Hyper-Local Marketing Strategies for Estate Planning Lawyers with Tim O’Brien

Viktoria Altman: Hey guys, welcome to the Law Firm Accelerator Podcast. Today with us, we have Tim O’Brien, who is an estate planning attorney located just outside of Chicago. Tim, welcome to the show. So nice to have you here.

Tim O’Brien: Thank you, Viktoria. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate the chance to talk with you and all of your viewers, listeners.

Viktoria Altman: Awesome. Tim, tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice.

Tim O’Brien: My name is Tim O’Brien and I run an estate planning, probate and small business advising firm just outside of Chicago. My main audience is usually families with small kids because my primary role in life is being a father. That’s what’s driven a lot of my business decisions and helped me build my business.

Usually when I’m talking to people, I’m like somebody’s dad. And also I run a law firm.

Viktoria Altman: So that makes a lot of sense for someone who has their business as a lifestyle business. Is that how you would qualify yourself?

Tim O’Brien: Yes, indeed. In fact, in one of my past roles, I was working with a business and legal consulting company based out of the UK. My role was great during COVID because I was working with a lot of teams internationally and had clients in Central Europe, clients in the US.

And so a lot of my day started very early in the morning and I was usually done early in the day too, because I was on international time zones. Great during COVID, when all the travel restrictions were there, when the travel restrictions got lifted suddenly I was traveling for weeks at a time. I remember one trip in particular where I got to visit India for a couple weeks.

Great trip, don’t get me wrong, but it was also at a point where my twins were six months old. And imagine having to tell your spouse that you are about to be on the other side of the world for two weeks with six month old twins and a 2-year-old toddler.

It was one of those reflection points that for me, I said, this has been great having this experience, but now I need to look and see what’s important for me, what’s a priority for me. And family definitely was and I wanna be able to see my family. So when I was deciding what I should do next, I really wanted to be community focused.

I went from having this global position to having an almost hyper-local community position that allows me to be home at night and travel only when I want to.

Viktoria Altman: Brilliant. So you’ve built a business that accommodates your lifestyle and I think a lot of attorneys out there are struggling with that specific problem. They might be working more hours than they want to work. Maybe they’re not there for their spouse or their children in the same way. So I’d love to zero in on how you manage to build this hyper-local business that accommodates your lifestyle and I’ve still provide to you with the financial support that you need.

Tim O’Brien: Sure. And, by the way, it’s been a lot of trial and error along the way because as with any business, when you’re starting it out, I had to learn for myself where to put in certain guardrails. Part of building that business too, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of late nights at times.

So at various points along the way, there have been those pivot points. Sometimes many pivot points, but things like saying, I am taking too many late night calls and so we need to trim that back because I’m not home for dinner, or we’re taking too many calls in a day and I’m not able to get the actual work done.

Some of that was just having somebody enforce my calendar and be that gatekeeper. Some of it was also recognizing when to say when, whether it’s client activities or other things. Because having that lifestyle business, it’s too easy for the business to become my lifestyle.

Viktoria Altman: Okay, so how do you combine running your business successfully with having good boundaries? Are there specific clients you go after? What kind of promotion do you do? How does that work?

Tim O’Brien: Yeah, so a lot of my promotion winds up being pretty local. I’m pretty active with a lot of local groups, a lot of community groups, and then some of it is just being out in the community. That presence becomes very important making sure that I’m seen and that people are aware of where I’m at.

So on the promotion side is just visibility honestly. On the client side of things, when I first started, I went after people that sort of reflected where I was, people that knew I could relate to their experience. It was things like families that have school age kids, small business owners, I know their stories.

I’m familiar with their stories because I’m living their stories. It was very easy to become relatable to those clients because I think a lot of times, especially with lawyers, there’s almost something mystical about us at times. Part of that was just breaking it down to be more approachable to people to recognize like, Hey, this is just a guy and he is going to help you out.

He’s gonna figure out the best path forward for you. But there’s also sometimes trepidation to engage with a lawyer because number one, I think there’s that concept of as soon as I talk to him, he’s gonna send me a bill for $50,000 or whatever that is.

But it was really finding that approachability factor, because I do wanna be in the community and I do wanna be seen as a local resource.

Viktoria Altman: So speaking of that local resource and approachability factor, your website actually opens in a very unusual way. You start with a personal story about your family. Is this one of the ways in which you market yourself and try to feel more approachable to the community?

