15. Building a Successful Business With Non-Scalable Strategies w/ Joey Reeve

[00:00:00] Joey Reeve:
There’s a lot of stress in a high stakes exam like the CPA exam. So people want to talk about it, you know, whenever there’s high stress people want community I think

[00:00:12] Bobby Steinbach:
Welcome to hot docket the show where we talk about winning marketing strategies that have built the most successful law firms

[00:00:17] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Join us every two weeks for the latest trends and tactics to grow your law firm.

[00:00:22] Bobby Steinbach:
Let’s start with the cheers cheers. Hey Thanks for coming on.

[00:00:26] Joey Reeve:
Thanks for having me. You guys are my guys My

[00:00:29] Bobby Steinbach:
oldest client my oldest

[00:00:31] Joey Reeve:
mean pug client. Hey, man, I like to think i’m the reason mean pug exists I mean, that’s what I tell the OG,

[00:00:39] Bobby Steinbach:
the, uh, the OOC, the original client, the original current client.

[00:00:44] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. The original client, the original client, original creator, original. Well, so with that OC, let’s talk about today’s theme

[00:00:57] Bobby Steinbach:
today. We’re going to talk about doing things that don’t scale to build a successful business. I think a lot of people listening right now might be like, Who’s Joey Reeve? Is he a lawyer? We’re on a lawyer podcast. Let’s talk about lawyers. I think it’s important that people hear view sets that are like not in the industry, poke your head out, see what other people are doing.

[00:01:17] Bobby Steinbach:
And you, I think are like one of the people I most kind of admire on this topic of doing things that don’t scale until you need to scale them. So with that, I’d love if you could just start off by telling us a little bit more about universal, what makes it different from the other established players and just give us your story.

[00:01:34] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. Uh, those are, that means a lot coming from you. Um, but no, yeah, I mean, I think when I first started Universal, I literally had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t know anything about the internet. Um, I didn’t know anything about technology, certainly. Um, so, when I went into it, I think, initially, I kind of had this impression that we were just going to throw something up on the internet and it was just going to sell, you know?

[00:01:58] Joey Reeve:
As many do. Yeah, so, I think, initially, we just went hard on the internet. On the quality of the product and the platform, which ended up helping us longterm. Um, but yeah, we didn’t know anything about, you know, how to rank on Google. I think when Andrew and I first hung out, you know, I was asking him a million questions about SEO, you know, how to rank high.

[00:02:17] Joey Reeve:
He was telling me all these things about the affiliates in our space. I remember

[00:02:20] Bobby Steinbach:
meeting you at a bar. We met

[00:02:21] Joey Reeve:
you

[00:02:21] Bobby Steinbach:
at a

[00:02:21] Joey Reeve:
bar, Stone Street

[00:02:22] Bobby Steinbach:
Tavern, Stone Street Tavern. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I’ll never forget that conversation. Me too, over like, I don’t know, some appetizers and like beers.

[00:02:29] Joey Reeve:
Dude, what I’ll never forget about that conversation is, I remember it was just like a ton of pressure.

[00:02:33] Joey Reeve:
My dad was like, you know, trying to get me to find the right people to build our website. And uh, I was like, yeah, I don’t, you know, I don’t, I don’t know, I mean they sound legit. I didn’t know anything about, you know, like any of it. But I remember you guys were fighting over the value of a domain name. And I was like, yup.

[00:02:51] Joey Reeve:
These are my guys.

[00:02:52] Bobby Steinbach:
That

[00:02:53] Andrew Nasrinpay:
sounds about right.

[00:02:56] Bobby Steinbach:
Pretty much

[00:02:56] Andrew Nasrinpay:
always an argument one way or the other. Yeah, exactly.

[00:02:59] Bobby Steinbach:
And we probably swipped, like, I bet back then I probably was like, yeah, it doesn’t matter at all what the domain name is. Dude, Andrew, I remember it was like,

[00:03:07] Joey Reeve:
no, it’s gotta be like, 7 letters or less.

[00:03:09] Joey Reeve:
It’s got to be like simple CPA. And I was like, nah, I’m going to go with universal CPA review. And Bobby was like, yeah, I like it. And Andrew was like, no, it’s got to be smaller than that. Yeah, way to go.

