Mindful Gifting || Resolutions Past and Future

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Conrad, what a ride that was. Congratulations to the Michigan Wolverines for beating Alabama. What a game.

Conrad Saam:

Wow. We are recording this on December 15th. You are listening to us, our future selves, having enjoyed watching Michigan win the Rose Bowl.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Gosh, I hope we don’t eat our words here.

Conrad Saam:

Boy. Oh boy. Can I wait for the LHLM hashtags about how Michigan sucks

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if we indeed lost, we will be wearing Alabama gear for our next recording.

Conrad Saam:

No, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Let me be really clear. the offer was to buy him a jersey from Alabama or for him to buy me a jersey from Michigan. I will never put that stuff on. No way.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay. All right. Good clarification there, Conrad. Well, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

As usual, we are starting with the news brought to you somewhat by the FCC. We’re then going into a great segment on gifting. And finally, Gyi and I are going to talk about our New Year’s resolutions from the past, our New Year’s resolutions for the future and what you think you should be doing for your law firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Alright, Mr. Lockwood, hit that music

Speaker 3:

Money Makes.

Speaker 4:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing and happy new year to you. Thank you for starting your new Year’s with us. Let’s hit the news

Coming out of the FCC and hat tip to my friend and someone all of you should follow if you are interested in the regulatory environment for digital marketing. John Henson, FCC has really closed loopholes on robo taxing and this became a really, really big deal with Camp Lajeune. We will put a link to the release in the show notes, but it is quite interesting. The new rules make it unequivocally clear that comparison shopping websites and lead generators must obtain consumer consent to receive robocalls and robo texts one seller at a time, rather than have a single consent applied to multiple telemarketers at once. There was a big push by third party Camp Lajeune, paper lead generating companies that really went afoul of this. And the FCC has finally made some pretty dramatic changes. So if you are in that space, this is something I really think you should be aware of and should be holding your marketing firm accountable to. Now, Gyi, we are a technology podcast. Talk to me about print. It’s coming back

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Print. I would like to share the great legal marketing’s hero icon letter in print in my hands. Really great publication. I encourage everybody to check it out. But as folks know, great legal marketing, Ben and Brian Glass, they take contributors lawyers, marketing people and they put it in print form. Now I got to tell you, it’s great content and the thing I like about it is they’re going where in a lot of places people will be like, oh, print’s dead. They’re not going to do, no one wants print. I don’t want paper one. There’s something about the physicality of it, like the actual holding it in your hand. But beyond that, guess what, I get a dozen email newsletters. Guess how many print I get? One stands out. Anyway, Conrad, you hate print.

Conrad Saam:

I don’t hate print. I will tell you this, my most aggressively growing clients engage in print advertising. Boom, go. And there this newsletter approach. I hope it is not the foundation of your marketing, but if you’re doing lots

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Of things, don’t be the only thing.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, if it’s the only thing, we have a problem. But if you’re doing a lot of other marketing things well and I believe in the synergies of multi-channel marketing, print should be in your consideration set.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And of course like everything else, the content matters, right? If you just go and mail out some direct mail piece, no one wants that. I think just kind of brainstorming here, but even doing this just at a local level, get local business owners to contribute stuff. You’re basically a local business news kind of Journal. That’s a great way to stay top of mind. Anyway, good job. Glasses,

Conrad Saam:

For those of you who were wondering how long it was going to take for us to push the concept of marketing local, we are three minutes in and binging, binging, binging. There you go,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right Zig, while others zag. And now let’s zig ourselves and take a break. Alright, we are back and we are talking about a great topic and it’s beginning of the year, it’s after the season of giving, we’re an appropriate time to talk about gifting Conrad. Tell me what you know about gifting.

Conrad Saam:

Well, this segment was inspired by a box that was sitting on my doorstep when I came home from a trip, meaning with lawyers. And I was about to throw it in the other pile of Amazon boxes that are now hiding in my closet for my children. But I noticed where it came from. This came from Benchmark Knives and I was pretty sure no one was sending my kids a high-end pocket knife.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And what and of a lot of listeners might not know this, you’re a huge high-end knife guy.

Conrad Saam:

I am. I love gear, I love outdoor gear and bench made knives are they are just kind of, they’re special. They’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Special. Quick ad for bench.

