Fifty Referral Partners Is All You Need, with Jay Ruane

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett [00:00:01]:
Hey, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser [00:00:02]:
And I’m Zach. And this is the Lawyerist Podcast, one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today, Stephanie talks with Jay Ruane about his new book on, I guess, really connecting with people, marketing with people, analog in a digital world, right?

Stephanie Everett [00:00:25]:
Yeah, analog marketing.

Zack Glaser [00:00:27]:
So, hmm, I like it.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:28]:
Old school.

Zack Glaser [00:00:29]:
I like it.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:29]:
But good.

Zack Glaser [00:00:30]:
I think we kind of have to get back to more of that because, you know, sometimes I look at marketing, I look at content and I think, well, if everybody else can do it, what makes me different? You know, and getting back to basics, back to like real world stuff is often the answer.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:44]:
Yeah. No, I think that, that it’s a super fun conversation. So definitely people want to check it out. But yeah, you know, another fun, like this is a great segue, right? Another fun conversation. We just have to find a way to make it work.

Zack Glaser [00:00:57]:
Weekly fun conversations with Stephanie.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:59]:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve been doing a blog at least this whole year. I don’t know.

Zack Glaser [00:01:05]:
Yeah, definitely all of 2026.

Jay Ruane [00:01:08]:
Yeah.

Stephanie Everett [00:01:08]:
Every Wednesday, pretty much, I write a blog about topics law firm owners face, deal with. I try to give you guys good thoughts and not, it’s not, I don’t think it’s just I think it’s helpful.

Zack Glaser [00:01:25]:
Frippery. No, it’s just—

Stephanie Everett [00:01:26]:
I try. I try hard. If you don’t like it, you can tell me.

Zack Glaser [00:01:29]:
If you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it, I guess. But yeah, you can also find Stephanie at [email protected]. And if you have complaints about her articles, honestly, she would love to hear that. She really would love to hear your thoughts on that. But like—

Stephanie Everett [00:01:45]:
Be nice first.

Jay Ruane [00:01:46]:
Yes, yes.

Zack Glaser [00:01:47]:
Like, don’t be an— that’s one of the rules at Lawyerist. Don’t be an asshole.

Stephanie Everett [00:01:51]:
Sometimes people, and it comes with a Wednesday, we also do a Wednesday email newsletter. We call it, I think it’s called like Big Bold Idea or One Bold Idea. I’m not getting that exactly right, but I try to take the blog and then say, okay, what’s one action item you could do this week on this concept? And I invite people, like it’s from my email, hit reply, it comes back to me and connect with me. And I’ve had some people do that and I do love that. And I try to be helpful and thoughtful when, you reach out to me and I do appreciate that and respond. So don’t be shy.

Zack Glaser [00:02:25]:
Yeah. I mean, this is a community, right? You know, like that’s the thing. We are a community here. So yeah, sign up for Stephanie’s email newsletter, go read her blog, email her your thoughts on it. Honestly, like, yeah, I’m sure many, many people listening to this have great thoughts on all these things. We’d love to hear it. Well, now here is Stephanie’s conversation.

Stephanie Everett [00:02:50]:
with Jay Ruane.

Jay Ruane [00:03:02]:
Hi everybody, I’m Jay Ruane and I want to talk to you about analog marketing and all other fun stuff about running law firms. Hi Stephanie.

Stephanie Everett [00:03:09]:
Hey Jay, I am so happy to, to hang out with you today. We were just fortunate enough to be actually breathing the same air in the same room together a couple days ago.

Jay Ruane [00:03:18]:
Yeah, it was fantastic. You know, I, I don’t get to see you enough. That’s, that’s the, the verdict I took from that, was that I love hanging out with you. I love talking about things. I love, um, your, your new book, uh, and, um, I gotta find more chances to get in a room with Stephanie Everett because it makes my life better.

Stephanie Everett [00:03:37]:
Same, back at you. I, I, I got to hear you present on your new book, which is what we’re going to talk about, and I was just taking notes because it was like, yep, yep, yep, yep. You know, things we know. So probably, you know, spoiler alert, like, you know this stuff, people, but you gotta do it. And Jay makes it really easy and simple, I think.

