Marketing Jiu-Jitsu: In-House vs. Agency Marketing, with Matthew Silva

Great lawyers don't always know

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Welcome to Elawvate: Build

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Welcome to Elawvate: Build and Grow

Your Law Firm. I'm Jeff Wright,

chief operating officer

at Gideon Asen. As always,

joined by your hosts,

extraordinaire Ben Gideon,

owner partner of Gideon Asen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good morning, Jeff.

Come on. I work on those

so hard for you, Ben.

I know. I know. You're looking

good this morning in bison wear.

I got the bison wear on and you're

joining us in the suit. Why is that?

Every now and then I like to

pretend I'm a real lawyer.

Okay, good. It's a good look for you.

Thanks.

So before we get started today,

we do have a very special

guest that we'll get into,

but like to give a shout out

to our three sponsors. Ben,

if you want to start us off with Supio.

Show today is sponsored

as always by Supio,

which is an AI platform designed

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has been vetted by Trial Lawyers and is

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So there's a pretty broad

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encourage other firms to join us

in doing that. So with that, Jeff,

can I introduce our guest?

Yeah. So we are joined

today by Matt Silva.

Matt is our director of

marketing here at Gideon Asen.

For those of you that have been

listening to this Build and Grow podcast

all along,

a lot of it is in regards to how our

strategic plan that we launched January

of 2025 is going, our

trials and tribulations.

And one of the key milestones

in that plan was us making a

determination on whether we were going

to go with a third party marketing firm

or if it made more sense

to bring somebody in-house.

Obviously we landed on the in-house

version and Matt's been with us 15

months roughly, Matt, ballpark.

Yep, that's right.

Who would like to introduce Matt Silva

and you can tell us a little something

about yourself, Matt.

Gentlemen, thank you for

having me. The day has come.

The day has come. I know

you've been pining for this.

Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah, the podcast

has been great and I'm happy to join.

I really enjoy all of the guests

you've had to date, but yeah,

let's get into it. So about me,

I come from a background

of digital marketing and

that's from the very beginning,

foot in the door, agency work,

doing SEO work that now

would seem so outdated,

but somebody had to do it.

And I was happy to do it with the

opportunity that I had with a local agency

here in Maine actually. From there,

I just really punched up and developed

my skillset joining some of the

largest agencies in the country,

doing executive accounts, PPC,

SEO. And then after a

while with agency work,

you kind of understand where it

ends and it's time to go in-house.

And I jumped in some

businesses here in Maine.

I worked with other firms nationally

and I saw this opportunity

here in my backyard.

And Jeff,

I remember our first call on the

phone and you asked me, "Well,

what would you do here?"

And I was like, "Well,

let's see." And I started talking about

channels and organizing into campaigns,

developing funnels,

attribution. And you said,

"Why don't you come on

in?" And here we are.

Yeah, I actually remember that well, Matt,

because we put a posting

up and we were not,

I don't even want to say we

were cautiously optimistic.

We didn't know if what we were looking

for was going to be available in our

market.

And a lot of the applicants I got were

people that were independent people that

had their own agency and wanted

us to be one of many customers.

And there was just a lot

of garbage applications.

And then when I got you on the phone

and you started talking about what you

would do very intelligently and stepwise,

I remember going to Ben and saying, "Ben,

I need you to meet this guy." Of course,

I screwed up the dates of our

first face-to-face interview.

You came what I thought was the day

early, but it was actually my mistake.

You left the interview and

Ben and I looked at each

other and we're like, "Yeah,

we found someone in our own backyard

that we want to move forward with." So it

was good.

Yeah. I mean, from that conversation,

we've done just that with

this marketing operation.

I'm really proud of what

we built here. 16 channels,

three campaigns.

We're refining attribution

here to understand performance.

And we're really in the beginning

stages of the entire operation still

to this date, and we have so much room

to expand and grow. It's exciting for me.

I mean,

this position goes well beyond digital

marketing and we've all learned lessons

in that. So yeah, it's given

me everything I've needed.

I need to ask you this because

I promised Taylor that I would.

So our listeners need to know you're

also a high-level jiu-jitsu practitioner.

When you're not working on marketing,

you're mostly training in jiu-jitsu and

that's brought you all over the world,

China, Japan, everywhere.

What lessons can translate

from jiu-jitsu to marketing

for firms that are out there that

are building a marketing program?

