across all mail categories, and part of that's because they've had five price increases in three years, which there's more to come, by the way. So, yeah, double-edged sword again. I'm like, okay, for our clients this works for this is good news, because it just knocked out the ones that you know weren't maximizing the value of those leads. Bad news, as a mail provider, because, of course, we want volume going out the door as well. So, yes, there's little competition. The other thing is, it's tangible, so there is a trust factor inherent to the media that we don't get in other media. The fact it sits around and it's real subconsciously the recipient knows that you spend some money and that this is probably a real business, so earned or not, you beat the trust hurdle. Now, of course, there's a lot of things along the way you can do to screw that up, but you positioned yourself somewhere that is very hard to get via other media, and that works, and it actually makes up for some of the flaws of it, like the expense and the cost per impression and stuff. But yeah, way less. However, we're seeing a lot of smart companies. I'm going to say they're smart. I assume they have the numbers come back online with their offline. The last one I got was a couple of weeks ago, and this is a Target kids. I mean, it's basically the Sears wish book, right? And Amazon was kind of the first one to resurrect this five or six years ago. They started sending out their wish catalog. I'm assuming to buyers that

it's holiday slash Christmas.

Yeah, yeah. So the neat thing that Target followed here that Amazon did as well is there's no prices. So I remember when I was little, the Sears and the JC Penney catalogs, you just circle everything. So it's kind of neat to see, you know, my kids doing that now as well, and they're massive users as well. Other ones that are kind of unexpected that I see in the mail a lot right now. You see Indeed, you see Google AdWords has always been a huge user of direct mail, which is like the ironic one, right? Can you just use your AdWords?

Wait, let's stop at catalog first.

Yes,

direct mail, direct marketing has been a big part of my history, and I just want to explain what two things. One is I worked at an ad agency, and I heard about this direct mail, direct marketing conference. I went and spent a week, and I was in a city I didn't know anybody, and so literally every day, and most of the people at the conference were from the city, so they went home. I went to my hotel room alone, and I read through my notes every night, and I studied this awesome course on direct mail, direct marketing, and I learned the basics of direct mail, direct marketing, and I had a couple clients, like I had a Sheraton hotel, and I had a florist, that's my first job in an ad agency, and I learned direct marketing, and then skip ahead, did tons of stuff with sprint and technology, and you know we were doing lots of direct mail. I moved to digital, and when I wrote the 10 golden rules of online marketing, you know, the heart of the 10 golden rules of online marketing is that this is direct mail on steroids, because you don't have to wait two, three weeks, two three months to calculate the data, and so a lot of the principles of 10 golden rules, even the first rule, there are no rules, is that with TV advertising we used to just have rules, you run so many GRPs, and it's going to influence your, your business, but we didn't really know, you didn't know definitively, like you just knew your sales went up when you ran TV, but with direct mail, direct marketing, and internet marketing, we know that we sent out this many mail pieces, and we got this many phone calls on the internet. We know we ran this many Google ads, we got this many phone calls, this many form fills on our website. So, the principles of direct marketing are that it's measurable, testable, precise, right, and principles follow through. So, the first thing I want to ask about is catalogs. We used to get a dozen catalogs around Christmas when we were kids. Now you

get, you know, one catalog - it really stands out. But how did the math? Because direct marketers always do the math, right? The catalogs used to cost a million dollars, and they used to get $10 million in sales, and then they got 9 million, 8 million, 7 million. And at some point, companies stopped doing catalogs, but now people are doing catalogs again. So, explain how the math worked, didn't work, and works again.

Yeah, how the mass math thing.. I think some of. Of it is the clutter online, and they're forced to try it again. So, I believe this is the first year Targets brought it back. So, I'll be curious if they stick

with

it. Amazon has stuck with it, so I think we have some of that. There are extremely increasing costs. So, the cost to do this 10 years ago would have been way cheaper than now, not only on postage but on the print side as well. Covid hit that industry crazy, you know. We couldn't get envelopes for a while, which is just insane.

Yeah,

so I think some of it's that. I think it's multi-channel as well. So none of these exist in isolation. I never let anyone think that any media, by its nature, is an either-or, because we know there's channel bleed on everything, right? Like, I think I'm as close as you can get to let's put a tracking phone number, let's put a tracking URL, and people will do what we tell them to do.

