Building a Thriving Legal Practice with Steve Fretzin’s Sales-Free Selling Method

Viktoria Altman: Guys, welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator. Today with us, we have Steve Fretzin. Steve, welcome to the show. It’s so nice to have you here.

Steve Fretzin: Thanks for having me.

Viktoria Altman: Awesome. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Steve Fretzin: Sure. I’m Steve Freson. I am an internationally known business development coach for lawyers. I’ve been doing this exclusively for about 17 years.

I work with them really on business development, personal branding, anything that’s gonna help them grow their book of business and have long-term sustainable law practices. They can be proud of. Enjoy the better things in life, like family and travel and all the stuff that’s non-billable. It’s been my absolute pleasure to be a part of this amazing industry.

As a non-lawyer, by the way, I got pulled into it years ago, but I just find them with the nicest, most wonderful people every day. So I’m very fortunate, Viktoria, that I have this particular niche.

Viktoria Altman: Well, I love that it sounds like you help people find happiness.

Steve Fretzin: I do. I mean, it’s nice when someone is being bombarded with billable hours from their partners, manager and clients with all these demands, and then they.

Start building their own client base, that they can take control of their career and they decide their hours and they can focus on rainmaking as opposed to building two, 3000 hours a year. And they can really live the life they wanna live. And I’m not gonna say I’m a huge part of that. I like to think I’m a part of it, but I give them a lot of credit because ultimately I’m the coach, they’re the player, they play the game and play hard, and then they end up winning in the end, which is to me very satisfying.

Viktoria Altman: So we can call you the rain main maker.

Steve Fretzin: I’ve been called the lawyer whisper, but I’ve never been called the rain rainmaker. I like it.

Viktoria Altman: Okay, so Steve, 1996, something big happened in your life. Can you tell me a little bit about this?

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. I’ll tell you, I went to Canada with my son and we were on an eight passenger plane flying through the woods to land on a gravel runway in northern Manitoba.

It did bring back some memories. I was in a small plane heading back from Eagle River, Wisconsin to the Chicagoland area. The plane had some issues and you hear that sputtering noise that you never want to hear, especially when you’re in the plane. Ultimately, we ended up crash landing upside down into a house in the north suburban area of Chicagoland.

Without getting into all the details, I was a human pretzel for a while and I found myself ripped apart along with the plane and all the members in it. Turns out we didn’t blow up and we didn’t kill everybody in the house that we hit because apparently we had run outta gas. The first thing any pilot learns is never, ever run outta gas.

The pilot to this day would probably say that we didn’t run outta gas. It was a plane issue, but all of the investigations that happened for years after said yes, in fact, there was no gas left in the plane. So it was a recovery in many ways, physically, emotionally, and mentally. But the one takeaway I can give people who can’t believe that this experience happened to me and that I can’t believe that I’m walking the earth anyway ’cause it’s a miracle no matter what situation you’re in life.

You have one shot at making this your life and making this a better place. I’ve dedicated my life and my time to take care of my family, my health, my friends, my clients, my business, and I’m trying to enjoy every moment I can as well as having an impact so that when I leave, hopefully at a very old age.

I can look back at a well established career leaving the legal industry far better than I found it in the niche that I’ve chosen, which is helping lawyers grow their law practices. Pretty harrowing situation, but you come out the other side on something like that, you gotta make a count.

Viktoria Altman: Wow. That’s quite a career turning point. You might be the first person to ever spoken that had a literal plane crash as their turning point.

Steve Fretzin: Well, there’s a reason for that because most people die. So when you’re in a small plane and you hit the ground at 80 miles an hour into hard surfaces, you’re not gonna typically walk away. And I didn’t walk away.

They dragged me away kicking and screaming. We come out the other side on these things sometimes, and if we can, then we have some perspective that maybe other people don’t have.

Viktoria Altman: Very interesting, okay, so you’ve said that franchising was your greatest education. Can you talk to me about that?

