Brett Trembly is a lawyer, a principal at the Trembly Law Firm, and cofounder of the firm...
Christopher T. Anderson has authored numerous articles and speaks on a wide range of topics, including law...
Published: | May 27, 2022 |
Podcast: | Un-Billable Hour |
Category: | Legal Support , Practice Management |
The COVID pandemic changed our understanding of remote work with new technologies and more efficient management. But does that remote employee need to be in your town, or even country?
Guest Brett Trembly is cofounder of Get Staffed Up, a growing firm that provides talented, English-proficient, remote professional legal support staffers from around the world. Some 700 law firms around the U.S. profit from offshore legal support.
Look beyond the limited – and highly competitive – talent pool in your region. Limit costs by working with staffers in countries with less expensive economies.
Never considered offshoring? Now’s the time, as technologies and attitudes about remote work open new ways to expand your business, tackle new projects, and delegate support services so you can focus on results that matter.
Special thanks to our sponsors TimeSolv, CosmoLex, Rocket Matter, and Clio.
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Intro: Managing your law practice and be challenging. Marketing, time management, attracting clients and all the thing besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host, Christopher Anderson, here on the Legal Talk Network.
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Christopher Anderson: Welcome to the Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode once again is about production and in fact, it’s really important. In fact, it’s quintessential part of production and that’s about team. We’ve actually had a couple episodes about team lately, and I think it’s because of the time that we’re in this has become really, really important. We’ve been going through and sort of continue to go through the great resignation. Hiring is challenging for a lot of law firms. So, we’ve talked about hiring internally. Now we’re going to change the conversation a little bit to talk about how to be able to delegate more without increasing your internal staff.
As a reminder and the main triangle of what it is that a law firm business must do, we have to all acquire new clients, we call that acquisition. We have to produce the results that we promised, which is production, and we have to achieve the business and professional results for the owners. Today we’re going to talk about team, and my guest is Brett Trembly. I’ve known Brett for, gosh, I think I’ve known for six-seven years.
Brett Trembly: At least.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, he’s the principal of Trembly Law Firm, which is how I got to know Brett. He’s also the founder of a business called Get Staffed Up and today’s episode of the Un-Billable Hour is Delegation Equals Liberation and I stole that off of Brett’s website. So I’m pleased to introduce my guest, Brett Trembley. He is former president of the Miami Kendall Bar Association. He volunteers for Florida Bar Young Lawyers, and does other great things with the bar, but we’re really going to be talking to Brett today about his role as a leader of the business that is called Get Staffed Up.
Brett founded this business about four years ago. He’s grown it since then to over 120 internal employees. It does not count the people that he’s got working inside law firms or with law firms across the country, and he’s actually working and helping more than 700 law firms today and growing from there. With that, I’ll let Brett explain how he got there, but Brett, welcome to the show.
Brett Trembly: Christopher, thanks so much, man. It’s really nice to reconnect and to be a guest here, and thank you so much for having me. I do want to point out one nuance, so something you said and maybe we’ll see where it takes us. But we are almost technically placing people in law firms, right?
Christopher Anderson: Okay.
Brett Trembly: So some people think like, “They must be an outsourcing company” and what we say is, “We’re an insourcing company.” So when go on hire a legal recruiter for an attorney, you kind of understand that you’re going to pay that recruiting firm and then the attorneys joining your staff. We essentially do that with administrative-level folks and I can get into all the different positions. We don’t do attorneys. I say we don’t do paralegals, but some of our people have been promoted up to paralegal at different firms that have worked with us for a while, but we remained the legal employer because all of the recruiting we do is offshore. It’s like near shore right? Latin America, South Africa. So you don’t have to pay the 40% on top of traditional domestic employment which is the employment taxes and he overhead and all that good stuff. You pay us, we pay them. But you’re not outsourcing. You’re not sending us work.
