EP091: Host Jay Berkowitz Interviewed by Legal Intake Guru Chris Mullins: Health, Wellness, and Marketing Insights

One of our core 10 Golden Rules is lead to trends. And the basic philosophy is if we can figure out what's going to be the next big thing, and we can apply it either for ourselves or for our clients, you've got a three to six month window before the whole market figures things out.

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.

Hello, everyone, it's Chris Mullins with Laura's tell all and today I am going to be interviewing Jay Berkowitz. And I'm gonna let Jay tell you about himself. Go ahead,

Jay. Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I'm a little boy from a little town in Canada called Winnipeg. But I was lucky. And my first job I worked for McDonald's restaurants. And then I from working in the small town to working in Toronto, at head office and work for McDonald's and Coca Cola and big director marketing kind of jobs. And I moved to the United States to work at a startup.com called e diets.com. And really channeled my career into working in technology and online and digital and internet very early on, like this was 2002. And we were the startup spending $40 million on advertising on MSN, AOL and Yahoo. And that made us the biggest online advertisers in the world at that time. And I had this tremendous Test Lab, where we were spending $40 million to drive about 100,000 people a day to our website, and we're doing a B testing and finding out what kind of banners to people click on, what kind of offers did they they sign up for. And we were able to generate about $60 million in online sales to a subscription diet service at this company e diets. With a $40 million spent, we generated $60 million. So that was my deep dive into it, what worked on the internet. And then I was asked to speak at the Direct Marketing Association, presentation, and a book called The 10 Golden Rules of online marketing. And I'm proud to say 20 years later that those rules have really stood the test of time. And they were high level strategies for what works on the internet and what what not to do. Yeah, and you know, five or six people came up to me after that presentation said, they wanted to hire me as a consultant. So essentially, I've been doing the same thing for 20 years, I speak at conferences, I get recommended people with their digital marketing. And now in the last four or five years, we only work with attorneys. So we really specialize in a niche because you know, frankly, became so broad that the whole world was too complex to to compete with every Amazon store. And it's and you know, we now specialize in internet marketing for law firms.

Where's your book? Because your book right there? Yeah, well, the

first book is above my shoulder here. It's, it's this one.

No, I see it. I see it. Yeah. Don't worry, buddy. Okay.

My new book is called advanced internet marketing. Okay. Yeah. This year.

Awesome. That's awesome. Okay, so. So now it's all law firms. One of the things I want to talk to you about was that I don't think is discussed that much is the mental health and wellness of like, attorneys. I mean, everybody in a law firm, but you know, starting with attorneys, and then so I wanted to ask you a little bit about your own journey on health and wellness and what you've done, what's worked, what are you doing right now?

Yeah, I mean, maybe I'll give you a theory on on the mental health of attorneys. But, you know, I guess I was lucky. And I played competitive sports. So we didn't necessarily do training for the sports, but we skated six times a week in Canada. I played competitive, first class hockey and playing goalie on the University of Winnipeg, Westman hockey team. And then the glory days were over. And I started working for an ad agency. Like I said, my first client was McDonald's restaurants. And there was a couple sales guys who were like the radio sales guys, or whatever. And they used to go to the gym, and it was kind of a foreign concept, but they're like, Hey, you should, you should come with us, you should come to the gym. So I got fortunately, an early start going to the gym and learning to work out and it's really been a part of my life ever since either playing a sport or on the off days going to the gym, doing either cardio or weights. And then obviously joining e diets was kind of a deep dive into health and wellness. And, you know, I learned a lot of interesting things. You know, I just thought I'd share a couple things. One is, I remember one of the nutritionists said, All diets work and no diet to work. And I thought that was interesting, right? You're at a diet company, you're selling specific diets. And the concept is pretty simple. And we've all learned it, you know, those of us who, who struggled with, you know, weight loss over the years, if you apply yourself to any diet, it's going to work. And then, you know, very specific diets, and I've done, you know, just calorie reduction where you, you know, one thing works really well eat half your meal, and then actually asked for a take home box with for the second half of the meal, and be disciplined and just eat half, because we get way more calories at a typical American restaurant that we need. So, you know, being diligent and applying yourself. And, you know, maybe the second extension of that I've found, at least for me, is that it's 1,000% or nothing, meaning you've got to stick with 1,000%. You mean, you can't do like cheat meals? You can't do? Oh, you know, I'll just have, you know, one cookie, that generally doesn't work for those of us who are, you know, at the diet challenge. So, if I get on a program, I've got to have zero carbs, zero sugar. Right, exactly. And I've got to be like, 1,000%, seven days a week for a period of time. And then, you know, another thing I learned at EA diets, that was interesting, you know, are the extension of the all diets work. You know, we were fortunate to meet Dr. Atkins, they passed away. And we did the first really the first diet, the the first Atkins diet, because Dr. Atkins wrote a book that was kind of like theories of weight loss, and we turned it into an online diet, it was customized for your height, your weight, your age, medical conditions. And we also met Dr. Barry Sears, from the Zone Diet, okay, in time, and I met these two, you know, the two preeminent diet, diet gurus, I'm that age. And one thing, you know, again, the concept, all diets work, no diets work, you know, book, basically, the Atkins diet had a little hike that, you know, you Oh, you could only eat steak. But if you actually, you know, studied the diet, it was like two weeks where there was what they called the induction period, and you just ate, you know, steak and chicken or whatever, you know, whatever, protein, and then after that, it turned into a diet that looked very much like the Zone diet, or Weight Watchers, or any of the diets have been added now, which is, you know, you eat lean meat, you eat for, you know, four to six ounces of protein, you eat vegetables, you eat salads, you don't, you know, have heavy salad dressings, and that's, essentially are our, you know, healthy eating and comes down to those same core principles. So, you know, I think some of those things are as true today as they were 22 years ago when I was at EA diets.