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. As a non-lawyer who came up in sales from 16 years old, selling shoes at Kinney’s, by the way, if you’re over 40, you know the Great American Shoe Store, Kinney’s, and working my way up the food chain of sales jobs.

Selling, advertising, and selling high tech and eventually ending up in franchising. The big aha for me was there’s something about selling a business and all of the different parts and pieces that go into selling a high ticket item, but here’s the more interesting part. I had to work with the franchisees on the backend, helping them not only get into business, but then advertise, market, business develop and build a business, build a company.

I was their support network. I had to sit down and review their profit and loss to help them hire, help them fire, help them put ads in the Yellow Pages back when they were Yellow Pages and all this stuff. What happened was I transitioned from being a straight up sales guy to being more of a business guy, and I started to really understand the inner workings of business.

Which set me up beautifully, not only to start my own business, but to help lawyers who not only need assistance with business development, but I also have the background of helping them understand the operations, this tech stack, the things, and I don’t do that stuff, but I know enough to help them figure out, Hey, you’re gonna need some new software.

You’re gonna need a new employee. You’re gonna need to delegate. And get the business running well. So the big aha for me was the understanding of how to be a business person versus just a salesperson.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. Okay. It sounds like you took some lessons from it. So here’s a question you were maybe not expecting.

What’s the number one thing you should do to become a rainmaker yourself?

Steve Fretzin: If you wanna become great at something like rainmaking. It’s not that different than if you want to become a fantastic chef or a great guitar player, or excel at a particular sport, right? You have to become a student of the game.

You have to immerse yourself in the content that’s available, the coaching and mentorship that’s available. You need to become interested in learning, getting an education and understanding that out of a lot of things you could do as a lawyer, nothing will impact your life more than building business.

Because if you don’t have clients, you don’t have business. If you have lots of clients, you can learn the business side of how to delegate. I know so many lawyers now that have built these systems, advertising, marketing, and business development to the degree where they can go take as many trips a year as they want or do whatever lifestyle they want.

The thing is running like a fine tuned machine. That didn’t happen without becoming a student of the game. So I would say whether I’ve got five books, I’ve got a podcast and there’s a lot of other people in legal and outta legal that would be very supportive and helpful to a lawyer who says. I want to become a great rainmaker and I need to learn what that’s all about because rainmakers are made, they are not born that way.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. I’m not sure if I agree with you there. We can debate about this. Okay. So I think everybody has a specific strength and if you truly want to make a lot of money, you have to find your strength and you lean into it. There are some people who are fantastic at systems. I’m one of those people.

There are other people who are fantastic at sales. There are other people who are fantastic at management and whatever it is that you are born to do, if you could do that and outsource the rest, hire people to do the rest, that’s when you make the most money, well be the most happy. I think learning is certainly a part of it, but you have to lean into your natural gifts, right?

Steve Fretzin: So yes and no. Here’s my point, counterpoint. I know this because I I work with very introverted attorneys. I work with very extroverted attorneys. I work with attorneys that can make friends with the devil and get away with it. And there’s people who can barely make eye contact.

And here’s what I’ve found. Yes, there are people who have very strong relationship skills and personalities that make them likable and make them trustworthy, where rainmaking is gonna come more naturally to them. They’re gonna have an easier path and ride to get to the rainmaking peak. Other people may have to work a little more to get to that point. But because I teach business development, relationships, time management, I teach process as a part of my business. I get to see firsthand the introvert who hates networking, and the person whose personality, I mean, if somebody’s a terrible personality and no one’s gonna like them. No, they’re not gonna be a great rainmaker.

They would have to change everything about themselves to do it. But if I find someone who is likable, is very good practitioner at law, and we can provide that person plans and processes and systems and get them comfortable with following a routine of what will make them successful as a rainmaker in business development. That’s a much easier path than them figuring it out and going against the grain for a number of years.

