124: How to Create Your Annual Business and Marketing Plan – The 2025 Playbook for Law Firms

And then we come back and we prioritize like, what are our best strengths as a firm? Then we do the same thing, what are our weaknesses? What do we need to improve? Where are we? You know, all the numbers we looked at the reason. We looked at all the numbers. Where are we behind our competitors? And then the third part we do is trends. And this was a big improvement from Rockefeller habits. We used to do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Was called a swat analysis. But what I found is strengths and weaknesses were always like flipped upside down. Were opportunities and threats and they were, they were almost the same exercise. So we do strengths, we do weaknesses and we do trends. AI is a trend, the new AI search results is a trend. The back end, like the the case status and the Hona, the app, software to make your clients happy as a trend. So what are some of the trends that you're hearing about work from home? Is a trend, AI driven cars, right? Self driving cars, and you brainstorm to strengths, weaknesses and trends.

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, hello everyone, and welcome to this month's webinar. So my name is Jay Berkowitz, and welcome to your annual planning session. We've got a bunch of people here, and I'm thrilled to have you all, and I'm just going to get to the right slide and then share my slides. And also there's a bunch of people live on LinkedIn, and we'll be sharing a link to download the plan workbook and a worksheet. So this is interactive, and we're actually going to try and build the first draft of your 2025, business plan and marketing plan. We're going to help you identify your business objectives, the top new tactics for marketing and lawyering, lawyer business, digital strategies and some conversion optimization strategies. Now, do me a favor and put a one in the chat. If you're pretty confident, like you had a great 2024 you hit all your numbers. You're a Morgan and Morgan, right? And if you're somewhere, you know, not quite as confident as John Morgan, but you're like, totally confused, like you have no plan. You're You're down. 24 over 23 put a two in the chat. Anyone in the middle, maybe put a three in the chat. You're like, hey, we we're making some progress, but the reason we're here is we don't really have a business plan, and we'd love to know more, and that's why you're here. I want to say, congratulations. We showed up. And you're either here live, or you're watching this sometime in the future on YouTube. I'm sure a bunch of folks will watch this through January of 2025, as they build their business plan. But you're, you know, typically, the ones who show up, the ones who put the time in, you know you're going to have way more success. And I'm going to show you some examples of that in a minute. As a matter of fact, 48,000 people so far have watched our digital planning webinar, and I think another several 1000 watch the next year. So this is a popular place to be, and thank you for being here. So what are some of the trends I want to just start with that. And let's you know, set our mindset on what are some of the big things we want to be planning on doing in 2025 The first one is real game changer, because Google has introduced their version of chat GPT. It's called AI overviews. And literally, they're showing a chat, G, P, T, style result in Google searches. This is a search for, how do I choose a car accident attorney? And you know, we first saw this in Google Labs. I was showing this over the past year, and this is a search for Tom Brady, and then this is a search for Tom Brady with the labs or the AI overview style result. So this is the result for how do I choose a car accident attorney launched may 14, called Google AI overviews, and this is going to be significant, right? Like Google needs to prevent people from going to chat. GPT, so these results are going to show up more and more, particularly for people asking questions, like, if someone searches for personal injury attorney near me, Google is going to show maps. They're going to show LSAS. They're going to show pay per click. They're going to try and, you know, sell a click to an attorney. But if someone's just in that early question and answer phase, they're going to show more and more of these type of results. Now the good news is Google is actually showing their homework. So these are the firms or the websites that Google used to compile the results. So the same way chat GPT goes out and reads the internet and then compiles a result, Google's using their artificial intelligence to read these. Websites and compile a result, but they're showing you the links. So this is why it's a new trend and an opportunity for the coming year. Because if we can answer questions on our website in our SEO and Google selects us to be part of the answer to these results, this is an active link that is an SEO traffic opportunity. Another trend is something that bubbled up in my head because I kept seeing this all across the country. This is my friend Jeff Phillips, and we consulted with him on his on his Google screen, but there's John Morgan right there, neck and neck, and I kept seeing this in multiple markets that we work across the country. You know, there's Jeff Phillips and there's Morgan and Morgan, or there's Darren Stewart and Morgan and Morgan, or Brian Garrett and Morgan and Morgan. So why is it that Morgan and Morgan is getting a disproportionate share of the local service ads? And my answer to that is branding, and I think because the Morgan brand and the Morgan image and face is so predominant in people's minds, they're clicking on those ads at a higher proportion, and so Google's showing Morgan at a higher proportion, because obviously Google's about making money. And this was further concerned, there was a huge Google data leak of the inner workings of the algorithm. And one of the key things that everybody surmised from all this data that was released is about brand. You know, if there's a universal piece of advice I had for marketers to optimize their SEO, it's build a notable, popular, well recognized brand. So the first step in that is picking a brand, meaning like, Are you the car accident guys? And that's okay, but be it everywhere you are. If you're the big check guys, be the big check guys, you know, everywhere and every instance of your advertising and marketing. Are you community based? Are do you fight the insurance companies? Are