In this episode, Steve Fretzin, Tim Semelroth, Casey Grabenstein, and Neil Dishman discuss:
- Building consistent habits
- Tracking meaningful metrics
- Repurposing and leveraging content
- Cultivating strategic relationships
Key Takeaways:
- Dedicating time, using accountability systems, and leveraging support drives sustained business growth. Consistency and structure keep focus sharp and opportunities within reach.
- Monitoring key indicators and focusing on high-value relationships ensures well-directed effort. Data-driven strategy prevents waste and maximizes measurable results.
- Sharing content across channels expands reach and strengthens brand visibility. Strategic reuse multiplies impact without overextending resources.
- Nurturing peers, colleagues, and referral sources yields lasting dividends. Balancing expertise with connection builds trust and opens new opportunities.
“It starts with knowing your numbers. You have to know where your cases are coming from. You have to track very carefully. You know what the average case value is. And once you start doing things like that, then the answers become obvious.” — Tim Semelroth
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About Tim Semelroth: Tim Semelroth is Iowa’s only board-certified truck accident attorney and a partner at RSH Legal. With over 25 years of experience, he provides trusted expertise in trucking litigation and collaborates with attorneys statewide and beyond. Known for his strategic approach and commitment to fairness, Tim offers consultation to help chart the best course for complex truck accident cases.
Connect with Tim Semelroth:
Website: https://www.timsemelroth.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsemelroth/
About Casey Grabenstein: Casey Grabenstein is a litigation partner at Saul Ewing LLP, handling complex commercial disputes and class actions involving securities, consumer fraud, and ERISA. He also advises clients in the cannabis and litigation funding industries, serving as both due diligence and primary counsel. A frequent writer and speaker, Casey brings deep insight into emerging issues in litigation finance and commercial law.
Connect with Casey Grabenstein:
Website: https://www.saul.com/professionals/casey-grabenstein
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-grabenstein-a375094/
About Neil H. Dishman: Neil H. Dishman is a principal at Jackson Lewis P.C. in Chicago, where he helps employers prevent and resolve workplace disputes. His practice spans discrimination, retaliation, and wage-hour compliance, with extensive experience across multiple industries. A sought-after speaker and published author, Neil is known for his practical guidance on employment law and risk management.
Connect with Neil H. Dishman:
Website: https://www.jacksonlewis.com/people/neil-h-dishman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neildishman/
Email: [email protected]
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin [00:00]
Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin here and I’m excited to share my new show, future rainmakers. This is a great show where I dive into quick practical lessons to help you grow your law practice, attract better clients and take control of your time and your life. Check it out today. But for now, enjoy the show.
Narrator [00:21]
You’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin [00:43]
Hey everybody, welcome. It is Steve Fretzin, this is the be that lawyer podcast, and we are live today. Be that lawyer live. So welcome everybody. Whether you’re checking this out today or you’re checking this out later, that’s okay. We’ve got a great show for you today. If you’ve been to one of these be that lawyer live events before or heard them on the podcast. You know that I’ve got three amazing rainmakers here to share their tips, secrets and ideas with you, and they’re all fantastic. And I know you’re going to get a lot out of them as we jump in. Want to just remind everybody that you’ve got the Q and A available to ask us questions in real time. And if you’re listening to this as a podcast, great. You know, I know you’re going to get a lot out of it. So with that, I want to welcome our amazing panel today. We’ve got Tim Semelroth, Casey Grabenstein and Neil Dishman. Tim, do you want to just give a little background on yourself as we launch into this?
Tim Semelroth [01:31]
Sure, I’m a personal injury lawyer from Iowa. My firm, RSH legal, is the largest Injury and Disability firm in the state. We have three offices and 17 lawyers.
Steve Fretzin [01:42]
Fantastic. All right, thank you, Casey.
Casey Grabenstein [01:46]
Yeah. Hi. I’m Casey Grabenstein. I’m with Saul Ewing, which is a national law firm of about 400 attorneys. I am in our Chicago office. I focus on litigation, commercial litigation, with an emphasis on class action work.