So I think you’re right to some degree that there are people supposed to being a rainmaker, but that’s like an eighties, nineties thing. The golfing and glad handing at the golf club. A lot of people can make things happen through systems and through social media, through building a brand that wasn’t necessarily available 20 and 30 years ago.

Viktoria Altman: It sounds like you’ve almost developed like a franchise solution to a small law office where. You give them the entire system that they can implement to have that rainmaking potential.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s all proven systems that when I have a class of 12 or 15 lawyers that meet every week for a training class. The goal is that not only we teach them planning and execution and all the different elements of business development and marketing, but that eventually they all start talking the same language.

They’re all doing the same things the same way, in their own special way. They’re all out networking. They’re all out leveraging clients for quality introductions for new business. They’re cross marketing. They’re doing all the things that they had never done before in a very advanced and polished way.

The goal is that they’re internalizing how to do business development as a learned skill so that they never need me again. They could just go off and continue this progress year after year, getting better results because they now own these skills that they never learned before.

Viktoria Altman: I love it. What a cool thing you’ve done. So you worked across 50 industries, focusing on lawyers. Why did you decide lawyers specifically?

Steve Fretzin: So, yeah, to your point, I worked with a Caribbean medical school. I worked with a carpet cleaner. I worked with Chicago Tribune. I’ve worked all over the place and in 2008 and 9, when the recession hit.

I had never worked with an attorney and someone said, Hey, would you work with an attorney? They just lost their GC job. They need to go out on their own. Then another attorney, then another, then a law firm, and within 16 months to two years, it became about 85% of my business.

I’ll tell you the two reasons why that happened. Number one, lawyers don’t learn anything about business development in law school. So it’s like a gap that’s keeping them from being successful and making it very difficult for them to grow in a sustainable way. ‘Cause they’re just winging it, trying to hope that things work out.

There was a need in the industry that wasn’t being filled at the time. Now there’s tons of coaches and I’m happy that exists and maybe I’ve been around a little block a little longer than others. But the other piece of it is that I came with a system. That helps people to learn business development and be rainmakers.

It’s called Sales-Free Selling. It’s the title of my first book and it’s the system that I created in studying with other coaches and reading and really putting together a model that I knew would work for everybody, but in particular, works really well for lawyers because lawyers hate sales. They hate being sold to. Nobody ever became a lawyer to say, Hey, I can’t wait to get out and start selling my services.

But if there was a system that was sales free. That allowed them to develop a book of business and develop their brand without selling, convincing, pitching. Well, that’s a very attractive opportunity. The need existed, the system existed that made it comfortable for them, and it was like Reese’s Peanut butter Cups. Chocolate and peanut butter put together, it’s been a match made in heaven ever since.

Viktoria Altman: So you found the place where you felt you could do the most impact quickest. It’s exactly why I worked with lawyers as well.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Sometimes when you find something special and you find a connection, it’s exciting because you may never have been something you realize. But once you recognize that you’re meant to be there, then all the walls come down. You can just lean into it and enjoy it.

Viktoria Altman: That makes perfect sense. So talk to me about Sales-Free Selling. What exactly does that mean?

Steve Fretzin: What it means is that there is a disconnect that came upon us in the last, let’s say 25 years. Before the advent of the internet, people were selling services, people were buying services, but it was a very competitive environment. If you think about buying a car, you think about what it would mean to meet with a new financial planner or insurance person. They’re just trying to sell you and you’re trying to protect yourself so you don’t get screwed.

That defines the last hundred years of sales. And in the last 25 years with the advent of the internet, there’s so much information, there’s so much competition. Think about this. You go to a restaurant, you research the restaurant, you can look at the five star reviews. You can hear what people say. You can look at pictures and images.

There’s just so much more now than there used to be, but people are still selling the same way where it’s me against you. And that’s not fun for anybody. I don’t think anybody likes selling and I don’t think anybody likes being sold to. So Sales-Free Selling was based on the idea that as the lawyer or as the coach or whatever it is that we’re doing.