you great in court, but, you know, pick one and stick with it and everything you do. This is a local attorney here in Miami, Amanda, and this is her branding guy, and this is her, what her social media looks like, and this is her on stage, and you see that every instance of her brand is consistently delivered against the brand guide, against the brand message. So we see that as a trend for 2025 and something we're working on, we're doing the annual planning with all our client the same exercise, and that's a great opportunity for you, by the way, if you want help with that, please reach out to me at 10 golden rules, we happy to walk you through this 2025 planning exercise. Another trend is, you know, of course, the local service ads, the Google screen. And this is something everyone's struggling with because it's become very, very competitive all the markets. I mean, we still think we can get more than our share of the pie with our strategies, but one thing that we're seeing as a trend is intake and conversion optimization and performance optimization. So these are direct phone calls. As most of you know now, the Google screen the local service ads are click to call on a mobile phone, or there's a messaging app. And so how Google's measuring how quickly you answer these messages? And a lot of times in the ad, it'll say, you know, typically responds in minutes, typically responds in 24 hours. Well, who's going to get the response? The minutes are the 24 hours. So that's a tremendous opportunity, and we have several technologies and softwares that can help you immediately answer those LSA leads. And that's definitely a trend that we're going to be rolling out with all our clients in 2025 and then the final trend I'll mention briefly, off the top here is the back end service for your clients. There's a couple great companies called case status and Hona, matter of fact, Andy Sievers, the founder case status is going to be speaking at our live event, tgr, live March 10 and 11th. And information on our website about teacher alive. Love to have you there, and he has this software case status. And ona has a similar functionality, where, after you sign a client, your client can get immediate updates on their case status. So think of it like the app for a law firm, and the clients can immediately get updates on their cases. The number one bar complaint is that clients are frustrated they can never get in touch with their lawyer. So this solves it. So think of it as the back end of lawyering and a software solution for customer happiness. So why is this such a big deal? And I'll get into the agenda. It's just one more minute. But I love to tell this story because I had two clients with very identical results. These guys had 4500 visitors to their website. These guys had 4800 visitors to their website. Here's how many phone calls they got, how many form fills? All the greens are good. Everything's going up, except for the organic chats. So generally, this looks really good. And you would think these firms sign a similar amount of cases, but one firm has a plan. They're very data driven. Everything they do is about the numbers. Every time we present something like, Okay, how does that break down? What's the ROI on that? That x? Exercise, they have systems and processes. You know, everybody in the firm runs to a system and a defined process. And also they're very innovative, like they have the scope and the capability. If we present something like, Hey, there's a new kind of chat. This is an artificial intelligence chat, like an intaker. They always want to try it, because they're organized enough that they can take on new projects. Now, this other firm had particularly weak execution, you know, like if we asked them, hey, you know, you guys are missing some phone calls. We see these missed phone calls in the LSAS or, you know, they're constantly changing, like the people in their intake team or the people in the marketing team are always changing, and so we're always retraining them on best practices, and they even miss meetings with us. So, you know, what's the difference between this firm that runs like a clock, like a Swiss clock, and this firm that's, you know, constantly in disarray, you know, I'm sure you know where this is going. These guys signed an average of 83 new clients in a month, and these guys sign an average of 24 new cases. Now, there's a lot more to it, because obviously, these guys are going to get way more referrals from happy clients. These guys are going to be struggling with just their web traffic, because they're not going to get as many positive referrals from clients, and also the vendors, like the MRI clinics, the chiropractors. You know, these guys are great to deal with. They pay their bills on time, and these guys are discombobulated. So the message here is, you know, you've got to really run your business like a business, and this should be part of your 2025 planning exercise, right? Great approach we've taken is we're using the system called traction, from a great book by Gino Wickman. There's other systems, like mastering the Rockefeller habits and scaling up books by Vern Harnish. And there's a scaling up operating system, the great game of business with Jack stack. We'll talk more about EOS and how we've used an operating system to systematize our business. And we even did a webinar, if you want to see, a great webinar with Mike Morrison, Gerardo Escalona and talking about how to implement the EOS operating system for a law firm. Matter of fact, I quote Gino here. He says, if you have 50 people doing everything 50 different ways, the increased complexity leads to mass chaos. So we want to have a system, right? We want to manage our business, weekly leadership meetings, weekly targets and scorecards. We're now having weekly meetings, and they're great meetings, by the way, when you use the US system, this is not a meeting that you hate. This is a meeting that that you get stuff done right? We're participating in an active mastermind. We did another webinar on masterminds. You want to see a great webinar. Think it's up to like 30,000 views. Now we have a business coach, we have a financial coach. We want to have a marketing calendar. And we've assigned a full time integrator, which is like a COO position in the traction EOS program. So those are just some thoughts on how you get the results. Now we're going to give you a link in a minute for a worksheet, and we're going to work through this to set your objectives, to set your business goals. We're going to help draft the plan. And here's the link, by the way. Okay, so here you can download the worksheet in a minute and the workbook. Want to get these slides and work through it as we're going through in terms of, you know, creating your plan. Here's the workbook and the marketing calendar, etc. So we're going to build this in a few minutes, and there's the link. So now let's get into the content here today, after that exciting setup. First things first, we want to set goals for 2025 so let's figure out what's our target. Where do we want to be at the end of the year, and how many leads do we need to hit our target? And then we're going to define our key numbers, and we're going to look at tools like competitive analysis. We're going to maximize our lead flow. We're going to talk about the core strategies for 2025