Conrad Saam:

I have one and now I have two because someone sent me a gift and I was looking at this and I wanted to make a couple of points about this gift. This was from Hunter Garnet who I have spent some time with, but frankly he owes me nothing. And one of the best things about gifts is when they’re unexpected and unnecessary. And so we’ve just finished the typical giving season and you guys have sent fruit baskets. I think we’ve already bemoaned the fruit basket sending and the cookie sending if you’re from Scorpion or whatever it might be because it’s expected in December. We expect to get these gifts in December and they all kind of munged together. And you can’t remember if the pear came from Bill or if the fruit basket from someone else or the cookies or whatever it might be. You can’t

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Even find the gift I sent you. You can’t even find it. Don’t even know it is.

Conrad Saam:

So for those of you

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Who so many gifts, it’s in a pile of Conrad’s gifts somewhere we don’t

Conrad Saam:

Have, I’m hoping the coffee mug that I was giving, Gyi, a hard time about is somewhere in my pile of gifts and I’m going to open it during Christmas and it’ll be really awkward figuring out why Santa

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Sent or I sent a random Lunch Hour Legal Marketing mug to somebody who’s like, what the heck? To neighbor heck is this?

Conrad Saam:

Anyway, my point here was this was unexpected and very unnecessary. There was no expectation, there was no agenda. This was just a thank you. The second thing about the benchmark knife is Hunter knows that I like this. We had had a conversation about whether or not sending a knife, a bench made knife to people as a thank you gift made sense. He knows that I really, really like bench made knives. And so it was personal, it was personalized. And Giftology is a book that if you haven’t read, you should, but it’s talking about personalizing the gifts. Two things. So this was very, very specific to something he knows I already like the next thing. That was awesome. And for those of you watching on YouTube, I’m going to share this with a camera,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s a nice knife right there.

Conrad Saam:

He customized the knife with the Mockingbird logo. It was not his logo, he didn’t need me to remember him. But in fact, what he’s done by putting something that matters to me on it is I will always remember where this came from and I will always remember his magnanimity in doing so, he made it about me. And that’s really, really amazing. And the final thing on this that I think this seems like a petty point, but I don’t think it is Bench Mate is not a run ofthe mill knife. These are frankly, there’s no rationalization for a knife of this expense and this quality. It is just really, really over the top. And furthermore, if you really are into these knives you will recognize or whatever it may be, you will recognize quality within quality. The handle on this is Bench MA’s carbon version. This is essentially the best thing that they make.

And I know this because it’s important to me and it’s a little nuance of things, but it’s important to me. But he also recognized that. So you are giving something really nice and when I send scotch, there’s a reason I don’t send scotch to people in a plastic bottle, right? You’re looking for higher end because people who appreciate scotch know the nuances of scotch. So this was a great gift, and I’m not just doing this in the podcast to thank Hunter, but I want you guys to start thinking about when I’m thinking about gifts, when we are personalizing things, how do we make these more impactful than the box of pears and apples that everyone else sends as well?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And think about this now, right? Don’t wait for the next holiday cycle season. Start thinking about how you’re going to send these gifts. And again, I’m not saying it’s this or swag, but I’ll tell you this, if I had to pick between the two, I would pick this gifting strategy. Again, budgets are different, but I just think about all the swag stuff that people send out that ends up in the trash or whatever. And look, there’s some creative ones out there too. So some of you lawyers, I know you’re like, I got the magnet on everybody’s fridge, great. But it is a different type of remembrance when it’s a thoughtful, personalized gift that’s out of the blue. You’re not going to send it to everybody in your contact network, but how much are you mindful of that and managing that throughout the year, right? Do you have a calendar of gifting? Have you done the research to find the personalized gift for the people that you’re going to do? I think that’s a great, potentially could be a great resolution.

Conrad Saam:

You know what I just realized? I am wearing another personalized gift for those of you checking this out on YouTube. I’ve got the Affinity over awareness shirt on. This was a thank you gift for Michael Mogul after I was on his podcast and we talked about Affinity being better than awareness. Two weeks later, this shirt custom, I mean it’s got their logo on the sleeve, but this is about what we were talking about. So these individual customized gifts are just so meaningful and they make such

Gyi Tsakalakis:

An impression. And I didn’t get one of those. So think about how much more meaningful that is for you to get that. He didn’t send me one.

