MPS: [00:00:00] What are some of the success habits that you carry on a daily basis or one key thing that you do each day that continues to move the needle for you?

Jan Roos: Oh, man, okay. You're opening up a can of worms here because I've been like a huge, kind of personal productivity guy for like a long time. So, to narrow it down to one . I'll say that the, I'm like a huge devotee of David Allen getting things done if you guys are familiar with it, but I think this is a philosophy I take personally, but I also, it's one that I take with the business as well, so.

And it's basically just to make sure that I'm not keeping anything in my head. So whenever I have something come down, I literally have a note on my iPhone. I'm constantly transferring out of it. So, I just make sure that anything that pops up in my head, I get it on a to do list. And like, you know, my to do list at this point is a little bit more, you know, I've iterated on this over the years.

I use different buckets according to the GTD system. But, it's super valuable because it's like, especially, you know, I consider myself like. Fairly, I mean, if you guys were listening, how [00:01:00] fast I was talking in the beginning, you know, I'm a fairly classic high energy entrepreneur thing, which is good.

But at the same time, when the next thing comes in, I'm usually clearing the slate in my mind. So, that allows me to not be stressed on a day to day by keeping like those mental, browser tabs open, while at the same time, making sure that those good ideas that come in again is far from every idea that ends up being good, but being able to execute on that stuff.

So, from a day to day perspective, I think making sure that it doesn't have to be GTD, but having some sort of an external system to capture your thoughts and organize things. So you're not keeping keeps you in the zone and make sure that you're able to focus 100 percent of the task at hand.

MPS: Hey Law Firm Owners, welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast. We're your hosts, I'm MPS.

And,

Richard James: I'm Richard James and MPS today. We've got a great conversation. We're going to have with somebody who actually [00:02:00] works kneecap to kneecap with law firms, helping them understand how to generate more leads. And then consequently convert those leads. And that's a real exciting conversation for us because it brings real life working experience into this conversation we're having with lawyers all across the country, but we're also going to get a sneak peek behind at the entrepreneurial journey.

Am I right about that?

Jan Roos: Yes sir.

MPS: You sure are. And so Jan, super excited to have you on today. Welcome onto the pod.

Jan Roos: Thank you so much for having us guys.

MPS: Absolutely. Looking forward to it. Well, for the people that don't know you, we like to do a little icebreaker around here. So, what is maybe one thing that not everyone knows about you?

Jan Roos: Oh man. Okay. I have talked about this on LinkedIn for a bit, if you really, really look close to this ear is super, super messed up. I'm like an avid grappler. I've been doing jujitsu since I was like 20, really, really love that. And that's something that people don't know if they're just listening to my voice for sure.

Richard James: Well, you said since you were 20, forgive me, like you both look not very far off [00:03:00] 20 anyway. So like, yeah.

Jan Roos: I'm actually 33, I spend lot of my times indoors as most good digital marketers do. So the sun damage has been, and, you know, I lived up north for quite some time. So been able to stay out of the sun for a long time.

Richard James: I see that explains, I'm a golfer and lived Phoenix for 15 years. That's why I look like a catcher's I get So, so, so Hey, tell me, are you married with kids? What does that look like for you in the personal life?

Jan Roos: Oh, uh, engaged. but yeah, try to get that figured out as soon as possible.

Richard James: Yeah, understood. Yep. We, we just went through the engage to marriage process with MPS here.

So, it's a fun journey. Enjoy it the whole way through. Michael, where do you want to go from here?

MPS: Yeah. No, I mean, so, obviously we got a little initial sneak peek about what we're going to discuss today. But, why don't you take us through your entrepreneurial journey a little bit? If you want to focus in on the field of law. Great. But why don't you just share your journey a little bit with us?

Where'd you start and how are you here?

Jan Roos: Awesome. So I'll try to kind of skip the most [00:04:00] relevant, like, to the most relevant stuff, but basically Case Fuel is my current company. And I actually formally rebranded it. The original name for that was, it was expert engines, but that's actually the second business that I started. So my, career is kind of oscillated in between sales stuff and doing my own businesses.

I actually ended up starting a business directly out of college. So I went to school in Canada, a place called McGill University, and I got really involved with the entrepreneurship department down there. And they had actually had this fantastic business plan competition. I ended up winning a grant when I was in school.