and then I'm going to wrap up with a strategy of how to win. Because one of the things we often do is we do these great planning exercises, and then the plan sits in a book and we don't look at it again until next year when we do our planning, or, God forbid, you do the five year plan and you don't look at it again for five years. So I'm going to give you some strategies and tactics to activate the plan that we develop here today, and this is a working meeting, but I want you to also think of this as a template. You know, if you're here as the leader of your firm, or you do the marketing or the business development at your firm, this is going to give you the tools to bring your team together, and ideally, you're going to do a, you know, a half day or a full day brainstorming. We did in our second year of Eos, we did our annual planning with Gerardo, and we did a two day planning session. So I'm going to just going to give you a quick update about me and tell you why I built my leadership and expertise in these areas, and then we'll get into the planning. So I come from a city called Winnipeg, Canada. It looks a lot like this right now. This is City Park. There's a beautiful skating rink there. And this is the Winnipeg Jets, which I am very proud to be a fan of, the number one team in the National Hockey League. And I don't get to say that hardly ever, but we've been a great year so far. So we're very. Excited, but I moved from very cold Winnipeg Canada to beautiful Boca Raton. This is my beautiful wife, Bonnie, my beautiful dog Parker, and we're very, very happy to be living here in the United States for over 20 years now. Early in my career, I worked for Coca Cola Canada. It was great to work on the marketing and branding for one of the oldest brands in the world. And then I jumped into technology and worked with Sprint, getting people their first emails, getting companies their first websites. I also worked for many years, both for the ad agency and as a director of marketing for McDonald's restaurants of Canada. And I had about a $40 million marketing budget that I was responsible for, and I sold some of the most delicious high fat foods in the world. I went directly from selling Big Macs and french fries to working at E diets.com an online diet company, and these folks sponsored me into this great country. I was an immigrant from Canada, and I worked at E diets.com and we grew this company in 2002 and 2003 to $60 million in revenue. And I got a really great experience working on the Internet back in 2002 where we were spending $40 million in online advertising. Google was still in beta, Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school, and we were spending $40 million to generate $60 million in revenue. With that expertise, I wrote the 10 golden rules of online marketing, which was a book and a presentation that I shared at the Direct Marketing Association meeting. A bunch of people came up to me at the end and said they wanted to hire me. So I've been working with folks directly, helping with marketing strategies. And our company, 10 golden rules is an internet marketing agency that works exclusively with law firms. Now these two books were best sellers, and this is my new book coming out in January of next year. So here's our company, 10 golden rules can obviously find more information at 10 golden rules.com These are some beautiful websites that we've done for clients recently, we work with folks all across the country. Love to work with you if you're interested. And this is a case study that we did on one of our webinars. And this is a small firm that grew very, very quickly and signed 62 new clients in the first six months of this year. Speak at conferences all around the world. And now let's talk about planning. So a lot of times we think our plan is going to look like this. And you all are thank you for showing up today, and you're thinking, This is great. You know, I've got a lot of groundwork laid, and I'm going to work with Jay, and he's going to give me some few more ideas, and this is what our year is going to look like. But the reality these days is more of our plans look like this, right? We run into moats and hills and valleys, and I find that the hills and valleys are bigger ever since COVID, right? Like it used to be bumps, and now it's real executional issues, right? I always like to quote this study really quickly. Harvard University interviewed a bunch of their graduates in 1979 and they said, Do you have any plans for your future? 84% had no specific goals or plans. 13% had their goals written and 3% had clear written goals and plans to accomplish them. The results, the 13% with their goals earned as twice as much as the 84% with no goals and the 3% with clear written goals earned 10 times as much as the other 97% so the moral of the story is very clear. We want to nail down our plans. We want to develop this with our team or with a partner like like 10 golden rules, and then we want to execute, and we want to measure what we set out, and we want to make sure we execute on the things we wanted to do. So the way we do this, and the way you all should do this, is to have a working meeting with your team. We brainstorm. We use a lot of sticky pads and and a lot of technology as well. And our agenda for our planning meetings is first, we review our objectives and priorities, like, what was our mission for 2024 what were we trying to accomplish, and where did we get to? Then we're going to lay out our numbers. So we do a deep dive. What did our year look like? Where are we trending? How many calls did we get? How many cases did we sign? What's our signing percentage? Where did those cases come from? How many came from the