EP073: Jon Cumberworth – Client Chat Live Founder & Acting Executives Law Firm Coach

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.

Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening. Whatever time this podcast finds you, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast. We have a great guest today, Jon Cumberworth get to join in two minutes. Just want to thank you for being here. And it's I think this episode is going to air sometime in January. But you know, let's face it, you could be listening to this in January 2026. So if you're a give me a shout out on social media, or give us a nice rating on iTunes or Spotify, we really appreciate it. Jon, welcome aboard.

Glad to be here. Appreciate it, Jay.

So, John, you know, I always look for great guests with an awesome background in the legal space. Jon, tell us about your background.

Yeah, so as far as legal goes, I was the co founder of a chat business called Client chat live. We worked with at our peak, we worked with over 650 law firms throughout the US and Canada. And we provided the software but also the live chat agents, real people chatting with visitors to websites. A lot of it was mainly PII firms, mass tort firms that were generating traffic to their websites. But you know, we we started in 2008. Bootstrap company grew over time through digital marketing. Relationships. Yeah. So exited in 2021. But still working with with legal now.

And where's the firm that I know you sold it? Where's that? And what's the status?

That's still still going still going strong? The parent company of alert communications were the the the acquire, so I worked with them for about a year and a half to help integrate and bring it over to to work with the team at alert. So if you get in touch with alert communications, they'll they'll have client chat live as well, but still going strong.

That's great. That's a nice integration for them. For sure. Cool. And so go back a little bit. You know, tell us a little bit more about your background and some of the more interesting things that happened in your life. Yeah, so

going back further, I was in oil and gas prior to taking over client Shall I full time. So I worked in Houston for a steel distributor. And we sold steel to oilfield equipment manufacturers. And so it was a lot of strategic relationships, and that terms of sales, and we didn't have any kids at the time and said, hey, we'll go anywhere in the world. Brazil was on the table, Singapore. So we ended up in Dubai for about five years to your contract, worked in Dubai. And from there, I think that was probably my biggest learning opportunity and growth opportunity. In my career, I had a phenomenal CEO who was my boss and just learned how to be a great leader from him. And just being over there, different cultures, different people, we're kind of on an island, if you will, so we can make our decisions. We are autonomous. And we can move pretty quickly and how we decided to acquire different machinery things like that different inventory. So it was supply chain driven. And, you know, I take a supply chain approach to how I run businesses. Now, even if it's tech or anything else, so you know, had three kids over there would recommend anybody going to Dubai, it's a great place. Very Western, very friendly and family friendly. Right. But it was great meeting all the different people from throughout the throughout throughout the world.

What was the most interesting thing about living in that environment?

I think just really getting to know the fact that it was not so different from being in the US and I say what I mean by that is people are people right? And so it's whether they are from Pakistan or India or England, they have similar motivators. They have different cultural aspects to how they would like to be led like to be taught to like to work in a business but for the most part, it was a great opportunity to learn how to motivate people how to hit targets, how to celebrate those targets, when you did achieve them so for me it was it was getting to see the global aspect of how business can work. Somebody from wood moved from Houston to Dubai and I knew them in Houston and great opportunity for relationship building and you It just showed how small the world is, in pretty much any industry you get in right? You know, it's a small world.

That's awesome. Fascinating. You said you had a great mentor and learned great leadership lessons from him. I can't let that one go without asking you to share some of those lessons.

Sure he was a lifelong expat and settled in Houston. His name is Fran Bob. So fun name, you know, but he, one of the first things he said to me, when I came on board in Houston was, you know, our job at our company is to provide opportunity for you to develop. And he said, I will be the first to write you a recommendation letter to go to Halliburton, or Weatherford, if, for whatever reason, we don't have that opportunity you've outgrown us, he said, that's our job is to figure out how we can continue to develop you and develop our company to give you those opportunities. And I thought that was pretty interesting, you know, for someone to say, hey, early on, if you're if you outgrow us, I'd be right behind you. And I thought, to me, that showed a lot of sincerity in how he wanted to lead people and develop people. And he truly cared about not just me, he got to know my wife got to know my family. And I don't think any of the other executives had really done a great job at that. And I think not, not everybody's going to be great at doing that. But, you know, really showed how much he cared about me as a person in my personal development. And I tried to, I tried to do the same with my team, as well. And understand that we all have choices. But at the same time, you know, we all want the same thing we want to develop and grow.