[00:03:22] Andrew Nasrinpay:
If it’s up to me though, we’d keep iterating on it until we did it. Just never find one. So you add something, you got to know at the end of it, I feel like

[00:03:29] Bobby Steinbach:
you’d, you’d be like, zoom out and be like, well, it might not just be CPA and it might not just be review.

[00:03:34] Bobby Steinbach:
Let’s call it universal. You know, you know, in that defense

[00:03:37] Joey Reeve:
though, in that defense though, that is sort of a re not a regret, but something that I do think about a lot is like, Hey, maybe it didn’t make sense to include the word CPA. Cause what if universal becomes, You know, visual learning for more than CPA at some, you know, someday, which you’re doing, which we’re doing.

[00:03:54] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, for sure. I think it could have been easier to consolidate it into one domain and just kind of keep it more general. But the more I look at GoDaddy, the more I realize how impossible it is to get a domain these days. Yeah.

[00:04:04] Andrew Nasrinpay:
If you want one of those good domains, it’s nine or 10 figures for some of those

[00:04:08] Joey Reeve:
great domains.

[00:04:09] Joey Reeve:
I just hired a broker to forget the askjoey. com domain. And they came back and they were like, she’s not selling it. I was like, but I have the trademark. And they were like, Doesn’t matter. Wow. Yeah.

[00:04:19] Bobby Steinbach:
That’s crazy.

[00:04:20] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. They wouldn’t give a number? Well, he was like, you could come back and offer him, you know, like a strong four figure offer.

[00:04:26] Joey Reeve:
I looked at the woman’s website. It was, you know, like women’s coaching or something. Wait,

[00:04:32] Bobby Steinbach:
Ask Joey is a women’s coaching business? Well, so

[00:04:34] Joey Reeve:
it’s actually a redirect domain, it’s not even being used. She was telling them apparently they plan on using it at some point. Um, anyway. Alright, well that’s a whole other point.

[00:04:43] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, I mean related more so to the, uh, the original question. Um, How to scale, you know, I guess without a lot of resources, without any understanding of the internet, you know, I guess that’s more, more or less what you’re asking. Um, yeah, so I, you know, we took a very aggressive, more so guerrilla approach.

[00:05:01] Joey Reeve:
And I think why that worked for me, it’s all I kind of understood, you know, like, Hey, let’s just high level here. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to get our brain in front of a ton of people. I don’t know how to do that through various algorithms. Uh, you know, whether it’s YouTube or Google. It’s something that was just way beyond me.

[00:05:20] Joey Reeve:
So I thought let’s just find ways to get the people manually into some sort of community where we can, you know, push out what it is we’re trying to sell. Um, I knew that we had a great product. I knew that what we were putting in front of people was going to stick. So I think that, you know, just the fact that we were essentially teaching accounting with cartoons was pretty cool.

[00:05:44] Joey Reeve:
as different as it’s going to come. Um, so we, so we did Facebook groups initially to start. And there was, you know, a big Reddit community that, that is still existing. Uh, we found that getting involved in Reddit was, uh, a little bit more policed than, than Facebook groups. Um, and Facebook, you know, has a ton of policies and security that prevent you from doing the things that you think, oh, I’ll just, you know, create a hundred Facebook profiles and like get a bunch of people into my groups, but like, you know, we tried everything in the book.

[00:06:13] Joey Reeve:
Um, and, and it, it did work, I think for the first couple of years. And I think that it’s, I’m not, I’d swear by Facebook groups to start your business. If you know nothing about the internet. Just a huge, uh, resource that you could do to build a community because, you know, what I found about, that was interesting about the internet was how many people are on Facebook and how many people are talking to each other on Facebook, you know, you kind of have internet friends, which is what it kind of became, um, and why it was so, uh, beneficial for us and why I think it works so well was because I think there’s a lot of stress in a high stakes exam like the CPA exam.

[00:06:51] Joey Reeve:
So people want to talk about it, you know, whenever there’s high stress, people want community, I think. Um, which I think applies really well to legal because talk about a stressful. you know, world.

[00:07:02] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. And I want to, I want to take a quick like stop there. I w and I want to establish your pedigree. So I think a lot of the firms we work with, they’d be thrilled if they had a couple of thousand users a month, a couple of conversions, get a couple of cases.

[00:07:18] Bobby Steinbach:
What are your metrics today?