internet? How many came from referral partners? Break down all the referral partners. How many were doctors? How many were MRI clinics? How many were referrals from existing customers? Right? We deep dive on the numbers. Then we do an exercise called strengths, weaknesses and trends. I'm going to show you how to do that today. And then we brainstorm for new projects. We do a start, stop, keep exercise with the things we're working on in 2024 we say this is something new that, you know, Jay talked about the artificial intelligence search. We better start figuring that out in 2025 so that's something we're going to start. Here's a program that wasn't working at all. We did this lead gen vendor, and the leads were costing like $5,000 for a signed case. We want to get rid of that program. We're going to stop. Up and then keep are the programs that are working well that you're going to keep. And then this is very valuable. Quarterly project plans. Seems like to do a big project, to introduce a new sort of project or program at a firm or at a company, like 10 golden rules, you can get that done in about a quarter if you have a good planning process. So what we do is we set quarterly rocks, and this is terminology that comes from Vern Harnish, from mastering the Rockefeller habits, and it's used similarly EOS in the book traction, by Gina Wickman. And you set quarterly rocks, and a big rock is a big project that you want to accomplish to change the trajectory of your business. And what we do is we set five per quarter, and the top one of five is something that we all agree as a team, no matter what we're getting the top one completed in the in the corner. So now we're going to jump into that link, and we're going to go through this exercise where we set our annual goal and our annual plan, and I'm just going to hop over to the workbook. Now, hopefully everyone's downloaded that, if you guys have any problems, but this is actually the copy of the firm. And what you should do, by the way, is you're going to download an Excel. So just create a copy of that and save it somewhere where. Well, you know, put it on your desktop for now, but save it somewhere where you're going to know where it is. Okay. So what we're going to do here, we're going to put in some numbers. So, you know, let's say you're a firm, and you did $3 million and you have aggressive goals for next year, and you want to get to three five. So we're going to put in 3,500,000 and hopefully you all have the worksheet and you can put that in there. The next thing that does for us is it tells us the monthly revenue target. So let's say your 3 million. And want to get to three five, you need to average 291,000 a month, which is just a calculation of the annual goal divided by 12. Pretty straightforward right. Now, the next question, this is a question I didn't ask last year, is, what is your why? And I just want you to fill this in, and if a couple people would share it with me in the Q and A or the chat, that'd be great. Now, I'd love to know what some of your big picture business objectives are? You know, what's your goal as a as a firm and as an individual? I met this morning with a large law firm owner. His son has joined the firm, and so his goal is to set things up so that it's in real good shape for his son to take over. And so he, you know, he's hired some new attorneys. He's short up the litigation team. He's interviewing agencies. He's considering hiring 10 golden rules to, you know, get a real good base for his SEO and pay per click. And LSAs, they have a new building. They're moving in to a beautiful new facility. So, what's your goal? What's your why? So, you know, people would have a different goal, like, I want to work less. I want to generate, you know, some significant wealth. Like, I want to get to $3.5 million because that's going to free up enough money make sure I pay for my kids college and and we can take one month in Europe, like a lot of people want to take, you know, time off in the summers, right? So write that into your your worksheet. All right. Now, the next thing is, What's your average case value? So this would be, you can pick from two different numbers, but typically this would be the revenue that the firm gets. So let's say you average, if you're a PI firm, or, you know, single event firm, you average $30,000

on a case, and the firm takes, you know, round number 10,000 so then we get 29 here I'm going to put 15,000 just because I know that's what I did in the worksheet. So what that means is that you need to sign 19 clients on an average month with $15,000 case value to get to that 291,000 right? So this is a calculation where it's just 291 divided by the 15. Means We need 19 cases. Now you probably have a pretty steady referral base. So every month between your the referral partners, other lawyers, past clients. You get a steady 10 clients a month. So we work back. So you need 40 leads. You sign 25% of those referrals, and that's 10 cases a month. So the this calculator just minus is 19 from 10. It means we need nine new cases. Now let's assume that we convert at the same rate, but that's probably high, because the internet leads are typically not quite that good. But normally the referral leads are better, like they're at 60% so we're just using round number here, but 19 times 420, 5% is you multiply by four. So we need 36 leads. Dollars to generate nine new new clients. And if our average cost per lead with LSAS Pay Per Click lead vendors, you know fine law AV, those kinds of things, is 200 bucks, then we we want to set our monthly budget 7200 so this is just a worksheet. Obviously, we're trying to set our goals, our marketing and business goals, where we want to be, what, what we need to hit every month. And now we got a pretty good mindset, like, hey, you know, to get to three five, it's not that bad. We really only need nine new cases a month, and we can either do that through pay per click or more referral programs, more partnerships, better SEO, those kinds of things. Okay, so now we've got our annual revenue goal. We've got our monthly revenue goal, right? It's just our annual divide by 12. We talked about our why, why we want to do this. We've got our average case or client value, the number of new cases, how many leads, the percent of conversion and how many new cases. You know, our business plan doesn't have to be that crazy. We just need to get average, nine new cases, nine new clients signed per month. Okay, next up is the operating system. And I talked a little bit about