Tim O’Brien: Absolutely. Main concept behind that, number one, was I wanted a website that felt genuine. So when we were building this website, we had actually gone through a number of other lawyer websites and found some really great ones out there. Found some other ones that we would love to give suggestions to.

But one of the things for us that we wanted to build into it was this notion of who is this guy? Because I’m dealing with a lot of families, small businesses and people who have very personal feelings about what they’re gonna be doing. They don’t necessarily care about all of my past achievements, they don’t wanna see my resume all the time, but they do wanna see that I might be somebody relatable, somebody who understands what they’re going through, somebody who understands what they might care about.

And then, once we start talking, I can tell ’em about achievements, things like that to be sort of that differentiating factor. But just at least opening the conversation. I wanted that to be publicly known, number one, so that there’s a genuineness to the website. And number two, so that it almost lends a touch of vulnerability, which is something that I think a lot of attorneys usually don’t see with a lot of their websites.

Viktoria Altman: Fair points. In marketing, the number one thing you learn is the person is never interested in you, right? They’re interested in how you can help them, guide them towards their own specific goals. So when you open a website with something that shows them how you are an approachable person, actually a helpful person, et cetera. Maybe how you would give them advice that you wouldn’t necessarily charge them for that is right away being helpful. And as a marketer myself, I also try to do the same thing, I try to give people helpful advice without expecting anything in return. But speaking of your achievements, you have some pretty impressive resume here, Assistant Attorney General, MBA from Kellogg. You’ve done some pretty cool things. Did you think you were going to be running a small estate planning law firm on the outskirts of Chicago?

Tim O’Brien: If you would’ve asked me 10 to 15 years ago, especially when I was first starting off as an attorney, I would’ve said, you’re crazy. That’s not what I wanna do. And I think there’s an interesting sort of theme that runs through a lot of my background.

Part of that is my very first job as a lawyer right after law school was in litigation for a larger firm. I quickly learned that I was not suited for litigation. I kept getting into trouble for trying to settle things and they’re like, that’s not what we do.

For me, I have tended to focus on things where I can find solutions. As a classic middle kid, I’m always trying to find the middle ground where everyone’s gonna be happy or at least make that piece. And so I’ve built that into a lot of the things that I’ve done over the years where it was like, how can I best find solutions?

And then as we talked about before, I had that global experience, which was great. And then when I wanted to build something locally, the first question I had was, what in my background can be most useful for the community that I’m in? What service can I bring them that is gonna be useful, valuable, and something that everybody should have.

Given a lot of the background that I have doing work within estate planning or wealth management, it was a natural fit.

Viktoria Altman: Okay, so my first question would be, how do you feel about politics?

Because I think if you are the kind of person that is highly educated and wants to find a solution that works for everybody, we could use you in politics. Maybe in a few years after your kids are grown. But.talk to me about how you take that approach.

It sounds like you are the kind of person that likes to lower the temperature in the room and find a resolution. How do you bring that into your marketing materials? How do you explain that to people?

Tim O’Brien: I think the focus really is on finding that solution. And so what can I put out in the materials that’s going to tell that story without necessarily saying outright, I’m gonna find a solution for you. It talks through a lot of the issues that families or small business owners might be facing.

I haven’t focused so much on my public materials about specific stories that I’ve had with clients, but when I’m meeting one-on-one with somebody, I’m able to tell pretty quickly, like, okay, they are a family with high school age kids or their family with elementary school kids.

What have I worked on in the past with families that’s gonna be able to relate to them and also recognize the problems that they’ve had and what have we done to make sure that we are finding the easiest path through that. And so that’s when we’re one-on-one. But what translates on the marketing side of things is really telling that story without naming names.

A lot of that is done in seminars for example. I try and partner with a lot of financial planners or insurance agents, those who have a natural market that overlaps with where we’re at. And meet with their families, meet with the individuals they’re working with and tell those stories.

some of it is broadcasting it on a smaller scale. Some of it is broadcasting it on a larger scale, like doing a podcast, or building that into community events, which is another area where we spend a lot of time.

Viktoria Altman: So that’s a very useful tip, right? For an estate lawyer, especially you guys have probably one of the longest sales cycles of any lawyer that does sort of a small type service like a small clients. Webinars can be really helpful and I’ve interview a lot of folks and some of them struggle to fill up webinars. Talk to me about what you do or seminars, if you do ’em in person. Talk to me about what you do to promote those. What do you talk about? How do you structure them?