Yeah,

and we know, like some do, right? But we know,

so a lot of these people go to target.com

exactly. So I

said the

product,

that's it,

and this catalog sold whatever kind of toy,

yeah. And I just interviewed someone yesterday that did enterprise level tracking, and they're they're trying to work through that, but it's only going to get worse as channels get more and more fragmented. So,

we have.. Do you have a podcast as well?

Yeah, we have.. we have Jurassic Market trying to

interview the direct marketing manager for Target in January, February, and get the story of how the catalog worked, and then I want you to share it with us.

We want their real numbers for the campaign, we'll see what we can do.

Yeah,

but that'd be great to find out. Okay, so that's catalogs, right? Huge disappeared back again. Then you start talking about direct mail, like Indeed, Google - we're actually working on a project for law firms to do direct mail, so talk about direct mail, and they're not all envelopes, sometimes they're brochures, and maybe some case studies. What's working? Yeah,

what's really neat is a lot of the direct mail we're doing is not the flashy advertising you may think of, so if you go look in your mailbox when you get home right now, you're probably gonna have, I don't know, some credit card offers in window envelopes, you'll have some bills of some sort in a very similar, you may have a couple postcards, you might, depends what you might have some magazines you subscribe to, or somehow magically got on their list. What you won't have much of anything of is a personal letter. Grandma's not sending the Christmas card anymore, or if she is, no one else in the family is. Okay, so a lot of what we're doing is emulating and resurrecting that look and feel. So we do a lot of personal mail, like number 10 envelopes, but making it look hand addressed, and, and trying to come across as very relational, very personal, like looking as close as possible to a one to one communication. So the billboard style advertising, it works. It's the hardest to make work. We like to first play in the middle ground, which is a much easier one, which is relational direct mail, meaning we are either opening up a new relationship or we're furthering an existing one. So two different tactical types here. We'll go with the furthering the existing one first, because I already alluded to it earlier. So if someone knows about us. This could be a lead, this could be someone that refers business to us, this could be a past client or someone in our circle of influence that we need to maintain contact with. This is the newsletter. This is newsletter, four pages. Yeah, I realize some of you are on audio, but it's a piece that comes every month, yeah,

and I grabbed one too. This is from an attorney friend of mine to mails like this,

yep,

same format, 11 by 17, folded down to enforce, basically.

What's the cost per piece on those? So, yeah,

call it $1-ish

dollars, good, a good general guideline for most

could be

more for the letter you talked about, right?

Yep,

and that's a letter, an envelope, a stamp in the mail, all the costs of the direct marketing company.

Yep, that's it. And that piece, there's a couple of keys to it. One is consistency, so this is, I like to say, monthly or nothing. Now we have people that go to every other month, go to quarterly, and we know that that newsletter is just going to die. On the other end, we know that if you send this monthly for six or seven months, you will send it forever, because the masks start working like the wedding situation. Now, what's really neat to me is what's in the newsletter doesn't matter anywhere near as much as the fact you sent it, so if you follow kind of our formula, you're going to have one article to write from the face of your business, so a real person. Usually the owner, even if the clients don't interact with the owner, and it should be about life, not teaching legalities of, oh, if you have this problem, or, oh, the insurance adjuster says this, say that. Okay, this is like personal interest. What you would talk to them at a cocktail party about.

What are a couple things that you've sent that resonated really well with folks,

so this one right here, I reused one. Shame on me. This is our staff skydiving outings on the cover. My kids are fair play. Anything to do with kids and parenting is fair play. Holidays and stories around them, but they have to be personal stories, like Halloween. I usually reminisce about the haunted house I own that got shut down by the fire marshal the day before it opened. I'll tie in a very quick business lesson sometimes, but that's nowhere near as important as building what's going on. So, anything that is going on in your life relationally, or for a while I was moonlighting as a fun gig, doing writing when Caitlin Clark was playing at Iowa, so I would be able to write about that and tie it in a lot, so yeah, anything like that, you would speak at a cocktail party. And then the rest of the newsletter, most of it's stock content, it is. Yes, you can have some teaching stuff about your area of expertise. We like recipes, jokes, something interactive, so that's usually Sudoku or crossword, something they can interact with, you can put blatant advertisements in there. I suggest you do it as an insert, not the actual newsletter, but consistency and make it fun. They should be able to get through it in three minutes. The one you rose up, I think I could read that in three or four minutes. The one I have here, maybe even less, so has it served its purpose.