Conrad Saam:

Well, this was from the one where I went

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Solo with I know I was just Dhir

Conrad Saam:

Michael, please send me, he gave

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Me a T-shirt, he gave me a T-shirt, and I am grateful for my T-shirt. I got the Game Changer T-shirt.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, when we come back, we’re going to answer a question about SGE and then we’re going to get into our dismal failure of New Year’s resolutions from last year.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And we’re back in Conrad’s in zero G.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, we have a question from Joseph Fantini about Google, SGE,

Speaker 5:

Joe Fantini from Rosen Injury Lawyers. I focus exclusively on nationwide mass torts. And my question for the lunch hour is, what is the long-term prospect of Google se? And is that a long-term player or is that just going to be something here in the short term?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So he’s said ssg, right? Yep.

Conrad Saam:

Search generative experience.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. So context for folks that have no idea what this is last spring, no, it’ll be a year. About a year, I think at the end of December. That’s when they officially said it was going to end. But for those that have opted into the experiment, if you go in the browser, they have a button that says Generat experience results. And they used their ai and recently Gemini got integrated into Bard. And this, all this stuff is like what role is this going to play in search in the future? So that’s wondering about, and my quick opinion that I’m going to turn it over to Conrad here is that it’s coming, I think it’s in the results as you’re listening to this on January 3rd. Maybe that’s a little bit of a

Conrad Saam:

Production there too. Your prognostication is that they will have launched SGE on January one or two and it will be widespread. Yeah,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I think they’re feeling the pressure. I think they’re feeling pressure to put it in to do it.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. So when you say Google’s feeling pressure from what, why do you think this is going live?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because the PR story on their AI has been not great. It’s cost them, at least at one point, it cost ’em some market share. I think they’ve recovered significantly from that. But I think a big part of the expectation is that this AI stuff is supposed to make the results better. People are going to other places for search, right? We’ve seen the TikTok stuff’s been going on YouTube, I think, which it’s a Google property, but the actual old school search results, I think Google is feeling the pressure to keep up. They got to up their game. And so that’s seeing this hidden gems update and it’s trying to service more content. And all the forums and discussion sites have been percolating up. They’re trying to make changes to the results to deliver better results. There’s been bad PR around the results.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, let me ask a question tactically for our listeners. Gyi, if you are a listener to this podcast and you want to verify whether or not Gyi is correct, how do you determine whether or not Google has widely rolled out?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think you’ll know if you’ve seen an S search generative layout, especially in the context of local, there’s a lot of similar features, but you can tell the difference in the way that the results are sourced is different and there’s prompts to ask different questions. So it’s a much different experience. And so that’s the question, right? So Joe’s question was long-term impact I think yes, huge long-term impact I think particularly could be disruptive and local. And in fact the near media, which by the way we’ve talked about near media before, but the near media newsletter is a post news by Greg Sterling, Greg, longtime journalist,

Conrad Saam:

Longtime local, smarty guy,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Their article SSG and 87% of local SERPs. There’s this question of whether or not there’s going to drive more clicks through local or whether it’s going to impact both what’s showing up in local and the user behavior from local. Yeah, I expect this to have a major disruption.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, I’ll second that. Mainly because Danny Sullivan, I think we covered this on the last pod. Danny Sullivan said buckle up, big changes are coming. He didn’t talk about what those big changes are, but my read between those Google mouthpiece lines is that Gyi is correct. So we’ll find out. Go fire up Google, run a query and see if that interface looks completely new to you. And if the answer is yes, SGE has hit the internets. Alright, we are going to talk about New Year’s resolutions. And in the spirit of keeping ourselves accountable, Gyi, we are going to recap what we did last year and review and see how we held up to our New Year’s resolutions that we shared on the pod. Gyi, what was your New Year’s resolution you shared on the pod last year and did you keep up with it?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I am so embarrassed. I said that I would do a book a week, 52 books in 23. And honestly, this is not a great reading year for me. I’ve got probably like three open and maybe two or three finished so far short of my goal. And here’s the thing, I’ve had this resolution before this last year, and so clearly I lack accountability, which that’s a lesson on resolutions, right?

Conrad Saam:

Little foreshadowing from what might come up later in this episode, I’m going to read mine to you directly. This is from the transcript of last year’s news resolution pod number one. I’m going to do one needed project on my house a month and it goes for everything from replacing drywall to my greenhouse needs a new floor. I’m going to do those things and I’m going to put the list of 12 things in my wallet and check them off as we go.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And how did you do, sir?

Conrad Saam:

There’s still a hole in my fucking living room

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wall. You had 12 to do.

Conrad Saam:

You had two I

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Probably articulated out of 10. And you’re O for two. You’re O for 12.

Conrad Saam:

I’m pretty sure. So the funny thing is I have no idea where my little slip of paper is that I put in my wallet.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Your greenhouse does not have a new floor.