So I was able to take that and parlay that into my first businesses, the now defunct, uh, Company called Vitality Sciences, but anyway, super, super fun experience. And I just kind of dove both feet into just getting a lot of the direct response education that I got really, really attracted to. I know we were talking a little bit on the pre call about Dan Kennedy, but I just got headlong into this stuff.

It was me and a partner. I was marketing and [00:05:00] sales. He was financing operations and sourcing and ran that for a couple of different years. So, we ended up having some awesome success. Like we were super early on a lot of things, maybe too early. Like we were doing, uh, you know, fulfilling by Amazon stuff in like 2013.

Like we're doing a bunch of like, you know, Facebook to long form, like, you know, copy automation, email sequences. And then, eventually kind of got to the point where we had some differences in the partnership. So I ended up transitioning out of there. But I'm kind of along the ways too. So we ended up launching that in South mode.

I worked for a big fortune 500 called insight, actually funny enough, located out of Arizona, if you guys are familiar with the name. so I got some awesome sales training through that. And then I ended up working for, In between the sense on that, I was working for first aid at doing door to door sales, which was quite fun.

As you guys know. Anyway, so I was kind of getting into this and I ended up in between these situations and I was like, I got this marketing skills that I feel like this is something I want to lean into. So my first idea about this was, well, look, you know, the most valuable stuff is the stuff that the fewest people can do.

[00:06:00] Let's do these, you know, highfalutin pay traffic, you know, email marketing automation stuff. And I ended up getting really into, I was doing a lot of training with Perry Marshall, doing some Google AdWords stuff. So I had all this thing like rattling around in my head, had a couple of false starts in terms of the, like, I wouldn't say like, just not really good, like niche down stuff.

But what I found was the paid traffic stuff was very, very attractive to people. And it was easier for me to position because. I didn't have to wait 12 months for things to pan out. And this was, you know, we're talking like 2014, 2015. So SEO is kind of the name of the game at the time. So it was really, really easy to position us against that kind of dominant thing that was going on.

So. I'm going through this Perry Marshall class, and they're like talking about all these different things, man, I really got a niche down. Like, I can't be working with these, like, 1031 exchange experts and blah, blah, blah, and then I was walking to like, one of my appointments on a job, uh, it was living in Manhattan at the time crossing Essex street.

I look over my shoulder. I'm of course, [00:07:00] like multitasking, listening to a podcast while composing an email. There's a car coming. It's like, you know, it's not gonna be able to stop short. So I end up, and this will connect to the icebreaker. I ended up hitting a judo break fall on the, uh, on the lid of the car.

So I didn't get away with anything worse than kind of a bruised shinbone. But I was like, you know, they're talking about personal injury attorney. So I'm like, there we go. That's my ticket. So I ended up, one of the things that we'd done at the first startup to get a lot of, and this is one of my like, you know, favorite things for getting into direct response, doing a lot of cold email outreach.

So I decided to cold email outreach every single personal injury attorney that was advertising in Manhattan and Google at the time. And, I said something to the effect of, Hey, you know, I got hit on a car across the Essex, by the way, I work with this stuff and I kind of noticed you're directing your ad traffic to a homepage and I'm not sure if you know, you're aware of this, but you could probably increase your conversion rates a little bit by doing this.

So I ended up landing an absolute whale of a client. And, it was this guy, Yeah, the [00:08:00] record jury verdict for, Kings County, which is Brooklyn. And that was kind of the start of it. So that was like, you know, a marquee client we're pursuing these super, you know, niche construction action cases and, you know, got some big wins.

And then that was kind of where the portfolio started to develop from there. So, we kind of, I always do a lot of stuff like behind the scenes too. So basically, you know, trying to go to the philosophy, I've always tried to kind of sell against the current. So SEO was kind of dominant at the time. So AdWords was really, really attractive.

And, but the thing is that the way that a lot of people were doing AdWords where they were selling traffic and the issue was, you know, there's a huge conversation about conversion that's not happening with it. So, you know, while some people were fighting to shave an extra 2 cents off of their Pay Per Click, we were trying to get the conversion rate from 10 percent on the website up to 25%.