[00:07:21] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. So we’ve grown, uh, 3X across the board, I mean, trial count, new users, sales for the last three years, uh, revenue, I mean, it’s, we’ve, we’ve grown pretty much two and a half percent, or two hundred and fifty percent year over year. Um, and, and it all started with Facebook. I think we spent, you know, 15K on ads in our first year to start.

[00:07:45] Joey Reeve:
Um, so, initially, I think so much of it was just kind of doing it this guerrilla way. And at this point, it’s all I know. It’s all I understand. Um, but yeah, no, we’ve, we’ve, you know, I think our biggest metric that we’ve grown, um, has been on YouTube. Um, you know, I, I think our subscriber count went, went up high, but I mean, you know, we, we do a lot of video content.

[00:08:10] Joey Reeve:
Um, but yeah, our, our, uh, we’re definitely growing.

[00:08:14] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. And it’s entirely, it’s not like you went out and raised 5 million of seed capital and like, Oh, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not my money. I’ll just do what I need to and grow it at all costs. You’ve been doing it intelligently in like a scalable way.

[00:08:27] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t know if I would say intelligently. Okay. I would say naively,

[00:08:33] Joey Reeve:
you know, I guess if that’s a word, uh, I think I just kind of went into, I was extremely naive when I went into it. I just kind of. bs, the whole thing. No, but you hung in there. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was obsessed with it. I, I also think I was leaving a job that was not, um.

[00:08:49] Joey Reeve:
You know, accountants, there’s a huge narrative right now in the world of accounting that they’re underpaid, they’re overworked, um, and, and I think for me, I just kind of learned pretty quickly I wasn’t going to file tax returns for the rest of my life, so. I thought you were going to

[00:09:02] Bobby Steinbach:
say file

[00:09:02] Joey Reeve:
tax returns.

[00:09:03] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, that’s another thing I’m trying to avoid, too. So, yeah, do you have any secrets? No, no secrets. It’s funny, people think just because I’m a CPA I know anything about, like, actually filing taxes. I know nothing about filing taxes. The actual practice of accounting.

[00:09:18] Bobby Steinbach:
That’s amazing. Um, so did you just splash me with your drink?

[00:09:23] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Not even possible.

[00:09:25] Bobby Steinbach
This is an elegant drink. I actually think it might be terrific. Splashing. Okay. That’s not a great sign for business in general. Roof’s leaking, getting splashed by whiskey and or water. Um, yeah, we’re exactly. We’re on the hot docket. Uh, so I would love if you could walk us through some strategies that, you know.

[00:09:44] Bobby Steinbach:
They don’t have to scale. I think the one, like one very common misconception is you have to do things off the bat that are going to generate a hundred X, thousand X, 10 X, whatever returns. And it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s like books written on this. Obviously people talk about it, but it’s easier to talk about it than do it.

[00:10:02] Bobby Steinbach:
What are some of those things that you’ve seen successfully through to the end that have been like non scalable strategies? Um,

[00:10:11] Joey Reeve:
yeah. So another thing we do is, so last year we had a really, um, you know, I was, I was going through, through, uh, you know, a business transaction that I was, you know, I had to make a lot of money quickly.

[00:10:25] Joey Reeve:
Um, so we, we put together live classes, um, and, and we offered, basically what happened was we needed to upsell our current business. you know, our current audience. What we’re struggling with is we don’t have act. We don’t have the resources to be at every university like some of our competitors. We don’t have the, we don’t have the relationships with CPA firms.

[00:10:45] Joey Reeve:
We don’t, we don’t have anything. So we basically had, we knew what we had. We had a list of, of all the people that have tried our product. We know that our conversion rate was 40 percent within the lifetime and 26% 12 months of trying it, um, which to me is high. I mean, I was excited about it. Um, so, you know, we had all these people and the thing about our product was when people bought it, they swore by it, you know, they, and I think a lot of that came with the community building piece, you know, just the continuous value add.

[00:11:16] Joey Reeve:
Um, so because we needed to go up essentially 50%, a hundred percent in revenue this year, just mostly for my personal, um, Um, I, I had to, I had to think, I had to think about, okay, what’s, you know, it was the first time I was like, how did, how, how can I make a lot of money fast? Um, and the only, the only solution I, I threw a ton of darts at the dart board, but the only solution was we have to sell more stuff to our current customers.

