EP086: The Power of Law Firm Masterminds with Ken Hardison, Craig Goldenfarb and Adam Rossen

I'm sure there's a lot of people who fainted out of the masterminds on the way, but the ones who stick with it, build an unbelievable lifetime friendship and camaraderie, and of course multi millions of dollars of business success together.

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 two part episode the next two weeks with all stars from the legal mastermind community. This is the audio recording from our live streaming webinar. And the show's feature Ken artisan. He's an attorney who built and sold to law firms and now runs filma, which offers both masterminds and conferences. Mr. Craig Goldenfarb, who runs multimillion dollar personal injury law firm and the seven figure attorney Summit, and Adam Rawson, he's a criminal attorney who's built his practice to amazing heights over the last five or six years. And he gives a ton of credit to the law firm mastermind groups that he's been a part of. So before we go to the live recording, I wanted to let you know about our upcoming live event. It's called tgr live growth strategies for law firms happening April 25, and 26th 2024. In beautiful Boca Raton, Florida, we have over a dozen of the top speakers in the legal community. I know because I've personally seen all these folks speak, I've curated this list, it's going to be awesome. We're going to cover topics like how to use artificial intelligence to actually do things in your law firm, to save time and save money. We're going to talk about how to build millions of social media followers, using cutting edge Instagram and Tiktok strategies. We're going to talk about building your law firm culture and profit. And the afternoon of the second day, we're going to talk about law firm technology. So it's gonna be fun, it's gonna be interactive, there's gonna be tons of, you know, interactive type of exercises. And best of all from here, I think we're gonna feature the 10 Golden Rules 20th anniversary party on Thursday night, April 25. So please join us in beautiful Boca Raton 10 Golden Rules event called tgr live growth strategies for law firms, information is available 10, Golden rules.com and on all of our social media. So without further ado, let's get into this week's episode, we're going to learn all about innovative masterminds and lawyers who've done incredibly well by learning from their counterparts in these mastermind groups. So I hope to see you at tgr live later this month. And here's the show.

Well, welcome everyone to this month's live streaming event. We've got an all star lineup today. Really excited to get and I'll introduce them in detail in a minute. But Ken Hardison is here. Ken is a two time law firm owner and currently runs pyjama, which is an awesome event, a series of events and also a mastermind, Craig Goldenfarb owns a very successful law firm gold law, and also a live event and a mastermind participant and expert and Adam Ross and is here today as our success story from a mastermind. My name is Jay Berkowitz. I'm the founder of 10 golden rules. And we do internet marketing for law firms. And we do these live live streams once a month, and you can find them on our YouTube channel. And if you liked the YouTube channel, do me a favor and give us a subscription over there. Because we've got amazing, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 views on these videos. And it'd be great if you subscribe to see more if you like these. Let me tell you a little bit about masterminds and then we'll meet everyone. But first I just wanted to give a shout out to Ben Glass. Ben was originally on the panel and he's an all star soccer referee, PII and disability attorney and runs a Great Legal Marketing Conference and mastermind and unfortunately, he had a heart surgery but everything went well. But he couldn't be with us today. So if you all are friends with Ben, give him a shout out and a well wishes and tell him we missed him here today. So the term masterminds was was coined by Napoleon Hill in the book The Law of success, and then described in much more detail in the more more famous book, Thinking grow rich. And he basically explained that a mastermind group is a peer to peer mentoring group used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from other members. So basically everyone can comes together to help each other in a mastermind. And Napoleon Hill was hired by Andrew Carnegie. And Carnegie wanted him to study and meet with and analyze the success of all his wealthy friends. And one of the success principles was the mastermind, and currently said the secret to his success can be traced to the sum of all the minds of his business associates. So he used to get to together on a regular basis. And this picture is one of the early masterminds with folks like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Teddy Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and Charles M Schwab. So all the you know, the early multimillionaires and the first billionaires all came together and masterminded, and that was a big part of their early success. Another way of talking about it and more contemporary expert, Tony Robbins always quotes Jim Rohn. And he says you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