So, we wrote that for a really, really long time. I actually wrote my first book on that back in 2017, but it was awesome because we ended up getting some honestly fantastic results. But again, this is kind of like, you know, four or five year acumen. The [00:09:00] stuff that was new ended up kind of become, well, I wouldn't say like AdWords was ever new at the time, but doing AdWords effectively was, we had like a really awesome strategy, a combination of Google kind of taking some of those things away.

And also, it got to the point where we could not get on the phone with somebody who hadn't already been convinced that AdWords, like, didn't work or had someone that they loved that was doing it for them. And, we just started trying to solve some other problems, so it got to the point where the one thing and, you know, we can kind of get into this and like a broader, like marketing conversation, but the one thing that didn't work for us, we were able to work with basically every practice area within legal, but the state plan, we always had trouble with.

And it wasn't that we weren't able to generate leads. We just weren't able to generate the kind of leads that most of the clients were looking for, wanted to work with. So it was fantastic at generating probate stuff, but it was like, I want to do this high ticket pre planning. You know, I know people charge 4, 000, 5, 000 for this, but I just can't get anyone who's not price shopping me on the phone.

I was, you know, kind of going back to this direct response [00:10:00] stuff. My favorite book that I ever discovered in that huge journey was Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. I'm like, this is a classic market awareness problem, but nobody's marketing for this stuff. So we started getting into this really, really heavily towards the end of 2019, which is really, really interesting timing.

So we had a couple of clients, we found that there was some really good success. And just as far as modeling what was working on, like a lot of the stuff that the, seven figure plus estate planning firms that we'd seen were like, you know, for the most part, all of them had some page on their website that said workshops or, seminars or events or something like that.

So putting two and two together, like, you know, these guys are cracking this in an offline way, they're able to get this non solution aware traffic and end up getting this to work. So we signed a couple of those and then the world ended. So we're looking at March of 2020. We were kind of trying out some stuff with a couple of really, you know, awesome, fun, clients.

And, you know, it was just kind of like, you know, whatever, let's take a flyer. These guys seem okay, then we get the call in March. It was like, Hey, look, the governor just told me I can't run these events. Um, you know, Got a close 250, [00:11:00] 000 to keep my offices open next month. What do you say about getting a little more intensive development into these bargaining?

So to make a super long story short, uh, we basically ended up focusing on taking the seminar model at the time online. So replacing direct mail with Facebook ads. Eventually we ended up working into YouTube ads as well and taking the seminar into an online webinar. But between those two things, we were able to, you know, in the short term get the firms that we were working with to keep the lights on and get to really discuss and then we basically took stuff on the road and that's kind of what we've been working on ever since.

So, that was back in May of 2020. we've worked with over 250 estate planning firms since then, but it's always just kind of a journey, right?

Because, you know, you start off with people who have the presentation. You got to learn how to write the presentation with people who don't, There's people who have awesome intake departments. There's people who don't, there's people who don't have their clothes. There's people who don't. So there's a lot of different things that we've ended up having to kind of get as accessory.

But I think a lot of it is just kind of the [00:12:00] extension of like, you know, I know you guys are a fan of, The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, what's the limiting factor and a lot of times. It's something that isn't directly in your control. So I guess sort of the philosophy that we've taken over the years is let's look at the problem from the widest frame possible.

And like, what can we recommend to get people done? But, um, just kind of a result of that.

Richard James: So yeah, let me zoom you out. So here we go. So, you dropped a whole bunch of names that probably a lot of the law firm owners that are listening to this. Don't know like Dan Kennedy, Perry Marshall, right? And, these are names that are direct response one on one that you come from the same world that we came from.

And you've had a great, an interesting journey. I think the headline writes itself. The idea literally hit me, right? with the car that hit you in the PI concept. So, you've got a great headline that launched you into this niche, which is wonderful. And then, you know, as you learn that they, most of the pay per click scenarios were being driven to homepages, not landing pages.

What, one of the first things I did when we built the law firm in Phoenix is we took all, when we [00:13:00] built our website in pay per click, you know, the pay per click company we were going to work with way back when called reach local, very old company, and, they wanted to drive to the webpage. I go, no, we're driving to a landing page.

And he goes, oh, that'll never work. And I'm like, well, okay, let's see. And you know, one of the reasons we were able to jump ahead of everybody else is we were converting it somewhere around 32 percent from our unique traffic to our landing page, over to, unique leads and, and whereas normal, you know, homepage traffic converts somewhere between four and seven.