this a lot of people, if you're like me, I was given the book traction nine or 10 years ago, and I tried to read the book, because everyone said it was so great. And I struggled getting through it. And I kept putting it down, put picking it up, then I would hear about it at another conference. Well, the solution for me was reading Gino second book called Get a grip. And get a grip is written for the visionary. So if you're the business owner and you're the idea guy or gal, and you build all the strategic relationships, and you speak, like to speak at the Bar Association and speak at conferences, and you're the founder of the firm, and you've got that Founder's Mentality, get a grip written for you. So that's a great step, like, I highly recommend this book, and then you could think about using the EOS operating system. So basically it's, it's, you can do it yourself, or you can do it with a professional implementer. And again, we have a whole webinar in this, but this gives you a really solid operating system so you're not trying to figure out how to run your firm every every day, and you're not constantly running into problems. Everybody's got a responsibility in the firm, and everybody's got a number. So here's a, you know, a worksheet. We have one like this, but we, I this is a fake one that I mocked up for a law firm, but we have this for our agency. So everybody's responsible for a number, and everybody fills the number in every week. So when we have our management meetings, our leadership meetings, we look at the traction. So how many cases are currently in the firm? So these guys went from 313 to 347, current cases. How many new cases did they sign? Well, they're having a good month, right? They're signing six cases, eight cases, five cases, four cases. So the four week average. This is a good, good way to look at where you're trending, because sometimes these go up and down every week, we like to look at our monthly averages. So these guys are settling 6.25 cases a month. The average value of the cases, the target's 15. They're doing a little better. The last quarter, you're averaging 16. They're getting 1200 website visits, 77 calls, new calls, 31 new chats, and 23 leads on their website. So this is your intake, right? This is where your leads are coming in. Calls are the best, because generally, you can convert those at a higher rate. If somebody fills out the form on your website, you generally have to chase them down. It's not as effective. 14 professional referrals, 14 past customer referrals for Google reviews and a five star rating in the past quarter. Or this is rounding up. These are our goals, right? We want 345 we're getting 342 and if we hit the number, it's green, if we miss the number, it's red. So this becomes a great tool for your management team. Now I put a draft of this. This is also in the worksheet that we looked at before. It's one of the tabs. Here it is. So we if we click here to the EOS scorecard tab, you could create your own scorecard and track the things that are important to your business. And there's one more tab, which is the budget allocations on the worksheet. Okay. So back to our next step. So in your meetings, you want to track the numbers very precise. Now you're going to create this is additional tracking. I talked about the guys who signed 81 cases and the guys who signed 25 cases, and again, the difference is the guys who are winning are tracking everything. So we prepare this report for our clients, and we send them a doc with all their calls, all their chats, all their form fills. They tell us which cases were retained, and we track the performance. So you want to be tracking your calls, tracking your your chats, you want to have a case manager, someone who's reporting on this stuff, and have. Case Management software like a file vine or litify or a smart advocate, and be tracking on the leads the lead disposition. All right, next up is the competitive analysis piece. And so we do this for our clients in the planning meetings. You all can do this from online tools. We look at SEO. So let's say we were working with monthly laws our client, we'd look at their SEO. So these guys have 997 different keywords that are in the top three on Google. So we're going to compare this to other firms, and we're going to look at which keywords so like they're number one for lawyers in Philly, personal, Philadelphia, personal injury attorney, attorney in Philadelphia, traffic ticket lawyer Philadelphia. And then these are some of the competitors. So 11 is behind them. They have 2300 keywords. And then we look at their links. So these are their backlinks, how many other sites link to their website? So these guys have 3700 keywords. Their competitor has 2400 we look at who's ranking and where they're ranking in the local service ads. So that this result here for the Google screen local service ads, you click show more. You can see all the other firms and see where they're ranked for different phrases, like this one's for personal injury lawyer. You can look at car accident, slip and fall, etc, and look at your different markets as well your different offices. So we're going to keep track of all this in our shared dashboard, and then we're going to look at the local map results. So this is the firm and where they're located, and what ideally you want to have more green. So this means they're number three in the Google Maps result at their location. They're number two at their location, and this is our client in Indiana, and these guys have a tremendous result where they're number one across their entire market. Now this is almost such a good result. I can't even promise this. This is a really, really great result, but obviously you want to see a lot more green and a lot less red when you search engine optimize your Google Maps, then we're going to keep track of how many Google reviews we have, how many Google reviews our competitors have, and what's the star rating. So these guys have a lot of reviews, but they have a 4.7 star rating. And we keep track of all this in some kind of reporting, like we might track our Facebook followers, our reviews, our rating, Twitter, YouTube, Google Maps. We're going to keep all this in a spreadsheet, simple spreadsheet, and then you might also put all your competitors. So you might have a breakdown a tab where you track your top five or 10 competitors, because you know you want to look quarter over quarter, year over year, if you're improving versus the competition, and if you're improving versus yourself.

