Vertical Go to Market_Sasha Berson_EP 54_Audio _Edited_Transcript
===
Corey Quinn: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Vertical Go To Market Podcast, where you'll discover new opportunities to grow your business from 7 figures to 8 from the world's most successful agency and B2B SaaS executives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today, I'm joined by the managing partner of Grow law firm, Sasha Burson.
Welcome,
Sasha Berson: Sasha. Thanks for having me, Corey. It's very exciting to be here. I've been a listener since almost the very time that you started. Oh, awesome.
Corey Quinn: Well, it's been, uh, any, any episodes come to mind, uh, as you, as you think back on, on
Sasha Berson: some of those? Actually, quite a few of them. One of the most impactful one for us.
That was the episode that goes back about two and a half months where you had Bill Hauser of SMB team. It is a very respectable competitor of ours. So I always want to network with people who do what we do. I do not look at them really as competitors, but co petitors. And we all can learn from each other.
So I definitely learned a lot from [00:01:00] that guy. I learned quite a bit from the guy from Blue Shark, whose name eludes me at the moment, but I know his name. I met with him at different conferences before and quite a few other episodes, including the episode with our man Seth Price and, and John Morris, actually one of our advisors.
He was on the podcast, so it was refreshing to hear him there. So yeah, quite a few episodes that I absolutely loved.
Corey Quinn: That's so, that's so cool. It's funny that there's been so many, or I should say a handful of agencies that are focused on the legal vertical in the show. And what I've come to appreciate, because I worked at a company called Scorpion, which you're familiar with, which also focused on attorneys, that it is such a, there's so much opportunity to go around for agencies in the legal vertical.
And, uh, you know, I, I come from very much the concept of a. of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And so I love that you have that attitude as well, where it's, it's, it's not, uh, necessarily [00:02:00] competition, coopetition, maybe. There's, there's ways to, to, to support and partner for sure. So could you share a little bit about with, uh, about yourself and GrowLawFirm with
Sasha Berson: the listeners?
Yeah, absolutely. So I have somewhat probably of an unusual journey into the marketing world. I started my first brick and mortar business in the U. S. 23 years ago, back in the late 2000. And very quickly, I learned that my personal and my business financial fortune was tightly dependent on how well the marketing team performed.
And at the time as a startup, and there were Two of us very young guys in our early 20s, we could not find a good marketing team. It took years to get to a point where our marketing started actually working. So, at that point, this is probably 2004 2005, I decided that one day, when I really get marketing, I'm going to start a marketing [00:03:00] company.
That first business actually did incredibly well, and I sold my 50 percent on it, and then I did not start a marketing company. I started a different business that was a consulting business, is I have learned the ropes how to grow small businesses. I started consulting small businesses on how to grow, but always, invariably.
They all ran into the same issue. I would tell them how to do it and then they would try to find vendors that would execute on it. And the toughest piece of the puzzle was finding the right marketing company to do it. Through different evolutions in my journey in 2017, I was speaking at an event where I took someone I knew who started a marketing company years before that.
I took him as my co presenter at that conference and he looked at me kind of funny and he asked me. Wouldn't you be happier if you did this? And I asked him, what's that? And at that time I co piloted a custom software development company with a friend of mine and I did not love it. In fact, I joined that [00:04:00] team with the intention of pivoting into the marketing business and that pivot failed horribly.
And the reason why it failed, this is a short, funny story. I taught him how to lend a lot of enterprise clients. for custom software development. And to me, it seemed natural that if we'll land those, we'll certainly be able to sell the marketing services. We couldn't, they had their own marketing departments and thus we couldn't displace whatever it is that they were doing.
So that failed. And in 2017, as we were sharing the ride to that conference, Stan looked at me kind of funny. He said, wouldn't you be happier if you did this? And I asked him this, what? And he said, this marketing. And I said, yes, I would be. And he said, well, how would you like to buy equity in our company?
And I said, let's talk. And seven months later, I was a happy co owner of our parent company that is Comrade Digital. And for the last six years and two weeks, I've been co piloting Comrade Digital and one of its brands specifically, which is Grow Law Firm, which is a [00:05:00] recent addition to the Comrade. Brand of families.
And I can talk to you about our journey into vertical specialization, which is funny, tragic, money wasteful journey that we've taken over these years. So just to
be
Corey Quinn: clear, so GrowLawFirm is a sub brand from Comrade Digital. So yeah, share us more about what is Comrade Digital and then, yeah, how did you Get into the vertical focus strategy.