Yeah. 100%. So like, so when we talk about the health and wellness of attorneys, I mean, because I think it used to be dentists, that were number one for suicide, and now and it's been for a while now, attorneys. So with your health and wellness program, self care program that you've done, and that you're doing, how has those strategies helped you in your thinking, and your day to day thinking in your, your happiness with your decision making?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know, the science of it, or, or the, you know, for attorneys specifically. But, you know, I just know that if I workout in the morning, I started today, I feel great. Way more energy, sleep better at night, which contributes to waking up and making it to the gym in the morning, or I play a lot of tennis. When I am you start the day feeling great. And when you get into a rut, and you're not, you know, you're not eating well, you're not exercising, and you're not sleeping well. You have way less energy and you feel like crap. So, you know, it's really simple. It is. For me, I mean, maybe not for everybody. But you know, if I, you know, I really try really, really hard to do something every day. So if I'm really pressed for time, you can walk for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and that's the fastest exercise I can get. And obviously, me, you know, this morning I was in the gym, got some cardio and some weights. That's a lifeline and feeling.

Yeah, but a few a few moments ago when I first mentioned about health and wellness and attorneys and mental mental health. You said I could talk to you about something you said something about attorneys about it. What is it? I'm just curious. Well,

you know, you talked about the mental health and one of the things I've learned, because we've probably consulted with I don't know, 500 law firms. And I talked about this in one of my online webinars on YouTube, and we've been blessed, like 300,000 people have watched our webinars, including learning about intake with Chris Mullins, the expert and I think our top webinar is called Top 10 technology. The strategies for law firms has been viewed over 80,000 times. You know, one of the things that I've learned, and I talked about this in our annual planning webinar is a case study of two law firms. Both of them get about 5000 visitors to their website, and one of them, sites, 80 clients a month, one of them signed 20 clients. And both of them are personal injury law firms. And one of them runs their operation very, very efficiently. They run a version of Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, they're extremely numbers focused, they hold us accountable for their numbers, they hold their entire team accountable for the numbers. And they really know their numbers. They know how many leads they got, what their conversion rate is, where their sign clients came from, what's working, what's not working, we're constantly refining that. They've got, you know, invested in training programs, like we shot some videos, with, with the attorney for SEO purposes, with the attorney answering questions that we use for blogs and social media. And the attorney said, Hey, can I book the same videographer for a full day training for his staff? So, you know, one firm runs really, really well. The other firm is the exact corollary. Right? Like they're internally fighting, different people trying to give us direction, you know, we had you meet with them, they couldn't answer the phone. They didn't answer the phone. Well, huge turnover, huge turnover in the intake department turnover, and attorneys don't pay their bills on time, you know, all the parts of a broken business. And so what what's the lesson there? You know, if you run your business while you run an operating system, you treat your people well, you, you have low turnover. And guess what, you know, the guy, the attorney, who runs that business has low stressed, looks great, finds a lot of time to, you know, take trips and exercise. And, you know, he loves to get in the ocean. On the on the other hand, the other guys are, you know, constantly in disarray look terrible. I was going through health problems. So, you know, I think the moral of the story is, you know, if you run your life and run your business, with some of the common best practices, we all know, it's no secret that you know, your life's better. Your business is better. Your health is better. Everything goes with the wind, you know?