So next up is the brainstorming meeting itself. I've spent so much time on the numbers. My good friend and mentor Josh Nelson says, what you focus on and measure improves. So like that tracking spreadsheet I showed you, we've looked at our agency performance every week on the leadership team, and when something goes red, we know we got a problem or an opportunity in that area, and we work with that team. We do what's called IDs, which is identify the problem, we discuss it and we solve it. We create a solution to the problem. So when you identify the problems, then you can focus on it and improve it. So I mentioned we do this rocks exercise, the quarterly rocks. So every quarter for, I don't know, 10 years, we've done this exercise. And so here we identified, like our top rock for this quarter in 2021. Was to hire a social media person. Number two was to do a new website focused on law. So for five, four years now, we've been solely working with lawyers. So we redid our website to focus on law, and we created a roles and responsibilities, a standard operating procedures, a series of documents. So we set our quarterly goals, and then we assign someone So Brianna was in charge of this, Maria was in charge of that, Laura this, Jay this, and Laura that, and we got it done. We hired diamond, who's our social media manager. She's been doing a great job. We launched our new website focused on only working with law firms. You know, you define as a priority, you focus as a quarterly project. You scope out the project, what are the steps, what are the milestones I need to achieve the project, and you get it done in the quarter. We also want to position ourselves, not only as internet marketing experts, but we do a lot of work, as I'm talking today about EOS and mastermind, and we run our own conference, so we want to also be thought leaders in the space. So we came up with this strategy that this book launches in January, and this book will probably launch a year later in january 2026 called growth strategies for law firms, where we talk about things like EOS and financial planning for law firms and intake strategies for law. Off. All right. So next up, how we do the actual brainstorm? So what we do is we brainstorm what we call strengths, weaknesses and trends. So for each one of these areas, if you have a large group, and it's great to have, like, as many people from your leadership team, like, if you could have, let's say, six people from your leadership team, like all the department heads, you know, maybe even like your intake manager, anyone who's a really key contributor in your business. And then maybe a couple key vendors, like, great to have your marketing vendor at the table, if you have a business coach or a financial person who's not just like a bookkeeper. And then what you do is you do a brainstorm. So the way we do it is we break into twos. So let's say we have eight people. We break into four groups of two, and we say, Okay, go off in the corner and take notes and brainstorm all the strengths, what makes a firm great. And then we come back and we prioritize like, what are our best strengths as a firm? Then we do the same thing, what are our weaknesses? What do we need to improve? Where are we? You know, all the numbers we looked at. The reason we looked at all the numbers. Where are we behind our competitors? And then the third part we do is trends. And this was a big improvement from Rockefeller habits. We used to do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, was called a SWOT analysis. But what I found is strengths and weaknesses were always like flipped upside down. Were opportunities and threats and they were, they were almost the same exercise. So we do strengths, we do weaknesses and we do trends. AI is a trend. The new AI search results is a trend. The back end, like the the case status and the Hona, the app, software to make your clients happy as a trend. So what are some of the trends that you're hearing about work from home is a trend. Ai driven cars, right? Are self driving cars, and you brainstorm the strengths, weaknesses and trends, or for a firm, might be your brand and your history. If you've been in the market a long time, your intake is really strong. Your Google reviews are really strong. Maybe your weakness has got some big competitors, Morgan and Morgan comes in the market. Maybe when you looked at the numbers, you're way behind the marketplace in SEO, maybe you're not as good at following up with leads like your intake team, so busy they only they have a chance to call people once, but they don't follow up with them. And then we talked about some of the trends, like Google screen, artificial intelligence, the multi location strategy. Law firms are opening second locations. So you do this exercise, and you figure out, okay, now when we come to defining our 2025 plan, we know where we're strong. We know what our marketing should focus on. We know where we're weak. We know which projects, which quarterly rocks, we're going to define to address the weaknesses. And what are some of the trends, some of the things that maybe we create, like a team to do R and D research and development and go out and figure out like we keep hearing, all these law firms are using artificial intelligence to do marketing work and lawyer work. What are some of the AI tools we can use to do that? By the way, there's a great webinar on AI strategies for law firms on our YouTube channel. Okay, so now we figure out, so what are the projects we're running? We're running pay per click, SEO, social media, Google Maps. What are our top five new projects? And this could be an annual thing and a quarterly so for example, Jay said Google screened was really valuable. And he said that, you know, several of his clients are getting leads from from local service ads and and we tried it and it didn't work. Well, you know, maybe we're going to give it another crack. So that could be your top project, developing your AI plan. I talked about opening a third location. So you opened a second location. You started coming up in Google Maps. You started getting local service ads leads. You, you know you have some attorneys who commute from far away. Maybe you can have that second location on their commute two or three days a week, they could work out of that second location, and now you have a staffed office that can get Google reviews, have a Google Maps location and target the local service, ads, social media, videos, super hot, right? We're doing tons of those cool videos for ourselves and for all our clients, with the captions and the B roll. And then, of course, you want to hire a great digital agency. I can recommend one if you're looking I'd love to have a conversation with you at 10 golden rules. So now we looked at our numbers, we built our plan. We looked at some of the trends. We've got our worksheets done. We've done our plan. We've laid it out for the year. So how are you going to make it work? How are you going to plan with your team? Okay, so this is an example of that annual calendar. So what we do is we map out the year, and again, what gets measured gets attention and improves, and part of that is