Jay Ruane [00:03:57]:
Well, I, I, I mean, really what it came down to me is I, um, I, I definitely have ADHD. Um, and it’s not a, you know, it’s not an excuse, it’s just my reality. And I’m also like a quick start person. Who loses interest quickly. And so part and parcel of this book was not only to reinforce my own offline stuff, but actually develop the systems that we have put into place over years and think through systems for analog marketing that we haven’t even touched yet. But I want to. So it was really an opportunity for me to sort of sit down and figure out, okay, if I’m going to really commit to this, as we’ve done over the years, Um, what are the systems that we need to follow? Because the, that, and, and like I said in my presentation, this is great for a month, but it’s month 2 that, and it’s not just lawyers, any business owner who wants to do more offline stuff winds up failing because things get in the way. That’s one of the beauties of digital marketing is that you turn it on and it just runs.

Stephanie Everett [00:04:59]:
Right.

Jay Ruane [00:05:00]:
Analog is, is tougher, but I think the payout long-term is, is much greater. And so it’s worth the effort to put in the systems. That’s why I wrote the book, to have the systems and the concepts in place. Uh, and it seems to be resonating. You know, a lot of people came up to me at the conference and talked about it, um, how it, it, it helps them, uh, and helps them pitch the lawyers in their firm about things. So I was really happy that it found an audience and, and people resonated with it.

Stephanie Everett [00:05:25]:
Yeah. Before we get into the book, um, one thing you said which is so important and And I know this about you. You are a systems guy, right? Like you build systems for everything. And I think it’s so important. And I love that the approach you took here is you need a system for this marketing, for your referral system, because if you don’t have that, it does fall apart.

Jay Ruane [00:05:48]:
It’s fallen apart annually for me for years. And it wasn’t until I just said, I mean, look, the, the reality is, is as human beings, we have a million things going on. I got my business, I got my family, I got my own self-care. I’ve got my friends, I’ve got my interests, my hobbies. And if I don’t have a system, I know I’m not going to execute because there’s a million people drawing on my time and a million things drawing on my time. And I wouldn’t change it. But perfect example, I have a member of my mastermind. I helped him with something that was challenging him, and he wanted to do something for me.

Jay Ruane [00:06:27]:
So he said, what is something that you want to accomplish in life? I said, well, here’s the deal. If I could wave a magic wand, there’s 3 things I wish I could do. I wish I could skateboard. At 54, I’m probably not going to do that. I wish I spoke another language, but the amount of work that goes into that is challenging. I have some ideas of how I do that in my retirement. And I wish I could play the guitar. And he said, oh, I play the guitar.

Jay Ruane [00:06:53]:
So he literally showed up in my office one day with a guitar. And said, here’s your guitar. It’s one step towards it. So here’s an online course you can do. You can do it from anywhere. And I have taken 2 of those classes online. I’ve had the guitar now for over a year. It sits right here next to my desk because I don’t have a system on my calendar to force me to do it.

Stephanie Everett [00:07:17]:
Well, and it’s, it’s got to be a simple system too, right? Because I think we overcomplicate things. I know you and I were just talking about AI before I hit record. And a couple of weeks ago, I actually had a conversation with ChatGPT about my eating habits when I travel, because I do great at home. Like I work out, I was at the gym this morning, I do all the things. And then I hit the road, which by the way, seems to be more these days than less, and everything falls apart. And ChatGPT, it kind of like, my chat kind of called me out because it was like, Stephanie, you create systems for your law firms for a living. You need one for this too. And we need to make it simple.

Stephanie Everett [00:07:56]:
You can’t do perfect on the road. So, what if you just did 3 things? You know, drank water, focused on protein, and moved your body. And I was like, yeah, I could probably, I could probably do that.

Jay Ruane [00:08:08]:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the thing. Like, I mean, we want to, I wish more people, you know, it’s funny. I’ve got one of my kids is in the next office getting ready for, uh, ready for high school. We don’t start for another couple of weeks, but he wants to be ahead in algebra. So I’m like, let’s do some Khan Academy, let’s do some algebra. And he’s like, I’m gonna get to it, I’m gonna get to it. He’s been saying that all summer.

Jay Ruane [00:08:29]:
Um, but coming into my office for an hour and sitting down and having that done, he gets a lot more accomplished. And so it’s a system, folks. Systems. It’s, it’s, it’s not hard. The people who win at the end of the day are not dreamers. They’re people who Have a goal and work a system to get there.