Tim O’Brien: So it’s interesting because I think everybody who’s ever hosted a seminar or webinar has had that dreaded experience of you’ve got 10 people registered and exactly zero show up. Everybody’s been there. And I think number one is not getting discouraged when that happens because you are gonna have times when people say they’re gonna show but then they don’t.

Number one is just keep doing it because consistency is key and you will eventually build that following and that community. Number two is learning when your community’s gonna show up. We’ve done things where we bought dinner for a group.

We’ve done things where we had a webinar. And as I mentioned before, I partner a lot with real estate agents, financial planners, insurance agents and we’re trying to share our markets a little bit.

And so we’ve identified times of the year. People are busy in July. People are doing summer activities. It’s not the time to host a webinar. People on Monday nights don’t want to go get a free meal, but on Wednesday nights, Thursday nights, they’re a little more willing.

They’re not gonna show on Friday nights because they’re with family. Just kinda learning from all those experiences and reflecting on those times when nobody showed, okay, what’s the reason why nobody showed? It’s really pinpointing because it’s easy to sit there and say, oh, this is a channel that’s not gonna work for us at all. Shut it down.

Instead, we’ve taken that step back and said, okay, why didn’t it work this time and what can we do next time? What data can we collect about it, and then what can we do next time to help fill the seats a little more? Then just continuing to learn from that.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah,it’s almost like you’re doing split AB testing with this specific situation. You’re split testing the dates and all that. That makes a lot of sense. Another thing, I run Google Ads for one of my estate clients who does webinars, and we found wildly different responses based on the topic.

People will show up for Medicaid, especially if it’s newsworthy. But if it’s not something that’s on top of people’s minds, if it’s not in the news, they will not show up. So it’s also about the hot button issue that everybody’s worried about.

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. I’ve definitely seen that too. Our phone will ring every time there’s something in the news about, especiallyMedicaid. I’m almost expecting the phone to start ringing every time there’s a story about Medicaid or anything over the last couple weeks when there was question about where the federal estate tax exemption was gonna land.

We got a lot of calls from nervous people. Especially in Illinois where we do have an estate tax. The threshold is, I would say, still a high dollar number, but it’s something that really does affect a lot of families.

And so we get a lot of calls anytime there’s anything in the local news about Illinois estate tax.

Viktoria Altman: That is interesting. And so even jumping in on that might be helpful for seminar. I also come up with ideas while I do this podcast because I work with a lot of attorneys. It’s always helpful to hear advice like that. So it sounds like you’ve done some really interesting things with the webinars. You’ve mentioned it a couple of times, how you work with real estate agents and financial planners.How do you meet these people?

How do you network? Might you cold calling them? What do you do?

Tim O’Brien: I would say most of the relationships on that side have come from either networking groups or community chambers of commerce. And a lot of it is face-to-face. You mentioned the sales cycle for estate planning attorneys and it is a long time. There is some truth to that sort of marketing thought of how many touches you have to have before you actually close that deal.

The same goes with a lot of the community relationships that I have. I see someone out a few times, have a few chats with them at a chamber event or something like that. It is honestly kinda like dating sometimes. You don’t wanna scare somebody off the first time you meet ’em by being like, Hey, come do a webinar with me. But after you develop those relationships a few times and you understand, ’cause part of it is finding somebody who has a similar approach to client service that I do.

Because the worst case scenario is you wind up partnering with somebody and then you get in the seminar and you realize they’re talking about taking every dollar from their clients and like, well, hey, that’s not what we. Part of it is vetting ’em on their side, but also letting them get to know me.

And so there’s almost that sales cycle for community partners as well. Over the last couple years I’ve developed a lot of relationships within the local community and the legal community. Networking with other attorneys.

I always need people who do litigation because I don’t do litigation. I need people who are in family law because unfortunately, people get divorced. There’s a lot of things that I don’t touch. I need real estate attorneys. And so the more other attorneys I have out there who are like, oh, I don’t do estate planning, but I have a client who does and so now, Tim’s my guy.

It’s like just having that mutual relationship in terms of areas I don’t practice, areas they don’t practice.

Viktoria Altman: That makes a lot of sense. Are you working specifically with people who work in your very immediate neighborhoods or are you going outside of them to meet people who maybe are further away from you but could still provide you good referrals?

