Dive into the world of legal marketing with Brendan Chard, Owner of The Modern Firm as he reveals the secrets to thriving in a niche that resists the usual marketing gimmicks. From his accidental beginnings to forming deep-rooted client relationships, Brendan’s journey is a lesson in growing a boutique agency against all odds. Tune in for a mix of golden nuggets on business, marketing, and the art of scaling relationships – all wrapped in a bundle of canny insights and heartfelt stories.
Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market Podcast.
- Growth through deep client relationships.
- Strategies in competitive marketing niches.
- The power of organic growth via content.
- Challenges of scaling personalized service.
- Balancing growth with maintaining a lifestyle.
Resources:
Connect with Brendan Chard:
Connect with our host, Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 14:27 – Brian: They go, oh well you know, I became a baker because I wanted to bake stuff and now I’ve got a business that I don’t want to do the business I want to bake.
Brendan: Exactly. So our role is to really to try to make their life and their job easier by taking a big chunk of the business part that they don’t want to do or they don’t understand and just taking it off their plate so that they can do more of the lawyering that they really want to do in that direct relationships and helping their clients.
Brian: But working with lawyers it’s gotta be in many ways like hurting cats right I mean there’s a fair amount of they’re getting paid to be right most of the time. Do they walk in the room and tell you what to do and you’re like no no you can’t do that cause that’s crazy.
Brian: Yeah, that definitely happens it’s a really highly educated analytical smart group of people and they are used to you know, a lot of them are also used to arguing and getting their way so yeah, but they’re also a lot of them you know they know when they’re out of their lane and through educating and giving them more information they can really you know I think they grow to respect us as experts.
Brian: Eventually they figure out that you’re in charge of this conversation and then they go okay fine. - 4:49 – But the differentiator with us is the relationship, we really invest a lot in getting to know our clients on a very deep level. Like I think a lot of our clients would consider us to be friends. We know like each other’s names, of each other’s kids, and dogs and you know it’s like a very partner-oriented deep relationship with them.
- 25:02 – I’d say certainly have taken a lot of knocks over the years. I think one of the biggest ones, especially as your business grows to delegate, to really get comfortable with letting go. That was something that was sort of forced on me you know midway through I had a son born with some medical challenges and I really had to let go of some big parts of what I was doing in my day-to-day to make time for that and it really helped us grow over the years but I think that you know the only thing we don’t get more of is time so as an owner the more that you can do to take things off your plate to be delegating to others that’s just huge. And it you just got to to get comfortable with it. Somebody might not do it the same way you’d do it, they might do it better or different. It might not matter but I think that’s something a lot of owners struggle with is just letting go of their way of doing things and trusting somebody to do it own way.
- 3:54 – We’ve put out so much content we have so many clients in the marketplace, we have been very fortunate to have been riding the rankings in the Google wave for a long time so we get a lot of inbound traffic from people specifically looking for somebody to help them with their website. And for us, we’re full service, we do websites we do content we do branding, and then you know all variety of online marketing organic local paid search, some social so it’s the whole mix of services to really be like the outsourced marketing department for a small firm. But the differentiator with us is the relationship you know we really invest a lot in getting to know our clients on a very deep level.
- 16:09 – I mean, I love it when our clients give us feedback and pushback because that helps to maybe push and evolve us and grow our thinking. But also, you know, they’ll come in with an idea, but once they understand the other things that are being contemplated, for why a decision got made, it might be, you know, handicap accessibility, you know, dictates a way that we have to do a certain thing.