And it's harder and harder to do in, in a virtual environment, right? Like, we used to have, you know, lunch with her, you know, with with everyone and we had an office lunch room, and you know, whoever was catching lunch at the same time, or you could go out of your way to spend time with folks. And we would have spouses to the holiday party. And now we're spread all over the world and all over all over North America for sure. How do you overcome that remote benefit and obstacle?

Yeah it definitely is a different skill set to do that. First is obviously being intentional about it, which which makes a lot of sense. But then it's incorporating people. One thing he did really well, when we were in person, as a leader and mentor was incorporating me into different meetings that I was just a fly on the wall. And then over time, I would be able to present a slide or two, you know, a month from then. So it was just getting that exposure. And you can do the same thing with remote. And so I think my team at client chat live was remote from 2015 on. So we were we were aware of how to work that way prior to the pandemic. And so it's, it's making sure you don't miss those meetings, making sure you've got your video on that was something that was, you know, I guess an issue at some companies that they had to enforce video and some people didn't like that. But I think it went a long way. But just having those meetings and then having some other things that were were team building, we did some different game mornings at client chat live. And it was not my idea. It was our team's idea they would they wanted to do some, some fun games and things like that, where they might be typically icebreaker icebreakers at different events, but they really were helpful with our team team building aspect.

That's great. And so you exited 20.1 Tell us about your current role and doing some great consulting work. Tell us about your role and what problems you solve for people today.

Yeah, after 2021 It was an opportunity for me to step back and say what do I really want to do? Worked with a career coach and hadn't worked with a coach before. And with her, I was able to identify why I made some of the choices I made for careers for college for for all kinds of things in my life. And it really kind of settled on okay, what gives me energy? And when do I feel like I'm adding the most value? And I was part of an entrepreneurs group called elite entrepreneurs out of Phoenix, and when we would do hot seats with the other business owners, I used to love I always had my issue and I talked about it and hadn't, you know, had my questions answered. But what I really loved was listening to the other business owners Having them basically outline what what their issues were at that time most pressing issue and then working with them to try to diagnose, and then give them some kind of advice or opportunity to improve or, you know, approach that situation. So what I'm doing now it's a company called Acting executives, and working with small to medium sized business owners, mainly law firm owners, and working with them with executive coaching, and also providing customized operational and system playbooks. So things like intake, hiring, how to manage your talent, so that you retain people. What is your tech stack look like? How do you analyze vendors, so all those can be playbooks put to put to use, and then as well as interim or fractional executive leadership, so businesses where they're not big enough to have a full time CEO, or need a full time CFO, they need one day a week, they need someone to help them execute, and implement some different systems. That's where we would come in.

That sounds perfect for a lot of our, our listeners and some of my clients. So we'll make sure we make that connection. Awesome. You know, we're early January, hopefully, folks listening to this or whatever time of the year. You know, I say it's planning season, and hopefully folks got a head start, when we did our planning webinar in November. But those who either don't have a plan or don't have an excellent business plan, what are three tips, or suggestions you make can make for folks about getting the plan right for your business? Yeah,

I think, and I don't want to include this in the three but first and foremost, is have a plan. And there's Yeah, and there's so many different things out there that how you frameworks that you can use, I always think that the same, the most simple for you if you've never done one before. First is understand your purpose and your mission. So purpose is what's your Northstar? Why do you exist? Who do you help? And why do you do what you do? Mission is more of a quantifiable, two to three year target. We want to help 200 clients in the next three years, feel like themselves, again, something like along those lines. But I think the three tips would be understand who you need in your team or on your team to achieve what you want to achieve, and have clear goals for each one of those roles. So if you have someone managing your intake team, what are the two to three KPIs for them, that that you would use to hold them accountable. And really, for them, it's creating clarity for them, they need to understand what would move the needle for them. So that's probably the main tip is having clear KPIs for each person. And then they're in charge of those KPIs. So it's not you reporting to them. Another tip would be create a system that can provide visibility and clarity for you. And meaning, you've got scorecards or dashboards, or something that sometimes can be tedious and putting together and maintaining, so just create a simple one that gets updated regularly weekly, so that you can have that visibility. It creates accountability, it creates motivation, all kinds of things when you can see the numbers right in front of you. So it might have been a lot more than three tips.