And I'm sort of being tongue in cheek,

but I also think that's a serious question

because there's a lot of parallels

here. So tell us about that.

Yeah, that's a softball for me.

I think about this all the time,

and it's not just marketing. I mean,

I'm so involved in jiu-jitsu

strategically and tactically.

I study, I practice,

but when I think about parallels

with what I do in marketing and how I

train my jiu-jitsu,

it's a constant process of competitively

identifying what's being

done out in the field,

looking at what's not being done,

bringing that into the

training room and drilling

it. Is it applicable?

Okay, it's applicable.

Is it working with resistance?

Okay, here are the problem areas.

Now we're going to refine this

against higher-level opponents and so

on. So it's this constant process

of experimentation, refinement,

execution that is really never

ending - just the way things work

competitively. There's others also

in the field doing the same thing.

So really drives what

everybody's doing forward.

And that's exactly what I see in marketing

and why I enjoy marketing so much. I

see it as a competitive zero-sum

game that somebody's winning,

somebody's improving on, and if

you're not within that process,

you're reading the blog that

somebody's putting out with data that

somebody's two steps ahead on because

they're in that refinement and execution

process. So yeah,

that's the biggest thing for me is that

curve there where it's so critical to be

on the edge. And with all of

these channels and developments,

updates and whatnot,

following all these platforms,

there's so much opportunity for that.

Matt, I think when you started,

a lot of our listeners are probably in

a very similar place to where Gideon

Asen was. So just for a little background,

Gideon Asen, before you started,

did no direct to consumer marketing,

no real brand awareness

campaigns, anything.

Very little.

The crux of what was done prior to

you arriving was all B2B and other

attorneys.

And Gideon Asen is a very

well-known commodity in the attorney

world, especially in New England.

So one of your challenges was,

okay, how do we do brand awareness?

How do we launch a direct

to consumer really from

scratch because it's not

something that we had done?

So can you kind of speak to that because

I'm sure there are firms out there that

are in very similar

situations to how we were.

Yeah, absolutely.

So I did have some experience

with brand awareness and

obviously direct to consumer

marketing, digital marketing.

That was the bulk of what I

was doing. When I came here,

I'm not necessarily a brand person,

but Ben really teed us up

with the StoryBrand model and

that allowed me to have a

direction to think in and

to understand the angle that we need

to put Gideon Asen in front of the

audience with. And with that,

I then went back to the technicals of

digital marketing and organized channels

into branding and lead gen. For me,

that was important because I need the

channels to function not on the same

playing field, meaning brand awareness,

it's critical for us to introduce

ourselves to the largest audience

possible while not necessarily

weighing it against lead

generation. And for the same dollar spent,

what is the performance

there in developing KPIs

that made sense for each of

those campaigns?

So obviously lead gen,

we really care about the cost per lead,

cost per acquisition, brand awareness.

We really care about

impressions, frequency, the CPM.

So layering the brand piece with

our messaging and behind that,

the technicals of the

campaign is how, in my mind,

I put that together and push that forward.

You talked about the StoryBrand concept.

Can you explain to listeners

what that's all about?

Yeah,

so actually the StoryBrand - that

was really good for me to understand

because I had never pitched anything

in my digital marketing career other

than here's what it is, here's the value

proposition, sell, sell, sell, sell.

The StoryBrand model flips that on

its head and puts the consumer first.

It makes them the hero in the journey

and allows the brand to connect with

them where they're at now, which

is critical in what we do, right?

It's really the only viable model I see,

especially in PI med mal, where these are

catastrophic events in people's lives.

You come across, you know,

what's going on in these people's

lives and put yourself in their shoes.

And I couldn't imagine dealing

with lawyer shopping and just being

sold,

but with somebody with some compassion

and can connect with me with where I'm at

and understand what I'm facing

on a deeper level. I think

that idea in and of itself has so much

value outside of we can share our

value propositions and say X, Y,

and Z about why we're

better than everybody else.

And while those may be valid,

it's the humility piece for me

that just makes the most sense.

And yeah, so anybody who isn't

familiar with that in the industry,

I think really should be because it's

an element of the work that I think

really shouldn't go undone. It's such

a vulnerable time in people's lives.

It was incredible to

come across that, Ben.

One of our core values

has been science and data,

and we've really attempted to

try to build our marketing plan.