what gets on paper and gets assigned to someone gets execution, right? So we say, Okay, here's our plan, because you guys might have a big january 4 thing you do every year, and you have a party and you invite your client past client. Clients, and it's a big deal. But if it's not on a marketing calendar, and someone doesn't, you know, start planning all that in April or May, you know, you're not going to execute nearly as well as you need to. So what are some of the things? Like Martin Luther King Day comes up in January, maybe you're going to put one main project. So you're going to implement chat, you're going to introduce intaker chatter, Apex chatter, juvo leads in January and then February, that's your customer VIP party, someone's assigned to that. You're going to plan for it. Maybe you're going to do a CRO audit, which is a conversion rate optimization audit. In March. You're going to do a spring theme in your social media, and you're going to write follow on. So you're going to create a whole series of emails and texts for leads that you're going to follow on with people right? April is your anniversary. You're going to roll out your new video program. May is you're going to focus on intake and improve your intake, and you're going to refresh your website. June is Juneteenth, and you're going to do landing page testing. So you see, the purpose of this is that we're going to map out our year where maybe that we're going to map out the first six months in detail, and then in each quarterly planning meeting we're going to roll, you know, the next two quarters ahead. So we got everything assigned and all the projects aside. So that's kind of how you make the year real, in terms of rolling it out on the marketing calendar. You know, I talked about the EOS plan. So the Entrepreneurial Operating System. We have a leadership team, we have our numbers, our scorecard. We meet every week, and then we have our quarterly planning meetings where we set the plan for the next quarter. We look at the numbers, we look at performance. Now, everybody is assigned to those rocks. Everybody has a number. Everybody's responsible for a number. So there's all those numbers we talked about in the scorecard. Everybody has their own individual number. And the team, the Department, has a number, and the team, you know, overall, our company, has a number. So you're going to do a planning meeting with your team. You're going to go through the exercise we talked about, where you brainstorm, go through all the numbers, then you brainstorm the strengths, the weaknesses, the trends. Then you're going to sit down and brainstorm the projects, and you're going to sign those projects for every quarter. And the most important thing, you pick the number one of five, so five projects per quarter, and you pick the number one thing, you're going to roll out, no matter what come heck or high water, you're going to get that done as a team. You want to lay out all your KPIs, your key performance indicators, on your spreadsheet, and you got the worksheet the draft you can start with that I provided. I highly recommend you go with an operating system, like an Eos, and if you want to check it out, read the book. Get a grip if you're the visionary, read the book traction, if you're the CEO, like if you're partners and you're Berkowitz, and Berkowitz and one of you is typically like the marketing person, who likes to network and rain make and go to go to the bar association meetings, and then the other person likes to stay back home and run the firm. The person who's out there is what EOS calls the visionary. They should read the book. Get a grip. Got the books here. These books are always by my side. So you're going to read, get a grip. And then the chief operating officer or your office manager, you want him or her to read the book traction. And then you're going to roll with an operating system. And you could self implement for 2025 and then maybe get a professional implementer, which is someone who's trained by Gina Wickman and the EOS company to do your execution. And we self implemented for two years, and then we hired our professional implementer this year, and it's been, you know, a significant leaps and bounds improvement. And then finally, you're going to schedule quarterly and weekly meetings so that you make sure the plan comes to fruition, and you're looking at your rocks, your quarterly projects every single week, and whoever's responsible for it is reporting on the progress towards completing it in the quarter. So there's your template, right? That's how you get your plan done. And I hope everyone can do it. And now I hope we can take some questions. Answer any questions. Okay, great first questions from Carrie. How do you select an integrator for your firm, and what criteria do you look for? So there's great guidelines in the US books, so get a grip. Is more written in Fable in a story format, but it's a real case study of one of Gina wickman's first clients, and basically the integrator is the kind of person who gets stuff done, someone who's like, super organized, writes your standard operating procedures, just just that amazing right hand person. The joke is, the visionary typically goes to a conference and comes back with, like, the 10 greatest ideas, they're going to solve everything for the firm. And then the integrator is the person who says, Jay, those are all great ideas, but everybody's super busy. Everybody already has their number. Everybody already has their rocks for the quarter, but two of those ideas are great, like those are going to solve two of our rocks. So. We're going to implement those two things right away, but those other eight things are going to go on the list for the quarterly planning meeting, and we're going to talk about it as a team, and we're going to prioritize it with the rocks. And then, typically, the visionary calms down, and Jay is calm, and he says, okay, good, you know, so long as we have those on a list and we're not going to forget about them, and then I'll try and sneak in a third one or a fourth one in the quarter. But you know, typically, that's the role of the integrator. The integrators just great at following up. And if you really, truly follow us, the visionary is going to go out there and do visionary stuff, and the integrator is going to run the day to day. So what you want to do is, you want to take the visionary out of any of the seats, right? We've hired a great business development person, and Jay is going to get out of the sales leadership role. We've hired a tremendous team leader for our account management team, so Jay's getting out of the leadership of the account management team, and we've hired an amazing, actually success story, Maria's had four promotions with our company, and she's now the head of our our strategy team, and head heads up the SEO pay per click and social media groups. So now Jay doesn't have to sit in those seats. So I can play the role of, you know, doing webinars, writing books, speaking at conferences and building strategic partnerships on a more regular basis. And obviously I have to, you know, pop into to sales meetings for for opportunities that