The people we find for you are going to — hopefully, you have weekly team meetings. They’re going to be working with you on your team. They’re going to be part of your accountability chart. They are just as an essential employee as anyone else. They’re just not legally an employee. So, I just wanted to make that distinction and maybe that takes us in a different direction early on or we probably would’ve gotten into that later anyway.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah I think we would, but I think it’s a great distinction to make. I got to know you as running your own law firm and then you got into this. Yeah. I think it is a distinction that it’s important, like the people that you place is — you’re not a temp agency. You’re not doing gig work. You don’t put people in for gig work. You’re actually putting people, matching employees with law firms to do various things. Like I know a lot of your clients and like I know you’ve got people doing intake. You got people doing sales. You got people doing administrative support, legal administrative support.
(00:05:03)
Like you said, these people even rise to the level of being able to do paralegal level work which is pretty impressive. But let’s go all the way back. Let’s roll back the clock. Like you’re running a law firm, growing the law firm, being, by my recollection relatively successful in growing the law firm and suddenly something happens and you think about getting into this offshore staffing model. How did that happen? Like did happen for you first and then you decided to make it available for others or like what was your aha moment?
Brett Trembly: Yeah. So a little bit of all those things and I do think it’s important because we all know the lawyer who is now a recovering lawyer, but they really, they couldn’t hack it, write themselves as a lawyer I guess. So it’s kind of like there’s a lot of people who were good at lawyers and running law firms who turned into sort of coaches. But then there’s other people who just like decided to tell others what to do with no credibility.
Christopher Anderson: Oh absolutely.
Brett Trembly: I just think that’s important. Like my law firm, we have 12 attorneys now and 35 overall people, so that should give me some credibility to talk about law firm growth and those sort of things and that’s the only reason I mentioned that. But I do have a business partner with Get Staffed Up, a co-founder, also an attorney. He had a real estate title practice in Miami and he and I spent several years. He would kind of like see what I was doing, “Christopher and like, working with you and like you would see my firm grow, right?” He started to read a lot of the books that I read and he was doing before he sold it about 35 to 40 closings per month. I mean, he really built both up a good volume.
So we always knew that we worked well together and we had monthly breakfast and he kind of disappeared at the end of 2017. I didn’t hear from him for like six weeks, which is weird because we communicated so often and he like pops his head back up. He’s like, “Man, I had these two people leaving my firm and now I got five new people. They’re all offshore” and I’m like, “What? What are you talking about? So he hired four people from the Philippines and one from Mexico and placed them at different position because we’re not a “get rid of your domestic staff advocates.” We’re not we’re not saying, “Fire your US-based people.” We’re saying, “You can’t find good people anyway right now. So let’s just open your mind to different ways of staffing your firm.”
So he told me about the whole program and I said, “Look, I need a marketing person. Can you find me somebody?” So he did and this is like very late 2017, early January 2018. I had been an entrepreneur’s organization and other growth-type organizations. He said, “I think I can help other people do this and I’ll charge them a fee.” I’m like, “Or you could turn this into a real business with recurring revenue and really you’re onto something here.” So it wasn’t even — like the original idea wasn’t even mine, just like the business model was mine and I ended up making his first two sales for him and one of our next breakfasts in 2018 he said, “Why don’t we do this together?” I said, “Where do I sign on?”
So what happened then is we spent 2018 really building out a lot of the backend systems and then we started officially kind of in July of 2018. So I don’t know when this is going to air, but we’re right about four years depending. He was able early on to take more time away from his firm and within a year he sold it and he was fulltime at Get Staffed Up and over the next three years I went one day per week where I could take away from my law firm and then two days and then three days. Then I spent all that time building up a leadership team at my law firm to eventually take over. So that’s kind of the trajectory of why and where it came from.
Christopher Anderson: I actually want to take a piece of that which has nothing to do with what we’re talking about and we’ll get back to it in a second about how lawyers can use this and why offshoring or out — it’s not outsourcing. It’s just like sourcing physically located somewhere else, but talk about that in a second because I want to take a tidbit of what you just talked about which just blew my mind when I read it. I just think it’s important for lawyers to hear is that — because this is just as applicable to law firms. You said that you took some time before — like you made two sales real quick, okay, but then you took some time when you got into the business and built it before you really launched it. So can you talk about like what all did you want to put in place to make your success more likely?
Brett Trembly: Yeah. I mean, that’s actually first time somebody’s asked me more about that and that makes a lot of sense why you would.