Sasha Berson: Yeah, so I joined Comrade as I mentioned early 2016, January 3rd, 2018, pardon me. And at that time, I tallied it up. The company was serving clients in 54 industries. There was not a team member. Everyone who was not super stressed out, I mean every single person on the team was incredibly stressed out, the marketing people, the salespeople, the operations people, like everyone's stress level was through [00:06:00] the roof.
And I was like you guys know what you're doing you're delivering results but this is beyond stressful. Let's figure out one or two verticals that we're going to focus on and start going in that direction until we can just become narrow specialists in those industries. The first year, there was no specialization.
We were just solving like really, really basic problems, like sales problems. The first year we grew 40 percent but through brute force rather than specialization or focus. Year two, we started looking at like, okay, who do we best serve here? Let's start pivoting. And so we picked one industry that we thought would be a great industry for us to serve.
And that industry was stone fabricators. We had a couple of clients and we're doing incredibly well for those clients. Incredibly well. Like the first client that hired us, he went from struggling to four years [00:07:00] later telling us that Thanks guys. I have so much cash saved up. I can retire now. And by the way, I'm only 47.
I mean, he made millions. He went from being broke to making millions or having millions of dollars in his bank account within a few years. That's the power of like high performance marketing. And so, and then we had another client. We're like, listen, we're doing so good here. Let's do this. And so we start a brand called StoneFab Marketing and StoneFab Marketing was a disaster Because what we did not do is we did not really survey the industry to understand whether they really really wanted our services What we learned through about a year and a half long journey Was that just because they exist and just because we can help them make more money Doesn't mean that they actually want to make more money A typical stone shop is managed by a blue collar guy who used to be a stone fabricator, who decided to, well, F my boss.
I'm going to go do it on my own. [00:08:00] His business sense is usually. Doesn't apply to everyone, but usually very low. He knows how to work really hard. He knew how to attract a few other guys to his stone shop and now they're working super hard. And when you start talking to him about, Hey, you know, you're like doing 600, 000 in revenue now.
We can help you take it to two and a half million. It's only going to take three years and you need to invest this much. He goes like, what are you talking about? Like, I don't care, I'm doing well, my mortgage is paid, my truck is paid for, you know, I can take a vacation, like, why are you approaching me with all this bullshit?
I just don't care. So it was an industry, it was not a competitive industry, they were not That's interesting, I, I, I can see that. They just, they just did not give a shit. You know the only people who gave a shit? We're the ones who got into the industry through a business decision making process. Like they chose to be in the industry.
They [00:09:00] did not start off as laborers of sorts. They were in a different business. They realized that the profit margins are high if you want to operate that type of business. And our best estimate was that across the entire nation, there are about 10, 000 stone shops, and maybe 5 percent of the owners are actually business minded people.
And it was really hard to find them. Really hard to find them. So that failed. So our next was like, all right, where can we measure our performance incredibly well to prove ROI on our services to our clients? And we're like, obviously it's e commerce. Look at how well we're doing for our e commerce clients, and it's so easy to prove our ROI to them And so we go into e commerce and we build catapult revenue brand.
That did not work very well Here are the reasons why and we didn't understand that at the [00:10:00] time when we started. Over 95 percent of our Client base at the time were service businesses. Majority of them were B2C service businesses E commerce represented like 5 percent of our book of business. To really expand into e commerce direction, you need to have dedicated people working on e commerce.
You need to have a dedicated marketing team that's just focused on e commerce and you need to have sales people that really understand e commerce. We didn't have neither one of those. So we tried and we failed to attract business. And the business that we did attract, we failed to convert them. Whatever little we converted, we realized that, man, this is, we're not well equipped to do this.
But since before I joined Comrade, I have always looked at one vertical as the vertical that they wanted to serve. And that was the legal vertical. And the reason why I wanted to serve legal vertical are actually very, very same reasons as Bill [00:11:00] Hauser from SMB team wanted to serve that vertical. They just check off a lot of chat boxes.
They really do. And even when I just joined Comrade, there were quite a few law firms that were our clients. So a decision was finally made in 2021, when I was already with Comrade for three years, over three years, to start building a lawyer focused brand, which is Grow A Law Firm.
Corey Quinn: So going back into, oh yeah, no, I was curious, I was curious back in 2018, when you just joined Comrade, you were in 54 industries, everyone's stressed out, and you, you decided to try and evolve the agency to focus on one or two verticals.
How did you know that that was going to help eventually sort of grow the agency from where it was? Like, what about, what about verticalization? What did you know [00:12:00] about it? Did you, like, how did you know that that was the right path? Yeah,
Sasha Berson: so the way I always look at it is When you think about income, so I'm going to use this analogy So when you think about incomes for example in one profession and that is health care You can think about income levels as a pyramid.