At some point when you're doing marketing,

you do have to take a leap of faith.

You can't test everything to the

ends of the world and get perfection.

You have to start iterating and trying

things. But within that context,

we have really tried to the

extent possible and within

the financial constraints

possible to utilize science and data to

make intelligent decisions and then to

build a program so that the

data continues to get refined

over time and cycles back in and

can help us make future decisions

so that in theory, our marketing is

constantly improving upon itself.

Can you just talk a little bit about that

philosophy and how we're attempting to

implement that?

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is funny because I've

always seen what I have done

through the scope of

science and data, right?

You cannot optimize a

campaign without such.

I'm always looking at the data,

pressing numbers in either direction

to make a more effective campaign.

But when I came here,

we pushed that to an Nth degree

that I didn't know was possible

and I am so much better for it. I mean,

we come up with creatives and before we

go out and implement the creatives to

gather data,

we first conduct studies on

the creatives and understand

the consumer's preferences and

it's to another level.

And that's something I've learned

a lot and I'm learning a lot,

especially in the non-digital world,

but that's something that

I've learned just from

the firm itself and

how this firm operates.

That's just improved me as a professional

so much because now I'm looking at

everything. And to bring it back to

jiu-jitsu, I'm gathering data on jujitsu.

I'm looking at high level

tournaments and I'm, okay,

what guard passes are being

used to what percentage?

And then looking at lower

level tournaments and doing

comparisons and figuring

out all kinds of things that I hadn't

paid attention before because I just,

on the surface level, you

look at match per match,

but if you put everything together,

the data tells you stories and anyone

who's involved with data on everyday

basis is very familiar with

that. So that's just been huge.

Those are two examples right there of

backing literally every decision you make

with data and science.

And just as a practical matter,

how does one go about doing that?

So you need to first

understand the objective of the

data that you are gathering

because numbers on their own

don't give you a direction.

Objective of the data will let you

know if you're in an area where the

numbers are making sense or

they're not making sense.

One thing that I think

the data has shown us is

we think we want to go down one path,

but the data tells us either we're

wrong or that path needs to be

adjusted.

And I think the ability to

gather the data and be able

to pivot and not just keep

throwing money at something that

in our heads should work, but the

data's telling us that it's not working.

I mean, we've seen it with LSAs.

We've pivoted from

marketing med mal to more

catastrophic PI and commercial trucking.

And it's continually

changing and enhancing.

And I think a big part of

that is the data. Matt,

I'm going to throw you a softball question

because Ben's throwing you hard ones.

No, no, no, no, that's fine. That's fine.

I think there were firms and attorneys

listening out there that would like to

hear your opinion on this.

We belong to the Injury Board and I've

talked to a number of member firms that

have asked me, "Geez, Jeff,

how did you guys decide between agency

and bringing somebody in-house?"

And you weren't privy to all our

internal conversations about that because

obviously you weren't here yet,

but I guess I'd like from a marketing

standpoint and someone with your

background,

can you kind of go through the benefits

of both when firms may be struggling

with what direction to go in?

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean,

bringing somebody in-house is

going to be critical when you need

somebody to be on your

side to the fullest,

to understand the values,

to be ingrained in the day-to-day,

to push along a vision and

organize everything to that

objective. You just don't get

the same touch with an agency.

And this is the problem with modern

agency work is that it's done by

deliverables. So if you

spend more with an agency,

you get more deliverables.

But what you don't get is that

strategic work that organizes

everything in a way that heads toward

your objective or the firm's vision.

And this is something that I identified

early on in my career where I could

clearly see what a

business actually needed,

but it wasn't my place to make

a call or organize a meeting

for a strategic discussion and

pivot. I can make recommendations,

but I'm just the guy that's

improving webpages for traffic,

right?

So that's kind of where it ends.

It's two different ball games really.

The value in an agency

is if you're a plumber,

you may not need somebody on 10

plus channels and a handful of

campaigns.

You may need a handful of

webpages optimized to your

local area and that's it,

and that'll serve you well.

But when you're looking at strategic

visions and expanding in all

directions and somebody that can

pass along data to leadership in an

intelligent way and use that to tell

a story and then optimize all of that

spend, push all the levers,

you need somebody in-house.

Need help on a complex personal

injury or medical malpractice case?

