Scaling a Law Practice: Jonathan Breeden’s Journey and Marketing Success

Viktoria Altman (00:01)
Hi Jonathan, thank you for joining me on the Law Firm Accelerator. Welcome.

Jonathan Breeden (00:06)
Thank you, thank you for having me. I’m looking forward to it, Viktoria.

Viktoria Altman (00:09)
Awesome. So could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your practice and where you are located?

Jonathan Breeden (00:16)
Yeah, my name is Jonathan Breeden. I’m a divorce attorney.

In the Raleigh, North Carolina suburbs, have offices. My primary office is in Garner, which is the home of Scotty McCreary if anybody likes country music, former American Idol winner. And then we have silent offices in Smithfield, Anger, and in Raleigh, North Carolina, which is the state capital of North Carolina. And I’m in one of the fastest-growing areas in America. This area is exploding. North Carolina is routinely ranked the number one place to live, and the number one place to do business. I would agree with all of that. So it’s been very, very fortunate. I’ve been in business for 24 years. I opened my law firm in the year 2000. We currently have six other attorneys and 18 employees in total. We service a lot of people here in the greater Raleigh area with divorce and family law, we do some guardianships, some simple wills, some powers of attorney, and stuff like that so anything that affects the family we kind of do here at the Breeden Law Office and you know for a long time it just me but now we got all kinds of team members and growing fast just like my community continues to grow fast.

Viktoria Altman (01:30)
That’s amazing. So it sounds like you are doing well. So my first question is going to be, what have you done with your marketing to get yourself to this point? Something must be working well for

Jonathan Breeden (01:41)
Yeah, you know, the marketing over 24 years has been quite the adventure. But I mean, the biggest change was, you know, I had a fine wall website back in for a long time, that was a final from like 2005 to 2016. And that’s like just stopped working. And you know, I was getting 89 % of my business off of my website. I didn’t have any social media at the time or any of that stuff. And I needed to get a website that was gonna work and I don’t have anything bad to say against fine law, but at that time they were having some trouble. I think they were doing some backlinks that maybe Google didn’t like. You can Google that. Anybody that had a fine law site at that time, there are stories and books about it. But we were able to make a decision and that’s the key thing, Viktoria, is you have to make decisions to do something different and it’s hard, right? You’re scared.

So we decided to move on from fine law and we located a different web company in Columbus, Ohio. When we made that switch, we went from a website that was not working the way we needed it to have a website that was working. And that probably was the single best decision I’ve made in the 24 years of practicing law because then if you have a site that is working, that has proper SEO, that is being updated, is, you know, Google changes the rules every six months, you know, where it’s being updated, know, blogs are being written, you know, you’re adding video content, you’re doing the things that Google wants to see. And you know, it’s their world, not ours. And so, you know, and you get a site that’s able to work, then all of a sudden you’re going to start to have more leads. And then, of course, the rest of it has been, what do you do with all those leads? But, but that was the biggest change for us. And then as far as the marketing, after we sort of figured out what to do with this website because the website was for many many years until probably the last year and a half or two years were generating more leads than I could humanly do with a lack of staff, the great American quit out through COVID, and all of that stuff. I didn’t need to do anything else other than live off of this website for a very long period, Viktoria. But I do think in the last couple of years, we’ve now done, we’re not doing a lot, but we’re now doing some local service ads and doing some other successful stuff once again, have to know your numbers. You know what I mean? You have to kind of know how many leads you have, how many sets you have, how many shows, how many hires, how many people referring to you. This sort of perfect client life cycle that my business coach, Richard James, your practice master, teaches. You have to understand the numbers because almost all law firms have enough leads. They just nurture them properly. And that’s the thing and I know the hardest thing for marketers about you Viktoria is you’re doing a good job, you’re providing leads and they’re dropping the ball the leads and they’re calling and blaming you when it’s not you it’s them because they’re not managing the leads properly.