(00:10:00)
In other words, since I know you Chris, but I’m not surprised you asked me that question out of all the times I’ve been sort of interviewed. So I made those first two sales and then three more, so that we get some — again its monthly recurring revenue and at the time, our pricing was much different, but we wanted to cover our own two employees. So the first five that he hired, one was from Mexico, we took her and then we took one more that we hired to work with me on the marketing side, and we at least had those covered so that we weren’t coming out of pocket, the business of covering itself, and we didn’t try, we didn’t talk to him. We didn’t make any more sales until we really launched in July and we were building out — me, I was in charge of the sales and marketing early on.
So we’re building out email funnels putting together, we use Zoho. So Zoho Campaigns, getting all the terminology ready with our CRMs and making sure that those were going to help us scale and he was building out all the recruiting. I mean, we’ve got a recruiting machine four years later that recruits 8,000 people on average per week who want to work with us. Now, I’m not saying that we do 8,000 interviews by any means. We’ve got so many filters where we get rid of people before we get down to what we say the top 1% of the best of the best. But we set up to scale early on and having our own businesses, it started as a side hustle because neither one of us quit fulltime, allowed us to do that and not have to just break things like crazy when we started.
We wanted to set up the system to say, “We think we’re on to something.” Proof of concept is how fast we made those five sales as that like — bet the farm type thing. Well, I don’t know. It depends on how, I guess, what everybody sees in the world, but we were like, “This is, I can’t-miss.” Like we couldn’t believe it didn’t exist. We couldn’t believe they want people out there doing it. We couldn’t believe. Once we started working and we saw the quality, people were like, “Holy cow, like I can’t believe I was so limited in my own mind before to think there’s there aren’t great people all around the world.” So we built out the recruiting system on the backend, right? Because you mentioned there’s deliverables for a business and that’s what we’re going to deliver and we built out some of the marketing and sales stuff and then we said, “All right. Now it’s time. Let’s send our first email and really start going with this thing.”
Christopher Anderson: Yeah. So that’s funny. So you touched the marketing and the sales. You touch the ability to get team and talent in. What about the work that was delivered to law firms? Like actually ensuring that the people did a good job and quality. Did you put in place before you got started like how to check on that and how to make sure that your clients were happy?
Brett Trembly: Well because we were so small at the beginning, it wasn’t that hard to know if our clients weren’t happy, right?
Christopher Anderson: Right.
Brett Trembly: But one of the nuances here is that if we could give law firms trained talent already, well one, we could probably charge twice as much. But two, yeah, that would be great because then we would do what every immature business owner kind of wants. Like, “Well, I just need someone to take over my marketing. Like I just need someone to –.” It’s like that person is supposed to get in your head and this happens, domestic, International, doesn’t matter. Like you have to take the time to train people how your law firm works and you may not even know how your law firm works because you may not have even put the thought into it, and so that’s really the big challenge.
There’s no way that we can train people because every law firm functions differently and every law firm owner thinks differently and their deliverables. There are some commonalities, sure, but what we do is we go find people who are educated, motivated, just pleasant to be around and are appreciative of good steady paying jobs because you can’t take for granted in other countries in the world. It’s not a given that you’re going to find a steady job and the amount of lives we’ve been able to change. I can talk another time, has just been incredible. So, we have a happiness coordinator who stays on with the client and make sure they’re happy and we have software to make sure that people are working. But we’re not doing the day-to-day and monitoring what, the staffers become or doing, they’re yours. Like I know they’re our legal employee, but they’re your team member, so you’re training them and deciding if you’re going to promote, retain, fire, et cetera. We’re developing more and more things to help our clients with that.
Christopher Anderson: But essentially, at the end of the day, they should be treating the people that you help find as their employees?
Brett Trembly: Absolutely, 100% and that’s always the best relationship. These aren’t just some people across the world.
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After COVID is when we really took off for obvious reasons, because our biggest objection was, “Well, how do I work with somebody virtually?” And then COVID just wiped all that away, right? Because if you have somebody who’s not in your office, physical office, it does not matter if that person is in Timbuktu or one building over from you. It’s the same concept. You have to get on Zoom. You have to use email. You’re building a virtual culture. That’s just sort of what our big challenge was and we were just trying to tell people, “It’s okay that they live somewhere else. You can work with them. They can do 98% of what somebody here does and they’ll do it probably five times better anyway.”