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and regularly co-counsels with lawyers

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The firm has recovered millions of dollars

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So Matt, I mean, you have been

working in this space for a long time.

You mentioned doing SEO back before

most people even knew what that was.

What have you seen in terms of changes

in the space over your career and where

are we now?

Yeah, that's a really cool

question. So when I first started,

Google acted more like a Rolodex,

and this is probably 12 years ago now,

where content was indexed

in an unstructured way, meaning

they would send crawlers,

crawlers would read a page,

they would look at the text on the page,

they would have an algorithm that would

then serve the content based on the text

on the page, and they had some secondary

factors that supported that. Now,

Google's intelligence has grown

incredibly to the point where

they're inferring context on a page

and they're understanding what is this

entity's footprint?

And this is something that I try to teach

people when I have the opportunity to

about SEO is the entity factor.

So Google's no longer

looking at a website as a

standalone object in space.

It identifies the entity that that

website holds and then it makes

connections all around the web about

that given entity. And it goes from

authority to the presence along

everything from directories

to different forms of media.

It's just grown to be

really a living database.

That entity is really like an ID

card that Google assigns something on

the web now.

And it's almost like Google

has this big city and it gives

out this ID card and it's

giving everybody a social score.

So it's really incredible.

And I'm just thinking back on the

things we used to do back in the day.

And believe it or not,

there are still some of those

activities that go on and people

are really treading water with

them and not making much headway.

But with that model, the entity model,

you can really start to

superpower your SEO efforts.

The other thing that's come

up with talking with other

firms that are looking to

either enhance their marketing

or start a direct to consumer

has been costs.

And obviously we've put

together a budget for you,

but we don't give you a blank check.

We're not Morgan & Morgan

that's probably spending 20,

$30 million a year on marketing or

whatever it is they're spending.

So you had mentioned some acronyms before,

CPMs and things along those lines

that people may not be familiar with,

but how are you making

your allocated budget

stretch and make it every dollar count,

I guess is the best way to put it?

Yeah, I mean this is fundamental

to digital marketing.

Optimizing for KPIs is

really the end objective of

all activities that I do.

So looking at campaigns,

so whether it's branding,

lead gen, referral,

assigning KPIs that make sense for those,

and then looking at each

channel day in and day out and

ensuring that those activities

are toward that campaign's

KPI.

So an example would be looking

at paid search and let's

say we're driving X amount

of clicks, which is great,

but where are the

conversions down the line?

All of this comes out in attribution,

which is something I'm

super focused on right now.

It's looking at all of the leads,

all of the touch points that a single

individual will make and making sure that

each channel is given its proper

credit for each of those touchpoints.

So for instance, it might be

the case that in a lead report,

you look at duplicate

touchpoints and just refer to the

earliest lead,

right? Something I've been thinking about

and building into what we're doing now

is assigning weights to each touchpoint,

which marketers will be familiar with

when they build attribution models.

So one would be the first

touchpoint and then we'd go to the

second touchpoint and based on the channel

assigning a weight. So if

they came through paid first,

then they went through organic

and then they touched social,

there would be some credit

given to all of those channels.

But what that does at the end of

the year is give us a full look at

kind of this marketing flywheel of how

everything's feeding into each other

and have data to back each of

those where if we looked at it

kind of in a zero-sum game

and we said PPC was the

channel that drove all this, but

it doesn't tell the whole story.

So when I look at budgeting,

all of a sudden those secondary scores

and attribution become critical because

we can't shut off assisting channels.

That's an example.

No, that makes sense.

And this is something,

and I'm sure you'll chuckle when I say

this, coming from the banking world,

when we did marketing, it was

to drive customers to the bank.

So we would put out a campaign

and it was more product driven.

We would put out a home

equity line of credit special,

or we would put out a campaign

for a bonus CD rate or whatever.

And we judged the success of

the campaign was how much did we

spend? How much new money did we bring in?

How much wallet did we capture

of those new customers?

Were we able to cross sell

them? It was pretty easy.

I know I drove you crazy at the beginning

because when we started this direct to

consumer, I would say to you, geez, Matt,

we're not really driving a lot of new

leads or intakes. And you're like, well,

that's because this is brand, Jeff,

this isn't lead generation.

And it took me a little while

to wrap my head around branding,

marketing and lead gen because

I come from a world where

everything was lead gen, everything

was bring the product in.