Viktoria Altman (04:58)
That is an excellent point. So it’s about taking action and making the switch, even though sometimes it’s scary. In terms of managing leads, not give myself a plug or anything, but I do run another company called Follow Up With. And what we do is we create a system where all you have to do is add the first and the last name, add the phone number in the email, and then you tell us how often you want this person contacted. We have an automated way for you to text, email, and even leave voicemails for this person for as long as you want. if you know, a lot of, the reason why I create is because I’m struggling with following up with my leads, right? When I speak with somebody, I’m excited, and then I get busy. And this happens to lawyers all the time. So following up with those leads is super important, whether you do it through a system like mine, or whether you do it because you have a receptionist, even though it’s cheaper now to do it through AI, which is how we have designed, but you can certainly have a receptionist do that stuff. But, taking action and following up. let me ask you a question. When you picked your agency, how did you know they were doing a good job? Because I do have a lot of people who come to me and say, I was with this agency for a year and after a year, I know I was paying for nothing. But while they were doing something, it felt like they were doing something. They were sending me reports and something was going on. So what is it that you’re looking for when you find yourself a good marketing agency, what are the signs You know, when I was trying to decide to switch, I got a referral to this agency.

Jonathan Breeden (06:41)
You know, so I mean basically what I did was I ran a Google search I went to the top 10 sites in Raleigh and I went to the bottoms to see who did the sites some of them say by the law firm and some of them say by who did them and you know and it’s a really what we did was we You know the top site one of the top sites in Raleigh that were owned by a friend of mine was done by search engine guys out of Austin, Texas They’re huge and so we called them and we’re like, hey you build us a site and they’re like no we got a non So we couldn’t build another family law site in the Raleigh area. But when they had an occupation, they said, well, you we recommend you call this company in Ohio post-Ali and maybe they can help you. And so we called them. We were also talking to a company that was connected to the Yellow Pages out of St. Louis, Missouri, as they realized that the Yellow Pages, is 2016. So the Yellow Pages are just about dead and they’re headed to death. And so this company had rebranded itself as, is doing websites for lawyers and stuff. And so was trying to decide between the two. And one of the things I did was I looked at the websites that they had done for other people. And so I went to the sites. I kind of looked at the field for them. I ran Google searches to see.

Where these sites were showing up, you know because most people are not going to come in through the home page. They’re coming in through a Content page and so I wanted to see if these content pages for these other sites that they had built were ranking You know that kind of stuff to see and in one thing you can do now They didn’t have this then but you can ask them or you can make it yourself then you know, they call it I don’t know to call it the scattershot or the scatter pattern where you can get where any is ranking within a five or seven-mile grid of whatever site that it’s based on. And so, you know, if I’m out there looking now, you know, what I want to do is get 10 sites they’ve already done and I’m going to either go run those, that scatter pattern for myself or I’m going to get somebody, I’m going to ask them to give it to me so that I can see where are their sites ranking in the areas that they’re trying to compete. And that’ll tell you a lot, there and there are tons of online website audit tools now that are fairly cheap and will tell you if you’ve got the right meta tags. I have tons of these companies Viktoria has always offered me a free analysis of my website, which I always take them up on because I’m always curious are we doing something wrong? You know, I always send it to my website company. Sometimes they say yeah, we’re gonna fix that and sometimes they’re like we disagree so You know stuff like that But I mean you’ve got a you got to do your homework And then you got to be willing to spend some money like, know, like like like because it’s a lot of work to have a site That’s gonna do well in major markets. You know what maybe not as much work to do well in smaller markets, but if you’re in a major market like Raleigh, County has, you know, well over a million people now. You know, my primary county here in Johnson is now up to 270,000 people. You know, you’re gonna have to, you know, you’re gonna have to do some work and you’re gonna have to pay some money and you gotta decide, do I wanna pay the money to get this done? I mean, my website, you know, costs more than $100,000 a year. And you know, people are holy cows, right?

Viktoria Altman (10:03)
Wow.

Jonathan Breeden (10:05)
It’s a lot of money. But you know when you think about the amount of money that we’re able to make because of the leads it can generate You know, it’s worth it. mean, it’s you know, it’s it’s worth it But you know, the other thing is you’ve got to look at it is it’s not just a website Like you know, like the company we use they do a little bit of everything. Yeah, you know what mean? They help us place offices. They can help us with billboards They could help us with you know coming up with you know, catchphrases and, you know value statements and you know all of those types of things that you do need when you’re scaling because you know you know when you go from four employees to 18 employees like I did in less than four years you know it’s no longer just me and my wife and one of my wife’s friends and a secretary right like it’s a much different animal now than it was just four years ago and so you just gotta be aware and you’ve to know your numbers, right? You’ve got to know and in 2020 I didn’t know any numbers. I didn’t have any idea what you needed to know but I know now and that allows you to make strategic decisions.