If you're lucky, depending on how you do it. And so that was an early conversion tactic that we use that you said that you identified as a hole in the market. And then from there, you were able to leverage that into, okay, you know, how do we find additional firms that may want to have, do marketing a different way?

Use direct response marketing. But from an infomercial perspective, webinar perspective, that language that is in our world so prevalent, and bring it to law. And we agree with that [00:14:00] wholeheartedly. We've been talking about that with attorneys for years. And quite frankly, there's not a lot of agencies that are willing to do it and they don't love the model and they don't understand the model.

And so, when I heard that you guys were doing this, I was thrilled to find out. Finally, there's an agency that's willing to do it for them because I used to like, I used to show them how to go hire a personal assistant or a marketing assistant or whatever, and try to paste it together themselves.

And it was so complicated and very few of them actually got it done that I was thrilled to hear that a company like yours was actually just going to do it for them. And then from there, you've taken all the knowledge you learned about conversion. You took all the knowledge you've now learned about working with lawyers combined it with the webinar, you know, the seminar online COVID hit became, you know, you had to turn it into the, necessity is the mother of invention.

Right? So here you launch something that solved a very unique problem for your clients. And then from there, you realize, oh, my gosh, yeah, we're doing a great job finally generating leads, but these guys have no idea how to convert them most of the time, not all the time, but most of the [00:15:00] time, or, they maybe know how to do intake, but they don't know how to do sales or they know how to do sales, but they don't know how to do intake or God forbid, they don't know how to do either.

And then they'll say things like these leads are lousy. No, these leads aren't lousy. It has nothing to do with these leads are lousy. These leads are awesome, you just have to know how to convert them. And so, you know, I love that journey because it paints the picture so readily for the truths you discovered along the way that the attorneys that are watching this need to know, right?

Don't drive your traffic to your home page. Make sure you pay attention to using long form content and online seminars to convert traffic or to generate traffic. When the traffic comes in, if you don't have your lead conversion machine in place, you're going to spend a whole bunch of money on marketing and you're not going to convert a lot of leads because you don't have your lead conversion machine in place.

And so I love that you just summarize this lesson in your journey. So, I mean, anything you want to add to that, that I said that you want to plus one on?

Jan Roos: No, a hundred percent. And like I also say this too, like, I don't necessarily think webinars are a huge fit for every service. Like I think when it [00:16:00] comes down to it, like I wouldn't want to be running a webinar ad for somebody who's looking for motor vehicle accidents. But as time's kind of gone on, we found some really interesting applications for it.

And it's kind of interesting, like, there's a lot of like very, very classically AdWords like, we're working on a project right now, I'm super keen to see how it ends up launching because the early test has gone fantastic. But, you know, even divorce law, for example, right? You have situation where there's the day.

And, you know, if you're on the receiving end of the divorce, you're going to get the papers. You got a certain amount of time to respond. You type in family law attorney, Minneapolis, and that's a solution based problem. But on the flip side. The other party didn't come to that conclusion over one day. Most likely, you've probably been picking up strikes for months or even years at this point.

So, getting webinars for people who are considering to file for divorce is a huge opportunity. People who are considering filing for bankruptcy. People who have an ongoing immigration issue or even, you know, some aspects of the probate process can be kind of, you know, Wrapped into this. [00:17:00] But yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity even outside of estate planning for doing this kind of stuff.

But I'm always at the end of the day, like a right tool, right job kind of guy from marketing perspective.

Richard James: Yeah, Michael, we just recorded an updated module on this. Remember? On the scale from 1 to 10 concept, right? So, identifying readiness in the consult, Michael is vital because in those practice areas you mentioned, not everybody is ready. Is that right? Michael, you want to address that?

MPS: Yeah. I mean, the marketing kind of plays right into the sales process, right? Is this exploration phase. Not every person is coming into a consult ready to necessarily take the next step, especially in the practice areas you mentioned, there's this exploration that has to happen. And so we've got to have the right sales system in place to also address that.

You talk about the right marketing system in place to address the exploration. Same thing applies with the sales process, but I'm curious, Jan, so during that journey, was there ever a, like failure point or a down [00:18:00] point in that journey and something you took from it?

Jan Roos: Oh, man. So many. I mean, the thing is, honestly, I think the closest I really got to hanging things up was probably right before we ended up making the switch to stay planning. And, um, you know, if I can get super vulnerable in this show, I'll say something that you don't really hear a lot with people talking about entrepreneurship.