We’re not gonna sell a service. What we’re gonna do is help someone buy a service. So the idea that I’m gonna meet with a lawyer and walk them through a buying decision to identify if I’m the right coach, if what they need is what I solve, and do we feel that there’s a fit to work together. If so, let’s move that forward together. And if it’s not a fit, let’s exit and stay friends. Let’s not invest more time with each other.

It’s about moving someone forward or moving someone out. If we can quickly identify who’s qualified to move forward and who’s disqualified to move out, we’re not wasting their time or ours. We’re understanding if the fit is perfect, we can cooperate and collaborate in a way that means, Hey, this is a win-win. Let’s continue to work together.

And so lawyers can really appreciate that. It’s not about pitching the firm. It’s more about, let me ask you questions, let me understand what your legal needs are. How deep that rabbit hole goes and am I the best person for you? And do you believe that as much as I believe that, and if so, let’s keep moving forward.

If not, I’ll refer you to someone that might be a better fit. And I do that, by the way, for me, as a lawyer coach all the time, I’m referring people away because they want something different than what I provide. They want a website. Well, I don’t do websites. They need scaling and operational help. Well, I know people for that.

That’s not what I do. I’m dangerous in all those areas. I know a lot about it. But that’s not anything I deliver. So I’m gonna push them in a direction and say, let’s stay friends. I’m gonna help you out and I’m gonna actually try to get you to the right person. Everybody feels good when there’s a win-win and when there’s a fit.

And that’s what I’m trying to help lawyers understand what Sales-Free Selling, that this model will save them time, make them money, help them find the right clients, and everybody can win in that scenario.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, that’s much softer approach than the traditional marketing. What do you do with lawyers who have an onboarding specialist or instead of doing a lawyer consultation, they actually have a system where they have a person in their firm whose job is to sign up as many people as possible. What would you say to them?

Steve Fretzin: I think. If I’m really working with the lawyers who are bringing in the business, and then if they have someone answering the phone and doing intake, I would wanna know what their intake process is. I would wanna make sure that they have a sales free methodology for how they’re doing intake. So that they’re responsive, client-centric and continually moving people forward to address that fit and make sure they’re signing up everybody that should be signing up and not losing opportunities because they have a weak performer or lack of a system for finishing the story. We spent all this time, money, and energy to drive this traffic into the firm, and now we’ve got someone who’s bungling it at the end, not on my watch.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, it’s not necessarily that you are anti sales, you just wanna have a very clean process to follow. That is sort of consultative selling approach.

Steve Fretzin: It’s not anti-sales. I mean, I think lawyers are anti sales. It’s really about can we agree on a process where everybody feels listened to, understood. And that the belief that the solutions we provide are the right solutions. And the prospective client believes that we have the right solutions so that everybody’s moving forward, feeling good, because then when we implement the client, we all have a good feeling there wasn’t any sales that led to some distrust.

We can keep building on that client trust and help them with their matter and develop a client relationship and loyalty that can go for years that provides opportunities for cross marketing, for referrals to really be a bigger part of that individual’s life. More than just being a lawyer. I try to help lawyers become counselors where they’re really like a business advisor for their clients, not just handling matters.

And that’s a flip of a switch that we work on a pretty regular basis as well.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. I like it. One of my favorite questions to ask on my podcast is talk to me about your worst marketing mistake. Now, I know you’ve spoken very openly about your own mistakes, and you’ve actually said that at one point you ran four companies at once, and I believe you said that was a mistake. Talk to me about this.

Steve Fretzin: That wasn’t a marketing mistake that was a business mistake. But I don’t believe that we can improve as humans. We can improve as business professionals without making some mistakes. And the idea that if I just stayed with my core business of business development, coaching, and training. Would I be further along than I am now? It’s possible.

But I set up a recruiting business. I set up an executive coaching business. I had a networking website. I kept finding businesses that were necessary and needed in my space. But when I started working with lawyers and realizing that’s really the area that I want to focus on and that I was really.