Viktoria Altman (11:21)
Okay, so make sure you check the bottom of the websites. I love that tip because I get so many clients coming to me from checking the bottom of their competitor’s websites. It’s the best way to get clients because then they appreciate your value. Make sure you do your research, make sure you ask questions and there’s so much information out there. Certainly, there are good tools out there. Take the meetings, even if somebody just wants to give you a little bit of advice or maybe they even are a competitor. Take the meeting, usually, it’s not gonna hurt and you might learn something. Yeah, those are great tips. So now that we’ve walked through everything you’ve done right and you’ve done so much right, I want you to tell me about what you’re struggling with because we had a little chat and I know not everything is perfect just yet.

Jonathan Breeden (12:06)
You know, the one thing that we’re struggling with right now, and we’re new to Facebook advertising with any kind of structure, you know what that means? We’ve never done anything where we spend any real money or any of that stuff. So what we’re trying to do right now is convert Facebook into active clients. You know what I mean? So can you do direct response marketing on Facebook and do it successfully? And there’s a ton of law firms out there it right. There are law firms not doing it right. We’re only about three or four months into this and we have not been able to have the success that we thought we were going to have. The way we’re structured right now is we got some static graphics, know, of, you know, the wife and with the teddy bear in the box moving out of the house, because we do divorces. We’ve got some of that. We’ve got some videos where I’m trying to just, you know, I look like I’m in the lights and I’m really big on the screen. And I’m like, are you afraid you’re never going to see your kids again? You sort of this sort of, you know, just sort of heaven or hell type videos.

Viktoria Altman (13:10)
The ultimate fear, yeah.

Jonathan Breeden (13:16)
Right, right. We sort of speak to people’s fears, right? So what we’re attempting to do is if we can get them to fill out the click, you know, like are they fill out the form, what we would like them to do is say, OK, say, well, we’re not done yet. You know, can you, will you book a call with us? You know what I mean? So what we’re trying to do is see if we can get them to self-schedule a call with one of our intake agents, not of an attorney, not a consulate, just schedule a call, you know, with conflicts and, you know, the fact that my website is good, I get a lot of non-qualified leads. I get a lot of calls from Charlotte. Charlotte’s three hours away from Raleigh. Charlotte’s a great city. I don’t practice in Charlotte, but it has a million people too, and I get calls from there. So we have to do a pretty good job of vetting because we get so many out-of-area calls just because of the strength of our website.

But what we’re just trying to do is get them to self-schedule a call with us so that our intake team can call them and make sure we can help, make sure we don’t have a conflict. We do charge for consults, collect that fee, and see if we can’t get them in here.

Viktoria Altman (14:27)
Okay, so we spoke about this and there are a couple of issues here that I’d like to share with you and hopefully it’ll be helpful to the listeners as well. So when somebody goes online on Google and puts in a divorce lawyer, generally that means they are at the end of the buying decision. They’re looking for a divorce lawyer or they’re very close to a hire, right? If they go on Facebook and they’re not looking for a divorce lawyer, they’re just scrolling on Facebook, looking at cat memes or whatever they do.

And you go, Hey, we are a divorce lawyer. Maybe they go, well, I’m not happy in my marriage and maybe I should be looking for a divorce lawyer, but are they ready to buy? And most of the time when a person is ready to buy, what do they do? They go on Google. Right? So what you need to do is you’re talking about the top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel. So when we start in marketing, if you’re starting with people who are not yet ready to buy, you’re starting at the very bottom of the funnel. And these people need to be brought into your sphere of influence educated. So if these guys are trying to show one ad and then convert that person, chances are nothing is going to happen. If on the other hand what they’re doing is, well, if you’re thinking of getting divorced, these are the five things you should be doing in advance before you tell your soon-to-be-former spouse. and by the way, we have a checklist for you. Why don’t you give us your email and we will send that checklist to you free of charge? And that’s somebody who is very much at the bottom of the funnel, just considering. And then we have their email and maybe retarget them on Facebook again. Maybe we go back to how much alimony would you qualify for or how much support, child support would you qualify for? And so when we have those emails, we can target those people on Facebook, right? And we can target something called lookalike audiences, which means people who are similar to them. So other people who might be considering divorce, but are not quite there yet. So if they’re trying to convert people who are not ready, waste the money. What you need is a funnel and you need to start with those people at the bottom. And a few of them are not, a good portion of them are not gonna convert. And then a few more and then a few more. The nice thing is because you have good SEO if they see you online, that’s another touch point. kind of, you know, it’s the brand is very important because it’s almost like they bring, they kind of see you, they trust you a little more than they see on Facebook again. Maybe they see a video on YouTube, maybe they even see a billboard and those are all touch points required. But if they’re going straight to conversions, it’s not gonna work. So I would say, and we spoke about this before, I am an SEO person, I’m a website person.