I'm not going to get too crazy. Don't worry. But it was at that point where, you know, you have the situation where it comes down to making payroll or paying off your personal credit card. And I decided to make payroll a bunch of that too. So I got to the situation where I'd racked up like $20, 30,000 of like, of credit card debt, which sucked.

and I got to the point where I was like, you know, we're doing okay at the level that we were at. And again, like before all this stuff happened, this is just, you know, kind of like a sidebar to this timeline. Like, you know, we got 18 people on the team right now. I was, one and a couple of part time people for a time to, and, you know, we were netting what we were netting.

so I was just making a couple little dent in that, I mean, picking off a couple thousand dollars per month and, you know, I'm extrapolating this out [00:19:00] and it got to the point where I was like, you know what, honestly, there's an opportunity to make an investment in some stuff for software that we're going to do.

It was pretty hefty. It was like, you know, it was, you know, we had to put a down payment that would have gotten erased all the progress that I'd made on the personal stuff too. And I was like, you know what, honestly. I can either go big or go home with this. And the truth is I can't have the benefit of working bankruptcy attorneys.

So I was like, I know it's not the end of the world if I have to file for bankruptcy. So, you know, let's just give it a hundred percent. And that was super instrumental in what we were able to parlay into the success that we found in the estate planning stuff, not three months after the fact. So it's kind of one of those things where I think.

There's, you know, commitment's obviously a thing. I don't think this is the decision I'd recommend for every single person I've worked with this decision I made for myself. But, you know, things can get hard sometimes, but the worst thing to do is to be in a situation when you're facing pain and not doing anything about it.

Right. So I made probably a little bit of a cowboy move, in [00:20:00] response to do that. But sometimes I think you gotta pay, take the big risk. That's that's kind of, what I take from that.

Richard James: Well, it comes down to, you know, it's relative to like, what's going on in your life. Like, if you're in your late thirties, early forties, and you've got two young kids and you're trying to save for college and your spouse is at home raising the kids and they're not working.

And, you know, the risk factor is a lot greater, right? If you've got a lot more to lose, whereas if you're younger and single and don't have a kids and aren't married or whatever, and you know, you don't have any real responsibilities, you can take a lot more risks and you were in that position where you were able to take a lot more risks and be able to say yes.

And, and look, I mean, there's always a cost to opening up every business. There's a learning curve to it. And, you know, until you understand the basic mechanics of profitability and generating cashflow and figuring out the right formula of what works to generate leads, what works to convert those leads and what works to serve the client well, it can be a challenge, but when lawyers are going through this. You know, [00:21:00] one of the things, you know, we always caution about is, is make sure you're doing everything with your eyes wide open and don't build up this mound of debt, because it creates a ton of stress.

I mean, would you agree that having that debt holding of your head with the credit card debt created a bunch of stress for you?

Jan Roos: Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So it's I'll say yes, but like after the fact too, it just sort of became something I got used to, which was not good. But the other thing too, is that like, I ended up seeing some health people after the fact and I was just like, Oh geez, like, I don't know why I'm waking up in the middle of the night.

They're like, yeah, dude, your cortisol levels are insane. It's like you were in the trenches in world war one. So like, even if you don't feel it, you know, it's showing up somewhere physically more than likely. So yeah, I totally agree.

Richard James: Yeah. So, you know, kudos to you for continuing to fight, continuing to find it, and work at finding it and then finally finding it and then once you found it now taking off. And you know serving a couple hundred estate planning attorneys through this model so I mean Michael, you know, [00:22:00] you've been pretty debt free your whole life.

You're pretty debt adverse but so I don't know that you have that stress too much. I mean you own a home and You got that there and you just bought a business. You have some debt there. So certainly have some debt, but you have to have it be manageable to you. Correct? Michael?

MPS: I consider it calculated debt, right? So I'm very strategic about what debt I'm willing to take on. And I've got to know that I can absolutely cover that for me to be willing to and okay with taking it on. But I think calculated debt could be good debt in some cases because that's leverage as a tool.

You don't want to over leverage yourself. But leverage is a tool to continue to grow whatever it is that you want to grow, income, assets, whatever it may be. So yes, debt free in a sense that I don't have credit card debt hanging over me. I have debt from assets that I would consider. So calculated debt.