Steve Fretzin [02:01]
You’re sure it’s Casey Grabenstein, Stein, not Stein. It’s grabbing Stein, grabbing stuff, because I think he goes the other way, a little bit better. I’m just putting that out there for you. Just give it some thought. I’ll give it some thought. Give it some thought. We’ll talk to you. I’ll talk to your family. All right, Neil.
Neil Dishman [02:15]
Thanks, Steve, hi everyone. Only one way to pronounce my name. Neil Dishman, nice to meet all of you. I’m a partner with Jackson Lewis. Our business here is helping employers handle disputes with their employees. So we represent companies in litigation brought by employees. So I defend companies from things like discrimination, harassment, wrongful discharge lawsuits. We also do a lot of proactive advice, helping our clients be compliant and hopefully avoid those employee lawsuits in the first place. We’re a national law firm. We’re a national law firm. We’re one of the biggest firms in the country that does Labor and Employment Law exclusively, and I sit in our Chicago office.
Steve Fretzin [02:46]
Yeah, fantastic. All right. Well, thank you three for being here today. We’ve got a lot to cover, and so we’re just going to jump right in. And what I’ll try to do is just call you out by name, and then work our way through the panel. Let’s start off with Casey on this one, what specific habits or routines most contributed to your early success in building a book of business?
Casey Grabenstein [03:03]
Yeah, it’s a great question, Steve, I think what helped me as a younger lawyer was to just start to carve out time. I was at a large law firm. I had long hours, and I found it difficult to find the time to devote to a client development. And I was actually working with you, Steve, I think, and you know, you said something like, this, is just your career. It’s just the most important thing. So you got to find time to do it. So sort of flipping my thinking to focusing, to boxing out some time to work on client development and not worry so much about the hours, was a big change for me, and I’ve prioritized it ever since. And I also became a big fan of a process based approach to things which I hold myself accountable each day to do some sort of outreach. So carving out that time was a big change for me.
Steve Fretzin [03:49]
Yeah, the time blocking and committing to it like treating it as an appointment with yourself, just as important as an appointment with someone else. Yeah, fantastic. Neil, I will
Neil Dishman [03:59]
forever be grateful to one of my mentors and former partners, now retired, Pete Bulmer, who was running our office at the time when I was a brand new associate. And he told me, I think in the first couple months I worked there, go join something right, pick something we’ll pay for it. Get involved. Volunteer to be on, you know, boards and commissions and so forth. You just you need to start networking. And the implicit message there was, look, you’re a first year associate. No one expects you to bring in business at this point, but you need to start planting the seeds and developing the relationships that are likely to turn into business a little bit later. And so out of all things, the first thing I joined was the little chamber of commerce here in the suburb of Chicago, Glen Ellen that I live in, which is, you know, full of tiny businesses, small employers, people selling, you know, auto insurance, right? Every local bank, that kind of stuff. And, you know, and I got my first client from it a few months later, first tiny little client. It was a local financial advisor who had three employees, and one of the employees was a big problem, so he hired us to help manage that situation. But I’m sober. Grateful for that. Just starting early and building relationships set me on the right path.
Steve Fretzin [05:04]
Well, I think too, there’s something to be said about, you know, getting, you know, get building out your network wide, and meeting people and maybe getting a quick win or getting a win in that first year. I think that really, you know, wow, there’s, there really is something to this, right? And Tim, how about yourself? Well?
Tim Semelroth [05:20]
As a young trial lawyer, you tend to focus on the skills right, cross examination, closing argument, but one of the best early pieces of advice I got as a young lawyer was great cases make great lawyers, and so you need to spend as much time making sure that you have good cases to work on as you do, working on your trial skills. And so that was a mindset, a mind set shift, that really helped me focus on client development. Yeah.
Steve Fretzin [05:51]
I mean, one of the challenges that lawyers have is not just going to something or time blocking, but it’s actually creating a habit. What are some, just anybody want to chime in, like, how do you create a habit that sticks, that allows you to be consistent? Because I think consistency and business development may be the most important part.