Christopher Anderson: Yeah. That was a great shift in thinking, that folks all the sudden realize that working remotely ain’t so bad. I am talking with Brett Trembly. He is the principal of Trembly Law Firm, but we’re talking to him as the CEO and founder of Get Staffed Up and we’ve been talking so far about how he got started and why and some of the cool things that he got set up beforehand. When we come back from the break, Brett, I want to start talking to you about mistakes that law firms make in hiring and how they think about offshore staffing. We’ve started to touch on it now, but I want to go a little bit deeper on that after we hear for a word from the folks who pay for this show. So let’s hear from them first then we’ll come back.
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Christopher Anderson: We’re back with Brett Trembley. We’re talking about Get Staffed Up, but more importantly we’re talking about law firms being able to find talent in outside-the-box thinking and still put them to great use as virtual team members and they’re not virtual, like they’re not robots, right? They’re just not physically located in the law firms. But so, one of the things that you said was, these law firms have to train them as their own employees. Earlier, you said that sometimes they make the same mistakes that they think they hire someone and a phrase that I like to use, I think I’ve used even with you is like, “They probably tend to abdicate responsibility for different things rather than delegate.” So, without specifically talking about these offshore individuals that you help them find, what are some of the biggest mistakes you find that law firms are making when hiring any position in their business?
Brett Trembly: Yeah, abdication, especially when it comes to marketing is a huge one. Lawyers like, “Oh man” and you know better than me, Christopher, but when you try to get them to start hiring paralegals and attorneys like, “Oh no, but I need to see everything before it goes out. My name has to be on everything” because they think they’re just — like they are the greatest attorney in the world and nobody could ever be better. But when it comes to marketing, a lot of it is, “Well, I don’t have time for that.” Okay, but like the way that you see the world is how your law firm is serving the world, right? And so if you think that justice is underserved here or old people are taking advantaged of here or estate plan should look this way, you can’t just hire someone and say, “Run with my marketing” because you’re the thought leader. It still needs to come from you and then that could be a frustrating thing for law firm owners because they feel like they don’t have time.
I learned about just really strict block scheduling from you, actually Christopher, and I used that often. Like all my time is scheduled, all of it, 100%, same with my co-founder who’s basically COO and in charge of now eight departments and all those people I mentioned. I have the easy job, right? I’m the visionary out here, I get to do the fun stuff. Like spend 10 minutes a day looking at everything they did the day before and then you can give feedback and that person can grow and then you can be happy with what the product that’s out. There are non-time intrusive ways to train your staff and it’s the same thing with your legal secretaries, your paralegals, your law clerks, your marketing assistants.
(00:20:04)
Like what we do is we’re not hiring you a marketing coordinator, we’re finding someone for you who’s going to take direction and then do pretty well with it and after, three to four to five months, start doing really well with it. The other mistake is people don’t realize how long it takes to ramp up and learn what the heck is going on in a business and arguably even your first year, there’s just so many things that you’re still trying to figure out. So, depending on how narrow or wide the scope is of what position you’re hiring for.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, that makes total sense. Then now let’s take that thinking and I bring it to the offshore. Again like you said, this conversation two years ago would have been very different when we’d have to explain it offshoring is okay. Actually, I should say that working from outside the office is okay. So that’s kind of gone, but I think people still have pretty big misconceptions about the talent that’s available, about language barriers, about technology barriers. Like what are some of the things that you find are misconceptions that stop people from really considering offshoring?
Brett Trembly: Yeah, the English language is the biggest — so we hire out of South Africa which is primary English and then Latin America and you would be shocked at how much emphasis there is in schooling on English. There’s just like here in the US. Some people, you understand really well and some people from deep parts of wherever, it’s a little bit harder, but you can’t work with us at least unless your English is really good. People will say, “Well, we all have the idea” and not the pick on anyone, but people from India have a very specific sound. Like I don’t want to work with that every day. That’s not how I want my phones to sound when they’re answered.