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. What’s really interesting is the area that I’m practicing in. Oak Park itself has about 50,000 residents, and then surrounding communities, there’s probably another 50 to a hundred thousand residents in our target geographic area.

There’s not a ton of estate planning attorneys in that area, which is actually to my benefit. There’s some in there and there’s some well-established ones. And we had to see what they were doing too. So at least when we stayed geographically centered, we were able to really target that market.

A lot of times when I’m working with other professionals in the area, they’re kind of doing that same thing where they’re like, okay, a lot of my market is coming from this specific area and it winds up being to our benefit. I would say probably about 80% of the families we work with are business owners, about a five mile radius of our office and then another 20% come from outside of that.

Viktoria Altman: So when you network, you are only working with people in your very immediate area.

Tim O’Brien: Again, that almost falls that 80 20 rule too. So I’ll do some networking with people outside of the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where there’s a lot of families in my target market, but there’s also a lot of established attorneys in there, and they’re kind of do the same things that I’m doing.

And so a lot of people will say, okay, am I gonna work with this guy down the street or am I gonna work with this guy that I’m gonna have to do a 45 minute car ride to get to.

Viktoria Altman: Right. And you do have a big advantage. I looked at your area. There is not a lot of competition and it’s always so much easier to market when you are one of the only games in town.

Tim O’Brien: Yeah, don’t let that secret out.

Viktoria Altman: Well, I’m not gonna open a law office there. So it sounds like you’ve done a lot of things right, but this is one of my favorite questions. Tell me about the one time when you did some marketing and you thought it was going to work, but unfortunately it didn’t, and what lessons you took from that.

Tim O’Brien: So setting aside all of those seminars we had where one person showed up and it was my cousin, you mentioned Google Ads before, and Google Ads was a shocking miss for us. It might be because we didn’t let it run long enough.

I do recall we had talked with some other attorneys and they were like, man, you gotta get on Google Ads. It’s bringing me three times my investment. So I was like, okay, fine. We set aside like a thousand dollars for that month of running Google Ads and we tried to target it and do all we could to really target it.

But an interesting thing happened for us. We had been doing some light SEO work and we had risen up in the search rankings when you typed for Oak Park estate planning attorney. When we started running Google Ads, our search results actually dropped. We were off the first page and then the hits we were getting were just

far from qualified leads. And so what we took away from that is let’s invest a little more in the local events, meeting with people locally sponsoring events, doing sponsorships, sponsoring our name on the baseball jerseys for little league, stuff like that.

And then still keep a few Google Ads going but for the most part, we kind of pulled back from that.

Viktoria Altman: So with Google Ads, what happens is you’re dealing with an extremely complex algorithm. Now Google is a for-profit company. They want you to succeed. Because if you don’t succeed, you’re gonna stop giving them your money and that’s bad for Google. But, it is very easy to set up Google Ads incorrectly, and it is very easy to lose lots of money by setting up Google ads incorrectly.

The reason why your rankings dropped most likely was because your ads were not properly targeted folks who visited your website, and I’m sure you’ve sent ’em to your website not to a separate landing page, they navigated away very quickly from your website. Google looks at how long people stay on your website as part of your ranking factor. So when somebody goes and hits three seconds and then leaves. Google says, this website sucks. Users hate it. Let me lower it down. If you had done it a little bit differently, you wouldn’t have seen the drop. I don’t know exactly how you ran the ads, but running the ads is complicated and you actually took away the perfect lesson from that, unless you have the budget and a professional doing it, you are so much better off investing in local because local actually helps you rank in Google. Even if the little league team doesn’t put your name on their website and doesn’t link to you, folks gonna go and Google you, they’re gonna search for you.

And then Google says, aha, this entity is popular. Let me move up the website associated with this entity. There is a lot of other things you could do. You could press releases announcing nice things you did. You could do social media posts. There is a way for you to take that local work and boost it and make it much more powerful in SEO.

Tim O’Brien: That is a great analysis because it was one of those things that was a real head scratcher for us. It was like, how did we drop? Also why are people searching for, I think the best one we got was like, somebody ran a search for tire pressure monitor repair near me, and we were one of the search results they clicked on and I was like, I don’t know how that linked to us.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, Google Ads can be very tricky to do. They’re trying to make it easier with AI and trying to make AI better understand your purpose, but you still have to know what you’re doing because you’re paying with a lot of money. You’re better off spending that thousand bucks on three local sports teams, unless you really know what you know. It can be very profitable.

