It’s really wonderful that we live in a digital age as we think about launching and running law firms because the ability to take your message to the market at some level of scale is really an unfair advantage compared to the way things were a decade ago. I am recording this video and I am going to take just a few minutes and I’m going to reach thousands of people. And to me, that was a very important part of my ability to bring only two clients with me from the large law firm where I left and managed to get to hundreds of clients is that I didn’t try to have coffee with people or go out to dinner with people or have drinks with people in order to get work. It’s not to say that I don’t do those things. I do. As a matter of fact, I had a coffee this week.

I’m going to have a breakfast with somebody else next week. And there’s nothing wrong with analog marketing. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine, J. Ru Wayne, who’s a mentor and somebody who is really a genius that everybody should know about, just came out with a book that I believe is entitled something like Analog Marketing in a Digital World. So I’m not saying that you have to be all digital, but if you are a business to business lawyer like I am, and it’s not everyone who walks down the street who’s a potential client for you, but it’s a certain type of business owner within a certain vertical. These people don’t grow on trees and not all of them are going to be ready to leave the lawyers that they’re working with now, and not all of them are going to have an immediate need for your services now.

And so to me, at least in my experience, it would not have been a good idea for me to take a lot of one-on-one meetings and to try to sit down with people and to try to email back and forth about what’s your schedule and when can we get together? Because it was a numbers game. For me, I needed to take my message to the market digitally. LinkedIn has been great for me. Video has been great for me. There have been hundreds of thousands of people who have seen my videos and I’ve spent far less. I mean, it would take a lifetime for me to network in person with all of these people. And so I have over time tried to think about how do I maximize my leverage? How do I take the most precious commodity, which I have, which is my time and get the most bang for the buck.

And so I’m definitely not telling you that you can’t take meetings in person. I’m not saying that you have to be a hundred percent digital. There is certainly an element of keeping up relationship marketing that is a good idea. But I would encourage you to not have a BS big firm marketing plan, kind of like the one that I developed for myself, the one that I was encouraged to develop myself, the one that was a lot of pressing the flesh. It didn’t do a lot for me when I was at the big law firm. I didn’t generate that large book of business because you got to find people that have what I once heard described as the can and care characteristics. They have to have the can element. They have to be able to hire you. And then the second thing is they have to care.

They have to want to hire you and to find in a business to business world, somebody that has the ability to hire you and then has the desire to hire you, it really is a lining of the stars and the moon. And so if you are not taking your message to thousands of people when you come out of the gate, I think that it might not be the smartest way to go. Certainly if you’re launching a law firm in the business to business world, if you’re highly specialized like I am, it’s just seemingly impossible, at least in my experience, to press the flesh with enough people if you come out of the large law firm with just two clients to survive. And so it’s a gift that we live in a digital world. I am fortunate to be somebody who is comfortable on video. I’m vertically positioned in the sense that all of the work that I do are for clients that tend to have similar characteristics.

And when one client loses an employee to another firm, it’s often the case that the new employer becomes a client of my firm. I tend to have some of those advantages. And certainly I have been lucky along the way to get help from a lot of good people. But a lot of people now will consider you almost like a brand. There’s the ability to enter the market as a media company-esque presence and to live rent-free in people’s heads long before they’re ready to hire you. And so take that coffee, take that lunch, do it because it’s fun. I play tennis because it’s fun. I play paddle because it’s fun. I don’t do it to get business. I go golfing because it’s fun. I don’t go golfing to get business. It would be a very tough thing for somebody to convince me that spending four or five hours on a golf course with three other people is going to be as useful of a thing as making a dozen videos that are going to be seen by tens of thousands of people over that same period of time.

So there are all different ways to market your firm and there are different times for different kinds of marketing. But when you’re coming out of the gate, if you are B2B, if you are a lawyer that is selling to businesses, you’re not selling to consumers, to individual people out there where you might not be able to take advantage of some, I don’t want to say shortcuts, but there are pay-per-click, local service ads. There’s a whole variety of different ways that you can kind of market on the internet if you’re selling to consumers that are not as readily available to a business to business lawyer like I am. I really would encourage you to consider marketing at scale. And whether that’s having a Substack where you write articles or whether however you do it, I do it with video, I do it with LinkedIn, how I’ve done it with email marketing, I’ve done it with newsletters.

However it is that you’re going to do it, I would caution you against just trying to meet with a dozen people and hoping that you’re going to get what you need because you got to take your message to a few hundred or a few thousand people, certainly at the initial stages when you’re trying to build up a client base. But for me, I have found that marketing at scale has really been an essential part of creating a law firm that has not only broken even and survived, but thrived.