Conrad Saam:

The greenhouse does not have a new floor, which meant we did not plant in the greenhouse last year and we both failed here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, lemme tell you one I delivered on. Okay, I promised Be a little bit more cynical.

Conrad Saam:

That is

Gyi Tsakalakis:

True in 23, and I’ll tell you actually, I don’t even want to hear it from me. How do you think I did?

Conrad Saam:

You were great. I remember we’ve talked throughout the year of we’ve swapped. It used to be good cop, bad cop. I was the meanie and now I’m like the nice guy, you’re making me look good, dude,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

How did I do as bad cop?

Conrad Saam:

The cynicism was very, very on the surface and I loved every moment of it.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

Conrad Saam:

So we also did New year’s resolutions for our clients. Gyi, can you go back to reminding people the new’s resolution you prescribed for our listeners?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. I suggested that folks do one short video on social media per day, just one video a day. I say distributed everywhere you are, but if that’s too much of a challenge, pick one I and I’ll No,

Conrad Saam:

No, no. Hold on, hold on. If you’re going to do a video and you’re in multiple places distributed everywhere, otherwise you’re just stupid. Agreed. You’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lazy and stupid again. No, no. I’m trying to be

Conrad Saam:

Empathetic. No, I’m trying to match your cynicism.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. Okay, great. I want to be empathetic to folks that it’s a labor to publish it across multiple platforms, especially if you’re doing it native, which I recommend you do

Conrad Saam:

Anyway. Okay. My take is if you’re going to take the time to do the video, take the extra 5% to push it on other platforms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s 5% for you. It’s not 5% for everybody. Okay. That’s all I’m going to say about

Conrad Saam:

That. Were you telling me I’m great?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, it was more of an indictment on some lawyer’s use of technology.

Conrad Saam:

Okay. All right. That’s fair.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right. Okay. What do you got? What was yours?

Conrad Saam:

So mine, and this was a really appreciate recommendation, I think you should commit to and explore and evaluate one nongo marketing channel for your firm throughout the entire year. There were key elements to this, and it was something that you tried throughout the entire year. We just talked about Google and SGE and the reason they are really pushing a new experience because they’re losing market share. And those of you who have not jumped on that wave of finding alternate places that people are looking for lawyers that do not start with a big G, you’re missing out because it is happening.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, I think both of our resolutions here have come true in 2300. I’ve seen a lot more short form video and I’ve seen it in a lot more places. I’ve seen a lot more activity on YouTube. I’ve seen a lot more activity on TikTok of course, and lawyers using the platforms in different ways, like folks getting smarter about paid social media buying. But anyway, so non-Google channels, that’s where people are going. That is, that’s true. That happened. We also had a podcast.

Conrad Saam:

Oh, we did

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Resolution. We did.

Conrad Saam:

What was the for the

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Podcast? Gyi, do you remember what it was?

Conrad Saam:

I don’t. And I didn’t remember about the drywall either, but we did go back to the show notes. Our objective was to cross 20% growth in subscribers. How do we do, Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We did excellent. And you know what? I attribute a lot of that growth. We did 23% subscriber growth, which I think is very good. We achieved our objective, we almost set a new one this year. And how did we do it? By eating our own dog food. We went out on many more channels with social content and that drove growth. And so I am grateful for our awesome production team because that matters too. The production quality, how you’re distributing it, where you’re distributing it, those do play a huge role. I think that was a big part of our growth. So there you have it. Our resolutions actually helping the podcast grow.

Conrad Saam:

Yeah, well done too. The whole LTN crew and people often talk about starting podcasts, et cetera. There’s a lot more behind this than you think to make it successful. And we had a really great year because of them. So much appreciated.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. Alright. And now as we look forward, our new resolutions, we’re going to do one for lawyers, a personal resolution and a new one for the podcast. Conrad, what is your resolution for this year?

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to make unfriend with

30% of our listeners with my answer, and then we’re going to give those 30% some advice. My answer is to stop hiring underqualified in-house marketing staff. But honestly, there are some firms who are making their hiring decisions based on the fact that someone is under 30 and therefore they must understand the Internets and they’re putting these people in charge of tactical marketing and they’re underqualified. And that is not the fault of the person in that seat. That is the fault of the person who put them in that seat. But there’s a lot of, and I’m seeing, sorry, this is some frustration boiling over with personal experience. Let it out, man. Yeah, I know. I should lie on the couch. You should talk to me that it’s going to be okay and it’s going to be, we’ll figure this out. But the problem is marketing is becoming increasingly complex.