Casey Grabenstein [06:10]
Yeah, I’m happy to I’m happy to jump in on on this one, because it’s near and dear to my heart. I had I actually use a weekly like scoring system to make myself accountable to have so many outreaches each week. I give myself like a point for an email to a client, maybe five points for a lunch. And I, I started doing that about, you know, eight or nine years ago, and I can’t go a week now without, you know, getting the points scored. And so it is. It has really helped me to just, you know, as long as I can do these things each week, I feel good about what I’m doing. So I think that process has worked really well
Steve Fretzin [06:46]
for me. I feel like we did that together. I feel like I had a journaling system and you weren’t real thrilled with it because it didn’t account for the scoring, or it didn’t allow you to be competitive with yourself in the same way that it would if you had a scoring system. So I think we, I feel like we did that together. Tell me that’s
Casey Grabenstein [07:02]
right, yeah, it’s kind of a added on to it a little bit and kind of customized it, but it’s worked really well for me. And I just It helps me to focus on, sort of the out the input, you know, and what you’re doing each week, as opposed to the results. Yeah, if you can focus on, you know, what you’re doing, that’s all you can control. And so that system has worked well for me over the years.
Steve Fretzin [07:21]
Yeah, Tim, how about you any specific ways you’ve been able to stay consistent?
Tim Semelroth [07:26]
Well, the first is to get help. Because, you know, when you’re in a busy litigation practice, your marketing is always going to get pushed off by the side if there’s a big deposition or mediation or trial, and so making sure that you have staff support that is helping your marketing efforts is a way to make sure that the crush of day to day work isn’t going to cause everything to screech to a halt.
Steve Fretzin [07:51]
Yeah, I think if you’re just starting out with business development, that’s less important. But as soon as you get successful and busy and you don’t have a va, a virtual assistant, you don’t have an assistant, you don’t have associate people that you can hand things off to, right? You’re just going to get the something’s got to give, and it’s probably going to be business development and marketing, which is problematic, right? Yes, Neil, how about yourself?
Neil Dishman [08:13]
So I have created two different I guess I would call them like accountability buddies or groups in my life for business development purposes. So one of my partners and a protege of mine at our firm, she and I meet every Tuesday at 10am because that’s the time we had picked. We carve out an hour every week to basically work on business development together. That’s our time we meet. We spend the first five minutes catching up and saying, All right, here’s the things I’m going to work on today, and then we kind of just spend the rest of the hour, like quietly working alongside each other on our own business development stuff that we’ve decided is most important for that day, and then check in at the very end, like, here’s what I got done, etc. And that works so well that that I also now have a second one that Casey’s a member of. So Casey and I and another buddy of ours, another frets and disciple from another firm, we meet every friday from 930 to 1030 to do the same thing. So that’s a minimum of two hours every week, However busy all my billable responsibilities get, etc, I know I’ve got those two dedicated times where I can do the most high value stuff.
Steve Fretzin [09:11]
Yeah, I think for me, the gym membership would just be just, I could just burn that money directly. I don’t need to buy the gym membership. I could just light the money on fire directly. I need accountability. I need to meet someone at the gym. I need to go with someone to the gym. And so like when I do Pilates, which is me and 11 women like I’m paying for it, they’re expecting me there. I have a seat saved, reserved. I have to be there and I go. But I think if it was like a reformer or some gym in my house, it would be just like an expensive room that’s never used, right, or something like that. So so many great ideas, not only about developing habits, but about how to stay consistent with habits, which is critical, critical. So, Tim, let’s start with you on this one. How did you identify and focus on your most valuable relationships or niches, like, what were the things that I mean you’re obviously, you know, in a very specific. Niche in your area, and you become a top player in the state because of it. So you’re like the perfect person to ask about this.
Tim Semelroth [10:07]
Well, it starts with knowing your numbers, right? You have to know where your cases are coming from. You have to track very carefully. You know what the average case value is. And once you start doing things like that, then the answers become obvious. And so you know what channels you need, you know are worth investing in, and you know what relationships you need to make sure you’re making time for.
Steve Fretzin [10:33]
So if you if you recognize, for example, that truck accidents is, like, the most important part of of your focus. And then it’s like, All right, so there’s that, and then there’s also, there’s also, who’s around, who else is around those types of accidents, sure.
Tim Semelroth [10:47]
So, I mean, that’s for me. I chose that in the big world of personal injury, that the highest value cases that I was working on all involved commercial trucks. And so then what you do is, you know, obviously you want to improve your skills by going to conferences, you’re getting to know experts, but in terms of getting the cases, a lot of it is making sure that you’re speaking on that topic, you’re writing on that topic, and that you’re just introducing yourself to other lawyers as, hey, this is what I do.