Richard James: I don't want to take you off, but I just want to address this since we're listening to it. And we've got attorneys [00:23:00] listening to this. I think, we've all now worked with law firms enough. We know where their case values are. We know how their leads convert. We know how much they can generate, and we should have a rough idea of their overall profitability.

Is it fair to say that now that we know what we know, when a law firm can start to generate leads, if they just learn how to convert those leads into paying clients, and assuming they know how to serve them in the legal practice that they're serving them in, There should be no reason why they should go negative cashflow at all.

Do you generally agree with that Jan or do you see it differently?

Jan Roos: Not for long, at least. So, I mean, that's kind of the situation and another huge reason that I've been like a big fan of paid traffic and it does kind of come from what we were selling against SEO. But like, you know, there's, I generally recommend if people are making the leap, you know, I think you can kind of everyone starts with the same table stakes.

You've got your referral base. That's kind of probably could start coming in. So when you do that, as a matter of fact, the only way that I think that you lose that bet is at if you're not committed to the intake side of things. And I think like probably the most [00:24:00] toxic mindset that you can have making that first investment is that I paid the money.

This should take care of itself. and there's process that goes into it, but there's also mindset because if you want to commit to this being something that's not your responsibility, you'll be able to find the kinks and whatever it is that you're working with.

Richard James: Yeah, that's a great point. Michael, do you want to add to that?

MPS: No, I think it's very well said, just that whole mindset of like, let me write the check and it all goes away, right? I'm just going to say it to the law firm owners that think that if that's truly what you think, you shouldn't own a law firm.

You should probably I'm just being honest, you should probably go work for somebody because that's just not what business ownership is. You're not just going to write a check and have it all go away, right? You've got to put work into it. Now you can put people in front of you to do that work, but you shouldn't have that mindset. And so Jan, I definitely agree with that.

I probably added a bit more of an extreme point to it, but I think it's an important point. What I'm [00:25:00] curious to know is, now that you've got Case Fuel, obviously you made a good pivot. 2020 things started going north for you, which was great. What are some of the success habits that you carry on a daily basis or one key thing that you do each day that continues to move the needle for you?

I use different buckets according to the GTD system. But, it's super valuable because it's like, especially, you know, I consider myself like. Fairly, I mean, if you guys were listening, how fast I was talking in the beginning, you know, I'm a fairly classic high energy entrepreneur thing, which is good.

Richard James: I love it. I love that answer, yeah. Getting stuff out of your I mean, you guys are younger and so you can use your phone and don't get me wrong I will use my phone but I [00:27:00] oftentimes forget and I've got a you know Yellow legal pad laying around at all times where or my remarkable so it's one of three places.

But I got to get out of my head onto a format that I can manage and measure on a regular basis and every day I have to take, you know, there's a few minutes every day that I have to unpack all those things I wrote down and put them in the proper orders and just make sure that I'm psychologically crossing things off of a list.

And so otherwise, if it stays in my head, it's a bad place. Michael, how do you manage it?

MPS: Yeah. I usually use my phone with notes. I create a lot of to do lists with notes in my phone, but not only does it help to be able to visualize it and get a to do list, but also just like the emptying of what's in your head is helpful. Just I think for your mental sake, otherwise you've got this stuff that's constantly sitting there and you're trying to remember, you're trying to think about it.

And then it just bogs you down in my opinion. So I think that's a great tip. And I think it's super helpful. And just from an organization [00:28:00] standpoint, it's lucrative to be able to do. Yeah.

And, Jan what's got you fired up today? What are you excited about? It could be personal, it could be business. What's got you excited?

Jan Roos: Okay, so I got to say, I've been super excited about, you know, it's end of the year. I don't know when this is going to come out, but basically, you know, we're going to have, 2024 coming out and I'm as excited as I've been about the estate planning stuff. We've had some really, really interesting breakthroughs coming in on these other versions of the practice that I was kind of alluding to before so it's like I've been kind of considering this the I call it the gray zone.

This is I recorded a podcast on it So like, you know not being fully black as in, you know The MVA case that needs to be taken care of not right not being fully white in the sense of the state planning thing that you have between the day you turn 18 and dying to figure out, but the stuff that's in the gray zone, because I think it's super, super exciting.