It really is. The technology is becoming increasingly fast at adapting to things. And there are a lot of people who are given the umbrella of running digital marketing, which is in hard in and of itself. If you’re going to hire that one unicorn, you’re hiring a $250,000 salary with 20 years of experience. Instead you’re putting Bill who’s been at the firm for four years and is a Paralegal and you think he’s going to do a great job on all these different things because yeah, pay-per-click. It’s just math. And we can send out a newsletter and SEO’s not that hard. We just have to write some content. It’s increasingly hard. And you guys are putting people in positions to fail because they’re underqualified on that and stop doing it. Well,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I am going to offer a slightly different take on this resolution, which is

Conrad Saam:

He’s trying to maintain our listenership of the under 30 crowd. Yes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I am. Beep,

Conrad Saam:

Beep, beep. That’s us backing up,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Not just the under 30 crowd. There are plenty of excellent in-house marketers and to those that find yourself in the situation that Conrad described, here’s my New Year’s resolution to you. Learn the math, right?

Conrad Saam:

Yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What else? What would be the things that you would recommend that in-house marketers who are struggling in these areas should go and do this year?

Conrad Saam:

The biggest failing that I see repeatedly, and this are not one-offs, this is a pattern that people don’t understand. And by the way, most of you, I’m just not talking about the in-house marketers, you lawyers don’t get this either. For the most part.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Some agency people also, by the way,

Conrad Saam:

Most agency people don’t understand this,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right? But let’s focus on the in-house marketers,

Conrad Saam:

No. Okay. For the in-house marketers, but for the lawyers and for any agency people listening who are unqualified to have your jobs, listen to this, go away from the tactical shit. You can learn all the tactical stuff and Google makes it easy to learn how to run pay-per-click and they make their recommendations. And you can do all these things if you do not understand really grok and understand the foundations of statistics, you have no business being a data-driven marketer. And by that I mean if you don’t understand things like sample size or confidence intervals or what a standard deviation is, if you don’t understand what those things mean when you’re doing analysis, you’re just reading numbers and it’s just arithmetic. And without the context of statistical foundations, you’re really just reading numbers. And that is not analysis. And I know this is a patronizing, Conrad has an MBA and he’s proud of his statistics and la la, la. But you make bad decisions because you don’t understand the statistics behind what you’re doing and therefore your marketing and your firm suffers. So understanding the foundations of business statistics, you cannot do data-driven marketing without that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A hundred percent. Here’s mine for the in-house marketers, and there’s a couple of different ways to solve the issue I’m about to describe, but you have got to be the person that is accountable for connecting the dots between marketing and business metrics. So what do I mean by that? If you’re the marketing director, you’ve got to have a relationship either with, if it’s the partners at the firm, whoever’s running financials, if there’s a CFO at the firm, you’ve got to be in close contact with them. And you’ve got to be able to speak their language too. That’s the part that’s always missing. There’s always like you talk to a marketing director and they’re like front end marketing metrics and maybe they take it to qualified lead, maybe. But you got to carry that the whole way through. And so either you need to understand the tech to do that at a basic level, how to work your stack, or you’ve got to hire somebody who’s going to implement that and you’re going to manage the data coming out of that. But if you don’t have that, and we see this, I mean I just talked to in-house market the other day, same issue. And so you’re driving down the freeway at 120 miles an hour with not great visibility

Conrad Saam:

And the dynamic that changes you need to have. You need to be in a firm where you have an impact on the decision making. And what often happens, and this is a failure of the partner or the law firm owner with marketing, if you are not speaking that same language, the business metric, the decisions never get made by the marketing person. If you can have that conversation and provide that data, the decisions happen either jointly with the owner and the marketing director or the owner gets to a point. And we have clients like this, and this is the firms that really kill it, where the owner has confidence in the business metrics that are coming out of marketing and gets the hell out of the way and lets market and crush it. That’s a beautiful place to be. But most of you are putting someone without any power in this role who is underqualified tactically to do this role. And who doesn’t understand the business metrics and the statistics needed to get to statistically relevant business metrics in order to make your firm really, really successful. So this a big role, it’s a hard role and it’s tactically difficult to do all of the things. But if you can nail that piece where someone has the intelligence, and by intelligence I mean business intelligence and the power and the accuracy to make changes that will change your firm, that is magic. That’s a great thing to work towards.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you’re a newer marketing person and you’re looking, you want to grow your skillset, focus on these skills. This is where to go learn. Go learn, CRM, go learn all the business metrics that the business people talk about. And then it’s easy, then it’s easy to justify budget, it’s easy to talk about why you have a role there and you’ve got benchmarks in place. So you’ve got a good handle on visibility and forecasting for your future. So