Steve Fretzin [11:19]
Yeah, and I always go back to the story about when I was in a plane crash and I broke both my arms, and my dad pushed the phone up to my ear and said, talk to Bob. He’s your attorney, right? Who’s the attorney in Chicago? I always ask Bob Clifford, yeah, and it doesn’t, you don’t go to number two or three or four. There’s like, one name that pops up to the top. And, you know, in Iowa, Tim, that’s you. And I like to think in Chicago, it’s Ken Levinson, but Casey, what’s your take on this? Yeah, I think I focus
Casey Grabenstein [11:45]
more on relationships, maybe than than the subject matter like I I’ve really approached it that way, and then when I start doing the work with someone that I have a good relationship with, and I developed some expertise in that space, and that sort of brings on more opportunities. That’s worked really well for me and the distribution space, and actually in the cannabis space as well. But I’ve never set out and said, I just, I got to do X. And I, you know, I’ve had colleagues over the year that, over the years, have said I just, I want to be an ERISA litigation attorney, or I want to be a mortgage backed securities litigation attorney, and I just, I’ve never, I’ve kind of shied away from that, because I, you know, those kind of things come and go, and I’ve been more focused on the relationships than building some expertise within that relationship and then trying to bring in more clients into that space.
Steve Fretzin [12:36]
But I love that angle, because it’s not just about the niches are in the riches, or the riches, or the niches, or whatever that saying is. It’s really about the importance of relationships and how you know, even if you stay somewhat broad within litigation, or your ability to, like, I know you’re an excellent cross marketer, right, like you’re able to feed other people, because you have these relationships where they come to you, even if it isn’t for litigation, right?
Casey Grabenstein [12:58]
That doesn’t that’s right. I tried to stay as broad as I can. I keep thinking, at some point in my career, I’m going to be forced to be a very specific attorney, but I especially with litigation, there’s so many different things that come up, and I enjoy learning, you know, new areas, and I’ve tried to stay pretty agnostic to the subject matter.
Steve Fretzin [13:14]
Yeah, I think that separates the niche, specific industry attorney from someone who is like the go to attorney, like, there’s attorney that you just this is the one I go to that knows everybody right, that can point me in the right direction and handle whatever situation I’m dealing with. Because that you have those kinds of relationships
Steve Fretzin [13:38]
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Neil Dishman [15:04]
Well, I’m a little different from Casey here. I’m already in a niche because I’m at a niche law firm that does only employment law. The shift that I had to make a few years ago was to better define and then put more effort into higher value opportunities for me, you know, we were talking earlier about when I first started out, and I was spending time at the Glen Ellen chamber of commerce with a bunch of small businesses and so forth. You know, I went through a long phase in my career where I would put a lot of time and effort into chasing any opportunity, right? Even if it was a maybe, you know, five or $10,000 a year opportunity like, you know, that was worth it to me. Then it took me a while to figure out that if I wanted to build to book a business that I wanted to I had to kind of shift that market a little bit. And so I did a little research and crunched some numbers and figured out that 500 employees or so is just like a magic number for our business. 500 or more employees is a business that probably has a lot of our kind of problems and is going to need us quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong. I still work with and love working with smaller employers. I have plenty of clients with less than 500 but in terms of chasing new clients, I put way more effort into the ones that are 500 or more. If it’s under 500 that it kind of has to fall in my lap, right? Like if they say, Hey, we got 200 employees. We really need you. We want to talk to you. Of course, I’m going to talk to them and see if we can be a fit. But it’s the bigger opportunities that where I will spend more time kind of chasing them.
Steve Fretzin [16:25]
Yeah, well, that leads to sort of a good follow up question, which is the importance of understanding your targets. And I don’t mean that word to sound, you know, salesy, however, there are a number of targets that are critical for us to focus on, because if we just, like, the one that drives the thing that drives me nuts is when I say attorney, like, who’s a good referral for you? And they go, Well, anybody? Okay, so you mean nobody. Because I can’t think of anybody, like, that’s not helping me, you know, help you. So talk about the importance of like, Neil, to your point, you know, having a number of employees, or maybe it’s a particular title, or maybe it’s a particular industry where you have a lot of experience like you guys. Can you elaborate on that?