[00:11:44] Joey Reeve:
existing pipeline. Um, and, and that’s where the live classes came in. And I was extremely fortunate to find, um, a really good instructor. Um, you know, and now we pretty much only recruit from where they came from. It’s funny. We, we, all of our instructors are from BYU. Um, and so we, we, we exclusively recruit from BYU and just the best, the best of the best.

[00:12:09] Joey Reeve:
And they have the highest pass rates out of school. They perform the best in school. And, uh, yeah, it was a little goldmine. And, uh, basically, we were fortunate with a great instructor to help us out. Um, but yeah, long story short, just upselling our existing clients was kind of how we grew quickest. Um, there was no secret hack to the internet, I don’t think, for us to just grow.

[00:12:32] Joey Reeve:
You know, I mean, even if we were to just pillage it at Reddit or Facebook, I mean, there’s only so much so many people can do. So, you know, we had to think creatively in that

[00:12:41] Bobby Steinbach:
way, I guess. And in terms of upselling, what’s your process? Is it like you’ve got outreach sequences built out where you put people into like a, an automated sequence?

[00:12:51] Bobby Steinbach:
Or is a lot of that manual outreach? How do you upsell? Uh, we were just extremely

[00:12:56] Joey Reeve:
aggressive. You know, really what it is is Facebook. We were Facebook messaging people. We were calling them and we didn’t have any legitimate CRM. I mean, we weren’t. We weren’t doing anything that was organized in any sort of way.

[00:13:08] Joey Reeve:
We had Google sheets and highlighted names and Facebook URLs. Shout out Google sheets. You can do everything with Google sheets. Yeah, for sure. You don’t even need a CRM the way I see it. Um, Maybe cut

[00:13:19] Bobby Steinbach:
that part.

[00:13:20] Joey Reeve:
I think you do need a CRM sometimes. Yeah, that’s true. You’re also talking to somebody who literally knows nothing about anything.

[00:13:26] Bobby Steinbach:
No, that’s not CRM related. I think that, um, You guys have the right approach. Use Google sheets until you can’t. Yeah. Right. Like no reason to preempt buying shit you don’t need.

[00:13:39] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah. It starts simple and see what works. Whatever brings in revenue or whatever science cases sells courses. And we’re guilty of

[00:13:46] Bobby Steinbach:
the same thing.

[00:13:47] Bobby Steinbach:
We’ve had our fair share of

[00:13:48] Joey Reeve:
it’s easy over engineering. Yeah. And it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a great concept. I mean, everybody wants to streamline and automate their sales process and make it, you know, access to quicker information I think is key in sales. Yeah. And, uh, that’s something Google Sheets does not provide.

[00:14:04] Joey Reeve:
I mean, I’m, I waste so much time every day just diving into my sheets. I have a million sheets, I don’t even know where half of them are.

[00:14:10] Bobby Steinbach:
Have you tried Airtable? I don’t know what that is. It’s um, it might be like your next. phase of it. You don’t want Salesforce. Google sheets doesn’t do quite what you need.

[00:14:21] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah.

[00:14:21] Bobby Steinbach:
Airtable kind of fits a nice little gap there. I do a lot of sales calls. We try to close. com. I have a story. I have a story, Ashley. That’s about you with air, with air, with Airtable. Very funny.

[00:14:30] Andrew Nasrinpay:
I think for if you look at the majority of companies, I think a lot of them end up over over engineering because most companies are small and most firms are small.

[00:14:41] Andrew Nasrinpay:
And you end up going with a solution that works for, you look at one of the enterprises, or one of the big, big companies, and you’re trying to emulate that. And oftentimes that might be the wrong choice, if you are small, because you’re not going to use it. Yeah, I think that’s a good point.

[00:14:57] Joey Reeve:
I, I think over engineering is something, you know, we’re definitely guilty of, but I think everybody I’ve seen.

[00:15:04] Joey Reeve:
You know, it’s, I think that over engineering is kind of a, it can be more crippling than you think too, you know, because it can actually take you steps back and you’re out two months of your work because you tried to do something cool and fast.

[00:15:17] Andrew Nasrinpay:
The cost and time is high.

