Jonathan Hawkins: [00:00:00] Welcome to Family Partner Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. Today, we’re going to welcome Brandon Osterbein to the show. I’m excited to talk through some of the things he’s done with his firm and just his approach to his firm and to his life. I’ve gotten to know Brandon over the past year in great legal marketing and been very impressed with the way he approaches his firm and all of that.
So Brandon, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us about your firm, where you are and what kind of stuff you guys do?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah. Thanks Jonathan for having me on. I really enjoy listening to your podcast. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you over the past year, as well. We run a small personal injury law firm in Lynchburg, Virginia. And when I say small, I guess I’m comparing ourselves to other firms that I’m aware of across the country. But in terms of Lynchburg, Virginia law firms, we’re getting to be on the medium slash bigger side of things.
Most lawyers in Lynchburg are solo practitioners or general practitioners, and they don’t [00:01:00] have much by way of staff. And we’ve grown pretty significantly over the last couple of years. We’ve got four attorneys on staff. And I think we’ve got six non lawyer staff. So paralegals, intake people, reception, that sort of thing. And we’ve got two paid interns. So we’ve got 12 people under Ruth on payroll right now. And when I say that out loud, I just get a little crazy.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’ll get a little sweaty.
Brandon Osterbind: I do. Payroll’s got to go on a couple of days.
Jonathan Hawkins: So how big is Lynchburg or greater Lynchburg? I don’t know how you characterize it, but how many people are there?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah, I call it the greater Lynchburg area because Lynchburg, the city itself is pretty small. There’s probably 70 80,000 people total in the city limits, but then you’ve got Bedford County, Campbell County, Lynchburg, Amherst County, Nelson County, Appomattox County. If you’re a history buff, where are our nation reunited after the civil war is right next door to us. So there’s a bunch of counties right around. That’s where the [00:02:00] vast majority of people are. So there’s probably 200, 250,000 total, if you include all of those counties.
Now, some of the counties are huge. Like Bedford County, you’re driving for probably 45, 50 minutes before you get through Bedford County, maybe an hour at part.
Roanoke is about an hour away. That’s the next biggest city closest to us. Everything else in between, it’s rural. And right in the middle, in between that sits Bedford County. So there’s a lot of space in between us, but if you count all of those, probably 200, 250,000 people total.
Jonathan Hawkins: Clearly, it’s big enough for you to have a niche practice. I know I’ve talked to a lot of attorneys that the smaller towns, it’s just a little harder to have a pure niche type practice because there’s just not enough people to do that. But it sounds like it’s big enough for you.
And shoot, you got a pretty big firm, sounds like.
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah. And one of the things that I’ve wanted to do, and I’ve talked back and forth with ChatGPT about a little bit is figuring out what is the market in Lynchburg for car accidents? How many car accidents [00:03:00] are there in Virginia or in the greater Lynchburg area? And then how many people are injured out of those car accidents? And then if you take out the people who are negligent in causing the accidents, how many of those people are our potential clients of ours?
So I haven’t done the math, but I wonder, I don’t even think we’ve reached our market potential in the market share that we could have. So that’s my greater purpose is to reach our total market potential, but I got to figure out what that is first and then work towards that.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s part of what I like about you. You’re very analytical. We’ll get into some of this, I know you’re a numbers guy. I’m a numbers guy too, I was engineering undergrad, so I like looking at spreadsheets too. So we’ll get into that. So how old is your firm? When did you start it?
Brandon Osterbind: We started our firm, my wife and I are both attorneys and we both are founding members of our law firm. And we opened up in 2017. Before that, I worked at a kind of a general practice, small law firm, just south of Lynchburg and in a little place called [00:04:00] Restburg, small little town, nestled at way in Campbell County. It’s about a 15 minute or 20 minute drive away from the city of Lynchburg.
And the people in Rustburg all go to Lynchburg for everything. But the people in Lynchburg never go to Rustburg. They don’t even know where it is, really. They know it exists because the sports teams play each other, but they really don’t go there for much of anything.
But I worked there for about 7 years. I was a partner. They made me partner after about 2 years. So I really got into the practice of law and specializing and niching into personal injury practice when I was there. And I really realized, I was really good at the personal injury stuff. I can make money at the personal injury stuff. And it excited me a lot more than the other different practice areas. So I really started niching down when I got there. And then when we opened up our own firm, it was just a no brainer, that’s all we’re going to do.
Jonathan Hawkins: So tell me about what led you to break off and start your firm? What was the spark or the [00:05:00] impetus? What was it? Did you always know you’re going to do it?
Brandon Osterbind: No. So in fact, when I was working at the other firm, I had the mindset that I had the best gig ever. I can do whatever I want. I can make a lot of money. And when all that started to change, that’s when I started to realize that maybe I can just control my own destiny and go do my own thing.
The hard thing is when you go into a legacy law firm that’s been around for a hundred plus years or whatever it may be, they have a certain way of doing things. And in a certain extent, they’ll let you do whatever you want to do, as long as you’re bringing in money. But when you’re trying to grow and revolutionize the practice of law instead of this is the way we’ve always done it, maybe there’s a better way. Or maybe we can do things differently, that you start to get a lot of pushback.
I felt that in a combination of just personnel difficulties and things of that nature, I just felt like it [00:06:00] was time. If I’m going to do what I want to do, if I’m going to have the life that I want to have, then I needed to do it on my own terms.
So that’s when I started talking to my wife and she’s obviously a lawyer. And when I first broached the subject with her, Kelly’s super smart. She’s smarter than me. She’s the better half, for sure. But she said to me, do you want me to talk you into it or do you want me to talk you out of it?