Tim Semelroth [17:08]
Tim Sure. So in looking at our numbers, one thing we realized is that referrals from other lawyers punch well above their weight in terms of case value and so as specialists, we do a lot of marketing to other lawyers in Iowa, or lawyers who are from Iowa. And because, you know, for the general public, they just know us as lawyers, right? And so they’re going to reach out to whatever lawyer they know best and say, Hey, this horrible thing just happened to me, you know, what should I do? And so I want you know whether it’s a real estate lawyer, a family law lawyer, you know, a corporate litigator. I want them to know for personal injury matters in Iowa that I’m the name that comes up first. And so, you know, we’re looking for ways to market to other lawyers.
Steve Fretzin [18:01]
Is it marketing, or is it marketing and also developing some form of a relationship? Is it is one? You know, one might be just how you’re, you know, feeding them information or getting them on a newsletter. Another one might be to Casey’s point, like actually developing a personal relationship. Is it a combination?
Tim Semelroth [18:17]
It is. So we have something in our firm called our mavens list, and those are the attorneys who have a track record of sending clients to us, and so we are trying to touch them every quarter, whether it’s with a gift, a visit, you know, a book recommendation. And so we’re trying to create those personal relationships. But then on the big picture, a lot of my efforts on the LinkedIn platform are based around just being interesting or helpful to other lawyers.
Steve Fretzin [18:54]
Yeah. Okay. Casey thoughts on this, yeah.
Casey Grabenstein [18:56]
I think my comments really echo what Neil was saying. I think early on, I made the mistake of taking every meeting, chasing every entity, every company, and I think it can be tough, because, you know, every company has like a website, and they all kind of maybe look the same on the exterior, like what I do is kind of similar to what Neil has done with respect to the number of employees. I’ll try to go kind of behind the website and learn more about the revenue and sort of the financials of the company, if you can find public information about that to determine whether you know this is it’s someone that’s going to whether this company is going to have the types of legal problems that we can help them with. And I think revenue can be a pretty big indicator. In addition to the number of employees,
Steve Fretzin [19:38]
yeah, Neil, anything additional other than 500 plus. As far as targets?
Neil Dishman [19:42]
Yeah, I think it’s important for everyone, everyone in the business world, not just lawyers and not just people who are trying to market their services. Everyone in the business world, I think, should have a good answer to the question, Who do you need to meet? Who’s the type of person that is most valuable for you to know, so that if I someone in your network? Work, meet this person or know this person, I should think to put the two of you together. I asked that question all the time to referral sources, to clients, right? Who is it you need to meet? And I’ve developed a very specific answer to that over the years, every company has somebody who’s in charge of handling the employee headaches. Sometimes that person’s title is HR, sometimes it’s in house legal in a smaller company. It could be the CFO or even the CEO or owner, but somebody is the desk where all the people problems land, and that’s the person I want to meet.
Steve Fretzin [20:31]
Well, the funny side effect of that, Neil, is, I remember you being so focused on those targets that I tried to refer someone to you and you like, reject. You’re like, I appreciate that, Steve, but you know, that’s not part of my targeted, you know, people I’m meeting with. So I’m gonna say, you know, thank you. But no. And I was like, All right, so you drank the Kool Aid. Okay, well,
Neil Dishman [20:51]
what’s that old saying? Like, anytime you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. Yeah, if you don’t know what that thing is, you’re saying no to so, yeah.
Steve Fretzin [20:59]
And I just had someone on the podcast, I know it’s a session or two ago, and it was like, you know, or maybe it’s coming, I don’t remember, but it was, you know, knows, a full sentence, you know, it’s just that’s something that’s going to get you further ahead and being a successful business developer than saying yes to everything and finding yourself, you know, way over your skis. You know, that’s a good lead in though, to like, what’s actually getting you guys results. Because ultimately, the people listening to this, you know, they’re doing their own thing, and everyone’s looking for results. And so there’s marketing, thought, leadership, Business Development tactics that actually produce business for you three, not just activity for activity’s sake, right? Casey, what was? What’s something that you do on a regular basis that, you know, produces every single year. Yeah.