Stephanie Everett [00:08:46]:
All right. So analog marketing, we talk all the time about digital marketing and you’re bringing us back to like, hey, old school, it’s about relationships.

Jay Ruane [00:08:55]:
Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, I, I, you know, one of my slides says, you know, analog doesn’t have to justify itself to anybody. It’s been working for 5,000 years. That’s how people connect with people. It’s how relationships are formed and business has gotten done for years. I mean, legal marketing has only been around since the late ’70s. Digital marketing, maybe 40 years. So, I mean, I think there is a— I think it’s wonderful that digital marketing exists.

Jay Ruane [00:09:25]:
You can get out to people who wouldn’t know how to find you otherwise, who wouldn’t be able to get to know you. And there’s a great place for it. But I think in our rush to love digital marketing, some of the things we’ve forgotten is what connects us to people in our community. And community-based marketing, offline stuff really does work. And since all of your competitors are going so far into digital, now’s the time to really react. I mean, one of the things that we did is for the last year and a half, we’ve had an AI phone system after hours. And my team wants to get rid of it because they say, you know, we’d rather spend the money and have somebody live answering our phones because calling us as a criminal defense firm, people are in crisis, so we need to be able to talk to them. And yeah, there’s going to be time and place for, uh, clients that you don’t necessarily want to get on the phone with for an hour at 3 o’clock in the morning.

Jay Ruane [00:10:20]:
Hopefully you get the skills to be able to get rid of that. But, you know, people connect with people at the end of the day. And I think you could be— if you took even 5 or 10% of your digital marketing budget and drove it into relationships, you’d see an explosion of business. We have.

Stephanie Everett [00:10:35]:
Yeah. No, I believe it. So what should people do if they’re, if, if they just want to get started or maybe restarted? Because I think some of the advice that you say, it’s like, we know, we’ve heard this, we’ve heard this advice before, right? Like, I don’t feel like, you know, fair to say, like, it’s not that, that you’re telling us something we don’t know. I think that, but you are packaging it in such an accessible way. I think that’s what was my biggest takeaway.

Jay Ruane [00:11:01]:
Well, I think for me is that you want to combine the digital tools with the analog implementation. And so my big push for everybody is to connect one of your AI tools, ChatGPT, Claude, whatever one you use, connect it to your email and do some searches, deep searches of your email, things that you can’t get easily through your search box in your email provider. And look for people who are talking about referrals. Look for people who want to send you a case or talk about a case, or great seeing you, great meeting you, that type of thing. Because you’re sitting on a diamond mine, a gold mine, however, whatever mine you want it to be of information there. And if you just connect your tools to your email box, you can have AI create you a spreadsheet of people who you’ve lost contact with. who’ve provided you with information. And so you could really put yourself in a situation where you can really take a lot of the hard, heavy lifting off of your plate by using those tools.

Stephanie Everett [00:12:07]:
Yeah, I guess we should probably even go back and define when you say analog, and I said relationships, like you believe very strongly, and I think rightly, you should have a list, you need to build a community, you need to build relationships with the right people so that they can potentially send you business and you send them business, right?

Jay Ruane [00:12:28]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is a two-way street, right? And you can be my— I’ll take a step back. I have always known that there are not a lot of people who need the services of a criminal defense firm, but they may know somebody who needs that. Similarly, I have tried to position myself in the legal community as the connector. For example, in my state, um, Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, I was out at national seminars because I wanted to educate myself very early on in my career. And I would meet people from Georgia, from Florida, from California. And so I would make that, you know, connection and keep that relationship. Uh, and then if somebody in my state needed somebody in Virginia for reckless driving, I know who to call, right? Somebody needs somebody in Georgia.

Jay Ruane [00:13:18]:
I know who to call and can even give them multiple names. So I want it to be seen as the connector. Right. And so that’s one of the wonderful things is that you may not actually benefit yourself, but it’s a blessing to be able to connect 2 people that need each other and allow that relationship to flourish and be the person who made that happen. And then you have 2 people thinking positively about you because you didn’t try to take it for yourself. I think lawyers sometimes do a disservice because, you know, they want everything to themselves. And I think we can do better because there are tons of clients out there. You know, it’s really just all about serving people.