You know, and I don’t do Facebook ads, but I understand the principle of Well, I do them for myself, of course, but I understand the principle of it. And you need to work with somebody who understands the entire conversion pyramid and can work on that for you.

Jonathan Breeden (19:41)
So I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing at this That I don’t know. We do have some Facebook videos. We do have videos of the five things I would do if I was getting ready to divorce. We’ve got a lot of, we’re very fortunate. was able to, I probably have shot.

I don’t know, have probably 150 to 200 YouTube videos where we’re answering common questions, three-minute type videos. I did those for several years with James Publishing out of California. Those are helpful. I now do those in-house. Now I have a social media coordinator, I have a studio, I have lights, have, you know, I didn’t have any of that stuff for a long time.

But yeah, so we try to put that stuff out there. And, and we, we, you know, we have our podcast, but our podcast, the community podcast, best of Johnson County, where we’re interviewing community members, county commissioners, small business owners. So it’s not really for the business. It’s not a direct response. So we don’t put that on the business’s Facebook page unless we’re talking about divorce. We will put that the podcast has its own Facebook page and it’s on social media and all that stuff. It’s kind of crazy that it’s its own thing now. But if we do the legal topics on the podcast, we will put it on our actual Breeden Law stuff. Because what we finding is all this content that had nothing to with the law was knocking down the content that we had that was about the law. So if you came to my Facebook page, you’d see me talking to a dentist. It wasn’t answering your divorce question. So we’ve been trying to work on that over the last few months.

Viktoria Altman (18:53)
Yeah. All right. So what’s important in addition to the content, which of course is very important, is the conversion you ask for at the end. So if you’re asking somebody very low on the funnel to make a consultation call, they’re simply not going to do it because they’re just not ready. However, if you ask them for an email to give them more information, they may do it. And then you have to nurture that lead maybe you put them in an email system, maybe you send them a newsletter, that kind of thing. So it’s all about what are you asking of people and whether are they ready to answer that call, so to speak, right? And when somebody finds you on Google, they’re ready because they went on Google and they looked for you. So hopefully this makes sense. I do want to bring up a couple of things that I found interesting on your website. You mentioned overcoming a scarcity mindset that halted your law firm’s growth. So I know this is a very common issue. What are the strategies you’ve used to help yourself get past that?

Jonathan Breeden (19:51)
I think that starting to study numbers, right? Like studying numbers and knowing that numbers are repeatable, right? So, you know, mean, human beings being animals, if you go back to just the fact that we’re animals are programmed innately to focus on scarcity because we have to eat, we have to have shelter, you know we’re making thousands of decisions every second about whether you’re dangerous, am I hot, am I cold, am I hungry, what all that kind of stuff and so you know for 20 years I’m doing this and I don’t how many leads I have, I don’t know how many sets I have, I don’t know how many shows I have, I don’t know what my conversion percentage is of, know, I don’t know my average case value, I don’t know any of this stuff. I’m just practicing law. And because I didn’t have the information, I mean, I had to get up every, I started literally until 20, the middle of 2020.

Well, probably at the end of 2019, I started every month with business debt, personal debt, and no real business savings, and I had to go get a number every single month to break even. And I think that number was $35,000 which allowed me to pay for the website, it allowed me to pay myself a little bit of a salary, it allowed me to pay the two employees I had at the time, pay my rent, that kind of stuff. And so that’s all I could think about is on the first of the month, what am I gonna do to bring in $35,000 this month? And so, and that’s the scarcity because they didn’t have anything and I didn’t know anything about any of these numbers. So when I got the business coach Richard James and I started tracking the numbers, well then you could see a pattern. And so the way to overcome a scarcity mindset is to gain information, to educate yourself about what is happening. Because I didn’t know. And because when you didn’t know, your gut, your innate thing is there’s not enough.