I have clients making a lot of money from it, but you have to set it up correctly and you have to be careful with it. But you’ve taken the exact right lesson.

I’m sure you guys are doing much better with that now. I appreciate you sharing that. So talk to me about the outside of business strategy.

It sounds like you do a great job of networking, but do you have any personal unexpected ways to build connections, may or may not be business connections, but just become more of a member of your community?

Tim O’Brien: For me, one of the biggest things is just finding that one thing that’s going to resonate with somebody. Usually when I’m talking with somebody, I try and do a lot of active listening, number one, and figure out very quickly what’s important to them. You mentioned the MBA, by the way, and I’m not gonna get into a whole story about the MBA, but I will say that one of the greatest skill sets that I picked up from the program that I did was communication and understanding.

I went to a very marketing heavy school and I loved all of the classes that had to do with awareness and customer perception. I’ve absorbed a lot of that over the years. And now when I’m talking with somebody, it’s number one, active listening.

Number two, figuring out what’s important with them. And number three, running through that database in my head and saying, what can I do to help make this person’s life easier or make their life a little bit better. And then pitching that back to them, but also making it sound like their idea in a lot of ways.

And then number two, recognizing that we do have that long sales cycle. We are a very low pressure firm. We are not somebody who’s gonna put an engagement letter in front of your face the first time we talk. We’re going to go through a little bit of that courtship and understand what matters most to you, and then figure out how we can best matter to you.

Viktoria Altman: Embracing the sales cycle is definitely an important way to grow a business, not just get new business. I find over and over again from the estate lawyers I speak to, the most successful ones are very low pressure people. Whereas in criminal, for instance, or PI, you have to be a little bit more assertive.

But for somebody who is in the estate and you’re dealing with money and long-term wealth. Having that low pressure mindset certainly makes a big difference. There’s different kinds of personalities for different lawyers really.

Tim O’Brien: Oh yeah. I have a lot of respect for those that do criminal law. I could never do it. I have a lot of relationships with criminal lawyers in the area because at least once a week I have an existing client call up and be like, hey, my kid got stopped for this thing or this happened. How do we get out of this?

And be like, really sorry to hear that. Let me connect you to this.

Viktoria Altman: Well, it’s like marketing agencies. If you come to them and they’re like, yeah, we’ll do this and we’ll do this, but you just run.

You don’t want that agency.

Tim O’Brien: They’re kinda like lawyers. They’re not magicians.

Viktoria Altman: There’s only one person. You might have a whole lot of staff, but you still have to lead that staff and understand where you’re leading it. I have 15 people, but I still have to do the strategy. It’s not magic.

So, on another note, I’m a big reader and this is a question I ask of everyone I interview. Tell me about some of your favorite non-fiction books and what are they?

Tim O’Brien: You know, this is one that gives me such great pause because there’s so many different genres. I have always been a very heavy reader, like reading and literacy has always been something very, very important to me. So I broke it down into a couple different areas.

I think one of the ones that has been really top of mind for me lately is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. If you haven’t read it, it is definitely worthwhile. It is a long, difficult read and it’ll take some time.

It does really talk about the things in American history that we’re never in the history books. I think it’s always important, especially when I’m raising my kids. I’ve worked with a lot of community groups over the last few years who may be part of a disenfranchised community or feeling disenfranchised.

I very much want my kids to grow up being allies of those communities. And part of being able to teach my kids about being an ally is helping them understand some of the unwritten history of the US or the world that isn’t as clean as they’re taught.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah. I have two teenage boys, 15 and 19. So I’ve done that experiment of trying to teach my children to look at the world in a way that’s not necessarily the most cleaned up version. You know,look at what’s really happening and it works out pretty good.

My 19-year-old has voted in the several elections he’s been eligible for, and I’m pretty proud of their way they present themselves to the world.

Tim O’Brien: That’s great. I mean, that’s a success right there and for us, for our kids, it’s always been very much like, just make an informed choice and then be able to defend that choice.

Be the leader.

Viktoria Altman: Talk to me about the other books. It sounds like you had a few there.

Tim O’Brien: I did. I’m trying not to stay solely in socialist leanings but, The Jungle was always a favorite of mine. The Upton Sinclair book about the meat packing industry in Chicago. Part of that is just interesting Chicago history for me especially when you look at where all of that took place a 150 years ago. That entire area has been just regentrified and it’s an entirely different thing than it was so many years ago. But it is sort of that interesting tale of the rise of workers’ rights and the rise of union that labor and things like that. So, a very interesting book. Again, not for the squeamish and not an easy read.