Jay Ruane [00:13:57]:
And I think many of us are called to this profession to serve. And I think maybe over years we forget about that part of it. And I think that if you connect with more people, you’re going to win the day.

Stephanie Everett [00:14:13]:
One, one of the things I know that you address so well, um, a lot of people are, will say, well, I’m an introvert and I don’t wanna get out there. I don’t wanna, I’m nervous. You know, the idea of going to coffee with someone or connecting, you know, connecting and building relationships, which by the way, we’ve, I’ve said this a couple of times now, relationships, it’s not a once and done. Like you’re not gonna meet someone and they’re gonna start sending you work. So you really do have to put in the effort and that’s what your system does, right? Like how do you touch these people over time and build that relationship? But first, First, let’s like address the introverted complaint or objection, if you will.

Jay Ruane [00:14:50]:
Okay, so here, here’s the reality. An introvert isn’t somebody who doesn’t want to talk to people. An introvert is somebody who gets exhausted talking to people. Extroverts get energy from talking to people. So if you’re a lawyer who says, yeah, talking to people is exhausting, great. I’m asking for 20 minutes. You can do 20 minutes. And then take an hour to yourself to recharge.

Jay Ruane [00:15:15]:
That’s okay. And the reality is, I mean, it’s not hard to talk to somebody for 15 or 20 minutes. I think we talked for 20 minutes. I mean, we already were friends, but we sat for 20 minutes and talked in between other presentations, and it was easy, right? Well, guess what? That could be done with anybody because There’s always stuff going on in your community if you’re reaching people local. I mean, Stephanie, it’d be difficult for us to talk about what’s going on in your hometown or mine because neither one of us has the experience and knowledge about what’s going on in other areas. We can talk about the greater legal community, right? That’s something that we have in common. But the great thing about analog marketing is, for the most part, you’re doing it with people who are also in your community. And so you have that.

Jay Ruane [00:16:04]:
You have shared relationships that you may both know. You have restaurants that you like locally that you can talk about. There’s a million things locally that you can drive into in a 20-minute coffee. And so it’s not as intimidating as it would sound. It’s just getting over the first hurdle. I mean, look, I made a reference to it in a recent presentation. I was nervous as hell when I used to go on first dates. And I get it, right? So I would think, okay, if we stop talking, what are we going to talk about? 1, 2, 3.

Jay Ruane [00:16:37]:
I’d have those things. Do the same thing, man. Just put it together and say, hey, worst case scenario, I could talk about this, this, and this. And you got those as your go-to. And then you get in there and you just sort of see what happens. And I bet you never even get to those 3 things because people at the end of the day don’t mind talking. I mean, yeah, there are some people who are never going to get out of their shell. And if that’s the case, you probably shouldn’t be an entrepreneurial lawyer because that’s, that’s a skill.

Jay Ruane [00:17:04]:
Like, you have to get over yourself if you wanna do it. Yeah. Maybe you need to find the partner who’s the entrepreneurial person who’s gonna get out there and, and network. And maybe you belong in a library writing briefs. That, that’s cool if that’s your thing, but then don’t try to be something you’re not.

Stephanie Everett [00:17:19]:
No, I love that. And I love, you know, the, the confession, if you will, that it’s okay to prepare even for a networking call. Or prepare, you know, before you go. I sometimes think about that because, you know, you’re like, I don’t want to just ask about the weather. Like, I mean, we could talk about the weather, but there’s got to be some more interesting things in the world going on. I think it’s a good reminder too to all of us lawyers that hobbies and having interests outside of work are a good thing. And right before we hit record, you were telling me how you were using ChatGPT to learn about black holes. And I found that fascinating because I was like, wait, One, why am I using ChatGPT voice that way? I need to start learning some stuff.

Stephanie Everett [00:17:59]:
But now if I wanted to, I could just start asking you about black holes and be like, yeah, tell me more. What? You know, that sounds cool. I don’t know anything about black holes.

Jay Ruane [00:18:08]:
But see, that’s the cool thing about it. Like you can, you can, and, and look, the reality is, is you can start off with somebody and say, hey, are you reading anything good lately?

Zack Glaser [00:18:18]:
Right?