Jonathan Breeden (21:59)
You throw in a little bit of anxiety. I’m an anxious person. a lot of lawyers are. And it was not a good situation. You know, didn’t think you could hire anybody. You didn’t think you could expand because that’s just one more. That’s just going to up the number I have to get every month. you know, but once you start studying the numbers, then you have an idea, know, how many leads, how many sets, how many shows, what percentage hired me, what’s my average case value, how many people were referring people to me, am I getting paid in full? What’s my collection percentage? These are all things you have to know to be able to scale so that you can make a plan. I didn’t know any of these things until you know, you know, I found a coach. I found Richard James in 2020 and you know, I just started listening to what the man said and following his program and working with the people in his program and you know, it took off from there as far as because here’s the thing. Here’s what I found out Viktoria. I have all the leads in the world. I sit down at the first meeting I go and I meet a guy named

Burt Deener, who’s a very successful attorney out of Wilmington, North Carolina, Deener Law. I think he’s in three or four states now. I know he’s in California. I know he’s in Texas. So anybody listening out in California, Texas, he does immigration law. He may be in another state. I know he’s in California. I know he’s in Texas. He’s also out of Wilmington, North Carolina. And he is a fascinating guy. And he studies leads and he owns a CRM and all this stuff. And I was like, my website gets I don’t know. At that time I was getting 12,000 visitors a month, a crazy number. Now, how many are in North Carolina? Maybe 3,000 of those, but whatever. I’ve given all these visits, but I didn’t know anything about the difference between a visit to a website and a visit in my state at the time. And he’s like, man, if you did right by those leads, you could quadruple your business and never spend another dime on advertising. And I was like, What? You’re out of your mind!

What are you talking about? He goes, you’re not doing the leads right. I didn’t even know what a CRM was, a client relationship manager. No clue. No clue. I’d never heard of a CRM. You know, so I didn’t know anything about retargeting. I didn’t know anything about email drip campaigns. I didn’t know anything about outbound phone calls. Like all these things I’m doing now. And basically, we haven’t done that much more advertising. And we did exactly what the man said. We quadrupled it. And now we’re going past that. And the only thing we literally since having dinner with him at my first Richard James event in Phoenix, Arizona in August of 2020, really the only thing we’ve added is local service ads. And that’s it. Other than that, we are still working with the leads off of the website. But now we have team members that make outbound phone calls. I now have a CRM. I have three team members in El Salvador and we’re making five, six, seven, and 800 outbound phone calls a week to leads that have not either, they didn’t book or they didn’t show or they didn’t hire. Because with divorce law, you never know when somebody’s gonna be ready to leave. What I am trying to say is, that bad husbands don’t get better. And so they just don’t. They don’t get better. And so I don’t know when, and women initiate 80 or 85 % of all separations and divorces. So I don’t care if we’re calling a woman or a man. If we’re calling a man, we don’t know when the woman said I’ve had enough because you’re not very good. And if I’m calling the woman, I don’t know when she said I’ve had enough because he’s not getting any better.

Viktoria Altman (25:11)
Follow up with those leads. Yeah, so you’re doing it, it’s a more expensive way to do it by having staff follow up. But whatever way you choose to do it, whether it’s through an automated system or humans, especially when you have a bigger office, can afford to do humans. Whatever way you do it, following up is huge. Like we get the same thing, you we have clients who come who just do the follow-up system and it’s amazing. They’ll convert 25, 30, 50 % more people because they’re following up constantly. And I think that probably the best tip I can give anybody who is running a law office from a marketing point of view is to follow your lead. It’s a sales tip, right?

Jonathan Breeden (26:16)
And there’s, and Viktoria, there’s so many CRMs out there now. You know, the one I use is called Four Eyes, which is owned by

Burt Deener and Richard James. And it’s a version of Salesforce. But Lawmatics is out there, Cleo Grow has gotten a lot better over the last four or five years than when I originally had Cleo Grow four years ago. HubSpot is doing a good job. I’m told Salesforce is gonna come out with a legal version of Salesforce which may make it a lot more affordable than real Salesforce. So I mean, like you don’t have to spend a ton of money to get a good CRM to the leads but I would bet that 95 % of the people listening to this podcast right now have enough leads if they would just nurture them properly. Build a structure to nurture the leads and then build an intake structure to get them in and sell them. You know it’s all together.

Viktoria Altman (27:16)
That makes so much sense. Jonathan, I know you have to run. I really appreciate you joining and sharing some of your wisdom and some of your success here. I will post the links to some of those resources you’ve mentioned in the podcast description. Thank you for joining us. Just stay for a few minutes so we can finish the upload in the podcast.