So one of the ways to accelerate your growth and accelerate your personal development and your business growth is to hang out with super successful people. And when everybody has that mastermind effect, where they're trying to help each other grow and help each other overcome hurdles, you get a tremendous amount of success with that. So our mission today is to share with you the top benefits of mastermind groups. And Craig Goldfarb is going to talk about the landscape of legal masterminds, and talk a little bit about his personal success journey and his event and mastermind. Ken Hardison is going to talk about the benefits of masterminds. And Ken's the millionaire maker, and he's going to talk about some of the success stories that folks have had in the film of masterminds. And Adam is going to represent GLM here today. standing in for Ben and Adam, thank you for doing that. And talk about the success he's had with different masterminds and including the GLM mastermind. I'm going to talk a little bit about my experience with masterminds more broadly, both. As a speaker I'm at masterminds, and as a participant, but I'm not a lawyer. We just work with lawyers all day, every day. But I've been lucky enough to participate in some great masterminds. So, you know, what is the magic of masterminds? Well, you get tremendous input from people one to one, and you have this group of close friends and associates that you can ask questions from, and I was lucky enough to be in a mastermind with a guy named Phil banks, who was the CEO of Eastern Airlines and Continental Airlines. And he helped me with some of the early structuring of my business in sort of one to one coaching, if you will. And then a lot of times today, my mastermind, like if someone's really great at something, we'll ask them for help and get a one to one sort of coaching session. But you get to know the intimate details of these people's businesses. And you get to know who's really, really great. Like if your issue is hiring or retention or onboarding new employees, or whatever it is, you can find someone in the group who's really mastered that section of business that you want to overcome. And, you know, generally, these are groups of eight to 10. Sometimes they get a little bigger. In general, when we get together for our mastermind meetings, there'll be some content shared some, some experts, you generally brainstorm on on topics. And then very commonly, masterminds will have what's called the Hot Seat might come by different names. But essentially, one person will share an issue that they're going through in their business. And then you've got this virtual board of directors who are going to help you solve that issue and move through that, that maybe a small crisis or a small issue you're trying to figure out. And then typically, masterminds will have a private online community. So a lot of them are using WhatsApp groups. One of my masterminds now is using a Facebook group, but it's a very close group. And only, you know, the eight or 10 plus the leader, or leadership of the group will be participant in that private mastermind. And then you can update any problems or questions in that group. And then, like one of the groups, we just share our highs and lows of the week on Fridays. And that gives you a pulse for what's going on in the group. One of the groups I've participated in as a speaker is a group called Vistage. And this is probably the world's largest mastermind organization. And these are advisory groups for coaching mid small and mid sized businesses. And they typically look a lot like this. I've been in a lot of these rooms. And I was brought in as an expert speaker to talk on the topic of Internet Marketing. And typically they have a speaker in the morning. And that might be someone on accounting or investments or hiring or, you know, staff motivation. And there's a series of different different experts and all the experts are on an online portal, and we all get rated for our presentations. And when you have a presentation that resonates well with the groups and you're highly rated you get a bunch to phone calls from Vistage groups to come speak at these groups. And the you know, the beauty of these, this these masterminds is like, I've been in so many of these rooms now. And you've got 10 or 15 people who've been together as a team as a mastermind for, you know, 1015 20 years, and all their multimillion dollar business success stories. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who fainted out of the masterminds on the way, but the ones who stick with it, build an unbelievable lifetime friendship and camaraderie, and, of course, multi millions dollars of business success together. Now, some of the groups I've personally been honored to be involved in. One was originally called the International Society of online entrepreneurs. And our founder got interviewed by one of the national media publications. And he said, that's, that's too confusing. I'm just going to call you guys the hot shots. And some of the real founders of the internet, were a part of that group of people like Craig Newmark from Craigslist, and some of the biggest names in the internet. And I was lucky enough to hang out with those guys. And we would meet three times a year for one of these mastermind sessions, including hot seats, and everybody would coach you on your issues. The Internet old timers foundation is more of a virtual group and we we are still still in existence. And when it was formed, you had to be 10 years with Internet success. And now most of us are 20 or 25 years working in the internet business. And finally, strategic forum is more of a CEO group that's based in New York and Florida. The mastermind that I'm a part of right now is out of a group called seven figure agency. And the Titans are the, you know, invite only elite, a member of that group. And we get together two or three times a year, share educational content, we do these hot seats. And it's been incredibly powerful for me, because everybody's a specialist. Like we only work with law firms. And then there's guys who only work with accounting only work with roofers only work with plumbing. And so everybody's very giving and very sharing, because we're not direct competitors in the marketplace. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Craig Goldfarb. He's a former litigator now focuses on building his team and overseeing the really significant cases they bring in. He was inspired by his mother's legacy as a Harvard Law School graduate. He's a respected national speaker deeply committed to philanthropy. And he'll hopefully tell us a little bit about that, and his organization called seven figure attorney Summit.