And one of the big reasons why I think that this is something that, people should be excited about is like, you know, If you look at the cost per [00:29:00] click on Google, there's never been a year where it's gone down. And as these things have become a little bit easier to access and a little bit more democratized, it's only going to continue to go up in those things.

And I think there's also been some, you know, I could probably go on a rant about how Google's been profiting massively off of getting everyone to do automated bidding and essentially setting the price for these things. But, even if you have a situation where you're able to do this stuff properly, and it's going to be more difficult as time goes on, there is a cap to the amount of people that are going to be searching for a given practice area at a given time, with the exception of those extremely.

you know, black situations. Right? But again, it's like, this constantly surprises me. Like even within the term of like motor vehicle accidents, like we have a situation where we're working with a firm outside of Los Angeles and there's people, you know, there's underserved communities, they don't know that these are things that you can do and they have car accidents and they have bills and they have ongoing care and they just never called an attorney and if it's within the statute of [00:30:00] limitations and all those things are lined up in a way that you can make a case of it.

That's money. That's what's walking around that you don't have to pick up. Right. But, I go back to, and I've been dropping way too many names in this podcast, but, Chet Holmes sales pyramid, right. And he talks about at any given market, there's 3 percent of people who are actively searching for something.

And you know, there's people that are open to it. There's people that are considering it, and there's people that would be open to it if they're presented with the information, but that's really where this stuff lives. And to kind of break things down into brass tacks for anyone who's familiar with advertising on Google.

If we're talking about stuff like personal injury, we've got what, two, three, 400 a click, sometimes, these costs per calls are getting up to seven, 800 bucks. That was 125, 200 when we got started. And still it's like, you know, it's tough to make business on that kind of stuff too.

But when you look at the situation on other networks and this really requires a fundamentally, completely different approach to marketing because we have to get attention as opposed to [00:31:00] capture attention and decision that was already made. I always used to say it's like, you know, when it comes to Google, the only question you need to answer is why you, but with these other potential avenues of getting in front of people, it's why you, but it's also why now.

But to kind of give some examples that I think are cool, like, this is going to boy, I'm trying to think if I share this, uh, I share this with a private mastermind. This is the first time I'm going live with this on a podcast, but I'm going to the absolute extremes. We have a mesothelioma client.

That's like, you know, the definitional insane cost per click, right? 500 bucks. Right? we are getting clicks for a client on YouTube for a campaign that we're doing for a very specific thing. I'll kind of leave it at that high level, but clicks for 2, 3 bucks a pop. We've been getting filled out completed surveys for $60, a fifth of the cost of a click. And then these are, you know, you guys know mesothelioma cases. But that's the opportunity for doing this. And I think, it's super unexploited. And I know there's people that [00:32:00] are, you know, probably marketing leaders at firms, probably marketing leaders with their own stuff.

And I just think there's so much to be taken advantage of and being able to learn this, but it requires a fundamentally different approach than put your stand up in front of the Google traffic and, you know, just make sure to talk about your free consultation, your biggest case values. Right? so I think it's a huge opportunity.

And, you know, it's certainly something we've been focusing on and, you know, trying to leverage this kind of time goes on. So that's kind of the big thing that I'm excited about right now.

Richard James: yeah, it's great. And I love it. I mean, every, there's still going to be the, you're still going to have to be required to have the sign out there that positions why you that still has to be there. This isn't any of the war. It's a both. And you need to be developing this other marketing technique.

If there's going to be more and more business going that direction. And no, we don't know a lot about the mesothelioma case is only because we don't play in mass tort very much. It's not where we typically spend a lot of our time. Most of our time, quite frankly, is spent with estate [00:33:00] planning firms and bankruptcy firms and family law firms and criminal and immigration tax resolution, right?

Some P. I. Some workers comp, social security, employment law. Where it's consumer facing and it's usually a, most of the time fee based where they're figuring out how much they need to charge, how they get paid, how they actually get money during the initial consultation. And so, but what you just talked about works everywhere.

I mean, you know, it works everywhere and it's going to work better in some places, not the other. And as you said it, the listener of this podcast, who's sitting in their office right now, wondering where to start. They have to start by changing their mindset a little bit about the way they're going to acquire business in the future.

Because as you said. It's going to get cost prohibitive at some point to pay for a Google late, even if you're great at intake, even if you're great at sales, it's going to start getting to the point where it gets really, really cost prohibitive. And so I'm excited that you guys have this next level.