So at the bottom, there's the most amount of competition Those are primary care physicians and I haven't looked at the numbers in few years But like let's say three four years ago Median income across primary care physicians was about 150, 000 When you were moving up to the top, it was more and more of a narrow specialty and like that last 10 percent or so were like narrow specialty in oncology, like rare type of cancer.
People would make there million plus dollars a year, I wouldn't say without breaking a sweat. They have to work hard and it would, they usually start making that money when they're 37, 38, [00:13:00] 39. But you could make that kind of money by being a specialist. By the way, it would take you almost the same amount of time to become a primary care physician.
Like minus two, three years, but the financial outcome is ridiculously different. And at the very top of the pyramid, there is a guy, if you remember him, probably do, Dr. Oz. Who was not getting paid for being a doctor, although he is an excellent cardiologist. He was getting paid for who he is because he replaced Oprah in her show, etc, etc.
Let me now connect the dots. So when I think about specialization in any type of business, I always think that once you specialize in a vertical or a horizontal, your marketing becomes easier. You have very clear messaging for a very distinct group of people or businesses. Your sales becomes easier.
Because your salespeople know approximately who they're going to talk to, their needs, their problems, their objections, and everything else. Your production is definitely going to get [00:14:00] a lot easier, because now you're working on one, two, three, four products, but for the exact same industry. Your reporting is going to be easier, your production is going to be easier, everything gets easier, your HR gets easier.
You can ramp up your people in any department a lot faster, and your management and leadership gets easier. Everything gets easier when you focus on a vertical or two at the most. And profitability definitely follows because you can optimize and streamline your operations a hell of a lot faster when you serve one industry instead of 54.
Sure.
Corey Quinn: So looking back now, today, having gone through this experience. Starting with stone fabricators, moving through e commerce, and ending up in legal. How would you have approached this evolution differently from day one, looking back, knowing what you know today? How would you, how would you solve this
problem?
Sasha Berson: Hindsight is always 20 20. So if I knew then what I know [00:15:00] now, but the truth is I knew a lot of what I know now about vertical specialization six years ago when we started. I think it was just a. An evolution that took place that could have been done a lot faster. But because we made ineffective decisions internally, it did take the years that it did.
What decisions were just mistakes.
Corey Quinn: Yeah, like were there any, any decisions that maybe an agency owner who is in that situation where they're working with 10, 20, 30 different verticals and they're saying, I really need to get down to one or two, like what advice would you have for them as they're thinking through that?
Sasha Berson: Decide on what your selection criteria should be for a vertical and once you do, trust your gut. You may be making a mistake. If you learn that you have made a mistake, just be prepared to pivot as quickly as possible. Don't, don't drag this [00:16:00] out. It's okay. Everybody makes mistakes. Warren Buffett, the best known investor of all time, has made some severe mistakes.
He bought a 400 million business a year before it went belly up. Didn't see that one coming. It happens. It's okay. You know, if you make a mistake, you make a mistake. So
Corey Quinn: in, is Comrade Digital, what are they, what, what other are they, are they just essentially a holding company or are they more of a generalist agency?
Like what is, what is Comrade Digital today?
Sasha Berson: So Comrade Digital is a holding company and a generalist, but when I say a generalist, so today Comrade, Comrade does not sign up any clients that are not service businesses that are not B2C service businesses. We have plenty of legacy clients who we have been serving for five years plus.
Amazing people. We love them. They love us. We do not want to end this relationship. We're going to have this relationship for years to come. [00:17:00] But overwhelming majority of new business are law firm owners. When I say overwhelming, uh, Q4 and we're recording this early Q1 of 2024. If my memory serves me right, over 90 percent of new business that we signed in Q4 was all law firms.
And that's the power of vertical specialization. We couldn't have done that. If we didn't have a dedicated brand to one industry.
Corey Quinn: So back in that legal vertical, the focus on legal happened in 2021 ish? Correct.
Sasha Berson: Around there? Correct. That's when the decision was made.
Corey Quinn: That's when the decision was made. What did you do after the decision was made?
Like what were the next steps?
Sasha Berson: Yeah. So we're experts in search marketing. So then we had to build a website that we knew could dominate the search space in time. The website went live in April of 2022. So we're three months, approximately three months away from the two year mark. And then myself. My partner and my production team [00:18:00] had to work really hard and be very patient because we know how long it takes to do well in search in a highly competitive industry.
We do really well now, but it took close to two years, like one, approximately, approximately a year and a half or so before we started seeing decent lead flow coming through search. Did you
Corey Quinn: do anything besides search?
Sasha Berson: Yes, we have certainly attempted other things. We have done paid search. Failure. Paid search in this ultra competitive industry did not work very well.