I mentioned the Philippines early on. We are one of the only sort of virtual staffing companies and again, we’re focused on the legal world. So there’s really not a lot of people doing what we’re doing, but we’re starting to see some. We left the Philippines and we went to Latin America and South Africa. We just felt the culture understanding was more in alignment, obviously the times zone is a lot better with Latin America and the English, the grasp of the nuances and picking up on little English sort of particularities was really good. There’s people that speak better English. I just did a webinar a few hours ago and the guy, also in Miami, he pointed out how a lot of his clients that he’s referred to us, their staffers speak better English than a lot of people that answered the phone in Miami and that wasn’t just conjecture, that was very true. So, that’s a big one.
The other thing is and I was like this too, you don’t understand that there are high-level executives in other countries. There’s bankers in other countries. There’s stay-at-home moms who are really talented, but they just wanted to be a mom. When you start thinking about building a better team and I always use sports analogies, right? You can do free agency, the draft, you can develop talent, make trades. You want to build a better team and if you have better people, then you have a better team. So if you’re trying to find the best of the best, then why limit yourself to your little village or your little city or your little town, when you could find what the world has to offer? Because we have, and man, like when you talk to our people, our sales team and you start to interact with — because all of our staff, except for one person is of the 120 are located outside of the US, we would pay those people, if they lived here, $150,000. These are just such high quality individuals who have been promoted for some of our other clients up to office manager and paralegal as we mentioned because they’re just homeruns. They just happen to be born in a different part of the world and they’re waiting for opportunities and they take what’s given to them or maybe they’re a little more resourceful. Hopefully, we can go find them and recruit them and put them with you.
Christopher Anderson: So the language and the fact that you’ve moved out of Philippines to Latin America is interesting, right? Because I think people do perceive that language would be a major barrier, but you’re saying — and I’m with you, man. I mean, I hire mostly in the United States and language is not always a great thing. It’s really in grammar and whatever. There’s difference between speaking the language properly and quite honestly, some of my more effective people operate out of the UK because Americans just love that accent.
(00:25:02)
But all right. So we talked about kind of like some of the misconceptions. What I’d like to do when we come back, we’re going to take one more little break here and when we come back because I want to talk about why, right? We kind of said why not and how we can overcome those objections, but we really haven’t drilled hard into why, because listening to you, like what I’m hearing is not like, if you have trouble hiring, maybe you should think about this. That’s not what I’m hearing. I think of hearing like, “If you want to grow your business. There’s a good way to do it. Think of this first, not second.” I want to have that conversation when we come back after this word.
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Christopher Anderson: So we’re back with Brett Trembley. He’s the principal, co-founder and CEO of Get Staffed Up. Before the break, we were talking about some of the misconceptions about offshoring and some of the obstacles and possibly objections that people need to overcome to think about it as a tool, that’s a resource that they have available for themselves in their law firm. What I wanted to do in this part of the conversation is kind of turn the conversation 90 degrees and say, “Really, should we think about if I’m having trouble hiring I should go offshore? Or should I be thinking about offshore first?” Are there actual advantages if I’m trying to grow slowly but having a hard time finding talent? If I’m trying to go fast, are there actual advantages to thinking about offshore as my primary resource rather than a secondary? So Brett, I heard you mentioned that of your own team, you’ve got one person here and you’ve hired I guess 119 roughly somewhere else. So it seems like you’re thinking about it first. So how should law firms who are trying to staff with an excellent team be thinking about it?
Brett Trembly: Yeah and I can tell you how we think about it on the law firm side and on the Get Staffed Up side. So on Get Staffed Up, we’ve got eight departments which means we have eight directors. Every director is not in the United States and they were all early hires who were just excellent. We keep promoting them up, up up. They’re getting raises and the like. We do have fractional, for example a fractional CFO, CMO, CSO, you name it, right? We have eight fractional HR and those are all US-based because like we want the experience in that high, high level position, right?
Christopher Anderson: Right.