Well, good. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Craig Goldfarb. I'm from Florida. And thanks for letting me speak, Jay, I appreciate it. And you said, quote, I'm not a lawyer. And in this stage of my career, I actually am not a lawyer, either. I'm the CEO of my law firm. And I've been the CEO of my law firm for about 15 years of my 30 year career, because I decided 15 years ago that I'd rather be a run a business than continue to deal with cases and clients. So I do personal injury here in Florida. But when someone asked me on an airplane, what do you do for a living, I actually say, I'm the CEO of a law firm. I don't even say I'm a lawyer anymore, because it's a more accurate description of how I identify myself as a CEO. So I've gotten to that point through coaching, seminars and masterminds. And that's the point that I personally wanted to get to, is to be a CEO. So who am I, I'm the founder and CEO of gold law, which is the brand name for our Florida personal injury law firm, which was founded about 20 years ago, I currently have two offices, 12 attorneys, and about 80 staff members. So in the on the national stage, I'm probably mid sized law firm, compared to some of the bigger ones, but fairly large compared to the smaller ones. Here in Florida. I practice throughout Florida. And I have a couple of niches that I do across the United States, such as sexual abuse, on a mass scale, like against churches, and we also do heart attacks in public places, which is when someone has a heart attack at the gym, and there's no defibrillator, there's a case there, or if the defibrillator was locked up, there's a case there. And there's really not a lot of competition in that space. Because no lawyers as in me, really specialized in that across the United States. So if you got a heart attack cases, send it over referred over to me in Florida, we've done it across, we've done it in most of the 50 states. So that's my profession. But getting back to the mastermind concept, I really accelerated my growth by participating in what I really consider three different types of learning. The first is a coaching course. The second is a mastermind, and the third would be a seminar. So I'm going to kind of talk about the difference between what I call lifelong learning, which is what I profess to be as a lifelong learner in coaching courses masterminds and seminars. And I've done that for all 30 years of my career. So what is the difference between a seminar legal coaching course and a mastermind? Many people really haven't thought about the fact that there is a difference between those three things and Adam and Ken both attend to all the all these things. And many people like can have offerings in all of these things. So I'll talk about the difference. And then the pluses and minuses to doing each of these types. So illegal seminar is in a lecture format, as you would consider there's a guy in the front of the room, and then it may be in classroom style, and they provide knowledge without a lot of feedback. So a lot of us go to a lot, a lot of seminars, so you know, your National Trial Lawyers, seminars, your your state's Justice Association seminars, your legal skills seminars, you know, your software industry seminars, such as Clio, Khan, or, you know, the Liquify seminar or the file, Vine seminar. These are mostly lecture format, they're not collaborative. And then your topic specific seminars, you know, seminar, jury selection, seminar and closing statements cross examination. This is what a lot of people think of when they're younger. That's how they learn. Because they're used to classes, they're used to someone standing in the front of the room, and then learning, but there's a limitation to that. As, as Jay nicely noticed, there's no collaboration or feedback or, or hot seats, or anything where it's collaborative, which is an additional level of learning. So I love legal seminars. I conduct one that you'll hear about at the end of it, my little short presentation, myself, but legal seminars as teacher and students. That's how I define it. And that has its role, and it has a great role. But I just call that a seminar, then you go next to like a legal coaching course. So illegal coaching courses, has an agenda. It's like a college course. But instead of one or two days, like a seminar, they may take months or years. So, you know, what are some examples those? Well, you know, some people on the call may know of SMB group, Bill Hauser, Andy stickle. down in Florida. They do very large scale, sales, sales focused internet staff may be one of Jays competitors. And that's one you know, Chris does a massive, massive legal coaching course and he has a seminar a big conference as well. How to manage a law firm in Florida or John Robbins, Great Legal Marketing that was mentioned a minute ago. Ben Glass one of the original attendees of this seminar of this of today's podcast had a heart attack heart at heart surgery. So he wasn't able to make it but his group Great Legal Marketing, has very good legal coaching courses. Law Firm alchemy, Charlie man who was formerly with Great Legal Marketing, also has a legal coaching course, fireproof teaches, has coaching courses based on the Eos entrepreneurial onto operating system, which many of us are on