Enjoying the coaching and training and just getting distracted by all the other things I was dealing with, and not to mention huge overhead. I needed to refocus. I sat down with a coach who looked at everything I was doing and got me to admit that I’m not focused here. That I’m everywhere doing everything, and I’m not enjoying myself and not helping as many people as I could be helping. So that’s a business mistake.

A marketing mistake I made was I set up video-based coaching and training, so a lot of people have video-based training programs so that you can get a subscription, but I did it too soon. I think if I was to do that now or in the future, I’d probably have the marketing engine to help run it, but I didn’t have a strong enough brand to support it.

So I invested a lot of time, money, and energy in a platform of doing video-based coaching and training for people, and it was a big flop. I ended up losing a year of my life doing that. If I had to do it over, I learned from those mistakes and do it right the second time. But I also know that’s not necessarily my jam either. I think these are all things that help us become better and stronger professionals.

Viktoria Altman: Interesting. When did you set up this video platform?

Steve Fretzin: I would say it was probably around eight years ago. I thought I was ahead of things, but maybe I was too far ahead of things because lawyers really are scared by the concept of business development, and there’s only probably 5% of the legal population that’s openly interested in looking for content in that area.

And the idea of watching videos or hiring a coach or engaging someone to help them. That’s a very small percentage of the legal population. I’m working within a niche to help the most motivated, ambitious attorneys, but it’s not into the thousands. It’s into the hundreds or into the dozens that are actually gonna reach out and take action and something like that.

But it was a good experience just doing it.

Viktoria Altman: I was gonna say that a lot of times with new tech as marketers, as business people, we want to jump on the new tech. What I found is that you’re better off letting a big company use it first so they can prove the concept before you jump in and start investing your own. Once a bunch of people are doing it, then you can go in and be like, okay, how can I make this even better?

Steve Fretzin: Fair enough.

Viktoria Altman: Okay, so you said you limit your practice to just 20 clients. That’s a tight number. That’s smaller than the amount of clients I have. Why do you do this? And how does it work?

Steve Fretzin: So when we talk about 20 clients, that’s a ballpark. Those are my coaching and training clients, and I spend a significant amount of time with them. And if I was doing 30, 40, 50 and I had to cut back on the amount of time that I spent with them, it would’ve impact my ability to help them in a dramatic and significant way. I set up my fee structure and the classes I teach and how I bring people in to hit that mark of 20 to keep the quality as high as possible.

And my time is at a premium? And so that’s that. Now, I also run these rainmaker round tables, and those are groups that meet monthly, and I’ve got about 40 clients in there, so it’s really 60 clients, but 20 that I have to really invest a significant amount of time in every day and every week. And then 40 that are more group centric than individual centric.

It’s easier for me to coordinate and I could grow that to 60, 70, 80, a hundred people over the next five years. And because they’re getting great value from being a part of those groups, they do have me on retainer. But it’s not like they’re meeting with me for an hour a month every month. So that’s why 2020 is the magic number for coaching and training.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, I guess a coaching business is a little harder to scale than a digital agency. You can’t exactly clone yourself.

Steve Fretzin: I’ve brought in people in the past to clone myself, and here’s something I realized. I really don’t enjoy managing people. I have one assistant, it’s a VA, and I don’t really enjoy managing him quite frankly.

There’s things that need to get done, and I’m a big delegator, so I have to do it, but to have a coach work under me or two or three or four, I’ve tried that before and it wasn’t fun or interesting. I think maybe my expectations of what I do and what I expect other people to do similar to me are too high. If they’re not as motivated as me and they’re not following the systems that I’m teaching.

I would teach someone sales free selling so that they could be a coach under me, and then they weren’t using sales free selling to go out and meet with clients. That’s hypocritical. I just have found that I’d rather build a business that’s high profit, low overhead. Provides me the ability to work four days a week, not five.

Take vacations, make great money, help a lot of people, but I’m helping the most interested, coachable people, not everybody. And that makes my life better because I’m working with really wonderful people. Back in the day when I used to work with law firms, they would give me 10 or 15 people to work with, and most of them were problem children.