Yeah, yeah. Okay, I forget the name of the program was it's that you did a while ago, and I learned about it.

75 hard.

Come on. Come on. Talk about that.

Yes, I guess it's two years ago now. I was listening to a podcast by Andy Priscilla. And it was originally called the MF CEO. And he changed it to the real AF. Andy for Sella. And he has a, I guess a supplements company called first form. But he doesn't even talk about it really on the shows. And so the MFC CEO was really motivating young people to become business owners. And really AF is dealing with a lot of societal issues. But he was, you know, pretty heavy guy. But he was also like a big weightlifter guy says massive guy. And I think he said he got to around 350 pounds. You know, he wouldn't even go on the scale, but he felt he probably hit like 380 and

he even like a long time ago, like a long time. Yeah. Yeah.

Like, well, not that long ago, like in the in 2016. Okay, anyways, he, what he realized is kind of reversion when I talked about before, it's like, I can't have cheat meals, like I can, you know, take a day off, I've got to go all in when I'm on my program, he realized the same thing. So we came up with this concept of 75 heart. So for 75 days, you work out twice a day. And the minimum workout is a 45 Minute intentional walk. So you know, typically you'd go to the gym or play tennis and then do a walk or you know, play tennis and hit some weights. And he's he's a big muscle guy. So obviously cardio and and weights is typical for that kind of body type. And then to work on twice a day. You take a selfie, which really helps holds you accountable. follow a diet any he doesn't, you know, but any diet, pick it stick with it. No GD, you read 10 pages of a nonfiction book. And I'm probably missing one or two other things. But to accomplish that did it for 75 days, there's an app that comes with the program and if if you forget to even like put your selfie and you wake up in the morning, you've got Andy like, growling at you. He's like, Did you g go back to the start if you didn't finish? You know, and like sometimes you like forget to put yourself and you're allowed to like forget to put it in, but you're not allowed to not take your selfie. Yeah, right. So if you miss anything, you gotta go back to the start. So anyways, I got through the 75. And then I found out there's actually a year program called live hard. And there's three additional 30 Day pulses where you go back to two workouts a day and he had some other fun things like the five minute cold shower. 10 minutes to visualization. You had to find someone new to talk to every day. And although I was doing it, you know during late COVID It was a little too challenging, but I did a lot of those those meetings on zooms but you know, sometimes it's like 11 o'clock at night, and I hadn't met anyone new so I had to I would go in like clubhouse and go find someone to do a one on one with him No way. But look it's you either you're all in or you're zero so anyways, that's it's a phenomenal program encourage you to check out, Andy for Sela are the real AF. And there's it's all free programs completely free and huge amount of success stories like hundreds of 1000s of people have done this program.

Well share some of the horror stories now. When you had when it was like maybe pouring rain or freezing out and you had to go get her get her done. I mean, come on, you

know, look, I live in South Florida. So like the guys who do this, do it in Minneapolis, you know, and do it and reading sleet, you know, in the winter, you know, they really had, you know another level of mental toughness. But that's something else that Andy talks about is like there's huge mental toughness. A couple of times, I bought some weights at home and I subscribed to Beachbody. So a lot of times I would do a Beachbody workout in the living room. But if I Oh, that's the other thing. One of the workouts has to be outdoor. So that's where the rain and sleet comes in. So a few times, I hadn't gotten in my outdoor workout. And so I had to work outdoors. So we have a little bit of a sheltered porch. So a couple of times I was outdoors with my weights and my Beachbody on my phone doing like a 45 minutes. Oh, it was raining and it was miserable as heck. But I can't you know that doesn't pales in comparison to the folks in Canada or Minneapolis. Right.

Exactly, exactly. I'll tell you just briefly what I do. And it's been a big journey for me too. But I have a SEAL Fit. Almost. She's a Navy SEAL trainer. And I meet with her twice a week on Zoom. And then I have a personal trainer. I meet twice a week in person. And I do crucibles every weekend. Awesome. So well for me. Right now my current crucible is running 45 minutes. And then after that immediately doing 100 Push Ups 100 Sit ups and 100 burpees.