Because we’re trained to do that. We’re trained in law school to see both sides of the issue and to represent someone on both sides of the issue. And she’s really good at doing that. And I said, I don’t know. Eventually, I came home one day or come home at lunch pretty much every day, at that point. I didn’t used to come home at lunch every day, but I started coming home at lunch every day just because I just couldn’t get into it. There’s too much drama going on with the staff. There’s not enough cohesive direction. There’s no clear plan. There’s no clear desire for growth. And I was coming home for lunch every day. And every day I would come home, Kelly would say, did you quit your job yet? Did you quit your job yet? No. [00:07:00] And then I finally just did it.
And probably did it the worst possible time. We were expecting our fourth child at the time, and it all worked out. It cost us a few thousand extra dollars in the long run. But it’s for the better.
Jonathan Hawkins: So you finally came home one day and you said, Kelly, I quit. So was the plan that she would join your firm immediately? Were you going to form it together? Is that the plan from the start? And I guess, what was she doing? I guess you came from your firm and where did she come from?
Brandon Osterbind: So Kelly was a prosecutor for five years. And then when we had our second child, she made the decision to step down from that role and stay home. At that point, she was doing some online teaching over at the university. And so she was doing that from home, just getting paid to grade and to teach kids online in college. So that was a nice gig, and she kept doing that.
And really, we founded the firm together. And we were partners from the very get go, but it was never our desire for her to have her own caseload, [00:08:00] because we wanted her to have the benefit of working in a business and working in a law firm and giving input. But we didn’t necessarily want her to be tied down to a trial docket.
With three, four kids, that’s just really difficult. You know how hard it is to have a trial docket without kids. It’s even harder when you’ve got that many kids. So we wanted one of us to have the freedom to always be able to go on field trips, always be able to pick the kids up from school, drop them off at school and that sort of thing. And for the longest time, I didn’t have that freedom. Even though I had my own firm, I couldn’t with the trial docket, if I have a jury trial, I’m not dropping the kids off at eight o’clock and then running over to a jury trial at 9. I’m getting to work at 6 or something like that. And then going over to the courthouse at 8 and getting everything set up and then it’s go time.
So she has never really had her own case load. Although she has worked on cases and she’s done legal work on the backside of [00:09:00] cases, even though she’s not primarily a responsible lead attorney on the case.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. We know a bunch of people that the husband-wife, both work in the firm. Some, they’re both attorneys. Some, just one is. So what was it like, and what’s it like now?
It’s a loaded question, man. So be careful.
Brandon Osterbind: Because she’s going to listen to this, right? But when people ask us this question, I always laugh because we always joke around and say, we don’t argue. We mediate. We know how to see both sides of the issues. So I think, that kind of flows through to our relationship, and we’re both generally agreeable people for the most part. And if you feel called to do something specific, then I’m probably going to support that unless there’s something seriously wrong with it. So she’s the exact same way.
So when we work together, she has a different way of looking at problems than I do. And I have a different way of finding solutions. She’s got a way of asking the big question and I’ve got a way of saying, I bet this would work. And then she’s got a way of saying, no, that’s not going to [00:10:00] work. And then I’ll say, what about this?
So I feel like, we’ve had some disagreements over the years. Some people fight and knock down, drag outs and argue and that sort of thing, and we don’t really do that. We do have a lot of issues. We don’t always agree on how they should be handled. But we have a way of figuring out the right solution or at least one that both of us can live with. And then sometimes, it’s the deadlock, just wait and just see what happens and then you finally figure out, Oh, we need to do something about that.
Jonathan Hawkins: So I’m curious, as the push and pull of growing a firm, you want to move forward, but you don’t want to go too fast. You want to try this, but maybe, whatever, and lawyers by nature, generally risk averse. So between the two of you, who is the more of a risk taker? How does that dynamic work?
Brandon Osterbind: I am. I have less of an aversion to spending money. And she is much more conservative about spending money. So it’s the same in our personal life. So we used to lead Dave Ramsey’s [00:11:00] Financial Peace University in our church. Did that for probably 10 years.
Led it 10, 15 times. And I would always stand up. And people think when you say Dave Ramsey, that you’re not allowed to buy nice things. And I always stood up at the very first class and said, hi, my name is Brandon, and I like nice things. I don’t mind spending money as long as I’m getting what I want.
So when it comes to spending money on the firm and growing and things like that, I try to look at things as an investment, and she’s always, should we do that? Should we do this? Should we do that? Are we ready for that? So I think she’s a really good check and balance to me. Because if it were just up to me, I would just spend all the money and grow as fast as humanly possible. But that’s not always smart.
So one of the things that we’ve done to really lessen my natural desire to spend money is we’ve implemented Profit First. And the big idea there is you have multiple accounts, business checking accounts, and you’re predetermining how much money you’re putting in each category in each [00:12:00] account. So all of our money flows into our income account. And 60% is what goes into our operating account. And we have to live every single month on 60% of what we bring in. 10% goes into the profit account. 10% goes into the owner’s compensation account. 10% goes into the tax account. 10% goes into an emergency fund account. We’re automatically putting money away for all stuff.
Jonathan Hawkins: So real quick, the 60% when you say you have to live off of it, you mean the firm has to or the firm and you guys at home?
Brandon Osterbind: So the firm lives off the 60%. So all of the salaries, the rent, the electric bill, all that stuff comes out of the 60% that we’re bringing in. And that’s hard if you think about it, and most people are living paycheck to paycheck and not really seeing profit from their law firm. But the Profit First mentality is you take your profit first and then you figure out what your expenses are after that.