So how do you see for someone out

there that's spending marketing dollars

and not seeing the immediate impact of new

leads and new dollars,

how important is the brand side

and how do you explain that?

So you need to understand where in the

funnel - a better term - where in the

"purchase funnel" your channel is.

That's the most critical concept there.

A commercial is touching people that

generally aren't in the market for

legal services.

A YouTube search for a birth

injury attorney near me -

that's generally somebody that's

interested in attorney services.

And those are two very different

parts of the funnel there.

So you can't run top-of-funnel

activities the same

way you run bottom-funnel activities,

especially with the same messaging.

The messaging needs to

be different, right?

You're talking to two different people

in two different times of their lives.

So in the commercial, you know, our

messaging is introduction to the firm.

We introduce people to Ben and Taylor.

We talk about the firm generally.

When we are doing bottom-funnel

marketing - more lead

gen - we kind of go back to that

StoryBrand model and we tell them

that we're here for you. That's how

that really should be segmented.

There's a lot that goes into that. I

mean, the KPIs differ. I mentioned CPM,

cost per thousand impressions.

That's a top-of-funnel activity.

We look at the very bottom of the funnel

or mid-funnel, we're looking at clicks.

Bottom-funnel, we're looking

at leads. On the firm side,

we're looking at acquisition.

So everything needs to be sorted

and organized in a way that

allows channels to flourish the way

they're supposed to be and not pinned up

against each other on kind of a one-to-one

basis where it's not an even playing

field.

Yeah.

And I think a mistake a lot of people

make is they want to get to the bottom

funnel lead gen,

but either ignoring or don't want to

spend the dollars at top of funnel

in order to get there. I don't

want to say it's impossible,

but to jump over all the top of funnel

things that you have to do and go right

to bottom funnel is

probably very difficult.

Yeah. I mean, you hit it right on the

head. I think what are we doing this for?

Well, we're doing this for to

increase business and to drive leads.

So to think about top of funnel and

making introductions and spending money on

that so that leads don't generate,

that can be a hard pill to swallow

for a new firm starting out,

but that might be exactly what they need.

They might need that kickstart on

their flywheel to get out there and

make introductions to people that pays

off down the line when they actually need

those services.

And that's why I developed that flywheel

strategy or implemented it really.

I didn't create that, but implementing

it within the firm because for me,

the target audience, it's

a herring, it's out there,

but it's really anybody.

So we just need to be involved in the

community and be introduced beforehand.

And that's such an important

part of what we do,

what PI attorneys do. Meeting

more people in my position,

firm owners, and talking to them,

there's a huge difference in the mindset

of those that are spending tens of

thousands and then tens of

millions on their marketing.

The more they're spending, the more

they're interested in branding,

and that's because they understand

that initial inertia of the

branding activities.

Matt, you've alluded several

times to different channels.

Can you just explain to folks

what are those channels?

You don't have to go through all 10,

but give them a sense for how you

segregate the different activities you're

involved in.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have 16

here, but when I refer to channels,

I'm referring to organic,

paid, local searches,

social media, display ads,

print, so on and so forth,

AI, email, podcasts, TV,

and you can get creative with channels

too and fit them into appropriate

campaigns. That's something that's,

I don't want to say unique to us,

but I built this operation

based off of what I saw

being done by high-level agencies.

So basically full-scale marketing

agencies will work is they have different

departments and those departments will

have one person who's the quarterback

that will organize all of those

and then deliver the data and

storytelling to the company.

I always envisioned an agency

model that does that in a

way where they just

don't get deliverables,

but that quarterback is a

strategic person almost in-house,

but with the power of all those

other departments. So when I came

in-house and had the opportunity to

develop something from the ground up,

I knew exactly how I

wanted to approach it.

I wanted to have all those

channels at my disposal,

but I wanted to be the quarterback.

That kind of organization, I think,

really suits an operation well

and one person can get a lot done.

And it's great that you've done that,

but there are a number of things that

you do not have expertise in and we've

had to utilize third parties and no one

out there is going to find somebody that

knows marketing, TV, PR, all of the above.

So how does it work?

What have you done to increase your

knowledge and what have you used for third

party resources for TV and radio,

which you didn't have exposure to as

obviously part of our channels and then

PR and getting things into print?

Yeah, exactly. So I mean, using that

same thought process just mentioned,

sometimes I'm not the

player for that channel.