Brett Trembly: So if you’re thinking about, “I’m going to hire.” Well, first of all, an attorney has to be here anyway, so that one’s easy, but every other position I would have the conversation with myself or with the leadership team. Why would we look here first? Because maybe it’s smart to look elsewhere first. We talk a lot about the great resignation and we kind of use that where we were already saying before the great resignation, “Hey, you should just shift your thinking and stop competing and getting outbid or getting poached from all the people who are poaching.” My law firm had one of our controller poached and when you go offshore, you’re not going to have that as much. I have seen it happened, but very, very rarely, right? Turnover crushes a business and the smaller the business, the harder it is to deal with turnover. So domestically, turnover is just a huge issue.
The cost savings, Chris, so Trembly Law Firm, we have 14 people through Get Staffed Up. What do we have? We have our receptionist. We have a client happiness liaison. We have three people on our billing team, three people on our marketing team and then we have a whole bunch of personal and executive assistants. So why not make your lawyers more productive and maybe instead of billing 30 hours per week, maybe they could bill 35, maybe 40.
(00:30:00)
Maybe it goes from 25 to 32 because they’re humans too and if they don’t have an assistant, they are their own assistant and they’re getting caught up just doing all their own personal things because they have lives to live themselves. So, when you think about 1,850, which is our — we charge 1,850, 1,950 or 2,050 a month all in, no taxes. I mean, “Well can that make my lawyer bill five more hours per week?” Well then I basically pay for them in one week and then the rest is just gravy, right?
Christopher Anderson: Right.
Brett Trembly: So, from the cost-saving standpoint, yeah I really liked seeing hybrid workforces where you have domestic team and then an offshore team and you try to treat them the same as much as possible, virtual events. I mean, you can do virtual escape rooms, virtual costume parties. We have been told by some very high-level people that our culture at Get Staffed Up is the best they’ve ever seen and how is that? Because I’ve only met I think two or three of the people in person.
Christopher Anderson: That’s amazing.
Brett Trembly: Everyone else has been virtual. So when you’re really thoughtful about the things you do which goes back to having the time or making the time to really think through things and having the mindset shift is, why not decide if all my competitors — on Main Street, there’s five law firms I’m trying to compete with. If they’re all fighting over the same very little talent pool and then just outbidding each other, why don’t I show up one day with twice as amount of resources, twice the bandwidth and half of the payroll. For every five people that you hire through us, you’re saving $125,000 a year in payroll. And then what do you do with those resources, right? You can pour them back into marketing. You could take some home and then it just snowballs. So yeah, I know it’s a little self-serving for me to say you should think offshore first, but I can’t find compelling reasons where you wouldn’t.
Christopher Anderson: I would find it a less credible statement if you weren’t doing it, right? You’re drinking your own Kool-Aid and you’re practicing what you preach. I think that’s really important as a part of establishing whether how seriously to take that advice. So this is what’s been happening. The pandemic has helped people to think about working with people outside their office. You’ve mentioned that there are other companies doing it outside the legal space, but let’s crystal ball here for a sec. So now we’ve broached the concept. Now, we’re getting acceptance. You mentioned you’re working with, what you’d say, 700 law firms?
Brett Trembly: Yeah, almost. We’re approaching 700.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, so this isn’t new. What’s coming? Like what changes do you see coming that people should be looking for? What changes do you hope to make happen so that people can take more advantage of this?
Brett Trembly: Yeah. Well, I think that there’s going to be a time where the offshore market from certain countries get saturated because let’s be honest.
Christopher Anderson: Sure.
Brett Trembly: Not every country is available for this, right? You can think of a lot of faraway non-English speaking countries. It just not applicable. You can sort of follow the programmer, a lot of app development programmers are hired out of India, then prices went up because they all kind of got hired locally by companies within you could hire who were going to manage those people, but it doubled the prices. I think you’re going to see after a while a saturation of the market in other countries, especially in Latin America.
You’re going to see some laws chink in the Philippines. The good thing about the Philippines is their economy is set up for this. Their economy is like, “Let’s have our people work for people in other countries and bring in that money that way.” I mean, that’s what they do. I think it’s 30% of the workforce or something crazy. Now, they have other challenges and by the way, we don’t have a local footprint. So all of our people work from home, which allows us to not be locked into a local demographic, small state. Like we don’t replicate the problem of being locked into small geographic city within a country, for example.