And the reason why we believe it did not work very well, and we know how to do paid search very well. But the reason why we believe it didn't work is that lawyers get bombarded. Absolutely bombarded by marketing and by advertising from marketing companies. They don't want to see another ad from yet another marketing company promoting our wonderful services.[00:19:00]
They skip right over those ads. The only ones that reached out to us through those ads were the desperate ones. That's it. We have tried that. We have tried paid social advertising that worked better for generating MQLs but not SQLs. We generate marketing qualified leads that have a much longer sales cycle rather than sales qualified leads.
They're also very expensive. We do numerous things. We have a grow law firm podcast. We do a lot of organic social media content. We go to conferences and for about a year, a little less than a year, we run with Outbound sales, hardcore outbound sales, 100 phone calls per sales rep per day. And that stuff flopped and we didn't know why it flopped until I went to your seminars or webinars about gift based [00:20:00] outbound and I very quickly understood that we never stood a chance.
So we relied very heavily on search. Do
Corey Quinn: you focus in on a specific practice area within the legal, like do you only work with personal injury or family law or are there some practice areas that you
Sasha Berson: focus on? Almost all B2C attorneys, like we will not even have a conversation with real estate attorneys because we know that that business comes to them through real estate agents.
We're not big on bankruptcy law because the average case value is kind of low, but competition is kind of high. And a lot of their prospects are not looking to them, looking for them through search. So but vast majority of B2C law firms. That
Corey Quinn: makes sense. And so You mentioned that paid search did not work that well, paid social, got some MQLs, but not really any MQL, SQLs, podcasts, social media, and then help out sales.
Share with me a little bit about the podcast. When did [00:21:00] you start the podcast and why did you start that and what role is that playing for your marketing today? So the
Sasha Berson: podcast was started 15 months ago in October of 2022. We do episodes very consistently. I am the host. I would assume that I'm roughly on episode 75, 78 now.
Great. The podcast is done for building additional brand awareness and building connections with the right people within the industry. It is not a good lead gen for us. It is a great brand awareness builder.
Corey Quinn: Who do you bring on? Is it interview style podcast?
Sasha Berson: It's interview style podcast. Just like the one that we're doing right now, exactly what they do on my podcast.
Okay.
Corey Quinn: And who do you bring on? Like who are you interviewing? Are you interviewing attorneys or other marketing people or someone else?
Sasha Berson: So, primarily, I interview other service providers to the legal industry, [00:22:00] because those are the connections that we want to build for the podcast. The second, second cohort of people who I interview are successful law firm owners.
Okay. Those who have reached substantially better than average results. And the reason why I interviewed them is success leaves a lot of clues. They're usually more than willing to share how they got to where they got. And they're wonderful connections. And I know that as you, I really like this term, you said the product cycle in our industry is three years.
And I know that the clock is always ticking. It's ticking for our existing clients and it's ticking for those law firm owners who have come on my podcast. And at one point, they may be reaching back out to me and say, Hey, Sasha, who do I talk to in your firm about this?
Corey Quinn: What about social media? What are you doing for social media?
Are you doing just organic content? And what is that
Sasha Berson: content? So organic content, primarily shorts, 60 second or shorter videos. I am the talking bubble head for all things [00:23:00] grow a law firm. It's getting traction, but there is no lead flow off of social. So when I talk about these things, I want to like underline one common theme.
None of these things are going to produce a fast ROI. If they do, Tell me how, like you need to buckle up and just be like, Hey, this is not going to work overnight. This is not going to over work over a month. It may take me a year, year and a half, two years to get this thing really going. And you just need to make that conscious decision.
But once you make that conscious decision, like you will thank yourself five years from now, but it will take time. And this time will pass one way or another. You might as well just stop struggling by being a journalist working with 54 industries. That's right. And start working on that vertical specialization.
Corey Quinn: Agency owners, in 2024, do you want to finally escape founder led sales? My book, [00:24:00] Anyone Not Everyone, gives you a unique solution to a big problem that digital agency owners face, serving too many types of clients. In my book, I guide you through my proven five step process, helping you to transform from a generalist to a vertical market specialist.
The best part is the methods in this book are simple, authentic, and effective. It's been endorsed by well known author Dr. Benjamin Hardy, legendary marketer Aaron Ross, positioning expert April Dunford, gifting expert John Rulon, as well as many leading agency owners and thought leaders. So, whether you're a seasoned agency owner or just getting started out, my book Anyone Not Everyone is your ultimate resource to unlock your agency's potential and scale revenue.
The book launches in March and the good news is that you can go to my website right now and sign up to be notified when it launches. You'll also get access to some early bonuses just by signing up [00:25:00] to be notified. Go to www. anyonenoteveryone. com That's www. anyonenoteveryone. com Now, back to the show.