[00:15:19] Joey Reeve:
Oh yeah, for sure. And it’s not until you really get into it, you know, a couple of years into your business where you realize, you know, what a month or two actually means, you know, to your timeline,

[00:15:29] Bobby Steinbach:
you know, it really can set you back.

[00:15:31] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. But I want to point out the other side of that equation. There are scenarios where it’s complicated because it’s complicated, right? Like, I remember we were at Morgan and there’s a famous quote from Andrew that I’ll never forget. Why don’t we just use Airtable instead of Salesforce? And it’s like, we could do everything that we’re doing in Salesforce with Airtable.

[00:15:53] Bobby Steinbach:
And he showed me like, like a couple of rows of attribution data and we’re like, look, We can see Facebook is here and Google. So it’s attribution. And it’s like, what about like call center routing? What about like queuing and assignment rules and escalation processes at the same service center?

[00:16:09] Andrew Nasrinpay:
And for, for, for my defense there, it’s because basic things weren’t happening.

[00:16:14] Andrew Nasrinpay:
It’s like, uh, the intakes weren’t being called and that sort of stuff. And we needed one agent to prove out a particular campaign or a particular channel,

[00:16:23] Bobby Steinbach:
but it’s complicated because it’s complicated. And I think it’s, or it’s complicated because it’s complex. Like, many times there’s a reason why it is the way it is, and there’s like a history to it.

[00:16:35] Bobby Steinbach:
For sure. But at the same time, I think what we’re talking about now, and like what Joey’s talking about, is from the get go, when there is no history, why create like this artificial

[00:16:45] Andrew Nasrinpay:
complexity? Get to an answer quickly. You

[00:16:47] Joey Reeve:
also don’t know what information you’re going to want, and what you’re going to need until later on.

[00:16:52] Joey Reeve:
I mean, there’s, you know, I think for us, I think phone call, phone numbers, you know, at first we did, we didn’t, you know, we thought selling online products was just, they were going to buy it on their own, you know, but then people don’t start buying on their own. And you’re like, we need to make money. So, you know, we need to do other things.

[00:17:07] Joey Reeve:
And that’s sort of my personality too. I’m like, we need to do everything possible to chase down this sale.

[00:17:13] Bobby Steinbach:
I would like to talk about something that I think you’re kind of uniquely positioned to. So, in legal, we sometimes talk about this like paralysis problem. Yeah. this unwillingness to try new things.

[00:17:24] Bobby Steinbach:
And usually that results in this like very, it’s very rare that lawyers get first mover advantage because they don’t really want to move. They don’t want to try things or they’re more conservative and like what they’re willing to try. So it’s very rare to create breakthroughs in the industry. I’d love to hear from you.

[00:17:42] Bobby Steinbach:
Like, why shouldn’t that be the case? What are some of the things that you’ve done or you’ve seen work? that have resulted because you are a first mover.

[00:17:49] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, no, I mean, that’s, I mean, if lawyers are bad, accountants are worse and accountants don’t move at all. If you even look at, if you seriously, if you look at business education in general, okay, you would see accounting at the bottom of the list in terms of any sort of growth or innovation.

[00:18:06] Joey Reeve:
Um, so it was weird for me. I like to think of myself as, you know, a creative in a, in a CPA’s body. So I, you know, my dad basically made me get the CPA license. Um, told me I, yeah, I love this story. Yeah. He basically told me, you know, I’ll pay for you to go to college, but you know, I get to pick the degree.

[00:18:24] Joey Reeve:
Um, and I thought that sounds fair. Um, but anyway, long story short, um, uh, yeah, accountants don’t. Don’t make moves. I mean, I think that they they’re they’re terrified of trying new things And and I think a lot of that could be said for a lot of professional services doctors are no better I mean, I grew up in a health care family You know it but anyway, I think that you don’t want to be too creative You know, you don’t want to go over the top because that can end up crippling you so it’s about taking controlled risk Um, doing your homework, you know, and seeing if there’s somebody else who’s found any success with it.

[00:19:01] Joey Reeve:
You don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel. Um, there’s this company in our world, uh, called Sketchy. Yeah, we talked about Sketchy. Yeah, I think they’re fantastic in what they do. Um, but you’re looking at, you know, within scope, you know, still education. Uh, but, but looking at something sort of, you know, not directly in your industry.