Most of them had a lack of interest in anything I had to say. They couldn’t wait to get away from me to go back to their desk and get back to the billable hour. That wasn’t fun or interesting to me at all. That was nothing but a nuisance to me because I’m working with people who aren’t enjoyable to work with.

So I’ve created a business and a system where I only work with people who are as motivated as me to grow business. And then we partner together and have the most incredible time together because I know that they’re highly qualified to be in the room with me.

Viktoria Altman: So I think you touched upon something very important here, and this is a conversation I have with people every time I interview them.

Being successful in business is not necessarily about making the most amount of money per year for some people. That may be what leads to their happiness, but I think for most of us, it’s the balance of doing the things we love, making a great living and having the kind of freedom you want. You mentioned working four days a week.

I prefer to work seven days a week, but only a few hours a day. I think when we build businesses, and I’m sure when you’re coaching people to build businesses, this is not my first rodeo. I’ve never actually had a job. I’ve always been an employer. It’s all about creating the lifestyle you want rather than necessarily just the bank account.

The bank account is a part of the lifestyle, but it is not nearly the whole lifestyle, as you know, and I’m sure as you teach people as well.

Steve Fretzin: Yeah. I live in the North Shore Chicago in a little town called Fort Sheridan. It’s a military base that was converted over into residential in 2000s. I’m in a late 1800s horse stable that was renovated.

I walk down to Lake Michigan with my wife. I walk into our town for drinks and live music. We’re in our dream house and we own it free and clear. My son’s college. His college is paid for. He is not gonna have any debt and we’ve got retirement. My wife’s a teacher, so we’ve got a huge pension coming her way in three years.

So how much money does it take to make someone happy? I thought I wanted stuff like back when I was in my early thirties, I wanted it all. And as you get older, you start to realize what really matters. And to me, it’s health, family, security, knowing that I have enough money to take care of myself and my family for the rest of my life, which we have.

We can take nice trips and enjoy life. It isn’t about stuff I want to get rid of stuff. That’s an interesting thing too. When you get certain an age, you’re like, how can I get rid of stuff? Like I don’t like all the stuff I have. How can I clear the clutter of all the things we accumulate? So I would take happiness over money any day.

I think most people would. But there’s a lot of people that have tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars, and they’re absolutely miserable with it. It can buy you some things, but it certainly can’t buy you happiness.

Viktoria Altman: Very true. So I was originally born in Russia and there is a Russian thing. It’s better to be rich and healthy than it’s to be poor and sick.

Steve Fretzin: I think it’s poor and happy than rich and sick.

Viktoria Altman: No. That’s the American saying.

Steve Fretzin: Of course it’s better to be healthy and rich. You wouldn’t want that.

Viktoria Altman: Well, that’s the joke.

It’s always better to have everything if you can. It’s better to be happy and healthy and have lots of money if that’s an option.

Steve Fretzin: I’m with you on that.

Viktoria Altman: So, okay. You have a podcast as well, and on your podcast, BE THAT LAWYER, you interviewed a lot of top rainmakers. What is the most counterintuitive thing that’s helping them succeed?

Steve Fretzin: The rainmakers I’ve interviewed, there were a lot of common themes to what they would say made them successful. One of them was a drive and a motivation to build their own client base and to make business development and rainmaking their business, not billable hours. They’re changing the script of what it means to be a lawyer.

A lawyer is someone who does the work and grinds it out behind the desk, type it on the computer, and they’re saying, Hey, I actually can help a lot more people and make a lot more money and have a better lifestyle if I focus on business development in the rainmaking. So that was a common theme of their drive and motivation to that end of it.

It doesn’t mean that, and they have to be a great lawyer to you gotta know what you’re doing, but not to focus on the lawyering aspect of it. That was one piece of it. Another element that came up repeatedly, and this is all in my book, behind me, Be That Lawyer: 101 Top Rainmaker Secrets to Growing a Successful Law Practice, which is it’s important to have great support.