come to me directly. So Carrie, hopefully that answers your question, if not ask a clarifying question. We've got some LinkedIn questions Jeff asked. We've really struggled with our Google reviews. What do you recommend for ethically growing your ratings? So Google reviews? Great question. You know, the number one thing is to make make someone responsible, you know, and put a number right, like, if you a lot of firms have success, where they put like thermometers on the on the wall and how many Google reviews they have, and then they put mini thermometers for every paralegal and every legal assistant and every lawyer and how many reviews they got. And you create an incentive program, so you might give $50 or Jeff Phillips even gives $100 to every you can't pay people for review, so make sure you don't do that. It's against Google's terms and services. But the paralegal could get a 50 or $100 restaurant gift certificate for every review. And then maybe there's a prize at the end of the quarter and the end of the year. So that's something works really well, because sometimes, you know, people kind of get burnout on the $50 restaurant gift certificates, and they're busy and and, you know, it was fun. Well, it started, and now they've got four or five gift certificates they haven't used. So then you create a fun thing, like one one firm was a sponsorship of their local arena, and bad Bunny was on tour. Bad bunny is like a rap artist, a Latin artist, the top downloads of the year last year, and they gave the bad bunny tickets, and everybody went crazy, and they got like 100 new reviews within that first quarter. So, you know, make it fun. And then, and then we also have a program where we send out these boxes, so after the first month. So the paralegals have a month to get reviews at Stuart and Stewart. And then we set up the skip flops, and it's got gift card in there for dunkin donuts or Starbucks. There's some VIP cards, all kinds of, you know, licensed merchandise from the firm. And then we call up on behalf of the firm. We say, you know, we just want to make sure you open your your gift box, your Stuart Stewart VIP kit, because there's a gift card in there. There's some VIP cards in there as well. You know, can I ask you a favor? Can I send you a link to do a five star review for the firm? So we do kind of a, you know, hands on, roll up the sleeves, kind of access. Chris asked, have any of your clients implemented EOS? How's it going for them? Great question, and the answer is absolutely yes. So several firms are running EOS now, and just, you know, really, EOS is having tremendous success across the board, like there's a conference I've been going to for about 10 years. I'm looking forward if any of the MNL folks are going to put morta Mexico in January, so we'll be back with the familiar awards. And when I ask a question in the room, how many people are running us? About 10 or 15. Hands go up and guess what? Guess what? The 10 or 15 biggest firms are? You know, Jeff Phillips, I mean, surely you're very successful. You know, he's running MOS. Daniel Stark, very successful with Eos, so highly recommend Eos, and it's going great for our clients who are running it. Question from Jen, what are the first things to look for when doing a CRO audit? It's good question, conversion, rate optimization. So there's a couple tools you can download onto your website. One of them is called Hot jar. It tracks where the eyeballs go, but it's tracking where the mouse so it tracks where people move on your site and where they click. And then you can see an overlay of your website, where the mouse went and where people clicked on the website. And I guarantee you'll be amazed that the way you design your site and the way you think people. Use your site is not the way people use your site. Like the number one thing people were doing on 10 golden rules was downloading the 10 golden rules workbook. Or there's a like, an ebook of 10 golden rules on 10 golden rules.com now that makes a lot of sense. Like, if your your company's name's 10 golden rules, people want to see the 10 golden rules. But I thought, you know, the number one thing people would go to is like SEO strategies for law firms, or, you know, our LSA playbook, or things like that. But no, everyone wanted to see the 10 golden rules. So we created a 10 golden rules, you know, we made it more prominent, we we revised the workbook and things like that. So the conversion rate optimization is designing your site, and the first step is looking at what the traction and what the traffic looks like on your site. And then the next step is doing some testing. So if you're running any pay per click Data advertising or any lead gen, and you're getting clicks to the website, we do landing page testing. So what we do is we take a copy of a page like, let's say it's the car accident page, and we create another duplicate version of the car accident page, and maybe we change the the color of the call to action box, or we change the offer wording like, you know, call today for a free consultation. We change that to call now, every calls free. Every case is free until we get a resolution, and you change the wording, and you test A versus B, and let's say A beats B, so your new test didn't perform better than your existing website. Then you do a test of A versus C, half the traffic goes to a and half the traffic goes to C. So that's a great way you can do conversion rate optimization by testing traffic to some of the pages, and then if one of the calls to action works better, one of the forms works better, then you can change that across the entire site.

All right, so we're just about at an hour, and so I think we did a good job. We got it in. So if anyone's watching this on video. Thank you for staying this long, and I'm going to put up the link one more time if you didn't download the worksheets, and then you can go through this planning exercise with your team, if this was helpful and if it was, and, oh, by the way, if you're watching on YouTube and you made it this far, thank you. Bless you, because the algorithm likes it when you last this way. But please give us a like on YouTube, or if you're watching it on some of our social media, on our website. You know, go out and do a Google review. Just search 10 golden rules and Google Maps. I'd love a five star Google review. And if this was helpful, you know, share the love, and then more people will find out about it. Well, to everyone who's here, live happy holidays. We're just coming into the, you know, December in the new year's period. And for those of you watching in 2025 I hope you had a great holidays and you're ready to rock and roll with your planning in 2025 and if I can help with anything, if we can, you know, if you want us to do one of those audits, or we can help with your planning, we can actually lead your team through the whole planning exercise. So obviously we charge a little bit for that, but we'd be be happy to work with you on that. So I look forward to meeting some of you in through the rest of your into 2025 and with that, happy holidays everyone, and I'm out.

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