But that's, that's perfect. That's awesome. How familiar are you with EOS? The Entrepreneurial Operating System?

pretty familiar with it? Definitely read the book traction. I know, you've talked about it in some of the other podcasts and guests and you're you're implementing that. Now, I believe with your business, right? Yeah. I think it's a great system. You know, for for me, there was a book called Three hag way that I that I love. And it's very similar to traction track, or EOS. But EOS for me was a little bit robust. So smaller firms or businesses may be able to take pieces of it and implement it. But I think it does take an integrator, somebody that's basically dedicated to integrating the system and maintaining it for a business, which for some businesses might be too much.

Yeah, I think the integrator can have another job. You know, like, if you have an operations manager, they're basically your integrator. And then they just run the level 10 meetings and whatnot. So we're really excited to go fully in starting January. And we've been integrating pieces of the puzzle, like you said, have our scorecard in place. We do our quarterly planning and one of the things I love about Gina Whitman and traction is he freely and openly uses the other experts like the planning. Pick folks who came before him, he uses their terminologies, you know, he like he uses the rocks, and he uses B hags and stuff me quote to these terms, so that a lot of people, like a lot of people write a book and they take that basic principle, and then they put their own spin on it and give it their own name. And sometimes it's confusing to folks, if you've read, you know, the other business books, and you're like, Well, wait a minute, is this this isn't the same? How many rocks do I need? Anyway, so that's my personal take. And I love it. Way too. Yeah.

And I think no matter what framework any business decides to use, the most important thing is that it has full buy in from the top, meaning, if you're the business owner, you're not going to just say, Oh, let me hire somebody, and they can implement ELS. And I'm going to do my thing. But make my team run. It's not going to work that well. And it's you've got to have buy in from all the executives, all the leadership, it's a commitment that needs to be made, starting from the ownership.

So you've got now a nice plan in place. Do you have two or three tips about growth for a law firm?

Yeah, I think first and foremost, know your ICP, your ideal client profile, you have to know who you're marketing to. And sometimes that might be this might be the most basic aspect of it. But if you're a personal injury lawyer, you go out and say, Well, I'm just trying to get anybody that gets hurt, and no fault of their own. A couple, one attorney I've worked with, identified, he loves TBI cases, he loves working on brain injury cases. And he's very good at them. And so it's, if you want to grow, sometimes it means niching. Down, and really identifying specifically who you want to work with as your ideal client. And I think the second thing would be identify who is going to be in charge of growth. So a lot of times, firms will spend money on marketing and activity, and they've got all this inbound, these inbound leads coming in, people are making phone calls, but they're getting dropped. They're not getting answered, or they're getting answered by the wrong people. You know, it's amazing what happens when you Secret Shop firms. So have a clear intake plan for what you're going to do with those leads that come your way? How do you filter them? How do you screen them? And then who's going to be closing them? So that's where I think that gets missed a lot of times is they want the phone to ring. But then what happens after?

Exactly great point, what are the best practices for that next step, stick with personal injury, you have a lot of expertise in that area.