That's right. It's, uh, there's the saying, uh, two, two times, two great times to plant a tree, which is 30 years ago and today. So that, that leads me to the next one you mentioned, which is the outbound sales, which you mentioned you had a group of sellers or outbound folks who are doing up to a hundred dials a day.
What is your impression of why, why that didn't work out? Like what would you do differently? Yeah.
Sasha Berson: So for anybody who hasn't been to Corey's training about gift based outbound, it very quickly forces you to understand why your shitty outbound effort will never work unless you do something like what Scorpion did years ago.
And we knew about Scorpion doing something that's very uncommon for the industry. We just didn't. Like I learned from you approximately what they did and I was like, we never stood a chance and here's why. [00:26:00] So imagine your very traditional outbound selling. Very traditional outbound selling means that you have at least a couple of sales reps.
You can't have one. You gotta have two really good people. You give them a really good list. Like really good list. Like first you buy a list that fits all the criteria. And then you have somebody in Philippines, Russia, Ukraine or somewhere else go through that list up and down, up and down, up and down, until they can swear on their kid's health.
That every single person on that list is indeed a law firm owner based in the major metropolitan area in United States of America and practices in the validated practice area. And here's their phone number, email and address. And they have validated every single piece of that information. Then you give it to your sales reps and you have to build out a technology stack that allows them to make those phone calls efficiently.
If you have never built out a sales stack like that, trust me when I say [00:27:00] this, it's going to take you two, three, four months before you're like, Oh, we have a good system that makes our sales force efficient at making those phone calls. It freaking takes. Yeah. And thousands of dials until you're like, I understand how I want this thing to work.
And now I made this thing work the way that I want it to work. The reason why you want a technology stack is good sales reps are going to be expensive. Like the base is going to be high and you cannot go around it. You're not going to get someone on commission to go into outbound for you. If you did, trust me, you just picked up a loser.
Like that's it, like no good sales rep is going to go like, like Alba. 100 percent commission. Absolutely. Sounds like an amazing opportunity. What do I start? So, good salespeople with a good sales stack, with a superb list, and then you start calling on people who [00:28:00] are neither expecting your call not welcome your call.
They have no idea who you are. They have no idea why you're calling them. They have no idea why you're distracting them with the shit that they have heard from so many other marketing companies before. They don't want you to call them. So, every time you call, you're going up against a tsunami sized wave that wants to crush you.
And now to get to the point where you statistically know that That doesn't work. You need to have those salespeople, great salespeople with a great list, with a great sales stack, make a hundred phone calls per day, five days a week. All of this is trackable for a number of months until you're like, I have proven statistically beyond any reasonable doubt that this does not work.
And then you start listening to Corey and you understand why it doesn't work. And here's the reason why it doesn't work. [00:29:00] Scorpion has the exact same list. It's just a hell of a lot bigger. And now Scorpion invests 10, 000. to get those people to actually answer the phone and want to answer the phone when your sales rep call.
You need to have a very sizable budget and still a lot of patience because as you said, the product cycle for marketing services is approximately three years long. Meaning, if you haven't been in Qorys training, that means that the time between the, Prospect, your prospect, bought marketing services the last time from their current vendor to the time that they're going to replace them with somebody, might be you, is going to be three years.
And you have no idea when you start reaching out to them where they are in that product cycle. They could be a day before starting to call marketing companies or they could be three years away. So patience, [00:30:00] outrageously cool gifts, professional sales force that doesn't just call, email, but sends gifts and figures out what conferences these prospects go to and flies to those conferences.
So if you can pull that off in three years, you're going to be like. I'm rich. But not, not before.
Corey Quinn: There's no, uh, no quick, quick, get quick rich scheme here. No. I think you represented it very well. It's interesting, as you're saying that, you mentioned about every cold call that goes out to these attorneys who's getting the same phone calls from other legal or law firm specific agencies as well as generalist agencies, like the big agencies that, you know, they're calling them too.
So they're getting bombarded. And so every phone call is more and more friction. And then on the flip side, when you send gifts, every set, every time you send an amazing gift, that's unique, striking, leaves an impression, it builds reciprocity. It's the opposite. 100%. So anyways, that came to [00:31:00] me. What is the importance of relationships?
You mentioned you went to associations and conferences. How do those sort of those situations or those, you know, events help you to grow the agency?
Sasha Berson: So far, very, very minimally because we're only about, we're less than two years into it with this brand. It, it like, it doesn't like, again, like none of these things are going to be working fast for you.
You have to buckle up and be prepared for a very long journey. Until you actually start seeing success. And guess what? It's okay. Like almost nothing is built overnight. The reason why companies that have wild valuations are called unicorns is because that almost never happens. Like you're not going to build a 10 million marketing company in three years.