So automatically, before the money hits your operating account, goes into an income account, and then twice a month you transfer 60% into your operating account. And that’s what you have to pay [00:13:00] your bills with. It’s just, he calls it eating off smaller plates. So if you go to the buffet at Thanksgiving, and you have a huge plate, you’re going to get a lot of food. But if you have a smaller plate, you’re going to get less food. So the idea is you’ve got a smaller plate. You’ve got less money in your operating account. You’re going to spend less money.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, so the Profit First, so there’s the owner profit that goes into the 10% or whatever. Out of that 60%, do you guys allocate salaries to yourself? So you’re paying yourself a salary?
Brandon Osterbind: Yep. So we pay ourselves a salary out of the operating account, but we also pay ourselves an owner’s draw out of the owner’s compensation account. So that’s part of just being an owner of the law firm. There should be a financial benefit to being an owner of the law firm. And that’s just every month, we pay ourselves the same amount every single month, just so that our income at home can be exactly the same every single month. And it’s very separate from the income at the law firm.
And [00:14:00] that account just builds up over time and over time. So like I look at our account right now and I can say for the next 10 months, I’m going to make the same amount of money. I know I am because the money is already in the owner’s comp account. And then the profit account, we just pay that out every quarter. And then the tax account, we’re saving up to pay Uncle Sam.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. And so let’s talk about it real quick. In a contingency practice, as you very well know, one month, month to month, I’ll say the 60% can vary wildly. One month could be a record month and you’re like, oh my God, there’s tons of money there. And the next month, maybe zero.
And so I’m just curious, the 60% account, is there a threshold where, okay, it’s big enough where we’re going to now move some of that somewhere else, or do you just always keep it there?
Brandon Osterbind: I just keep it there is the short answer. I try to make plans for the next few months. I’m looking at the year and quarters, so I’m trying to say how much do I need this quarter and how much am I going to bring in. And in our practice, it’s really difficult to know when a case is going to settle.
It’s easy to know when a case is going to be tried, although that can go haywire as [00:15:00] well. Cases we’ve had multiple times, where we thought this case is either going to settle or it’s going to get tried. One way or the other, it’s getting resolved in this quarter, and then we get all the way up to the trial date, and for some reason or another, outside of our control, the case gets continued for a year.
And that throws a huge wrench into our plans on our revenue. So I’ve actually gotten really, I think, good on tracking when cases come in when they should be resolving, telling my attorneys, I expect that this case should resolve within this period of time. And then having a list of cases that we’re working on trying to resolve each quarter.
And then, if I hit 50% of that, I’m hitting my financial goal. Because you can’t say, I’ve got a list of 12 cases that I think I’m going to settle, and I need all 12 of those to make payroll. That’s not going to happen. You’re not going to set all 100% of them. You might sell 50, 60% of them. So if you’re pushing 10 [00:16:00] cases and you’re able to resolve six of them, then that should be hitting your financial goal, but that’s the way you should be, you should be approaching every quarter.
That’s the way I approach every quarter. I have a list of cases that I think should resolve this quarter based on when the case came in, based on when the client has reached maximum medical improvement. And we try to predict when that case is going to resolve.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So another thing that I know that we’ve talked about and it’s just the other reality of a contingency firm is, you have this docket of cases in house that you’ve assigned values to, you don’t know exactly when, but you can guess, but it’s probably at least 12 months, maybe nine months to 18 to maybe longer than that months out.
So you’ve got this huge inventory cases. You’re like, I’m sitting on basically gold in the ground, but I got to get it out. And you got to work the cases. So then you’re in that sort of scenario where you need help and you need people to help work the cases because you can’t do them all.
And so this is one of the sort of the conundrums [00:17:00] of growing a contingency type practice. You get all the cases in, but there’s not money there yet to hire the people to help work them. And so how have you figured that out? And maybe it ties back into this Profit First 60% account. How do you approach it?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah, that’s probably the most difficult question to ask. And I’ve asked, I’m in multiple lawyer groups people who talk about are very open about talking about their business practices and things like that. I’m in a non-lawyer group. And I’ve raised this question in all of my groups. No one has a good answer to it. And I think the simple answer to it is you have to be smart with how you spend money and then how you make money.
So I’ll tell you, we started doing Profit First, right before COVID. And we were on record on par to have a record year in 2020 when all of a sudden the court shut down. And then the court shut down.
And every single 21 days in Virginia, they can only shut down the courts for an emergency period of 21 days. So every 21st [00:18:00] day, we’re sitting on the edge of our seat, wondering, are we going to be able to try that case in a week? Are we going to be able to try that case? And the answer was always no. And we didn’t find out until the last minute.
That summer, that 2nd quarter and 3rd quarter, money really dried up for us. So that was probably the worst we’ve ever seen it. But fortunately, we have been saving money up and there is money in that operating account. There was money in an emergency fund account. And then with PVP and all that stuff that came into play, we were able to not fire anybody, not lay anybody off, and pay all of our bills. And then when things finally opened up again, we’re able to start working cases again.
But I’ll tell you in the 5 years that we’ve been doing Profit First, we’ve come close a couple of times on payroll, but for the most part, there’s always money somewhere. And I never really have to stress about whether or not we could pay our people. And the hard thing in a contingency practice is that capacity always precedes revenue. So if you’re going to provide a five-star service [00:19:00] to people, you’ve got to have the capacity to do it. And if you don’t have the capacity to do it, people are going to get upset. They’re going to leave. They’re going to leave you one-star reviews. Then no one’s going to want to hire you, and then your firm’s just going to go down the tube.