If I'm honest, when I first saw you doing it for estate planning, the first thought went through my head is. [00:34:00] Huh. I wonder when they'll figure this out for the other practice areas. So, I'm excited that you're going to do that because I always knew it was there, and I'm looking forward to watching what you can do and we can't wait to introduce you to a lot of our folks that have all those other practice areas as well.

Jan Roos: and it's interesting to just, I'll say one more thing on just what it kind of takes to get this up to because the gut reaction and we've had so many opportunities to kind of see this is that when, and it's the same thing, like when people go to referral to advertising for the first time, they're like, God, this is a little tougher to close.

Richard James: Right.

Jan Roos: I think this is a low quality lead. I kind of like kind of work on this lead quality and the same thing too. It's tough because when you're used to having stuff coming in from, you know, and just kind of going back to the customer journey stuff. If you're dealing with people who are on Google, they decide to hire an attorney before they type that in, before they click, before they wound up on your calendar.

So you have the situation where, I mean, there's things and you guys are fantastic. I was listening to like some of the episodes in preparation for this. You guys have been on this for years. If you get the situation, replacing outbound calls, [00:35:00] getting people on the phone call 70, 80%, right? Like those are the numbers that most people don't even deal with because they're waiting for the second email, which blows my mind.

But once you do, so again, you start with the table stakes that, we might have to be the one initiate the contact. We start with the table stakes that yes, they are curious at this point. But if you are committed to walking through the process with them, showing them, and then this is just, you know, basic.

Well, I guess basic for the broader sales world, but maybe probably for the advanced fraternities, you know, illustrating the challenges that they're going to face and what's going to happen if they don't move forward to it, you should be able to take curiosity and turn that into a solution, that they come to themselves.

And if you can do that, the world is your oyster. And it is, I mean, again, like, I always kind of think about these things. It's like the commitment of dynamics as they change, you know, imagine what it would have been like to be on Google in 2007. Right? Like, that's where this stuff is at right now.

And. It's, you know, the advantage is going to diminish as time goes on. Right. I think all these things [00:36:00] equalize over time, but, you know, that's just, that's kind of the stuff to them. And I'm a weirdo. I like trying to, figure these things out as opposed to following like blueprints and stuff.

But well, again, whatever you get the idea. but again, that's what we have fun. And, you know, we'll, we'll try to have fun with this for as long as time as we can.

MPS: Yeah, I love it. where can people go to find out a little bit more about you if they want to?

Jan Roos: Okay. Awesome. So if you guys want to check out CaseFuel.Com, you'll obviously see some very heavily a safe planning focused content around that. But, you know, we've got an email list, if you guys also want to check out my podcast, it's a Law Firm Growth podcast. We talk about a lot of these topics, you know, it's been recommended not to listen to that one on double speed if that's what you do.

But, uh, anyways, that would be, it's at many, uh, CaseFuel. com. Check out the email list. That'd probably be my recommendation.

MPS: Awesome.

Richard James: You said you wrote a book, right?

Jan Roos: Yeah, so we got 2. So basically, I got 1 on Amazon. That's called a legal marketing fast lane. That's on AdWords. Again, if you were trying to get AdWords off the ground, it's still a great book. It's usually top 5 in law firm marketing if you search that. And [00:37:00] then we also have, BeyondIntakeBook.Com.

So a lot of this is just stuff that we've discovered in the process of doing this kind of, just, it's about adapting intake processes so that a lot of them are designed for inbound. But if you're again, willing to make some mindset shifts, willing to make a couple of process shifts, it's just about how that's set up.

And I really do think that that is the key to unlocking this whole other tranche of traffic that I think the industry is, waiting for the tidal wave to hit.

MPS: Awesome.

Love it. Well, Jan, we really appreciate you coming on today. And to the law firm owners listening, thank you for taking the time to listen. As you know, we have the gentleman's agreement around here. So we just ask that in exchange, if this isn't your first time for listening, if you got some value today, make sure to drop a like.

Hit that follow or subscribe button depending on where you're listening or watching and comment down below. Show Jan some love. Um, just really great episode here, but Jan, thank you again for taking the time to be on today.

Jan Roos: Thank you so much for having me guys.

MPS: Absolutely.

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