Panama Ken, who's on this call, has a great legal coaching course. And also has a seminar or seminars during the year. So Ken has a variety of offerings that are wonderful. I've spoken at Ken's and I know many people in Ken's coaching courses that speak very highly of it. So Ken, who's on this call today, has several offerings, but also offers legal coaching courses. And then one that I'm fond of, which is called Atticus in Orlando, which is they have a more holistic approach, which is great practice great life. So you talk about work life balance, and how many days off you should take a year. And it's it's kind of a dual focus. And that's why I love it so much. It doesn't just teach you how to run a great practice. It teaches you some life skills. And It delves into a lot of things. So I've been in Atticus for about 20 years. And that's another one you could look into. And all of these groups have their pluses and their minuses, their strengths and their weaknesses. But I just wanted to list these because anybody who's new into the legal coaching, or mastermind world might want to maybe take a picture of this and look into these groups. They're all good. They're all different. But if you're like, which ones do I start with? I always say start with a story, the list and just go to websites. And take a take a look at all these. These are all great, Jay, I don't even know if you'd get a coaching course. But so many groups or organizations are getting into coaching. When I started 30 years ago, the only one that existed that I knew of was number four, Great Legal Marketing Ben Glass in Virginia. And that was the very first coaching course I ever took. And it still exists today. It's still excellent. But back 30 years ago, there wasn't a lot available. But now there's so many of these groups that offer coaching courses, and that's why I think you should if you're interested, you should go to all their websites and take a look. But the limit there are limitations to a coaching course. You know The quality is determined and limited by the course creators knowledge. And also may involve minimal feedback. So if you're being coached, you're not going to have a lot of collaboration. Sometimes it depends on the coaching course. So I love coaching courses, I've been in several, and then they kind of run their course because we run the agenda. And the agenda is over, and then you may be done. So a lot of people stick in coaching courses for a few years. And they tend to be expensive. But they're worth it. They accelerate your knowledge. So I'm all for coaching courses. And I've been in many, so, you know, that's seminars and legal coaching courses. And now we get to masterminds. So as Jay talked about, they're small, and they're self determined. So the point about self determined is really important to me.