So you’ve got to have the capacity to do the work for all the cases that you’re taking on, and you don’t necessarily have the revenue for a year to 18 months out. And that’s the hardest thing. So you have to do it one at a time. And you have to look at it quarter to quarter, and you can’t just go out there and hire six people. You have to look at it and say, okay, I’m taking on an average of eight cases a month. So if I’m taking on an average of eight cases a month now and a year and a half, I’ll be settling or trying an average of eight cases a month. So I’ll be resolving eight cases a month. What is my average case value? That’s what I’m predicting that I’m going to make every single month in a year and a half. And you just say, I’m going to push it, I’m going to push it, I’m going to know these are the 12 cases I don’t want to settle this month and maybe you get [00:20:00] six or seven of them. And then these are the 12 cases I don’t want to settle next month and maybe you get six or seven of them. And you got to keep pushing the averages because the law of averages ultimately will prevail. And if you keep pushing and pushing them, then what I’ve found is everything just starts to go up.
And the more people that you bring on, the more resolutions you’ll have. So for example, we’ve had a law clerk in our office for the past two years and she two months off to study for the bar exam. And we noticed a significant decrease in our productivity and number of cases settled. But when she came back, that just popped back up like twice as much.
The people, the capacity is there to help you bring in the money, and you got to have the capacity before the money gets there.
Jonathan Hawkins: I imagine, there’s probably a critical mass once you reach that level, that there’s plenty of revenue that you can incrementally higher when you need it, you just got to get there, that’s the hard part. So the Profit First, how did you find it? And how hard [00:21:00] was it to actually implement? I’m curious.
Brandon Osterbind: So I found that idea in the same way that I find most of my good ideas, and that’s from my wife, Kelly, and partner. She read the book. Kelly’s a crazy reader. She reads a hundred books a year, just outrageous. I’m lucky if I get 10 or 12. And she told me, you should read this book. I said, okay, all right, buy it for me. And it sat on my desk for a few months. And then I finally sat down and read it. And when you read the first half of that book, you’re like, heck on, this guy is describing a need to a tee. This is a problem. So I kept reading it and got all the way to the end. And I told Kelly, I think we need to do this. And she was like, great idea.
So it really wasn’t that hard to start doing it. If you have online banking, it’s pretty darn easy. I just went to my local bank that has our operating account and trust account and said, I need to open five more accounts.[00:22:00]
And they said, okay, here’s the forms. So we sat there, took about an hour, opened up all the accounts, got all the online forms or online accounts added up, and I just created a spreadsheet for how much, what my target percentages were, what my current allocated percentages were. And I just started putting in cases.
Every time money came in from a case, I put it on the spreadsheet. And twice a month, whatever the number was there, that’s what I would distribute into the other accounts. So you just got to start somewhere.
I think the last chapter in Profit First is helpful. And it’s like, how do you do this? How do you actually do this? And the mentality is you start with 1%. If you just start with one account, the profit account, and you start putting 1% into the profit account every month or every time money comes in, if you can run your business on 100%, you can run your business on 99%. So then you have what he calls your current allocated percentages, that’s the 1%, but your target is 10.
You might not just start [00:23:00] at 10. That kind of sounds crazy to start at 10, and it’s a pretty big jump. If you’ve been operating on 100% of your revenue, you’ve been spending 100% of what you bring in, you can’t just stop and take 10% and put it into a profit account because now you don’t have enough money to pay people, you don’t have enough money to pay your rent, you don’t have enough money to pay the electric bill, all the things that you have to pay, but you can start with 1%.
And 1% is a whole lot easier to fathom than 10%. So start with 1%, and then every quarter, bump it up a couple of percentages. The second quarter you do it, now you’re putting 3% in there. And then the next quarter, you’re putting 6% in there. So you just slowly grow into it, and all of a sudden, you’re putting 40% into all these different accounts. And you’re making more money than you ever have before, cause you’re spending less money.
Jonathan Hawkins: So you mentioned some spreadsheets here, and we alluded to that earlier. You’re a spreadsheet guy, and I love your spreadsheets.
I guess the first question is, what’s your undergrad? Are you some sort of math background or accounting?
Brandon Osterbind: Not at all. So I’m really good [00:24:00] at creating spreadsheets. In fact, in my first year of undergrad, I took a basic-level Microsoft Word Excel course. And it was as basic as you can get. And of course, I aced it. I just was flying colors, and the professor was like, Hey, you’re really good at this. Will you be my TA next semester? And I’m like, okay, sure. So like these people in this class, I don’t know how to put a formula in Excel and I’m like, you do this, you just showing people how to do all this stuff. So it’s always come naturally to me. I’ve never enjoyed math, but I’ve always been decent at it.
I like to track things. I like to know that the decisions that I’m making are based on data. For example, when I first started practicing law, I started tracking how much money I brought in every single month. Why I did that? I couldn’t tell you. I just started a spreadsheet back in 2010 that had the amount of revenue that I brought in every single month.
And so I can look back now, and I just kept filling it in. Every year, I add a new [00:25:00] column and I just keep filling in that number and it’s crazy how much bigger that number has gotten over the course of my practice because now I’ve got a bunch of people doing the legal work that’s producing the revenue that goes into that box.
Jonathan Hawkins: I’ll tell you, that spreadsheet, you inspired me. I went and created one myself. And there’s a lot of cool things with it. You can see the growth, visually see it. You can graph it out. It’s just cool to see, but you forget. And it’s good to say, look and see where you are now, and see how far you’ve come. So there’s a psychological benefit to, assuming you’re going up. I guess if you’re going down, it might be depressing.
Brandon Osterbind: And you can see certain trends too, right? So if March is always a bad month, you know that. And when March comes, you can brace yourself for it and say, we’re not going to do $200,000 in March or whatever it may be. Because for some reason on that particular month, it always seems light.
So in January and February, you can plan for that and the sky is not falling. You can just reassure yourself that, okay, just because we had a down [00:26:00] month, doesn’t mean that we’re going to have a down quarter and it doesn’t mean that we’re going to have a down year.