If you do, please [00:32:00] write a book about it so we all learn how to do it.
Corey Quinn: That's right. It was funny, as an author, I recently interviewed on this show, his name is Alan Dibb, he wrote the One Page Marketing Plan and he talked about this idea of going to conferences for two things. Number one, it's a great way to accelerate your learning about a specific vertical.
So if you go and you sit in a room for two days at a conference, let's say a law firm conference, a personal injury attorney conference, you're going to learn a lot about their pains, the problems that they're dealing with, their language, and so on and so forth. So it's really good for that. But then secondarily, the first time you go to a conference, let's say it's an annual conference, the first time you go, you're going to meet some people, maybe meet a client there.
The second time you go, the next year, you're going to start to see some of the old people that you, that you hung out with the last year. Maybe you get a meal with someone and have a beer or whatever. And then the third year you show up and it's all the same people and then they welcome you as in family because they [00:33:00] know that you're, you're becoming part of that tribe.
And to your point, you're not going to create those kind of emotional connections by going to a conference once. And then kind of going and not following up the next year. But when you do that, you get to build a lot of that, that trust that you want to create when building your credibility in that vertical.
Sasha Berson: And I actually have an interesting example that was not vertical specific, but talk about finding the right conference to go to. There is an amazing small business advisory company based out of Chicago here where I am. They're very sizable now. I cannot tell you exactly how many advisors they have, but it's a very atypical success story for small business advisory group.
When I say very successful, 25, 30, 35, 40 million. under 10 years, 100 plus advisors. This is like very typical success. So in 2019, my partner gets [00:34:00] introduced to someone who is the owner and co founder of this group. And he's like, we met with him and like, such a cool guy, really smart. And he's like, we're holding our annual conference here in September and you guys should sponsor it.
You're going to love it. And we're like, how much is that? And he's like, it's this much. And we're like, we never spent 10, 000 on the sponsorship of a conference. It was like a little less, it was like 7, 500 bucks, but all in because we don't have to fly anywhere. It was still like a little over 10 grand. So we're like, you know what, we're just going to do it.
See what happens. That relationship over a course of about three years. Resulted in probably two and a half, three, three and a half million dollars worth of business. Wow. But when we just went to that conference, like we left that conference. Without a signed contract, we had a few leads. Some of them were great, some of them weren't great, but then we followed up and we did so many other things with those advisors.
And over time it was [00:35:00] just a referral, a referral, a referral, a referral, a referral, a referral, a referral. Yeah. And there we struggle, but then we've gone through like industry specific conferences like for law firm owners and every person in that audience, hundreds of law firm owners would be sitting there.
Zero referrals. Year one, year two, you lend a client and you're like, oh shit, I just spent 15 grand going to this conference. Took me three days, the whole thing, and I just lent it, like, one client. Okay, it paid for itself, but nothing to write home about. So, again, talk about no silver bullet. You never know when you're going to strike gold.
Some things will work, some things will not work. Just be patient.
Corey Quinn: In a world where there's a ton of legal marketing agencies or agencies that focus on law firms. How do you differentiate or position your agency different than a lot of the others that are out there?
Sasha Berson: We don't. And I think that the marketing industry, I don't know who [00:36:00] came up with this idea, but if I ever was to meet this person, I'd want to beat them up.
Somebody came up with the concept that you need to be different. And honestly, when I talk to potential vendors for us, I don't care how different they are. I always care about like, what's the advantage of hiring you versus everybody else. If there is no advantage, then you can be bigger, smaller, yellow, green, or red.
Whatever it is that's different about you, I don't give a shit. Like what's the advantage of hiring you? So whenever I think about that, what's the advantage of hiring us and prospects sometimes ask us like what what what makes you different? I'm like we are experts at search marketing. We follow best practices If you think about it If everybody followed best practices, everybody would have great results.
The truth of the matter is that vast majority of search marketing agencies do [00:37:00] not follow the freaking best practices. And because they do not, and there are a number of reasons why they do not follow them. Sometimes I'll expand on those reasons. But because they do not follow best practices, you get really shitty results.
You want great results, you hire somebody who does like follow the best practices.
Corey Quinn: I think you just called out your differentiator,
Sasha Berson: but the differentiator is actually, is actually different than that. The differentiator is this. So SEO for anybody who has done SEO and knows how to do it right is incredibly hard because it is hard.
It's incredibly labor intensive. Because it's hard and labor intensive, you have to have very high quality people who are inexpensive or you have to charge premium prices. When you charge super premium prices, your niche within the niche gets really small. So if you want to go big, not build a lifestyle business, but you want to go big and we want to go big, we want to go a hundred million dollars in gross revenue.