So first and foremost, it goes back to that ideal client profile. So do you have that that criteria laid out? Okay, were they injured? Yes. Were they at fault? No. Does the opposing party have a zero source of recovery? Do they have insurance? Yes, things along those lines. So it really depends, you've got firms that will take soft tissue injuries, and a firm down the street won't even won't even give that person the time of day. So first and foremost, understand what your criteria is for who gets through the door, basically, like a sales qualified lead. Once you've identified that, that next step is who is going to be the person that does even more discovery within that intake call, who's going to close who's going to either set that consultation or set up that meeting where they're going to go visit the potential client. So when you have multiple people doing that, in a firm, sometimes it's lawyers, sometimes they're better at it. If you have intake people make sure they're sales driven. As opposed to customer service driven. It's a very tough job, being on the phone, talking to people about their, their potential case all day. But track their close rate. And that could be number of calls they've taken and number of consultations they've set. So you'll look up and you'll see, Jim will have you know, 15% close rate, and Sam has a 20% close rate. And you know, Sheila's doing 35% It's like what is she doing differently than the other two, but that you have to have that visibility in those numbers. So for me, it's it's identify the WHO who's taking those calls, who's going to be handling them. And then what do you want to come out of that? Do you want to consultation in that It's fine. And then that next step is closing from consultations. And it's a whole nother kind of ballgame, if you will.

I love it. Awesome. Well laid out. Thank you, sir. I mentioned this on our previous call, and I'm a member of a CEO networking group, and the MBAs audit that group. And one of the questions we ask our guests is, tell me about a pivot or a change decision in your life, or maybe a couple, and one of the life lessons you learned, as it might pertain to a young MBA or a young attorney?

Yeah, I think the probably most impactful pivot or change in my life was after I sold, or we exited client chat live, was I never used the muscle and this is going back to my career coach, I don't think I really exercise the muscle of making a decision for what I really want to do. And I hadn't spent time on identifying what gives me energy, I took whatever came across my way, and made the most of it, the opportunity to work in oil and gas, the opportunity to, you know, go to college here in Texas, play basketball, things like that, okay, I came my way. Sure, I'll do that. I'll make the most of it. And so, doing the exercises to really identify my own personal core values. You know, we do it for business all the time, we have annual plans. We don't do enough of it for ourselves as business owners, entrepreneurs. And I would get really frustrated with myself for not knowing what I wanted to do. And it was kind of a spiral for a little while. So I think, for CEOs for people that want to own businesses, or be in leadership positions, it's understand your why and understand what gives you energy. And makes, you know, makes you feel valued.

I love it. Tell me a little bit about the personal coach and the exercise and how, how that developed and what you've worked through with him or her now.

So she, she is a career coach that works with a lot of UT here in Texas, UT MBAs, but she's also got that little psychotherapy background as well. So it was like, we can talk career, we can talk childhood, all that good stuff. And so it was tell me why you chose Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Tell me why you chose to work at Santos right out of school? Why did you choose? These are these other options, and she just basically identified patterns from that. And it was that that pattern of I took what came along, or what was presented to me. And so it was working through that. But then as we progress through the coaching, it came to Okay, now that we've identified some of these things, what are we going to do with them? So let's talk about self talk, let's talk about doing things that are outside of your comfort zone. I went skiing for the first time this year, pretty proud of that. Didn't think I would enjoy it didn't enjoy it at first. But talking with her, I almost almost packed up and just did the bunny slope at the end just to get a win. And I was like, Nope, I'm going back to it. And people that are skiers will kind of make fun of me for this. But I'm back to my green, I'm gonna tackle that green. And I did it finally. And it was just that self talk, working with her identifying what it is I'm telling myself like, and what am I gonna do with that information with with that talk? So, you know, I think that was probably the most beneficial in working with her and identifying what it is I want or can do.

I love it. That's awesome. Great. Well, we always wrap up with a couple quick questions. What are some apps or techniques you use for personal productivity?

I'm I'm pretty heavily involved in chat GPT right now as a lot of people are but I use the custom GP TS quite a bit, the ones where you can create your own. So I basically built out an executive team. I have a CMO CFO, CFO CRO, and I have a VP of Sales Chet Holmes, the the Ultimate Sales Machine. He's my he's my VP of sales. So I use them to create outlines create some strategic planning, and it's sometimes it can be a rabbit hole. So it kind of goes opposite of productivity but I love utilizing chat GBT right now to create outlines and then I jump into Trello which is kind of like JIRA. monday.com I think a lot of people use that but I add different add tasks to Trello. And my VA that I find through Upwork. She'll tackle some different things. I've got a designer through Upwork as well. So I'll use Trello to communicate with them and slack to communicate with them to take care of tasks.