So it’s, to me, like a security blanket almost like I can just cuddle up and feel good about myself.
Jonathan Hawkins: We’d other thing that I’ve tracked for forever, I looked at it the other day, maybe at least seven years monthly is, leads, how many leads come in and where they come from. And so I can look back and see month over month, the trends and they’re up. And so it’s cool to see that and see where they came from. And I just put it in a spreadsheet. Eventually, I am looking to get actual CRM software to put it in. But those sorts of things are helpful for me.
And the other thing that ties this together a little bit is, as you plan for the future, as you said, you can see the historical whatever, but also, if you ever come to a place where you want to try to sell some equity or sell the firm or whatever, you’ve got all this data that you can just show boom.
And then another thing along these lines that we’ve talked about a lot or at least I’ve heard you talk about is, you’re big [00:27:00] on, I’ll call it the marketing Legion LSA stuff. And so you probably can tell, Hey, if I start spending money on these things, I’m going to see an uptick in leads come in. Have you gotten that sort of sophisticated?
Brandon Osterbind: Yes and no. Our marketing, we do a lot of marketing. But a lot of it is behind-the-scenes stuff. So we do a ton of direct mail pieces. We do newsletters to 15, 16, 1,700 people. I don’t know, even know how big the list is now, it’s pretty big.
Anyone who ever calls into our firm or tangentially is related to our firm whatsoever, even if they didn’t ask to be put on our list, they get put on our list if we think that they should know who we are. And then we do a lot of attorney referral marketing, we’ll send out a mailer every single month to our attorneys and you tell a story about a successful case that we’ve had and with a QR code, send us your cases.
So we get a lot of attorney referrals. That way, we do LSAs. We get a lot of [00:28:00] calls from LSAs. They’re not the best quality leads in my experience, although we get a good number of them. We get a lot of organic SEO results. A lot of people just find us. We badger people for five-star Google reviews. So we try to be the best-reviewed law firm in Lynchburg.
And then, there’s a couple of ways to measure that. There’s another law firm I was actually just looking at this earlier today at a curiosity, cause we got another five-star Google review yesterday. And I wanted to know, where are we in comparison to some of the other law firms in Lynchburg?
And we’ve got, I think, 124 five-star Google reviews right now. There’s a general practice law firm that does a lot of divorces and real estate and civil litigation, and they do a little bit of PR work. They’ve got 164, I think, or 165, but they’ve got a 4.6. We’ve got a 4.9. There’s another guy who just randomly showed up in Lynchburg who’s got, I think, 93 and he’s got [00:29:00] five-star rating. I don’t know, but I feel like some of those reviews may not be 100% legit.
If you actually look at the studies on what your rating should be, 5.0 is not the top rating that people are looking for. People are looking for a 4.9. And they don’t consciously know that. But 4.9 is the best rating that you can have on Google. 4.8 I think is second, 5.0 is third. So if you actually want a bad review or two on your docket, which is crazy to think of.
Jonathan Hawkins: Next time I ask for a Google review, I have to ask for a bad one.
Brandon Osterbind: There you go, but Google reviews are a big driver of business. I can’t tell you how many people have come into our firm and I say, how did you hear about us? And they said I started reading your Google reviews. And I just felt like I needed to come here. So we ask people to specify why they chose us, what they came in here for, Google’s looking at the content of the reviews.
So Google wants to see a personal injury law firm. They want people to use the word personal [00:30:00] injury in the review. So things like that, we really focus on. So that’s a big piece of how we get new cases in. We do some Google ads, but it’s really specific. I don’t do the big broad search 7, $8,000 a month, spend on that sort of thing, just because it’s not the return on that in Lynchburg is not big enough.
The big out-of-town law firms, some law firms from Roanoke and Virginia Beach, and Richmond are doing that in our market, and they’re probably spending 10 grand a month to get that stuff. And if you’re not spending outspending them, or at least in the top two or three, then you’re just wasting money. So we shut those down unless people are searching for really specific things.
So we’ve got some exact match searches where we’ll show up for people. I track every month what we spend. And attribution is really difficult in our space because someone can see you on Facebook. We do Facebook ads as well, just kind of video view ads, the cheap stuff.
So someone can see you on [00:31:00] Facebook and then they can get a recommendation from a friend or they can see you on the LSA and when they search, and they ultimately decide to call you, but it’s an accumulation of reasons for why they call you. So it’s hard to really tell when someone is coming in from one specific thing.
So I’m always looking at how much of my spending overall. Is that worth it? And if I can get my face and my name out there a little bit more, will that directly increase the number of leads that we have? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no, depending on what the medium is.
And then sometimes, it takes three or four months before it really starts to kick in because you’re really talking this to people’s subconscious. Especially with personal injury cases, they’re not necessarily in the market to hire you when they first see your spot or when they first see your ad. But you’re trying to get that subconscious, Hey, this is a trustworthy law firm, you should consider hiring them. And then all of a sudden, they get in a car accident. Oh, I remember seeing something about that. So your marketing is [00:32:00] additive. It’s one thing on top of the other, you’ve got to have a good foundation that the foundation from, as I see it is your newsletter, it’s your email list.
It’s all the people who have touched our law firm over the last seven years, all the clients who I’ve handled their cases or dealt with in one way or another, over the last 15 years, all of that is your foundation. It’s marketing to the people that already like you, the people that already know you, and the people that already trust you. So when someone else gets in an accident, they’re saying, Hey, you should call that person.
I’ll give you a good example just happened this week. We just got hired on a catastrophic car accident case, which of course is terrible, but the referral came from a guy who thought he had a medical malpractice case and we told him he didn’t.