If you want to do [00:38:00] that, you have to have a lot of high quality people for inexpensive. You have to build your own production offices overseas. That's what we've done, not easy, like not easy. You have to build a management layer that's overseas that you control from here. Yeah. Ha ha. Talk about, talk about at least two, three years to build that up.
Yeah. We've done that.
Corey Quinn: And that's powerful. And so, it sounds like the, the proof is in the pudding for you guys, your ability to provide results. Yeah, that's really great. And, you know, to be honest in the agency, the agency space, differentiation is kind of a misnomer in my experience, because there's only so many ways you can differentiate in being able to provide the specific services around PPC and SEL.
It's just, there's not, there's, there's not much. And usually of all of the varying different types of ways you could sort of. positioner or differentiate, it's being done by your competitors [00:39:00] too. So it's very, it's a very challenging problem to, to approach.
Sasha Berson: Yeah. And, and there, when it comes to that differentiation, the way that we usually get a leg up on competition, sort of say, is because we're so incredibly good at SEO, we love getting clients from Scorpion.
And from SMB team and from a number of other marketing companies, because what they, guess what they do not do well, it's SEO. And I understand why. It's hard and it's incredibly labor intensive. It's much more difficult to scale up SEO if you do it well. So SMB team, we looked at their clients, horrible results.
Not talking about paid search, not talking about social paid, talking about strictly seo O Scorpion. Forget it. Awful . Like whenever, whenever we have somebody coming from them and we see like scorpion in the photo of the website, we're like, yeah, like, yeah, here we go. We know exactly what to do here.[00:40:00]
Corey Quinn: That's good. It's the true that's, that is your, yeah. And that, and that is a, that's a way that you're specializing as well. Yeah. In addition to law firms, it's in the SEO. Are there any negatives to verticalizing a business?
Sasha Berson: I couldn't find one and I've heard about them, but I don't believe them. So the way people would talk about it like, but your people will get bored.
I'm like, no, no, they won't. If they're going to get bored, that just means that I have wrong people in the right seats because people who like, like being an expert is a lot easier than being a generalist. So, the one differentiator between small businesses and larger businesses, and this applies to marketing companies, as you're growing, we are growing, I think we have about 60 employees now, is the larger you get, the more specialists in something you get, and specialists don't want to work for half hour on an e commerce client, 45 minutes on a healthcare client, 17 [00:41:00] minutes on a lawyer client, 25 minutes on snow plowing company.
They don't. It's pointless. But, but if they have an ADD of sorts, and they talk about it very lovingly, like my 16 year old has pretty decent ADHD, I know what that looks like, but I'm like, like, hey, he wouldn't be a good fit for this business. Yeah, I get it. You know, if you want to work on a different thing every 15 minutes, that's cool.
But please go destroy somebody else's company, not mine. But when you run like a 500, 000 marketing company, like you get generalists who try to do everything. And it is not a way to scale up. But that is the only true argument that I heard about, like, why you shouldn't specialize because your people will get bored.
And I'm like, no.
Corey Quinn: And that's a very common one for sure. What would be your party advice as we wrap up here, particularly for agency owners who are struggling with scaling?
Sasha Berson: Number one [00:42:00] is you gotta get an advisor like Corey who knows what they're talking about, who are going to show you a blueprint how to go from point A where you're serving 54 industries to point B where you're serving one.
Maybe two. Having the right mentor saves tremendous amount of time, energy, and money. It may sound counterintuitive, but whenever I hire a mentor, we're very particular when, when we're like qualifying, like whether we should hire this person or not as a mentor, because we want to make sure that it's a really good fit for solving our current problem.
We've had numerous advisors over the years, and sometimes we would look at an advisor, like I have an advisor lined up. Who would be amazing. We talked it over with my partner and we're like, not today in six months because the list of problems that we're solving today, it's not going to solve itself.
This guy is going to help us solve next level problems. So we're going to hire him like Q3 [00:43:00] of 2024, just not today. But we know that for every level of problems, we're going to solve them a lot faster with the right advisor. So if there was just one, one, one advice, Hire an advisor. They will, like you think that they're going to cost you money.
In reality, they're going to save you a ton of money.
Corey Quinn: Who not? How is one of my favorite books I've read recently that talks to that It's in that stack.
Sasha Berson: I don't see, but it's it's in that stack. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Love, love, Dan, Dan Sullivan. Great books. Yeah. Great books. Yeah.
Corey Quinn: Do you, uh, go to any kind of coaching groups like EO or Vistage or are you a member of Strategic Coach?
Do you, do you guys do that there?