The simple reason why you do this monthly, like if you're a personal injury attorney, estate attorney, family law attorney, you get it out every month. Cost per acquisitions is generally people are targeting 2000 so if your list is 2000 you send it out to past clients and some referring attorneys, you're going to get minimum one referral a month,

yeah, it's and your referral

acquisition for that case is $2,000 If your list is 5000 and you get three referrals a month, your cost per acquisition is under $2,000 So you want to always do what I call marketing math with everything, everything you spend money on and evaluate was the return on investment. This is Jason Melton, my buddy. When Jason sends us out, he should get a case every month and get a phone call every month. Oh, how'd you hear about us? Oh, saw your newsletter, or

yeah, and you should track it like any other media too. So you put your tracking number and your URL on there, you put your call recording on, and it's amazing to me. In some of our use cases, like, we also serve health and wellness, so medical, dental type stuff. And it's amazing how many current patients, in that case, call the number on the newsletter to set up their appointment. This is someone that already exists in their world, should have the number saved in their cell phone.

Yeah,

the other thing that amazes me is, and I used to think this was complete bs coming out of the direct response world, is some of them get passed along. There's like no earth-shattering news in this newsletter, but somehow they get passed along, and we know that from the call recordings. Again, I take it, you should take it, it's amazing. Again, it's hard to believe until you like have it happen to you, but yeah, there's I don't know, maybe they passed it along for the crossword puzzle, but use it to your benefit. By the way, yes,

the obvious one is for the attorneys. Every chiropractor, if you can have it sitting in the lobby, that'd be great. Every estate attorney, you know, have it send it to all your accountant referral partners, because when folks are waiting to go in, if it makes it to the reading pile, that'd be fantastic.

Yeah, and the money, Matthew did right, by the way, with cost per acquisition. So, the first people thing people jump to when they start learning direct mail is response percentage, which usually is abysmal. If you want to just look at the absolute percentage, we have a lot of campaigns that can survive at under a half percent response and actually do strikingly well. So, yeah, you want to look at those dollars, not necessarily percent, you want to watch the percentages to improve the rate, but the absolute number doesn't mean a whole lot.

Yeah, one to 2% was always the standard in direct mail.

Yeah,

but if your personal injury and the case could be worth 20 or $30,000 even a small case,

well, yeah, and if you're mailing to a warm list or your house list, you might get a 30% response on a no-brainer offer, so you got to be careful with that. So that's how we build the relationships once that door is open. The other piece of tactical direct mail we use is opening the doors, so these are referral generation campaigns, but it's to get the referral source, so referring attorney, I heard you mention, so this would be to get more of those beautiful parties, you can get the list of the attorneys that are likely to, you know, in whatever specialties would refer over to you, so we have campaigns built around that that show. As like the number 10 letter in an envelope. Hey, we understand that you may have clients with these particular issues. This is how we can help. They'll be thrilled you referred them. We're not competitive with you. We're not going to steal your client. It's very templated, but we know exactly the three or four paragraphs to put in that letter, you put it with a supporting pass along piece, usually a brochure, and yeah, hit them three times over the course of three months, and then you grab another batch of 1000 or whatever, and this is such a basic thing when you stand back and look at it, but it works, and the math works a lot better because we're chasing someone that can refer multiple cases to us. We're not chasing that individual lead, so it's a little further away from the money. It's a little more time delayed for the ROI, but once you hit them, it's a lot more money over the course of one year, two year, three year referral relationship. So we probably send more of that type of campaign than anything else out of our production facility, second behind it's probably the newsletter, and then we go out in the let's hunt down some cases, which again hardest money math, and also most competitive, so when we talk about the mailbox not being clogged, when we go after the end consumer that's now hit a list, or

the end user might have five or 10 in the mailbox, depends how open the records are to get that lead.

Yeah, I absolutely love the concept of the newsletter for the attorneys, and there's a second piece to it - it's the referrals, right? It's it gets passed along and it gets referrals. So another creative that you talked about was magazines. I love that concept. If you can get that magazine into the chiropractor's office, into the MRI clinic, into the referring attorneys' offices,

yeah, I mean, if they're smart, they should only have their media in their lobby, but they're not. So you take that to your benefit. We have one that we do for ourselves here, and it has different theme every year. This one's very heavy on the dinosaurs, always that heavy. Yeah, and essentially

I got that one.