So the interaction that he had with our firm from start to finish, hey, I think I have a medical malpractice case to our closing letter that says, Hey, you don’t have a medical malpractice case. He was so impressed about it [00:33:00] like two years ago. And he was on our newsletter list when his friend was significantly injured in a car accident. He went over to the hospital and said, you gotta hire this law firm. So that’s the kind of foundation that you should have to have, and then you start to build on top of that.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s a great story and a great example. And I also like you say, it’s addictive, I call it like an ecosystem and everything works together. And a lot of people that are just getting started, we’ve all been there. It’s you look at it, you’re like, how am I going to do it all in a question?
The answer is one thing at a time. But then all of a sudden, you get that critical mass and it just starts working. And the other thing I like to say is, you want people to think you’re everywhere all the time, but they see you everywhere coming from all different angles. I really like that.
So let’s shift gears just a little bit from marketing. I’m curious, your role at the firm. So when you first started, I’m sure you were doing everything, doing all the client work, just doing everything. I know you had Kelly helping you, and she was probably doing everything to except going to court. What are [00:34:00] you doing now? Take me through the evolution of how maybe it’s changed from the beginning to now.
Brandon Osterbind: Oh, yeah. In the beginning, I didn’t even hire someone to clean the bathroom. I did that. And my assistant did that. We just took turns back in the day. Yeah, we were trying to run a lean mean machine, and just do as many cases as we could, as that we could handle. And just try to pinch as many pennies as we could to make sure we can pay the bills and grow.
And over time, one of my best hires has been an attorney. Her name is Hannah Bowie. And she came to us because she just graduated law school and she was looking for a law job and there really weren’t any in Lynchburg.
And we were looking for more of a paralegal position because we were growing and we just needed more document help on getting discovery done and pleadings and that sort of thing. And when she applied, ah, we really don’t want to hire a lawyer cause that costs more than hiring a paralegal.
But [00:35:00] then, the more we thought about it, we thought, you know what? She can do a lot of paralegal work. And then if it works out, then she can start to have her own caseload. So that’s what we’ve done over the course of time. And now, she’s essentially running all of our PI cases.
We’ve got another brand new attorney that we just hired, but she’s been with us for two years. So she knows her system. She knows how we’d like to move cases along. And she’s really good at all of those things, the moot court tournament, her third year of law school. So she’s really good on her feet, prepares for everything, and just works her tail off.
Hannah is in charge of making sure all the cases are run smoothly and then distributed among her and Cameron. Kelly and I are back into the big-picture seat. I’m doing a ton of marketing work, Kelly is really a visionary in our firm. She has the big ideas. She asked the hard questions. Why are we doing it this way? Why is this person not happy? And then she’ll get into a case and like reverse engineer, what has happened almost on a quality control type of a [00:36:00] role, and make sure that we’re providing that five-star experience.
She’s doing a lot of that and I’m doing a lot of the marketing content and creation, and just coming up with new ideas on how to get more clients through the door. I’ll tell you, even two years ago, I remember sitting in a Great Legal Marketing Mastermind and there was another attorney, she’s not in the group anymore, but she was getting five P.I. cases a month. And I asked her during lunch, how in the world are you getting five cases a month? That just blows my mind. Our goal is two.
And then just to see where we are now, we’re getting 10. Now, it’s only the last couple of years and we went from, and I think you’re 100% right with the critical mass theory. At some point, you just achieve that level, and the machine just starts to take off and do some of the things for you. In Ben Glass’s words, the universe recognizes the good that you’re putting in and starts to search to see it and you’re feeding it and then you’re getting new things out of [00:37:00] it. I don’t call it the universe. I call it God’s provision. But I think Ben and I are talking about the same thing. But you reach that critical mass and all of a sudden it’s just starts to flow.
I remember in 2021, we brought in 52 new cases. What is about four or five cases a month? And then in 2023, we brought in, I think it was like 119 or something like that. That’s when I can pinpoint it and say, okay. 52 was our biggest year ever in 2022. And then in 2023, it more than doubled it.
And then in November, we’ve already hit or gone past a hundred. Our goal was just hit a hundred cases again this year, because we thought, maybe it was just a fluke year and it really wasn’t. So we’ll probably end up somewhere around 130 or so new cases this year. That critical mass theory, I think there’s something to it.
Jonathan Hawkins: So as you look back over the last seven or so years since you founded the firm, if you could pick one or two things that you would say, all right, this is [00:38:00] really the juice that helped us go. Are there a couple of things you can point to?
Brandon Osterbind: This might be a hit to my ego, but I think it’s really me getting out of the legal work and focusing more on the processes and the systems and the marketing. I think that’s been the biggest growth driver for our firm in taking us from four people on staff, two years ago to 12 people, 10 full-time now.
So when I started saying, okay, I can do this case really well, but so can Hannah. She may do it a little bit different than me, but I’m going to trust her to handle it without me. And if she has a question, she can come to ask. When I started legitimately delegating legal work to other people, I think that is the one thing that started our path of growth, the way that we’ve done it.
Jonathan Hawkins: So that is a really hard thing for most lawyers to do, whatever reason, probably lots of different reasons.
How did you go through the mindset shift and let go? Was that hard for you? Or was it [00:39:00] not that hard?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah, it was hard for me because I’m confident in my legal ability. I know how to do these things. I could try a jury trial in my sleep, I could just go do it. And I feel like I’m pretty good at it. And I feel like I’m really good at writing. And I feel like I’m really good at drafting pleadings and motions and briefs and things of that nature.
But for me, what caused me to have the mindset shift is probably Ben Glass, Charlie Mann, just constantly speaking into my practice and saying, just because you are really good at it, doesn’t mean that you’re always going to be the best at it, and just doesn’t mean that the way that someone else does it is not also really good.