You cannot become a rainmaker and bring in all this business if you don’t have a paralegal, an associate, a team, a staff, a group that you know is gonna help you create great client service and get a great outcome for the matter. That’s all really critical. So ultimately, motivation and drive to do it, having great support and if you don’t have great support, you need to get great support.

Another one is having great systems and processes. I’ve spoken about business development systems and processes, but also do you have the technology? Do you have the marketing? Do you have the systems in place so that when you bring in business, it becomes almost automated, almost like an assembly line, so that you can run like a John Morgan , of Morgan & Morgan, the top personal injury group in the country.

It’s the John Morgan way. He’s got a process that every group, every office that he has, a thousand lawyers, they all are singing the same song, marching to the same step, and they’re all following the John Morgan system.

So I think that’s another, I would say the motivation, having great support and great systems work, common themes through the podcast and through the book.

Viktoria Altman: And that’s certainly very logical, but I bet you have something that you found that was counterintuitive, that maybe didn’t make sense, but you keep seeing it on people and what is it?

Steve Fretzin: People who are introverts and they would talk about leveraging their introversion as a strength. Asking more questions instead of talking. Instead of going to big cocktail parties, focusing on small groups and one-on-one meetings where they can be more successful. So it was a situation where it was very helpful to lawyers who listen to my show that are introverts and are terrified of the people in the interaction and could never see themselves on a podcast around a stage doing this kind of thing.

That a lot of it is in their head, but even if it’s real, there are ways around it. And so I thought that was kind of content that was coming on the show that was counterintuitive to what people think about introverts and how they can handle business development and be successful in it, even though it doesn’t come naturally.

Viktoria Altman: I love that. So I’m currently reading a book by Bill Gates, about his life called Source Code. Bill Gates doesn’t seem like a particularly extroverted person.

He seems kind of nerdy and geek, sort of the kind of guy who sits in the corner. And so I’m reading this book and it turns out he actually did exactly this.

He took his introversion and channeled it into this because he’s such an intense person like really being good at business and negotiating, and that’s actually how he ended up so successful. Intensity and that inner focus turned it out. It’s a very good book for an introvert. Who is not sure they can make it in business. I mean, he’s done pretty well for himself.

So speaking of books, is there any books that you could think of that you love? Any nonfiction books that you love?

Steve Fretzin: One that I regularly talk about and actually buy many copies of and give to my clients. This is the only non Steve Frezen book that I send them, but I do it religiously. It’s called Getting Things Done. It’s by David Allen and it’s changed my life.

I tell people on the regular that I’m not built for organization. I’m a feather on the wind, which is why I had four businesses at one point and went through all that because I’m just built that way. And like you maybe a serial entrepreneur.

So staying focused and staying organized is not something that comes naturally in me. So. I needed to read a book and implement a system of how I deal with time. I don’t do every single thing that he says to do. I don’t have my email set up the way he says, and I don’t go to the grocery store with a specific list.

I’m gonna go to the grocery store and maybe on the way I need to make a stop somewhere. So I’m making one trip, but that’s common sense. But getting things done really provides a way of clearing the clutter, so I have no paper anywhere near me. I put everything on my remarkable two tablet. I stopped working Fridays, so I’m working four days a week.

I delegate everything I can. Every little piece of everything I can delegate that isn’t worth my time gets delegated out. I’m trying to be the poster child for getting things done and also for my clients to say, look, I know you’ve got 500 emails in your inbox that are on open. Let’s work out a way to get through that, to clear the clutter, get to that zero inbox, and stay there as well as all the piles you have.

And I’ll help them work through that along with David Allen in that great book.

Viktoria Altman: I like that. I’ll have to check it out. Speaking of getting lawyers organized, I’m extremely organized because I have to be. I have ADD, which means either organize or unsuccessful, and I like being successful. How do you get lawyers to get more organized and cooperate?

That’s been a challenge for us, as a marketing agency for lawyers.