So the masterminds I've been in, especially the ones that I've organized, you get to choose who's in the group, or at least the leader gets to choose who's in the group and the one in one that I'm in currently, if a new member is going to apply, everyone in the group has veto power. That's really important that everyone in the group can say, No, that guy's a jerk. We don't want him in the group. So I like the self determined part of masterminds. I think that adds to it. I mean, in the one Jay showed, if, if Andrew, if Henry Ford said he didn't want Jay Carnegie in the order in the group, then they wouldn't let Carnegie and Andrew Carnegie in the group. They wouldn't let them in. They have veto power. So it's really you choose your friends. And you choose people you know. And that's why I think masterminds are probably the highest level, the highest level of knowledge based learning and lifelong learning to me. So I think they have a defined agenda. And they encourage maximum feedback. Like Jay said, you have hot seats, you have a board of directors, that is really firing things at you. It's high pressure, but high value, it's like high risk, high reward, you risk vulnerability in masterminds. Everybody gets to know you deeply. They get to know your flaws. They get to know your vulnerabilities. But through vulnerability comes growth as Brene Brown great speaker says. And that's why I think masterminds may be the highest level of knowledge base. So there's a couple of groups that I'm aware of there's brain trust, Legal Group, run by Derek Darrell Isaac's out of Kentucky. That's pretty big. He has about six different groups going at the same time. The one I'm involved in, as we call it, the Justice League. It's run by me and Chad Dudley, of Dudley de Bowser in Louisiana.

He and I hand curated our group. We're about 10 to 12 members, and many masterminds have a questionnaire. So you should join a mastermind, that's people that may be of your level. So if you're earning one to $2 million dollars a year, my opinion is you maybe should be in a group with equally equal level people because you're facing similar struggles. So in the Justice League Group, it's, you know, it's eight figures in more in revenue. So that's because we're facing similar structural or growth problems at eight figures. And there are groups that are actually nine figure masterminds, that you're earning over 100 million a year. So my point is that you probably should join a mastermind, where you're in the right in the right room, like, like Justice League, like ours does. We have minimum requirements of staff number and average general revenue, then the mastermind experience, which is the hot seat format, that's run by John Fisher in New York, I've been in that for about 10 years. He does his four times a year. And again, if you get out your cameras, folks, and you take a picture of this screen, you can take a look at any of these mastermind experiences about 75% personal injury attorneys meets four times a year, and is limited to 25 people. And it's the Hot Seat format. And that group is absolutely just the best people around. I've been with the mastermind experience for about 10 years. Small Group, wonderful guy, John Fisher out of New York. Now, the limitations I guess, in a mastermind, that the topics raised are limited to the ones that people think of. So it might not have a set curriculum. But while that is a weakness, perhaps it's also a strength, because you're not married to a particular agenda that the leader of the group has come up with. So in my Justice League, they send around a spreadsheet a month before the meeting, and say, Hey, what do you guys what do you guys want to present on? Or what do you guys want to talk about? So it's an open ended agenda. Some people would consider that a strength. Some people would consider that a weakness I consider it a strength because we can be flexible as to what we're talking about. depending on what's going on in our practices, so I really like masterminds as my favorite. But as I said, I've done all three of these. And I continue to do all three of these seminars,