Stephanie Everett [00:18:18]:
Mm-hmm.

Jay Ruane [00:18:19]:
Or are you, what, what are you binge watching? I mean, These are cultural things that— or, or like, I mean, uh, I, I was joking with my wife. She’s a stay-at-home juror for the Clancy trial that’s going on up in Massachusetts because she’s watching it and filling me in every day what’s going on. And we’re talking about it nonstop, which is really exhausting when you’re a criminal defense lawyer. And she is too. That’s the thing that is crazy. She’s a juv— she’s the worst. She— I mean, she’s not the worst, but she does juvenile criminal defense, which is depressing as all heck to me, where she’s talking with kids who are looking at life sentences at 17, 16. But she’s wrapped up in this trial and she wants to talk about it constantly.

Jay Ruane [00:19:00]:
You could do that at a coffee with somebody and you could be like, I mean, there’s always newsworthy stuff around your practice area. It may not be local that you can bring up, or the other person’s practice area. or the other person’s interests. And that’s the benefit of sitting down and, and actually making a friend, you know, find some commonalities, find some things that interest them. Uh, and, and you should only do about 30% of the talking anyway. So prep a few probing questions and then see where it takes you.

Stephanie Everett [00:19:31]:
And then at some point, do we talk about business? How do, how do I, how do I move into that topic?

Jay Ruane [00:19:37]:
I think it’s real simple. I think, you know, 2/3 of the way through the conversation, just say, look, you know, I wanna be on the lookout to help you with business. Explain to me, what’s your ideal client? Who’s your perfect, you know, client? And if you start with that, they’ll tell you, you know, they’ll tell you, oh, look, I want this type of case and these types of people as clients. Uh, and then you just file that away in your brain. And guess what? Their response is gonna be, now tell me about yours.

Stephanie Everett [00:20:03]:
Exactly. Right.

Jay Ruane [00:20:04]:
And, and so then you can explain your ideal client. Who’s the avatar that you’re looking for? Right. And then you’re both keyed into what the other person needs so that you can help serve them up. And then when you hear that need, maybe it’s in your community, maybe it’s in your office, maybe it’s in your greater niche practice area that you have connects that other people don’t, then you can make that connection and everybody wins. Everybody wins.

Zack Glaser [00:20:31]:
Yeah.

Stephanie Everett [00:20:32]:
And I love that. I do the same and I teach the same. And then You know, the other thing that you can ask the person, especially if you’re kind of new to building your network, is I like to ask, hey, is there maybe 1 or 2 people in our community that you think I should be connected with that you might know? And would you be willing to make that introduction? That’s a great way to kind of expand your network as well.

Jay Ruane [00:20:53]:
I love that. Because people, I mean, for the most part, want to be givers, especially if it costs them nothing. Not everybody wants to give if it costs them something. But a recommendation, a referral that really doesn’t cost many people much. And they love to do that type of thing. I mean, I’m planning something with a couple of colleagues, and the constant question is, who else do we want with us? And the first thing that came across the text chain was, they have to be a giver. They have to be the kind of person who wants to share. We don’t want people who don’t share.

Jay Ruane [00:21:28]:
And there are a few people who might be good, for this thing that we wanted to do, but they’re not really sharers. They’re more takers than givers. And that’s not the tribe I want to roll with. I want to roll with the givers.

Stephanie Everett [00:21:43]:
I really love that. I think it, and it speaks to, you know, sometimes even I fight the, you know, we want to have that growth mindset. You know, there is enough in the world for all of us. And, you know, I find myself slipping into that scarcity mindset every once in a while, and I have to be like, hey, knock it off, right? There’s plenty of work for everyone. There’s plenty. I always tell people my competition is the couch because it’s really just doing nothing, right?

Jay Ruane [00:22:13]:
Right.

Stephanie Everett [00:22:13]:
There’s so many lawyers that need help, so that shouldn’t be a problem. But I think that that’s a great reminder too, is that people gravitate towards those givers, and that’s what you want to be known as. So when you find yourself slipping into that scarcity mindset, you know, tell yourself, hey, knock it off and let me go give and be generous with your time and with your knowledge. People just wanna hear what you have to say. And it doesn’t always have to be about giving gifts, although gifts are fun too. I think you like gifts.