But it’s that accountability. It’s that external. Someone looking into your practice and saying, Hey, I don’t have any stake in this, but you should delegate more. You should do this. You should do that. That’s why we go to Masterminds because it’s easier to spot other people’s problems and to solve them than to spot and to solve your own problems.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’s funny in those [00:40:00] sessions.
Brandon Osterbind: It is.
Jonathan Hawkins: When you get up there, you’ll say, not you. But just when a person gets up there, what do I do? And you feel like they don’t have the answer and then they sit down, somebody else gets up there, basically says the exact same thing. And they’re going, dude, do this.
Brandon Osterbind: Take your own advice, man. And I do that, how often I can speak up, ’cause I’ve been through what a lot of people, have been through already. And I’ve seen it and I’ve done some of the things and then I’ll get home, I’ll get back to the hotel that night and I’m like, man, I should really try that myself.
Jonathan Hawkins: So let’s talk about the Mastermind. You’ve been in it much longer than I have. How long have you been doing coaching Mastermind stuff for law firms and how did you get into it? And what would be your advice for others that perhaps have never done it?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah. So we opened up our firm in 2017, and I found great legal marketing and I think maybe towards the end of 2018. So I just joined at like the lowest possible level or something like that. Started doing the homework, started figuring out, Hey, this is pretty good stuff. And I went to a boot camp, probably in 2019 or so.
[00:41:00] And it wasn’t until it was the great legal marketing summit in 2020, which is the COVID year, and there were like 25 people in the room. And it was only three hours from us. And so we just went. We went to the summit and it was really intimate and personal and got to know some people. And that’s when they rolled out the hero and icon groups at great legal marketing. And I just looked at Kelly and I said, I think we need to do this. And she said I think we should too. So it was a joint decision. And then January 21 was our first meeting and we’ve been doing it ever since.
And now I’m in two of those groups, and I’m in a non-lawyer group that’s local here in Lynchburg as well. And the best part of it is not even necessarily what happens in the room, but the relationships that are formed outside of the room over lunches and over meals and events that you do. And the conversations like we’re having now that happened outside of the room, I learned probably more [00:42:00] from those conversations than I do.
Sometimes, the conversations in the room, I learned a lot in the room as well, but it’s the relationships of people who are going through it, the people with a similar mindset because I’ll tell you, there aren’t a lot of people in Lynchburg that have the same mindset that I have. There are some, but quite frankly, I don’t know that I want to sit down and share all my secrets with them. All the things that I’m doing with them if they’re great, especially if they’re going to try to compete with me.
But there’s more than enough cases to satisfy us and to fill our plate. And there’s more than enough cases to fill the guy down the street’s plate as well. But at the same time, getting out of Lynchburg, out of town, wherever you are, and sitting down and just focusing for two whole days on your law firm and solving problems in a law practice, there’s magic to that. It’s almost palpable.
When you leave, you always have a list of things that you want to do and a list of projects to get started on. And then you have to figure out what can I [00:43:00] do over the next quarter to move the needle forward. And you can’t just get answers to those questions if you’re just sitting at your desk doing legal work all day.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’s interesting. Atlanta’s pretty big. There’s a lot of lawyers here. Probably 20,000 lawyers here. But even with this many lawyers, there aren’t many that think like this, they’re just not. And you can feel lost. You’re like, what’s wrong with me? And it’s really good to be around others that feel this way. And there’s an energy that you get. I really love it. And every time I go, there’s some little nugget, usually more than one, but at least one, I’m like, I’m going to do that. And it’s really nice.
And then it’s just be able to bounce ideas and somebody can say, yeah, don’t do it.
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: You’re going to waste your time and money. Don’t do that. And you’re like, okay, I won’t do it.
Brandon Osterbind: And the old joke was, someone is going to go home and fire someone. There’s always someone in some firm who’s underperforming, and there’s always a law firm owner in the room who doesn’t want to do anything about it because they think that there’s some magic solution. And if you just do this, it’s all of a sudden going to be problem solved. But the solution to the problem is just let the person [00:44:00] go. So that’s always fun when that happens. It’s not fun to let anyone go. It’s probably the worst thing ever, but it’s always interesting to see the look on the person’s face when you say, Hey, you’ve got to let that person go.
Jonathan Hawkins: It’s not easy. I do have some people who’ve told me that it just gets easier every time, you do it enough. I don’t know if I ever want to say, it’s been easy.
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah. And the hard thing is, for the longest time when you’re small and this is one of Charlie Mann’s big philosophies, it’s you’re a family. You view everyone as a family, you’re friends with everyone. You go out to eat with everyone. It’s that close, tight-knit family relationship.
As you grow, you get farther and farther away from that. And you get to the matriarch and patriarch where you’re mom and dad or grandma and grandpa of the firm, and then you go to captain of the ship. And the captain doesn’t eat with the crew. And that whole mentality that you have to say, okay, we’re not really family. We really shouldn’t be family. You have your own [00:45:00] family. And you need to provide for your family and make decisions that are in the best interest of your family.
And those decisions that you make that are in the best interest of. Your family may not also be in the best interest of our firm. And those paths may diverge at some point in the future. And at the end of the day, that’s okay.
And I tell people in our firm this, I don’t expect everyone’s going to finish their career here. That’s an unreasonable expectation. At some point, you’re going to find something, your life is going to change, and you’re going to want something different out of your workplace. And we’re not going to be able to fulfill and satisfy anymore. And then at that point, you have to make the hard decision to take the leap and take that moment of growth and do that thing that ultimately is going to lead to fulfillment in your life.