[00:19:22] Joey Reeve:
So if it’s legal, for example, if you’re, uh, You know, working in personal injury, maybe, maybe look and see what has worked in defense, you know, or something like that. Um, you know, looking outside and doing a little bit of homework outside of it and seeing if there is kind of a case study that has, that has worked in that

[00:19:38] Bobby Steinbach:
realm.

[00:19:39] Bobby Steinbach:
I’ll tell you for us, when we work with clients, one of the first things I always like to think about is what other businesses are generating their revenue by virtue of their content. If you want to talk about like building top quality SEO and content, look at the businesses. Who’s lifeblood is content and SEO.

[00:19:55] Bobby Steinbach:
So we’ll look at like New York times. We’ll look at Washington post. We’ll look at major publications for inspiration on like widgets to build and way to lay out content and all that stuff because they should be tip of the spear when it comes to things that they’re doing.

[00:20:10] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah. I think that one thing around that though, Especially on the ad side are the ad arbitrage guys.

[00:20:23] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah.

[00:20:23] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Where they are making money by running ads on content, on other content platforms. Mm hmm. So you’ll be on the New York Times. That is like the origin of clickbait titles and things like that because they rely on it completely because the margin is so thin. And the product is almost nothing. It is just clickbait content.

[00:20:47] Bobby Steinbach:
I won’t get too deep in the weeds on this because I, I have a friend slash, um, one of our developers actually, who is involved in like some of the stuff you’re not involved. This is getting way sketchier than it actually is. He, it lives, lived in Ukraine. Now he lives in Poland. I made it way worse. And apparently there’s like this very, very, um, common arbitrage there around casinos and like, uh, betting apps, basically ways to create, uh, like traffic arbitrage on a casino.

[00:21:21] Bobby Steinbach:
Because they’re not allowed

[00:21:22] Andrew Nasrinpay:
to buy traffic. Yeah, correct.

[00:21:23] Bobby Steinbach:
So you, so like a lot of apps embed it, but it’s against app store policy. And then it’s like, how do you, how do you circumvent? And there’s like a lot of kind of. maneuvering in those channels. So yeah, I think doing anything there is hyper competitive and if you win there, you’ve also kind of figured out how to circumvent regulation, which is its own, I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing, but it’s definitely impressive.

[00:21:44] Bobby Steinbach:
For

[00:21:44] Joey Reeve:
sure. Um, no, I agree. I mean, for us, for example, um, social media, you know, is, is an area I, basically when I look at, accounting education, or I look at anybody that we’re, you know, working, uh, you know, competing with, um, we try to do everything that they’re not doing. I think for us it’s particularly easy because, you know, they make it easy on us.

[00:22:05] Joey Reeve:
Um, you know, we’re talking about competing with 65 year old men reading off of a PowerPoint slide in many cases. Um, so what we try to do is we try to just be as creative as possible. I mean, we, we try to create funny videos, you know, we try to, Uh, you know, we, we try to, I bought, I have, I have like, I have like, I have like six or seven wigs at home.

[00:22:27] Joey Reeve:
Don’t worry, she doesn’t sell them on your site. Yeah. You should see my Amazon, Bill. I bought like seven wigs. I have a

[00:22:33] Bobby Steinbach:
I’ve seen your wigs in your videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they’re amazing. So,

[00:22:35] Joey Reeve:
yeah, I mean that, that’s one way to go about it. I don’t know that everybody’s, you know, down to throw on a wig and Dress up like a woman and dance in front of That’s doing things that don’t scale.

[00:22:46] Joey Reeve:
I think that’s like part of it part of your magic Yeah, yeah, I mean it forced us to be creative and and I think you know legal and accounting are kind of Similar in this way in that, you know There’s not a lot of people who are gonna take risk on on the content side of things But I mean just look at these apps everybody’s you know, every five years There’s a new app that everybody’s using Tik tok snap, you know snapchat Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, you know, what have you.

[00:23:13] Joey Reeve:
And that’s where traffic is. Um, you know, uh, maybe TV ads, I guess are still a thing, but you know, I think if you could create, if you could create creative content on that, on those apps, you know, and, and find ways to be different, I think it’s, it’s a no brainer.

[00:23:29] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah. And I think you’re, you’re also kind of talking specifically about marketing here and how you’ve done things differently there.