Yeah, the so you remembered it, the first year we did it, essentially was just a collection of one page ads, like there was no cohesiveness to it whatsoever, but we sent it in a shiny envelope, and people talked about it 10 months later, when I saw them at networking events, and the thing sat around, so then we put a little more effort into it over subsequent years, and now it's, it's still full of a lot of ads, but it's a little more cohesive with case studies and things like that, and these, these sit around, and this is not, you don't create one of these every month. There's that's not the need, so we create them annually. You'll notice it doesn't have the.. it doesn't say January 2025 you know. We let this thing live on for a year. If you see us at an event, I guess I'll go through all the ways it's used. Okay, it goes to our house list, so if you're on the newsletter list, you're getting the annual magazine. It goes to events with us. It's a great handout piece, because it's got what Dan Kennedy would call the thud factor. Yeah, this is going to stand out in the bag.

It is

in a timed follow-up sequence behind any new lead, so if new lead has hit our pipeline, our sales pipeline, you know, it's in the follow-up. I don't know where it's at, somewhere between week two and six, I believe, so it's a sequential piece that way. And then anywhere that it may have shelf space, you're mentioning other lobbies and things like that. Oh, I'm sending them 510, copies, and hoping that they run out of them. So that's a good one. It is a harder piece to create, though, so you're, you want it to be probably 2024, pages minimum, so there's a heavy lift for your marketing person for content and design to get that out the door.

What's the dollars to get that in the mail?

Yeah, so barring actual production of the content, I believe these are typically five $6 to land them in someone's mailbox,

but it's a great piece. It's a great follow-on piece for leads that don't convert.

It's a huge authority piece, I'd say, behind

a piece

for attorneys who wrote it, you know, the fun run, and they give you a table or the community event you sponsor, that's great content.

Yeah, and if you have like some hardcore teaching that needs to occur to educate your prospect before they engage your services. There's room for that in that piece. You to be want to be very clear with next step and what you're trying to accomplish in there. Just like any other media, it's easy to get that lost in a long form piece. You're like, oh, I can teach them about this and send them to this landing page, and about this to this landing page, so you want to kind of dial that back in to make sure we know what the goal of it is. Our goal the first year was honestly primarily entertainment, so we didn't care, but as we saw that this thing has legs, we did dial that in a little better, and there is response, and probably one of the most talked about pieces I. I would say right behind a book and being an author for a tangible piece that's still number one for me, but the magazines probably number two.

Love it. The other benefit, you probably are like me, when you meet a firm, you're like a marketing consultant looking from the outside in, and the most successful firms I meet always have a newsletter, at a minimum, a need newsletter, and the very successful firms always have a printed newsletter. And they went to a trade show, and they met someone like Justin, and they're like, okay, let's try this. And, like you said, they have enough budget and wherewithal, they have a marketing department, they get six or seven in a row out, and they start getting some return, and they're they have enough wherewithal that they can test and measure, they have tracking numbers and things like that, or they use a URL or a specific offer, and they realize it works, and they've got enough ongoing budget, they don't have to like cut the budget, and this thing never becomes a budget cut.

Yeah, I mean, it can, it can become one. Marketing in general is an easy but flawed cut. I will say so, mentioning that this is a tough lift to sell for us. The newsletter I'm talking about, most people don't come out looking for that, just as I mentioned. If you have an educational hurdle, we have one on that particular piece. It's actually the piece I most like to sell, because I know it has the most predictable ROI over time challenges. I know it's a delayed ROI, so you're going to tie up a little cash for a little while, 567, months. You should have responses before then, but in sufficient quantity, you believe it. We got to get you there. There's a little bit of a hurdle in content, but we have that pretty dialed in now to where, like, 15 minutes of internal company time, but the fact it's further from the lead, and it's a referral play again. It requires a specific marketer to be willing to do that when XYZ Company over here is willing to sell me a lead ready to go for $225 you know. So the answer is do A and B, but it's not a solution people seek out, either because they're not aware of it or they don't see the connection.

We touched a little bit on Dan Kennedy. I recently saw Dan at a conference. I've seen him several times. You said he's the OG, he's one of the original marketing coaches and mastermind. Dan had some health stuff, we almost lost them recently, so you're a Dan Kennedy guy. Tell us a little bit about Dan Kennedy. What are two or three of the core principles that everybody should know?