I love it. Matter of fact, I have the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine pulled out here you go, because we were working with a firm this morning, and we're going to I talked about doing an annual planning and develop their dream 100. A refer to it at l east once a week.

Great. Yeah, it's an amazing book.

Yeah. Next one, you touched on a couple books, any other best business books you recommend? For

starting out as an entrepreneur, I would definitely recommend the E Myth by Michael Gerber classic. Indeed, he talks about, you know, putting out that org, that org chart, even if your name is in every box to start, what is it you want to build and add people later throughout that, but E Myth is great. from a leadership standpoint, and I know some of your other guests have mentioned this, but multipliers was was phenomenon. Kind of helps you identify how you can get the most out of people, and how you kind of have to work with sincerity and, and honesty. And I know a lot of people will read that and say, Oh, I've had a boss. That was the diminisher. We've all been there. So definitely recommend now and then three Agway as well.

Yeah, there's definitely been a movement in business to have much more disclosure. I guess in this day and time, you can't hide very much.

So for sure, yeah. Transparency is?

Yeah. What? What caused it? And what's the benefit of it? And what would you recommend in that space?

As far as being more transparent? You know? Yeah. You know, I think, I think it's just not just the younger generation coming into the workforce. But I think, you know, the more and more people want to understand what their value is, and again, what are they working towards? So what's the purpose? And I think Bill Biggs touched on it recently in your podcast is they want, they want to know why they're working as hard as they do. And so it's really just that why that is starting to take over how businesses are run. And it's generational, but I think it's just over time, you know, I don't recognize myself as a millennial, even I'm, like, right on the cusp, despite this gray, the gray beard, but, you know, it's I personally as well want to know why I'm doing what I'm doing. And if I don't believe in it, it's gonna be hard to motivate me. And that goes for a lot of other people as well. I'm sure.

I love it helps. Explain that for me thing, right? Any blogs, podcasts or YouTube, you subscribe to that you recommend that you would never miss.

I never miss my first million. It is a great podcast. It's kind of all over the place business wise. But it's all about new business ideas. And you know what, what's coming? What's out there? They have good guests out there. So that's one of my favorites, for sure. And on the legal side of Charlie man, as well, what he's doing with they don't teach that at law school. But on the blog side, I'm getting some different GPT different AI specific blogs, think prompts, prompts daily is a good one.

Nice. Yeah. Big fan of Charlie. He recently did a great session for us in this podcast, about the $500,000 Referral Engine. If you don't have a great strategy for building your referrals, please listen to that show. The second last question? Who's your nflt?

So I'm from I claim Tucson I'm an Army brat. I claim tucson arizona so I'm an Arizona Wildcat basketball fan. I don't I don't claim the Cardinals. But I lived in Houston for a time so I'm going for the Texans. I'm loving what CJ strats doing. Can't quite get on the Cowboys bandwagon not being from Texas originally, but you know, I just I love sports. You know, played college sports and love love watching the competition that was in Green Bay last week watching the Chiefs game with some friends so I'll go wherever I can to see live sports. Oh, that's

great. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely bucket list to see the stadium. It was amazing. I took the tour. I probably still have to see a game there.

Yeah snow flurries, it was a it was textbook story but Lambo visit packers one sorry if you're a chiefs fan, but you know is that storybook visit for sure.

I'm adult offense defense so that when was great, put the offense in first place. I don't think we'll hold it but should be that by. And last question, Where can people get in touch with you?

I'm on LinkedIn quite a bit. So definitely find me on LinkedIn, to John J. O N calmbirth. And then our website acting executives.com. But I would say LinkedIn is probably the most where I'm most active.

Awesome. Well, John, thanks so much for doing this. I know everyone. If they made it this far, they really enjoyed it. So definitely get in touch with John, or follow him on socials. Thank you again. That's awesome.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Jay, good talking with you.

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