Jay Ruane [00:22:41]:
Oh yeah. I mean, I, I love, I love being known as a good gift giver. Yeah, that’s definitely, you know, I, I, I, you know, it’s funny, I, I was talking to, uh, Jason Hennessey, who’s big in the SEO world. Um, and he came up to me when I saw him recently. He’s like, you’re the best gift giver, man. Uh, you know, because I’ve sent him some stuff, but they’re meaningful things, you know, that I, I’ve sent him. And I think that has cemented— you know, I mean, I’ve known him for 20 years, but it cemented a relationship because he knows that if I’m giving something, there’s thought to it. And that’s one of the big things that I, I like to harp on in the offline marketing is that oftentimes Um, people will send, send me branded Yeti cups or branded mugs.

Jay Ruane [00:23:22]:
Man, if it’s got your brand on it, it’s advertising. It’s not, you know, it’s not hard unless there’s a story behind it, unless you talked about it, um, you know, that type of thing. Like if someone says to me, man, you know, I’d love to do those Yeti mugs, but, you know, I just can’t afford them, I’ll send them one of mine and say, sandblast my logo off and there you go, you can have it, that type of thing. But, you know, the, the reality is, is a lot of lawyers default to what’s easier. Okay, buy 300 of these things and send them out to every client. That’s not necessarily going to do anything. I mean, we actually send a— we have a vertical in our office of people who are potentially facing charges, right? So they’ve gotten a letter, maybe they’re a target, or they’ve got a letter that maybe somebody has seized records that could implicate them and that sort of thing. So they naturally go to a lawyer, right? And they say, hey, I need some help because I may be a target of something, or I may— my company might be investigating me, whatever it could be.

Jay Ruane [00:24:22]:
So they’ll hire us before they get arrested or indicted, and we’ll start preparing for maybe an eventual arraignment. So we’ll do a psychosocial background and that type of thing. But one of the things we sent out right at the beginning is a nice blanket in a box that says, relax, we have you covered. Right? But we don’t put our logo on it. It’s just a blanket. And it’s amazing how many people will say, man, I love that blanket. Why didn’t you put your logo on it? And I’ll turn around, I’ll say, Because you don’t want to have to explain if this thing goes away. You don’t want to have to explain to your friend why you have this law firm’s logo on a blanket in your living room or bedroom, but you might still like the blanket.

Jay Ruane [00:25:05]:
So we just said, you know what, we’re not going to put our logo on it and we’re just going to give a gift. People love it and they remember us regardless of our logo on it or not.

Stephanie Everett [00:25:17]:
Exactly. I think that’s the other point. When you get a good, when you receive a nice gift, you do remember. I mean, I can walk around my house and I’m just like, oh, Aunt so-and-so, you know, 17 years ago, that’s where that came from. Like, I know the story behind those things and then I want to keep them versus some random chocolate. I pick, like you, I’m at conferences a lot. I pick up things and often joke that my kid only wears LegalTech socks at school because I don’t buy socks.

Jay Ruane [00:25:46]:
Yeah, I mean, that, that’s it. I mean, I, I don’t know, I’m trying to remember if there was like a swag gift at any legal conference where I was like, I want that, I need to have that, that jumped out at me as being something like, oh, I went to the booth for a good reason and I got something cool. There’s some stuff out there, but is it mostly in the bottom of a drawer somewhere that I thought was cool for about 30 seconds? Yeah, there’s not There’s nothing on my desk that has stuck around.

Stephanie Everett [00:26:16]:
The last, you know, and then as someone who goes to conferences and has to give out stuff, by the way, it’s a challenge, right? Like we really, so I was pretty proud of this earlier this year. We were at an AI conference for women in AI. We gave out reading glasses, like really cool reading glasses.

Jay Ruane [00:26:34]:
That’s awesome.

Stephanie Everett [00:26:35]:
And yeah, some of them had the blue light blocker, but they were all like funky colors and really cool. And everybody was eating, those things went like hotcakes ’cause people were like, cool reading glasses. I need those.

Jay Ruane [00:26:47]:
That’s awesome. Uh, that is, that is, I’m, I might steal that.

Stephanie Everett [00:26:52]:
You can.