Yeah, so I think this came up when we were discussing branding a little bit in the dinosaurs, because in Dan's world branding is a complete byproduct. If you get it, great, but we don't intentionally put any effort there. Some of the core principles are they're baked into everything we do now. We say they're in our DNA, along our dinosaur theme again, but it's always multiple response mechanisms, it's always clear call to action, it's always spelling out exactly

multiple

response

mechanisms. Yeah, yes, thanks for asking. So, multiple response mechanisms is, we don't just say call 888 blah blah blah, it's call 888 blah blah blah, or scan this QR code, or go to this landing page, or in his world it would be fax to blah blah,

yeah, Dan's preferred or only method of communication is you have to fax

them, yes, infamously you have to fax, he, he does have a computer, by the way, but he's not going to answer any email. Dan also has teachings around areas on the fringe as well, so he has managing employees, which is funny when you get to know Dan. There's a book on that, but the core is there as well. But everything trackable, every dollar accountable. He lives in a world where clients, you know, they spend today's dollar and they need it back tomorrow as $1.50 which is the world I live in as well. We serve small businesses, like I tell our leadership and our sales team this all the time, is this is not like play money, there might be a play budget, but guess what, like this actually makes a difference in people's lives in the legal industry. You're actually serving people in something they need help with, you know. We have a sub niche within there that is IRS representation work that we serve a lot of, and God, people need help there. They got the Goliath of the IRS on them. If you're in personal injury, oh my God, we got the insurance company and the health companies were fighting, so I have to remind people that it's not about paper, you know, it is paper, but that's that's not what we're doing here, so you know, Dan Kennedy is really big on results, everything's dictated right by results, like nothing else matters, his persona is very, I would say, gruff and blunt, I swear, I think he does have a heart when you catch him not on stage, but that was it. So that was built into everything, and I learned first how to write sales letters by reading some books by him. I learned what is now known as funnels from reading his follow-up marketing books. And really I had the benefit of incubating all that when it didn't matter, you know, I was a student, I was young, I didn't need the revenue so I could do it the right way and test it, so that was a benefit of timing that I ran into Dan very young,

and speaking of funnels, Dan's business got purchased by Russell Brunson, right.

Yeah, so Dan's, yeah, ultimately now Russell Brunson owns Magnetic Marketing, which is where Dan outputs a lot of his content, so that's where you'd see him on stage. There are some other avenues as well. If you're super interested, reach out, I'll let you know what they are. But if you find marketers, chances are there's some road that leads back to Dan. So this conversation occurring right now, V and J goes back to Ben Glass. We met through Ben Glass, who

became a

student of Dan Kennedy.

Yeah,

who I knew about from being a student of, like, it doesn't take a whole lot of layers of separation. It's really kind of funny,

and this is like my fourth Dan Kennedy meeting this week, because two people I met at Ben Glass's last GLM conference, one's a phenomenal copywriter and one's a phenomenal direct mailer, and we're going to test, we're going to test doing direct mail to attorneys, prospects who don't sign up. Yep, makes a lot of sense, but we're at that time in the, in the podcast where I asked the quick one liners

the rapid fire questions.

Yeah, first one, what apps or techniques do you use for personal productivity?

So we use an app called 90, because we run on EOS, specifically to productivity on that is teaching people what communication methods to use for what media book reference is called Come Up for Air by Nick Sonnenberg, unrelated to EOS, but says, "Hey,

wait,

wait, you can't skip ahead on the questions.

Oh,

that's

a book reference for 90,

no, that's communication, so

book you like, okay?

That's my number one productivity book. Okay, come up for air. Nick Sonnenburg tells the staff what they should email, what they should use chat for, what they should use a knowledge base for. So, really cutting down on time-wasting informal communication.

I love that, because that's one of my personal pet peeves, that people will often use a Slack for something that needed a Zoom meeting.

Yep, guideline people will

book a Zoom meeting for something that could have been done on Slack.

Yeah, we trained it two years ago, and I'm bringing it back to the staff meeting next week to remind people. So

that's great, because yeah, we, we get staff turnover and new staff, and some of the great books that we've got, we've done a book club on about four different books, but most of the books didn't even, weren't even here for the first book. Do you have a personal wellness and fitness routine?

Yeah, so my, I hired a personal trainer about three years ago, actually, because the doctor was threatening me with some meds I didn't want to take, and that worked,

good move.

The other thing is, you see, I got my aura ring on here.