Viktoria Altman: Yeah, I’ve heard it mentioned multiple times and I haven’t read it, and I think it’s gonna be on the list. It’s a good reminder that I’ve been meaning to read it for years.

Tim O’Brien: There’s one more too. This was more of a fun one, but it was, Billion Dollar Whale, which had to do with Malaysia. There was basically a Malaysian Ponzi scheme, number of years back that brought down a number of financial markets, especially in Asia.

The main driver in this thing was a very charismatic individual and one of those who just people flock to. And nobody ever really asked questions of him. And then the more people started digging after the fact, they’re like, wow, this guy’s entire thing was just paper thin.

It’s an interest. That one’s a little more of a fun read. It doesn’t sound like it in my description. But it’s more of a fun read because it really gets into the details of like the parties he threw and the people he was interacting with, and the people he got money from.

And when I say money, it’s not like signing that engagement letter. It is billions of dollars, from people.

Viktoria Altman: Sounds like the Malaysian version of Anna Sorokin. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of her.

She’s quite a character here in the city. So last question, you branded yourself as an empathetic strategist. Now I’ve had a whole conversation with you and that makes perfect sense. So where do you see yourself growing in the next five years, your firm, and expanding that message to or are you quite happy with where you are now and you wanna just maintain?

Tim O’Brien: It’s an interesting question to ask, because we’ve been talking a lot over the last couple weeks about where are we heading to next and what does our plan look like? And there is a part of me that’s like, I kinda like where we’re at right now because we’ve exceeded our revenue targets for this year, which is great.

But then we’re also at that point where we’re almost maximizing our capabilities right now in terms of what we can do. And so I think when you start to look at growth plans, it is far too easy to grow too quickly. And so we’ve always tried to grow carefully. When I’m saying we, it’s usually myself, my team and my wife. I talk to my kids, but they don’t have always the best input.

Viktoria Altman: Give them a few years. They will have all kinds of opinions.

Tim O’Brien: We’re having that discussion now, and if I’m looking five to 10 years down the line, what does the exit strategy look like? I have to reflect on why I started this in the first place. I started this to give myself choice.

In part it was a bit of my retirement plan too. When I get to retirement age, I don’t necessarily want to stop working, but I want to have a choice about where I’m working and how I’m working. And so, I still wanna work with clients. I still wanna do those things, but maybe I don’t wanna be doing all the grunt work.

For me, part of it is how am I going to build that infrastructure over the next 10 years to have something that is ultimately self-sustaining, where I can just choose where to work. It’s a little bit amorphous right now, but the idea is really continuing with, how do I get that choice.

Viktoria Altman: I think there is a lot of value to not assuming you necessarily want to grow your company, right? Because I get the same question a lot, like, where do you wanna grow? And I dunno, like I don’t know that I want to grow. If you are happy with where you are, maybe that is where you’re supposed to be, right?

And I speak with people all the time who say, yeah, I’m perfectly happy with this lifestyle.

And there’s a value to it, and that’s a choice you should be able to have.

Tim O’Brien: Yeah. I appreciate that. If you would’ve asked me 10 years ago, I would’ve been like, gung-ho, let’s build this thing. Let’s maximize everything. Let’s take an entire floor of the building we’re in and have 20 lawyers here.

And now it’s much more like, what’s in it for me and my family? You reach that certain tipping point of all the effort you’re putting into building something, and does it start to drain you more than fulfill you?

Viktoria Altman: Well, I appreciate this conversation. Is there any last words of wisdom you have for people out there who wanna build themselves a nice lifestyle with maybe not so much stress?

Tim O’Brien: I would say persistence and consistency is gonna be the key. When I started the firm, I did not start it with existing clients. I started it with a lot of just getting out there and finding people willing to take a chance on me. And if I look back at the, you know, we have year over year revenue things that we look at every month.

And when you look back at month zero, month one, month two it was like, my goodness, how did we get through those months? Where was it coming from? But had we stopped then, we wouldn’t be here now.

Viktoria Altman: Stick with it and find something that works for your personality and for your lifestyle. Makes a lot of sense. Guys, thanks so much for joining us. Tim, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate. What a great conversation.

Tim O’Brien: Thank you, Viktoria.