I can't fill that role and I identify

that and I need to then be the quarterback

and find somebody that can fill in

that channel and drive this operation.

Let's just use TV as an example.

We've had our lessons in that

from just me being from the

digital world and us putting

together the script, the set,

the organization,

the production team on our own and just

go through those hurdles of we're going

to figure this out and we're

going to do this together.

Everybody here is super resourceful

and we did just that. But yeah, I mean,

you need to identify when you're

not the player for the position.

And I think with this

structure of this operation,

it becomes easy to put somebody

into that channel to head that

and still maintain being the quarterback.

Where do you see things

going from here, Matt?

Yeah, well, we have so

much room to grow. I mean,

how long do we have to talk about Gideon

Asen? What we're doing now is in Maine,

going back to jiu-jitsu,

we're in that develop and refine

cycle of execution and testing,

looking at our end of year attribution

report that should be coming up here

soon,

that's going to allow us to pull levers

to improve upon what we're doing for the

next year when we talk about

budgeting and looking at assisted

conversions, weighted attribution.

Gideon Asen's looking at expanding

throughout Northern New England.

So what we're doing in Maine is

really a model for the rest of our

market, which would be New Hampshire

and Vermont. And of course,

that can't really be

done at the same pace.

We're going to have to incrementally roll

out channels there because if we were

just to turn on the switch and unleash

X amount of channels and X amount of

campaigns in another state,

that creates a whole nother set of

scaling problems. So it has to be

a strategy that is broken

down into tactics and a game

plan that makes sense for

growth.

And based on what we're doing in Maine

and looking at the competitive landscape

in Northern New England, I

think we're in a good spot.

Matt, you touched on something

there that I think is important.

Since you've joined the firm, our

intake volume has more than doubled.

I don't want to say it's easy,

but people out there that just want

to throw money at a lead gen campaign

need to take a step back and look

operationally internally and say,

okay, what can we handle?

Do we have the infrastructure

to handle a 10% increase,

a 50% increase, 100% increase?

Are we going to have

appropriate turnaround times

for these potential clients?

Are our attorneys going to have the

appropriate capacity, support staff,

everything else? Because

if we gave you free rein,

we could probably double our

intakes again with more money and

really hammering pay-per-click

channels and things along those lines.

But we've tried to do it

systematically where we're not losing

the internal efficiencies

that we've built.

Yeah, totally, Jeff. And I mean, credit

to you. I work closely with you like,

"Hey, I'm going to pull this lever.

What do you think about this?

And you tell me where we're

at, what we can handle,

what's the bandwidth of our teams?" And

that's something you don't get with an

agency, going back to that question.

You need somebody in-house to

understand where the firm is at with

bandwidth and understanding scale and

do we have the systems in place to

support that? Scaling is

something that, I mean,

obviously it's a topic that

is so critical to growth.

It's make or break.

The blueprint here with Gideon Asen

on developing systems and efficiency

allows us to think about scaling

in all of our activities that we

do.

Do we have those in place to support

what we need and make the decision to

pull this lever or that lever?

And again, Jeff, I mean,

every Monday we meet and I run through

granular activities with you and kind of

get sanity checks on X,

Y, and Z, and I need that.

I need the pulse of the

firm the way you have it.

I think together we really have a

good hold on the firm internally,

what we're getting out there in front

of audiences with and buckling all that

down to scale in a way that makes sense.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean, from my observations, and I'm

a little bit further removed from it,

but I really appreciate that you're

participating in the daily operations

morning meetings, Matt,

so that you're seeing firsthand

what everybody is dealing with

as a result of our marketing efforts

in terms of the volume of the cases

coming in. But even more granular than

that, the type of calls they're getting,

specific anecdotes of stories of people

you know and you've taken an interest in

the work that we do. I mean, you

come to the press conferences,

you occasionally or more than regularly

participate in our litigation team

groups so you know what's

happening with that.

But watching you integrate in that

and then asking say Christine, "Hey,

I need to make sure we're collecting

the data on this issue as people

come in so that I have that information

and you guys work really well together

in my impression to get that

flow of information back

to you that you need to

evaluate the success or failure

of each of our efforts.".

Yeah, everybody plays an individual

role, but it's a team effort.

And I am surrounded by an

incredible team that truly

inspires me from litigation to operations.