Oh, that's awesome. All at once. In a bad way. Awesome. No,

I mean, yeah. All at once

ran one marathon or multiple Maryland. Oh,

I've run multiple marathons triathlons. I'm training right now for 30 mile Ultra in October. Oh, that's Oh, yeah, it's a journey. I get it. It's the same. And I don't know. But you have to reach a certain place up here before you actually can call it with the switch and get more bang, you know, so mental toughness is probably the most important I think. Okay, so just a couple of other things here about you talk about your your three core values. I'm looking at my notes here. Honest results, constant communication and innovation. How is it that you hold yourself and your team accountable for executing that every day? Well, thank

you for that we went all in on Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. So we've been self implementing for two years, but we got a professional implementer one of the best, Gerardo escalada Yeah, we did it, you know, full on with, you know, the full full day. EOS Trini. So one of the exercises, you come up with your company's core values. And then from those core values, we wrote our, you know, our marketing brief and develop some new marketing materials. And the first one honest results comes from, you know, part of it is something that we feel is part of our core integrity, and part of it is, you know, versus competitors. And a lot of competitors in the legal digital marketing space. They won't give you any data, they won't give you your website. So if you leave, you don't get your website, you don't get your AdWords account your Analytics account we're dealing with right with it right now. You know, the client can't get their historical analytics. You know, the honest results is a we're going to share with you the results every month, we give you a dataset. And if we're up, obviously we celebrate if we're down, we'll give you a plan to you know, here's, you know, here's where we're down a little bit. And here's what we're doing, of course, correct. And the communication piece is also above. You know, again, it's something we do really, really well. And we've always held two meetings a month with our clients. And that's somewhat self serving in that, you know, if the client shows up to the meeting, they see what we're doing. They see the result. You want them to approve things because like, we don't typically add things to the website if the client doesn't approve it. So you're gonna Campbell to show up on a Zoom meeting for half an hour. But when they show up, you know, we're organized. We've got the reports. We've got a PowerPoint like we we run them through a fun and enjoyable. We tell the joke of the week every week.

Yeah, I think that I've been on a couple of hours. Yeah.

And obviously people are thinking, Well, what's what's the joke of the week? The joke of the year last year was once a lawyer's favorite drink, the SIP, Pina Colada. Oh, okay. It works every time. Okay, okay. What's the third one you have?

So we had honest results, constant communication and innovation.

Yeah. And innovation has been a core part of our business. Part of it is I'm just like, I always love the new stuff. I'm an early adopter. But we throughout the years, been on the on the sort of cutting edge of what's what's going to work. And one of our core, you know, 10, golden rules is lead to trends. And the basic philosophy is if we can figure out what's going to be the next big thing. And we can apply it either for ourselves or for our clients. You've got a three to six month window before the whole market figures things out. Yeah, yeah, going back in time. The first one was the Papa. And I always talk about, you know, remember, in those early days, when you'd be on like Expedia, and Travelocity pop up would pop up, you'd be like, Oh, great, I'm going to check the price of the flight and see if I get a better price on this other site. And then you, you'd go with the competitor. And you might even forget, you're on the first travel site. But those pop ups started, like you started getting six and eight and 10 of them, and then they drove you crazy. And then like, I hate popups. And all that happened within six months, like they went from getting 30% Click through rates to being you know, the scourge of the internet. So that's an example of that. And over the years, we've, you know, I invite a lot of people to Twitter for the first time ever, and we did a blog and a podcast, you know, and blogs and podcasts for our clients. before most people had heard of these things. And in the last couple of years, we've become one of the leading industry experts on the Google screen local service ads. And that was a tremendous opportunity. We got our client, I think they were the fifth person approved and screened by Google in New York City. And so when, when there's only three spots at the top, and it was rotated between five guys, you know, we got a couple 100 leads before some people even heard of this program. So we've been able to, you know, now we're, we're very expert, we've got what we call our secret algorithm, to help our clients get more of those positions, those highly paid positions in the top three right at the top of Google screen. So that's our sort of core of innovation, and staying ahead of the curve on the stuff that matters. That's perfect.

I love that. Okay, so everybody make a note. Honest results, constant communication and innovation. Perfect. Awesome. Any last words for everybody? Jay?

No, the only thing I would say is please, you know, come check out those YouTube videos. You can 10 golden rules, te N Golden rules.com We're pretty much everywhere. Or Jay Berkowitz on on LinkedIn, or Facebook or Twitter, and you know, happy to meet with you all. And, you know, the ultimate is if you know if your web guys your SEO guys, giving you results and constant communications and innovation. You know, I'd love to meet with you. That'd be great fit.

Perfect. Awesome. Thanks so much, Jay. Appreciate it. Thanks, Chris. All right. So long, everyone. We'll see you again real soon. Bye bye.

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.