Casey Grabenstein [21:43]
So I think our work in the litigation finance space has been pretty productive. We we try to write on cutting edge issues, and we also speak quite a bit our group, which I’m a co chair of, so, you know, I think that’s been a successful effort each year. I guess. What I’ll say about it is I’m not a huge fan of taking the time to write long articles and sort of dig into that kind of stuff. What I’ve found to be very helpful in this space and in other spaces is to try to leverage something I’ve already researched or worked on or had to argue about, and then try to turn that into something that I can use externally for marketing purposes. So that is something that’s worked really well, and it’s kind of gotten me over the hump, or the resistance to, you know, sitting down for five or 10 hours to write something, if I already have it, I can just repurpose it. So I found that pretty helpful. Yeah.
Steve Fretzin [22:35]
I mean, that could be if you guys are keeping track of, like, takeaways from today, that’s at the top of the list of things that you guys should all either write down or internalize is, you know, that it’s all about repurposing stuff. A pod, this pod, this webinar, turned into a podcast, right? The podcast turned into video. The video turned into, you know, blog called Blogcast, which are articles right from the interview. So, yes, that’s critical. Neil, how about on your end?
Neil Dishman [23:01]
The public speaking has been really productive for me. That’s not the right answer for everyone. I’m always kind of mystified when you see those polls that, like, the number one fear most people have is public speaking. I love public speaking. I always joke whenever I give a speech, like I’m an only child, and it shows right, like when people are quiet and focused on me, that feels right to me. So I enjoy public speaking, but it’s been really fruitful. So I do many public speaking gigs every year at mostly at HR focus groups, but also sometimes different, you know, small business type groups and what have you. And that’s been terrific for me, both in terms of, you know, kind of building a personal brand and becoming known in this area, but also in terms of just, you know, generating direct opportunities you can, I found, if I can get on stage and I can demonstrate some expertise and show that I’m, you know, good at telling stories, because that’s what you need your lawyer to do, is tell your story. More often than not, a direct opportunity comes from someone in the audience well.
Steve Fretzin [23:56]
And I think part of that, too, goes back to a previous comment about targets, like, I think you’re speaking to the people who can engage you or refer you, as opposed to maybe a group of other employment lawyers. Yeah, that’s right. So Tim, how about on your end?
Tim Semelroth [24:11]
Well, I’m gonna take a step back to repurposing, because that has that’s a very specific example I can give. So once a week I try to do a post on LinkedIn that I think is helpful, interesting or entertaining to other lawyers. We then track what kind of which posts do. Well, we then turn that into a twice a month e newsletter that goes out to lawyers in Iowa with the same content that we used in the LinkedIn post that worked well. And then once a month, we take the articles that got clicked on on our E newsletter and we turn that into a one page print newsletter that goes out to every member of the Iowa. State Bar Association, and so it starts with social media. It goes to an E newsletter, and then it goes to a print newsletter, and doing that, last year, increased our attorney referrals by 15%
Steve Fretzin [25:14]
I got to tell you, I’m just impressed that you’re doing anything in print. Good for you. It’s like everything’s gone so E that we forget that people actually like to read and like sit down with a piece of paper at some point. But that’s fantastic. The other thing that’s beautiful about that, Tim is, when you said tracking, you can track a LinkedIn post, you can track a newsletter, there’s data, and that goes back to where you started. You know, at the very beginning of this episode of the show was about the importance of the numbers.
Tim Semelroth [25:42]
Absolutely, it’s you don’t want to spend more time and more money to promote something that people weren’t interested in the first time.
Steve Fretzin [25:50]
Yeah, right on. Well, let’s sort of wrap up this. This again. This might be something you may have mentioned earlier. Maybe you’ll pick something different. But we love to say, you know what’s Tim’s big mistake? Casey’s Neil’s big mistake. And you know, one thing that that’s critical in business development and just growing a book of business or in life, actually, is, how do we make mistakes and learn from them and come out the other end better? So Neil, let’s start with you. What’s Neil’s big mistake?