Sasha Berson: My partner is a member of Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. And he is with, uh, I forget the name of the group. I think it's based on the other book, which is, uh, 10x is easier than 2x, which I see that's like not title number four from the top. I see that one. And we currently have one of the people [00:44:00] who was on your podcast a couple of months ago, John Morris.
He is our advisor. And the reason why we really wants to work with John. We know RISE. RISE has actually been referring business to us for years. We know it's a great organization. We lost an employee three years ago, and she wanted to work for RISE, and I was like, it's a great choice. I wrote a recommendation letter.
I was like, if you guys don't hire her, you're idiots. It's a great company. So when my partner, my partner loves networking. I freaking hate networking. So my partner brings in a lot of good connections. So when he, when he met John, And he was like, Hey, we can like, talk to John about helping us. And I'm like, John from Bryce.
And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, great. That's amazing. Because we know that guy sold Bryce for tremendous amount of money. We don't know exactly how much, and we know he didn't reach a hundred million dollars, but guess what? We're still at around five million. And we know that when he sold his business, it was like upwards of 40.
So I'm like, if we can hire a guy to advise us who grew his business to [00:45:00] like almost 10 times of where we are, I'm like, cool, help us get to that next level. It's amazing. John's awesome. So we see
Corey Quinn: John often. Last question for you. What is your motivation?
Sasha Berson: I have a few. One of my motivations is that I'm never satisfied.
Like I make very decent money. It's not that I'm greedy. I have a good lifestyle, but I feel that I could do more. And a couple of years ago, I learned from this guy, I'm a religious Jew, he's a religious Jew, but I'm just not quite as religious as he is. And he is like, one of the great tenets of our religion is that you have to be incredibly charitable.
He's like, I do this every year. Every year, my goal is to double my charitable contributions. Do you know how freaking hard it is to double your charitable contributions every year? When I heard him say that, I was like I'll not do it. It's going to be my goal to double my charitable contributions and [00:46:00] I'm not very strategic.
I'm not like Ray Dalio or Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. Like sometimes I'll see, I had a fiance who passed away from cancer a few years ago. So sometimes I'll see a post on Facebook that someone's like loved ones, like a father in the family. The guy was 42 years old. That happened a few months ago, passed away from cancer, no source of income, little kids.
I was like, here's five grand. I have no idea who you are, but somebody who knows you, knows me, and they vouch that that's a legit scenario, that actually happened, you know, here's five grand. It's okay. That's beautiful. I will not spend it on my family. There are some things that I really wish to buy, and like, I don't own the watch.
Well, I have a couple of like really old watches. I'd like a fancy watch, but I was like, screw it, here's five grand. It's okay. You know, like you need it way more than I do. You know, so I think that that's probably like, like beyond just making ends meet and having like decent lifestyle. I think that that's, that's a really good, [00:47:00] good way to motivate yourself to make more because there aren't like, like I'm in my mid forties, I do pretty well.
There aren't very many new exciting things, but an opportunity to help somebody else always excites me. That's great.
Corey Quinn: Where can people reach out to connect with you if they want to follow up and chat more?
Sasha Berson: Well, I don't know if your audience wants to follow up with me, but if you want to check out how we do things, check out growlawfirm.
com. As they say, success leaves clues and we're doing quite well for a brand that's subbed two years. Look at how we've done things using SEMrush, S E M rush, however you refer to it. To see how we've done SEO, I can tell you that there's a lot of excellence that went into that. When we're talking about the amount of labor that went into our current rankings, and I can proudly tell you, we're soon going to absolutely dominate search for all things legal marketing.
It is obscene, just obscene amount of labor that went [00:48:00] into it. And guess what? You can replicate it. I would be just amused if somebody like, like catches up and passes us and I'll be like, see, that's beautiful. We could have done even more. And all things that we do on social and other things, like, like everything, like you could reverse engineer everything that's being done.
And, and if you follow like our lead there, you could be like, This is cool, we'll do this. Just remember, have a lot of patience. Like it's not going to be like in a year's time, we're going to start getting 20 hot leads a month through our website. Not gonna happen. Trust me. It's not gonna happen. But just keep in mind that it doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it.
You should absolutely do it because the struggle of being a generalist is very real and it's not going anywhere unless you settle on the vertical and pursue it.
Corey Quinn: Beautiful. [00:49:00] Sasha, thank you so much for joining today, being very generous with your time and your wisdom and your experience that you've been sharing with myself and the audience.
So thank you.
Sasha Berson: Thanks, Corey. Much appreciated.
Corey Quinn: All right, folks. That's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time for the Vertical Go To Market Podcast. If you receive value from this show, I would love a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks, and we'll see you soon.