Everybody in this firm is somebody

I look at doing their job and

it drives me to want to do

the best job I can to pay

attention, to pick up every detail,

understand every number that I can.

I mean, you just mentioned Christine.

That's somebody that I look

at and I am just like, wow.

I've never seen anybody

control data the way she does

and her work product is incredible.

When we collaborate on anything,

she just has this control on data.

I deal with people that like

to think that they do that,

but you haven't seen anyone do that

until you've seen Christine do it.

She is truly a master at what she does.

Yeah, I agree. And I mean,

what you just said is the answer

to the question of in-house versus

agency because what you

don't get with an agency,

and we had used a number

of agencies over the years,

both this firm and in my prior firm,

but what you don't get with an agency

is somebody who wakes up every day and

cares about your business. In an

agency, they care about a business,

but it's the agency's business and

you're just a customer and they

have lots of different customers.

But when you have someone in-house

and you have the right person,

ideally they get up every morning trying

to make your business better and not

just through the machinations

of performing tasks,

but through their mind and thinking

about how to do better and just

bringing their unique skills

and creativity to that tasks.

I feel like you've done that from the

outset and that's been a journey and it

will continue,

but you're invested in that every day

and that's what you don't get with an

agency. You don't get somebody who's

fully invested in your success.

So let me ask a question for you two.

Going from not having a marketing

director and managing the

activities that you were,

how has your vision of

marketing changed from hands

on doing what you can to now

overseeing this operation?

I mean, I could say from my

perspective, because as I said,

I worked with a lot of agencies over a

number of years and generally you work

with somebody for a year or two and you

end up firing them because you're always

disappointed.

I always felt like we were being taken

advantage of and primarily because of the

information gap,

because they understand this industry and

we're lawyers and it's not our job and

it's not our expertise to understand

things like SEO, pay-per-click,

whatever that may be,

any of the channels,

it's just not our forte.

So you have a constant feeling like

you're getting taken advantage of,

that you're not getting good

value for what you're paying,

that you're basically getting the same

cookie-cutter product that every other

firm is getting.

So therefore you don't have

any competitive advantage

because everybody's doing

the same thing.

People give you information.

They might do that

Google report each month,

but a lot of it is just spin in

terms of what they want to say

they're doing to make

themselves look good.

And so bottom line is having

you in-house. And look,

we often have hard discussions and press

you on points and sometimes you have

the answers, sometimes you don't,

and you have to go back and look for

them and find them and come back.

But it really is an empowering

thing because now we're no longer

the victim of the system.

We can control our own destiny

and you help us do that.

And you do it not just in-house,

but also we do have a number of vendors

and you're pressing them with hard

questions and not accepting the BS.

It just gives us a sense of power and

control over a process that it felt

powerless to control

without your assistance.

Yeah,

that's a great point that I didn't

mention about having somebody in-house is

having someone that can see through the

smoke and mirrors of agency reporting,

which is often exactly that, smoke and.

Mirrors.

I've seen things polished in ways

that nobody should ever polish.

Right. We've found vendors that are great.

Our relationship with Hype Legal has been

really good. They have a limited role,

but you direct their operations,

you direct them in a way that makes sure

that we're getting the value for our

dollar, they're doing things we

actually need, that you're identifying,

but wouldn't be a great use of your time

to do. Likewise, when it came to TV,

we started out by doing

all of our own media buys,

which was useful because we learned a lot,

but what we determined is we weren't

getting the best bang for our buck doing

that. You researched and found a media

buyer after interviewing a number,

and now we're doing better

on that. As the quarterback,

you're also interfacing with these people,

making sure we get the best

return for our investment,

and you have our firm's interest in mind,

not your own agency's bottom

line interest in mind,

and that's just a totally

different dynamics,

and it's extremely valuable to have that.

I mean,

it's expensive to have an

in-house marketing person,

but it's also expensive to overpay

half dozen different vendors for

marketing services and then not getting

the value out of that that you really

need. Matt, thanks for coming on and

doing that. Really appreciate it.

Let's keep it up.

I'm excited for the next time you

come back to share the incremental

successes we've had in whatever the

timeframe is between now and your next

appearance.

Yeah, this was great.

Thanks for having me on,

and I look forward to doing

it again. Thank you very much.

Appreciate it, Matt.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate:

Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

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