Neil Dishman [26:14]
Yeah, Steve, I’m going to brag on you a little bit here, because the first session that I went to when I went through your coaching program years ago was gave me one of the biggest revelations of something I’ve been doing wrong all along. We talked that day about figuring out who is the real decision maker at the potential client that you’re talking to, and I realized I’ve been doing it wrong all along. So as I said, we mostly work with HR professionals. Those are typically the people whose like problems we’re going to solve every day. But even the head of HR at many companies is typically not empowered to hire lawyers by him or herself. They’re going to need to get buy in from someone else, whoever their boss is, COO CFO, something like that. And I realized that I’ve been having all of these terrific meetings with potential clients who were HR leaders, and the meetings would always go great, because we speak the same language, right? And I understand what their problems are and and how we can make them better. And I’d have these great meetings and I think, Oh, this is great. I’m going to get a new client. And then it would just kind of die on the vine. A lot of times, like, I couldn’t get them to commit, couldn’t get them to sign on the dotted line, and I realized it’s because I wasn’t finding out from them. Is there another hidden decision maker here? Who else at the company needs buy in? If anything, I think I was almost subconsciously avoiding getting at the real decision maker, because my conversations with HR professionals are so great and pleasant and easy that it was kind of like giving me a dopamine hit, and I didn’t want to have a difficult conversation with a CFO who doesn’t speak my language. So that was a big revelation for me, of something I’ve been doing wrong for years.
Steve Fretzin [27:46]
Yeah, and it can be incredibly frustrating when you’re being ghosted and you’re just not sure why you’re like everything went so great. So I totally get that, and now that’s why having a system right, having a process to follow that includes things like qualifying decision makers, is so instrumental to success and not leaving sort of open ended, you know, opportunities to fail on the table. Casey, how about on your end?
Casey Grabenstein [28:09]
Yeah, I think I the mistake I made was not realizing how important the relationships of with people around me were during my first, you know, seven or eight years again at a large law firm, and you know that I wasn’t cultivating relationships with other associates, or maybe my law school colleagues, or other people that should have been staying on top of during those early years. And you know now it’s really hard to go and reach out to to that type of person. If I, when I give advice, I say, like every you know you need to have a good relationship with everyone you should collect relationships. I’ve kind of flipped that, you know, now I see there’s so many opportunities. It could be opposing counsel, it could be a mediator, it could be the people that work under you or above you. That every relationship is just it’s so important, because this industry is so small, and people go on to do so many different things that, you know, treating them with respect and just staying in touch with people is so important. And yeah,
Steve Fretzin [29:06]
when I talk to law school students, which happens a couple times a year, and I, you know, you say, take a look to your left and right, and they think I’m going to say they won’t be here next year, or something like that. I say, no, these could be the GCS that you’re going to be wanting to talk to in 10 years. These could be the people you know, running companies, and you know, you’ve got to decide, you know, how you’re going to maintain relationships, because if you just let it go, and someone else is going to have the relationship and get that business. Tim, how about you wrapping
Tim Semelroth [29:33]
things up? I My biggest sin is that I try to DIY everything for far too long. As a trial lawyer, you know you think that if I take enough time, I can learn how to do anything and and all of our marketing efforts, as I said at the beginning of this episode, would grind to a halt when my casework would take me away from them. And so when I was finally able to convince my partner. Nerds that we needed to invest in a an employee whose job it was to implement our marketing efforts. That’s when things went from good grape for us, and it’s fueled a lot of our growth.
Steve Fretzin [30:11]
Yeah, well, really fantastic. Listen everybody. We’re wrapping up our first segment. I want to take a moment to thank Tim Casey and Neil for being on the panel. They’re going to be back in a few minutes or in a couple days, based on if you’re listening to the podcast. I also want to take a moment to thank our wonderful sponsors, rankings, io, law, her podcast, legal, verse, media and hire paralegals. So thank you all great sponsors. You can obviously Check out all their information in the show notes. And with that, I’m going to tell you thank you. Be that lawyer. Everybody confident. Organizing the skilled Rainmaker. Take care of you, safe. Be well. We’ll talk again soon.
Narrator [30:48]
Thanks for listening to be that loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fredson.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal, business development and marketing trends, for more information and important links about today’s episode. Check out today’s show notes.