Jay Ruane [00:26:53]:
Like, you know, because, you know, I’ve done, I’ve done everything. I’ve got, you know, I’ve, I’ve done tons of things to, to give out at trade shows to promote my mastermind and stuff, and it just, they, it just, it’s, it’s just taking up space in a suitcase. I love the idea of readers. I mean, that’s genius.

Stephanie Everett [00:27:11]:
So yeah, especially when you pair it with our books. One of the, one of the tips Jay gave on this stage, you know, a lot of your referral sources might be lawyers. And I mean, I loved this. You were like, hey, you know, send them a gift. You could even send them a copy of my book. And I thought that, I was like, that is genius. That, I love that.

Jay Ruane [00:27:31]:
And I’ll show you on my book in the very first page, I did something that said a personal note. So you can actually write a note to somebody inside the book before you send it to them. And I did that because I knew I wanted to send out the book to a ton of people and I wanted to leave a personal note. So I just made it easy because I could have slapped a Post-it note on the COVID but I thought, hey, just write it right inside, have a page right there. And it works. Books are amazing things. Lawyers love books, right? And, um, there’s amazing things. In fact, I was thinking about, um, some of the other speakers, uh, mentioned some books.

Jay Ruane [00:28:12]:
I was like, I’m gonna buy some. I’m gonna buy a bunch of yours. I want to buy like 100 of them because I know 100 lawyers that, you know, that could actually use the content of your book. I hope they read them, um, you know, that type of thing, because that’s such a valuable book, um, and I can’t wait to— like, I’m— let’s get them.

Stephanie Everett [00:28:31]:
Yeah, well, now I want to go tell our person, hey, go add a page on the inside for the next round of, uh, so that we can upload, because that’s the beauty of the Amazon on-demand printing. I was like, I, I need that page because, you know, Debbie and I’ve been sending them out to people as well. Well, guys, listen, I could sit here and talk to Jay for many, many hours, um, and you should get his book. This, this is— it’s a great book. We didn’t even cover Like a chapter.

Jay Ruane [00:29:00]:
Yeah, we really did.

Stephanie Everett [00:29:01]:
I know, right? I was like, wow, we, I mean, this has been a fantastic conversation and you kind of got 2 of probably hundreds of tips. But what I love about it because is he breaks it down and he makes it really simple. And he’s like, here’s not just how many people you need in your network, but here’s how you need 10 of these and 15 of these and 5, you know, and then here’s how you’re going to do it. And here’s what you’re going to do every Sunday night. And here’s what you’re going to do every week. This is a repeatable system that he uses, and I know it works for him, and he’s a rock star, and I love it. So like, I’m like, anytime Jay talks, you guys should listen because there’s so much good stuff. So we’ll make sure, Jay, to also put anywhere people should go to follow you, learn more about you.

Stephanie Everett [00:29:45]:
We’ll put it in the show notes and also, you know, links to the book as well.

Jay Ruane [00:29:49]:
Yeah, it’s at analog.marketing. It’s really easy. It takes you right to Amazon to pick it up. And here’s the thing that I want people to take away from this. I have a friend, and I talked about him, I talked about him, that, you know, had this desire to have 1,000 referral partners. You don’t need 1,000. I think you can cap it at 50. 50 is a manageable amount that you can keep in touch with.

Jay Ruane [00:30:12]:
And if you have 50 people that are looking to send you business, you can have a very, very good career. Now, are you going to have The Morgan and Morgan style numbers of clients?

Stephanie Everett [00:30:22]:
No.

Jay Ruane [00:30:23]:
But the thing is, not everybody wants that. And if you have a comfortable practice which allows you to live the life that you want, you are doing great. You are doing great. Don’t look at what other people are doing. Look at what you’re doing and really focus on those relationships, and that can help you succeed. And that’s really what about, uh, all about analog marketing. It’s, it’s, it’s finding those relationships and doubling down on them.

Stephanie Everett [00:30:46]:
Love it. Thank you, Jay, for joining me today. It’s been so much fun.

Jay Ruane [00:30:50]:
Thank you so much for having me. I love seeing you twice in a week. I have to do this. I’m going to have to do this again soon.

Stephanie Everett [00:30:56]:
I’m going to make sure of it.

Jay Ruane [00:30:58]:
Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie Everett [00:30:59]:
Bye.

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