Yeah,

now I rolled my eyes when I saw people with the aura rings and the whoops and stuff. So I think I got indoctrinated via the Apple Watch,

yeah,

and it's health tracking. And now I got the aura, which I really love for sleep tracking, so it gives me a readiness score and says take on the world, or it very carefully words, maybe you shouldn't do a whole lot today, but I love that thing, I don't know, I think it was like

interesting

bucks and five bucks a month, and it's yeah, I wear it 24/7

okay,

now, now the next question is, best business books,

best business,

in addition to come up for,

yeah, so you can have the EOS book as well, which Traction would be where I started in their library of stuff. So, Gina Wickman's Traction,

yeah, I actually recommend, for especially for the entrepreneurs,

there you go,

you got to read Get a Grip, because many of us who are the founder and the visionary in a firm, if you try and read Traction, it's very cumbersome, and I tried to get through it a couple times, because everyone's like, oh, EOS traction, do you know Wickman, and it was all every business meeting for years, it seemed like everybody was recommending traction, and I just couldn't get through it, and then I read Get a Grip, and it explains it in a story format,

yeah, I mean, the other option in that library would be rocket fuel, which, if you're a visionary, is just going to sell you on like wanting a GM to run everything, basically just that rocket fuel there.

And for our lawyers in the audience, Gino Wickman is like second client all time, or most famous lawyer client, is Mike Morris, who built a $200 million firm, and Gino Wickman still his integrator, his implementer, okay, blogs, podcasts, YouTubes, whatever you subscribe to, and one of them hits your feed, what do you stop everything for?

Yeah, so right now I'm on Entree Leadership, Dave Ramsey, again, I go back and forth with that one, so I get hot on that for a while and. I let that one go, and then I come back to it. Always, I'm listening to News Sales Simplified, so both sales and sales management side of that, and liking that, and not just because I learned, like after eight hours of studying, that the guy actually sold in the direct mail world. All roads lead back the same place, they do.

Yeah,

yeah, there's Tricera talks, of course. Now those are the ones I listened to. I think I have like 20 I subscribe to, but those are the only ones I'm listening to steadily right now.

Perfect. Who's your NFL or sports team?

Yeah, so I'm going women's basketball. I'm either watching the Hawkeye women still, which is not at the level it was when Caitlin Clark was there, or I do watch some WNBA Indiana Fever, not quite as much as I did when she was at Iowa, though.

Great stuff. What's a great introduction for you? If we meet someone who needs, which service do we think of sending me your way?

Yep, look, look for referral builds, so we like people that are already out there, they're operating, they're doing awesome, they're getting good reviews, and they're probably the type that are saying that they don't advertise because they live off referrals, which you know is a step in the hurdle to let them know that that means you're doing everything right, let's throw some fuel on the fire, but that's who it is. We serve primarily professional service industries, so we're not all niche specific, but they all kind of fit in there, and they got to be in the US. We only mail domestically here in the States. We cut out all the international mail because making that land was a pain in the butt, and they're marketing interested. They people that want growth, like I've been to conferences before where we were a miss because everyone I talked to was like, I got my book of business, and I'm writing it out to retirement, and I'm selling it. That's that's not fun for me as a visionary entrepreneur. Like, I want people that want to grow and conquer the world. Here, let's help them.

Amen. Last question, you want to send Justin a referral? Where's the best place to get in touch with you?

Yeah, probably just the website Jurassic marketing.com There's giant buttons all over to reach out or set up a time. You can text as well. You want to text 309767000 I see most of those. I'm not always the one that responds to them, but I'll see it if you call me out specifically or something humorous enough. I'll try and grab it before someone else here does.

Awesome. Well, Justin was a lot of fun. Thanks for going back in time with the Jurassic story. We look forward to doing some business with you guys. I know you guys are planning to come to TGR Live, our conference as well, right?

You can see our dinosaurs live and in person. We may just have some dinosaur giveaways while we're there.

That's awesome. Well, we like to have a lot of fun at TGR Live. We're gonna have you been playing any music instruments?

I was a drummer. I still am a drummer. I just had a concert last week. Seems like

we may have a

spot for you. We're putting together the TGR Legends of Law All-Star Band, and it's a jam band. And so nobody signed up for drummer yet, so we might be able to, we

might be able to pitch

in,

so the cock cocktail party is going to be rock and roll this year. Justin, thanks so much for your time. It was great having you. Thanks, Jay.