Steve Fretzin: I mean, I’m putting them in a situation where it’s impacting and affecting. Their ability to be successful at business development and growing. If they’re disorganized all over the place, then how are they gonna have time to do business development?

How are they gonna use their time efficiently? So I’m putting them in a corner where they have to learn and be more organized. Something I do with many of my clients is I have them track their day and send it to me. So let’s see, what did you do from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM and track it in 15 minute increments, like you would track your billable time.

I find that they’re going on Amazon, or I find that they’re doing administrative tasks or low level marketing tasks and things they should be delegating to a paralegal or an associate. We start to work out, Hey, you realize three hours of your day was something you shouldn’t be doing, and it’s disorganized.

The disorganization isn’t helping. We need to work through that together and clear that out so that they can get that time reclaimed and focused on working with clients and billable hours. In many cases, business development billable hours. Those are kind of two important things to focus on.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, definitely tracking time is a good way to get folks to start being a little more cooperative. Let’s circle back to fear. Now, your crash experience gave you a very rare perspective when a client or an attorney that you are working with is stuck in fear, especially asking for business closing clients. How do you help them break through that?

Steve Fretzin: Well, I don’t say just do it trust me, it’ll work or just trust me.

That’s not something that lawyers respond well to. What I would rather do is explain to them a way of doing it. Deal with their skepticism and their risk aversion and their fear. Work out some language for them to get through it so that they can attempt. For example, asking for an introduction from a client to another client, whatever the fear is that they have, and saying to them, Hey, let’s try it one time this way.

Just try it. You know, it’s like going on a rollercoaster. Once you go on one, you can go on all the others. And the idea is that on the other side of that fear is proof and evidence that a lot of it was in their head and with a system and language, they can accomplish almost anything that they’re concerned and have fear about.

It’s the winging it and not knowing that they have a proven system where a lot of the fear occurs. But I can’t say just trust me, this is a proven system. I have to work through, here’s what you might want to consider saying it this way or doing it that way. They say, oh yeah, I can see myself. And then maybe we rehearse it, we do a role play, get the words out, write it out, whatever we need to do.

Then they execute it. Like let’s say they ask for an introduction from a client and they’re terrified of this, and the client says, yeah, I would do anything for you. You’re the best lawyer I’ve ever had. Who do you wanna meet? And you name it, I’ll do it. And they’re like, did that just happen? Like I could have been doing this for 10 years, and I’ve been silent this whole time when I could have been bringing in all this business by asking a simple question like, you’re the greatest client I’ve ever worked with.

You’re ideal for me. Who else do you know that’s like you that I could work with and getting that out? And now they’re getting all this business brought in because they’re seen as a top player and they can be introduced as a top player by people who really appreciate their skills. That’s just one example, but that really illustrates how fear. And there’s an acronym kind of made up called False Evidence Appearing Real.

That’s what most fear is. I know that’s made up, but it’s okay. It still works. It still makes sense.

Viktoria Altman: I think I agree with you. Most people’s fear is the fear of the unknown. And once they know, once they have a way to go from A to B to C to D. A lot of times you can resolve it, especially if they’re willing to take action.

Okay, so before we wrap up, what’s next for you? What are your big plans on the horizon?

Steve Fretzin: The next plan is to continue to build the brand, continue to put out amazing content, continue to lean into AI to help produce, I think I’m gonna do an audio book through AI so that it’s my voice. But I don’t have to sit and read every word. And create an audio book for my new book, Be That Lawyer.

I’m always looking for self-improvement. I’m always looking to figure out better mousetraps in ways of accomplishing things for me and for my clients. I think it’s just a never ending effort to learn and get an education and business and in life and continue to live a great life and emulate what I’m trying to show attorneys can happen when you work hard and you build a brand and you help a lot of other people accomplish their dreams.

Viktoria Altman: I love it. Very inspirational. Alright, Steve, thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it. This was a great conversation.

Steve Fretzin: Thank you. s