And sometimes, that happens on the other end. And you can see it as the law firm owner and you can say, okay, our paths no longer are converging. And you’re going this way and we’re going this way. And those are two different directions. And people don’t [00:46:00] always want to leave voluntarily. They don’t want to take that leap of faith because they’re afraid. But sometimes, you have to make that decision for them. And it’s the kindest thing that you can do. Because six months, 12 months from now, they’re in a much better position than they were, if they just would have stayed because they would have been miserable. And we would have been miserable and everyone would be miserable and it’s not good for anybody.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. That is another thing that maybe it’s everybody, but definitely, lawyers have a tendency to not want to address the problem. And they just let it fester and then it gets worse and worse. And then everybody else is like, why aren’t you doing anything?
You gotta have some courage and part ways if the timing’s right, and you just gotta do it, sometimes it’s just better for everybody.
So let’s shift gears a little bit. We’ve been talking about your firm a bunch, but, I think you have four kids.
Brandon Osterbind: Four kids. I’ve got one that just turned 14 today, and we got a big birthday party planned tonight. I’ve got an almost 12-year-old. He’ll be 12 in a month. And then I’ve got a [00:47:00] 9-year-old and a 7-year-old. So we’re in like the taxicab phase of life. No one can drive themselves, but everyone has 17 places to be every day.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So you and Kelly, how are you guys balancing that with running the firm and growing the firm? Cause it is a challenge. You are in it. You are neck deep.
Brandon Osterbind: I’ll tell you, we couldn’t do it without my mom living here in town because she does a whole lot for us. But we have organized and created our firm to be set up to where Kelly can leave every day, and she can go pick up the kids from school. So it’s like a complicated process of Kelly dropping kids off in different places.
And then they all have to be picked up at different times, but that’s usually after five. So I’m usually leaving and I get a text message every day with who I’m supposed to pick up. Because for some reason it changes every week and I can’t keep up with it, and I’m not on all the emails. And if I were on all the emails, I still couldn’t keep up with it the way that she does.
So her office is literally right next door to mine, [00:48:00] and she’ll send me a text message every day. Pick up this one, and this one at this time, and that time from here. So I get my marching orders and I just do what needs to be done. And then we all converge back at the house around 6:30 or 7:00 at night every night and try to have dinner and try to have a decent bedtime.
But it’s hard. It’s not easy to keep all the plates in the air because there’s so many different things. It’s starting to slow down a little bit towards the end of the year. Some of the kid’s activities are ending. So that’s getting a little bit better.
But I wake up early in the morning. I’m usually up around 4:30 or 5, try to get a workout in. Some days, I’m taking my son to the gym and we’re playing basketball. He’s big into basketball, my oldest son. So we’re trying to do training and get him ready for some middle school basketball and stuff like that. So that’s been fun. My free time is probably before. 8 AM.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, so I’ll wake up at about 5. There have been times when I woke up at 4:30. And people used to ask, how do you do it? That was the [00:49:00] only time that I had to myself, so I just had to do it. And I just ingrained now, even on the weekends, even if I’m trying to sleep in, I just get up.
I appreciate you spending time with me today. Before I let you go, I want to ask. As you sit here today and things can change, what do you see as the vision for the firm? We may have to get Kelly in here to help answer since she’s a visionary as you call her. But yeah, you and Kelly, as you sit here today, where do you guys see the firm going and where do you want it to go?
Brandon Osterbind: Yeah. So I think big picture and this is a question I haven’t answered, and we started with this, what is the total market for Lynchburg? How much of that market, what percentage of that market can we seize? And then what is the ceiling for Lynchburg? So I think once we figure that out and once we achieve it, and I don’t think we’re anywhere close to it yet, but we’ll probably look to opening some satellite offices.
Central Virginia is scattered. There’s a ton of rural areas and not really good places to open up satellite offices in between here and in the bigger cities. But Lynchburg is [00:50:00] surrounded. We’ve got Danville, an hour to the south, Roanoke, an hour to the west, Charlottesville, an hour to the north, and Richmond, two hours to the east.
So we’re just surrounded by all these different bigger cities. So in my mind, what I see is, if we reach that cap in Lynchburg, that ceiling in Lynchburg, we’ll probably have to look to expand geographically. I don’t know when that will happen. If that will happen in the near future or more in the longer term, that’s yet to be seen. But like I said earlier, all of these decisions have to be based on the numbers. And then the big question is, how long will it take for that new office to be profitable? And what does that look like? How do you gauge profitability? How do you get new cases for those areas?
Because now, all my marketing has been really focused in Lynchburg and the surrounding counties, but none of it has been focused in Roanoke or Danville or Charlottesville or Richmond or something like that. So you’re looking at new marketing expenses [00:51:00] and all of the above, what to figure out what all that looks like. But right now, my focus is solely on more cases every single month.
I’m trying 2025, my goal is to essentially double our inventory. So to go from 100 cases a year to 200 cases a year and see what that looks like. And then what do we have to do capacity-wise to make sure that we can provide a five-star experience to every client who comes through the door?
So that’s the big problem that we’re trying to tackle now. What does that look like and how are we going to do it for 2025?
Jonathan Hawkins: I like it. I love the big problems because it gives you something to work on. And I’m fascinated by geographic growth to another city or another jurisdiction. And it’s the sort of thing that you’ll try one and you’ll make a lot of mistakes, but once you figure it out, then you’ll do it again and again.
So if you want.
Brandon Osterbind: Rinse and repeat.
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s right. Cool. Brandon, I appreciate you coming on, man. It’s been real fun, real interesting. Look forward to seeing you again in person in January.
Brandon Osterbind: I appreciate your [00:52:00] friendship, my friend.