coaching courses and masterminds. But I'm not sure a lot of people have made the distinction between these three things. And I really draw a distinction, if you can afford it, do all of these. Because these are multipliers, they're accelerators in your growth. They're accelerators for you for money, and profits. To me, this is not a cost. This is an investment. That's what salespeople say, right? It's not a cost. It's an investment. It's like the greatest sales, logon ever. But I believe it, because I'm living proof that I've been a mastermind seminar coaching junkie, for 30 years. And I've grown, my growth has been ridiculous, and how fast I've grown in money, and in size. And I don't attribute that to my own brilliance at all. I attribute it to the fact that I surround myself with brilliant people. And being in these types of groups. I'm surrounding myself with brilliant people. When I think how do I do this? I've got 100 or 200 people, I can email and say, How do I do this? Or how do you guys do this? That's called an accelerator. And I'm all for accelerators. I guess younger people these days, call them hacks. If you want to hack to growing your law firm, these three things are hacks to growing your law firm. So the benefit is that masterminds to me are the most collaborative structure, and the most dependent on the quality of the members. The what's the best? Well, I've been personally involved in all three, all three are great, and will accelerate your knowledge. I think my opinion is coaching courses and seminars may be better. For the first few years of law firm ownership. I just think just That's my opinion, Ken and Adam may differ. But you want to learn stuff that you don't know, early on. And seminars and coaching courses are where you get taught, you get taught early in your career, you need to be taught things. masterminds may be better after you've achieved maybe 5 million in gross revenue, and maybe 25 and employees. Again, that's just my opinion. But that has been my experience. And that masterminds you see who is in the mastermind that Jay showed Carnegie Ford, these are some pretty successful guys. I'm not saying masterminds are not good. If you're a small firm they are. But I found more value in masterminds as I've gotten older. And as my career has developed, you can't go wrong with any of these forms of lifelong learning. All of these are great. I'm currently in to masterminds. And I still attend seminars regarding the business of law, I don't attend to any seminars involving practicing law, because I'm not a lawyer anymore. I don't go to any seminars about practicing law, I could not give a closing argument if my life depended on it right now, because I wouldn't even know what to do. I used to be able to do that, but no longer. So I think all three are great. So that's my summary of the topic. We were talking earlier, Jay mentioned that I have a a a seminar myself that I give I've given it for about seven or eight years. Adam has has come to many of them. Adam Rossen is on this call. It's Boston, Thursday, April 11. It's one day the speakers there are just people from my law firm. And it's on running your law firm like a business. So all I talk about is the business aspects of running your law. Running your law firm, I'm not going to talk one bit about personal injury or being a lawyer, because I don't I don't know how to do that. So what I talk about as compensation packages, I talk about work culture. I talk about how you pay your non lawyers, how you pay your lawyers, I, my wife's gonna speak on work life balance, and how it is being married to an entrepreneur. I'm really scared of her speech, because she's going to talk about what a schmuck I was as a father and a husband. So that's going to be a great one. It's the first time I've let her speak. I'm scared to death. But she was a journalist and an anchorwoman on TV. So he's a wonderful speaker, but I'm scared to death about what she's gonna say about me. And then we also hear from my head of HR and culture, who's talking about hiring, firing, payroll platforms, all kinds of wonderful stuff on the onboarding, and hiring and recruiting process. So it's a one day seminar. If you go to the website, it's 1299 for the day, pretty reasonably priced, I think, and it's a wonderful day. Adam has been there a few times. It's really great. And I encourage you all to register if you want to learn about how to treat your life firm like a business? My take on mastermind, Jay, thank you.

Thank you. And I'll just quickly sum up what I heard. First of all, I thought you did a great job laying out the landscape. And so hopefully, folks grabbed a screenshot of that. If not, you can watch the replay. It'll be on our YouTube channel. Number two is you differentiated between seminars, which is like one way and educational, and masterminds and lectures. And I thought that was really great. And, you know, I think we're folks who are new to this are really starting to understand the power of the masterminds. And then the third thing is, I thought it was interesting that you're in multiple masterminds, and I'm in multiple masterminds. And one of the reasons why I thought of doing this topic today is because invariably, if I'm in a room of, you know, 80 or 100, attorneys, the top 10 or 20 guys in the room are all in masterminds. So it's no secret that this is a super success accelerator, and I think use that term too. And then the final thing is if you want to learn how to run your law firm like business, go to seven figure attorney.com and join Craig's event in April and I think it's funny my my mastermind is called seven figure agency and yours called seven figure attorney. So there's a lot of you're lucky

because you're lucky Jay, because I had my trademark so I would have sued Yeah. But

it's not my it's not my group but but yeah, Josh is awesome and a great giver as well.

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