Conrad Saam:

He’s right. Get deep, deep into the nuances of your CRM system, whatever that may be. If you’re going to learn one thing, don’t get the surface level understanding of Lawmatics. Go deep. Go real deep and understand how it works and how you have it. Set it up because you’re going to find interesting information within there. Okay, Gyi, what’s your personal resolution for this upcoming year?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Man, I got to tell you, I’m going to do it again. I’m doing it again. 52 books, but this time Conrad, you’re going to hold me accountable.

Conrad Saam:

You want me to hold you accountable for 52 books?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So

Conrad Saam:

Gyi’s point here is that without accountability, my drywall is still going to have a hole in it. That is a really big mistake that most people, including yours truly make when they’re thinking about resolution. So I always say, don’t make a resolution for this coming year without some real accountability. And I think it’s third party accountability. We’re clearly garbage at keeping ourselves accountable to these things. I couldn’t even keep my list in my wallet.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, which brings us Conrad to your personal resolution for the year. What is it?

Conrad Saam:

This is tough. I am going to try and work less and I don’t know how to look at that. I don’t know how to quantify that. It’s not a smart goal, but we’ve been busting our butt this year and I am trying to get my firm running with less Conrad work and more efficiency. So

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Good for love.

Conrad Saam:

That one. That’s my goal. Yeah, that’s

Gyi Tsakalakis:

What it says in the show notes though.

Conrad Saam:

Well, no, no, this leads to what it says in the show notes, what it says in the show notes, what it says in the show notes is Conrad needs to be happier. And the accountability coach is my wife. Okay, so that’s some real accountability right there.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Now you’ve just celebrated your 20th wedding anniversary,

Conrad Saam:

Right? My 20th, yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. And has your wife been your accountability coach this entire time

Conrad Saam:

On the happiness metric? Yeah, I think your spouse is always your accountability coach, regardless of who you are on your happiness metric. That’s true

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Regardless. True. It actually doesn’t even matter what the metric is. It doesn’t matter

Conrad Saam:

What the metric is. That’s right.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right. You want accountability.

Conrad Saam:

Marry

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Up, have a partner. Have a partner.

Conrad Saam:

And finally, what do we want to do with a pod this year? Gyi?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think we stick with the plan here. We did 23% in 23. Let’s go for 24 in 24.

Conrad Saam:

Alright. I like where the math gets harder as that number gets bigger.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that before. And what is our plan, Conrad, to get to this amazing number?

Conrad Saam:

So we’ll be launching the LHM newsletter and putting more Conrad and Gyi in front of you in more different mediums. I go back to this concept of we were really successful in pushing the pod through social. That really worked. Continuing to find different channels to expand your voice. And this is not a really subtle metaphor to what you should be doing for your law firms continuing to have multiple channels that are working together. You do end up with that awful MBA term that is overused synergy, but it happens. And so the more we do on multi-channel to push out the pod, the more the pod will grow individually.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes, and I agree. I’m really excited for this. We’ll see how it goes. Got to have hypothesis, but I love this idea of expanding to a new channel. And I’ll tell you lawyers, if you’re not picking ’em on the nuance here, finding ways to grow email lists and to send emails that have value for people, whether it’s something like we’re talking about that Ben Glass does, even if that’s digital, it’s a really, really excellent tool for expertise delivery and staying top of mind. There’s a bunch of lawyers on Substack. I think that’s probably something to foreshadow. We’re going to look at some of what they’re publishing, but those emails publishing on Substack, I think that’s going to be more and more valuable as we move forward. A authentic writing.

Conrad Saam:

Alright, well you’ve blown another hour with Conrad and Gyi, this is the first pod you’ll have listened to in the New Year’s. Hopefully Michigan came back from Pasadena victorious and we will see you throughout the year in multiple mediums.

Speaker 4:

Thank you for listening to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. If you’d like more information about what you heard today, please visit legal talk network.com. Subscribe Vieth Apple Podcasts and RSS. Follow Legal Talk Network on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Conrad Saam:

I feel like this is sideways.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s just part of your shtick, man.

Conrad Saam:

I’m sideways.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

It’s always a little bit like crooked. You’re out to the side, you leave the screen.

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