But what I see coming is laws that will change. It will make it more expensive in other countries and like get in now while the getting is good because we’re being contacted, not to get too much in the business, but Get Staffed Up serves lawyers, right? But our recruiting entity can do whatever we want. We can wholesale and we’re getting contacted by big companies saying, “Hey, can you fulfill this many orders?” And we’re saying, “Sign a contract and give us six months and we’ll get there.” The sky is the limit when the bigger — now offshoring has been happening for a long time and we’ve always said like the big boys, right? But in terms of service-based businesses, you’re going to see bigger nationwide service-based businesses kind of like say, “Wait a minute. If you look at 10,000 people, we can save millions of dollars. So let’s start looking into the strategy and then you just play the numbers and it will get more difficult.”
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So, like we operate with the sense of urgency because the time is now. The opportunity is now and we want to continue to deliver to our clients and saying, “Because of what we’ve created, we can still find you the top 1% but you’re not going to be able to find them on your own and you’re going to have to compete with all these other guys.”
Christopher Anderson: That makes total sense. So something fun before we go. It’s a question you suggested, but I want to know the answer, so I’m going to ask it. What’s the coolest use of a virtual assistant you’ve seen one of your clients use?
Brett Trembly: I was interviewing a client. It’s somebody we both know, Christopher, and I didn’t know the story, but he had hired four people through us and he mentioned that what he did is he was having trouble with Google reviews and it was hurting his ranking. It was hurting his PPC and his SEO. So he said, “What I did is I took one of my staffers and I gave him our last 200 clients and I had them pick up the phone and call.” The whole thing cost like probably two weeks in time. So let’s say if he was paying us 2,000 a month, which he probably wasn’t, cost him a thousand dollars, right? I think he got over 100 Google reviews just because someone took the time to reach out and ask and say, “How is your experience? What else can we do? Would you leave us a Google review?” So he went from like 4 or 5 to over 100 in a very short span which is just an amazing story in and of itself to think about that, right?
Christopher Anderson: Yeah.
Brett Trembly: Because if you had hired one of these companies that these review companies, you’re paying them that much or more per month for only a few reviews because it’s all technology-based. I was just blown away by, “Man, what a great idea and a great use of somebody who again, cheery, you trusted them to represent the firm because you know they’re your own team member and you got to know them and they’re smart enough to get it done and you’re paying them 30% of what you would pay someone.” It gives you the bandwidth to tackle projects you’ve always wanted to tackle because it’s not costing you so much.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, I’ve definitely seen that. That’s venture we hadn’t really talked about that, but it’s like we’ve really been thinking about all the things that we do that just have us overwhelmed. If we could just get somebody to help us do those things that we already are doing, maybe less well, sometimes never getting to it. But yeah, like the projects you never get to. When it’s costing you 2,000 a month, that seems to open up a huge amount of bandwidth for stuff like that.
Brett. We are out of time. This has been a fantastic, at fast (ph) quite honestly discussion, and I think our listeners will really appreciate it and they’re going to want to know more. So, if they want to hear more from you, how can they get in touch?
Brett Trembly: Nice and simple, getstaffedup.com. I mean, we’ve got the contact, the blog’s. We have tons of free resources. If you’re not even sure yet, we’ve got, I think over 35 downloads about accountability charts and the first 10 things you should delegate to your first offshore assistant. We’ve got so many things on our website that are helpful for people. So, of course, you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever, Brett Trembley. But best thing to do is go to get getstaffedup.com.
Christopher Anderson: Fantastic. I’d recommend folks to it and of course that does wrap up this edition of the Un-Billable Hour. Our so thank you to our listeners for being here with us. Our guest today has been Brett Trembly and that’s in case you are looking him up on LinkedIn, that’s T-R-E-M-B-L-Y. We’ve been talking about the company Get Staffed Up, but we would talk about really the mindset and the thinking around using offshore folks and what Get Staffed Up does is makes it easier. I mean it helps you. I think you said it a couple times, but you’re bringing that 1% rather than diving into the pool. Of course, my name is Christopher Anderson and I look forward to seeing all of you or you hearing me, anyway, I can’t see any of you, next month with another great guests as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. Remember, you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or on iTunes. Thanks for joining us. I’ll be speaking to you again soon.
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Outro: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer. Thanks for listening to The Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast.
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