[00:23:36] Bobby Steinbach:
I think like the approaches you’re doing, And again, like the parallel here for law firms is even though there’s like all these ways to do things differently on marketing, there’s also ways to do things different on pre lit, on litigation, on your operations and back end, on your call center. You do things differently in not just your marketing, but you also do things differently in like the way you want people to learn.

[00:23:58] Bobby Steinbach:
And you think visual is better.

[00:24:00] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. I mean, I, I, I like to think I’m a visual learner. I think we’re all visual visual learners. I mean, the retina processes information 60, 000 times faster than text. Oh God, you

[00:24:09] Andrew Nasrinpay:
just hit an ad.

[00:24:11] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah, Joe, you’re currently in ad format, so. Oh, cool. You’re back. You’re now back to a

[00:24:17] Joey Reeve:
fireplace.

[00:24:18] Joey Reeve:
Um, I think we’re all visual learners. You know, I think at the end of the day, the retina processes information faster than text. There’s nothing about a block of text, if you don’t know the information, complex information, um, that is, that is going to help you understand, you know, the logic and the intuition behind information.

[00:24:35] Joey Reeve:
So to me, a visual, you know, really helps kind of dumb that down and it helps kind of make it, you know, a simplified format. And yeah, I mean, I, I think that there’s no reason that accounting can’t be taught with cartoons. You know, there’s no reason that people can’t learn with an accounting 101 sort of, uh, basic approach.

[00:24:53] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. And, oh, are you going to say something?

[00:24:55] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah, I was just going to say, Joey brought up an interesting point about different channels, uh, coming, uh, as, Things change. It’s the same eyeballs though. So as long as your content itself is different, it’s more important than the actual channel itself. So you could be a first mover on TikTok, it’d be fast to get there.

[00:25:16] Andrew Nasrinpay:
But if your content is the same, it’s not going to matter. You’ll have a window of time where you’ll do well. Yep. But that’ll get eaten away once someone produces better content. So I think focusing on, you know, Uh, differentiation with your advertising and your product

[00:25:33] Joey Reeve:
is important. Whenever we put out, whenever I go over the top on content in terms of quality, whenever I approach it in the same way that I would approach the product, they perform the best.

[00:25:41] Joey Reeve:
I mean, our, our, you know, anytime people say, Oh, I saw this video and, you know, when we ask them, Have you, have you, how’d you hear about us? Um, they saw a specific video that I’m, that I’m particularly proud of that I thought, you know, that took me my entire morning to come up with a seven minute video on this.

[00:25:57] Joey Reeve:
Um, but so I agree with that, you know, and that quality content is king.

[00:26:01] Andrew Nasrinpay:
What’s your favorite video right now? Jeez.

[00:26:04] Joey Reeve:
That is a loaded question. Favorite video right now. What’s our best performing video or what’s my favorite video?

[00:26:10] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Either or. The one that’s just the most different or most out there for a CPA learning video.

[00:26:16] Joey Reeve:
Alright, so I did this video where I Basically created a profile, you know, an avatar for three different students who failed the CPA exam and one was, uh, Kyle. And, uh, Kyle, Kyle’s firm bought his review course for him. And then I just kind of froze the camera on him and he’s just making this ridiculous face.

[00:26:36] Joey Reeve:
And then the other one was Erica and Erica was this, uh, blonde haired girl who, uh, Who thought that if she took, you know, just crushed a bunch of questions, she would fail, or she would pass. Um, and then the other was this guy, Daryl, and he, he’s an EA, not a CPA, so he obviously knows tax. Um, so yeah, that was my favorite one, where I just kind of created, you know, like these profiles.

[00:26:56] Joey Reeve:
And I was like, these are the three pain points that, that we see in students. Let’s just put them into a character, and make it as

[00:27:02] Bobby Steinbach:
ridiculous as possible. Yeah, no, I think that’s awesome. And like a parallel to, to legal here, we are like working with a nursing home abuse firm right now who saw a lot of success in a campaign where they created cohorts of people who were in scenarios like, Oh my, I saw my mom has like these bed sores.

[00:27:22] Bobby Steinbach:
I don’t know what to do. What should I like think about or who should I call and putting yourself in these scenarios and creating this like you are Connecting directly with like an end client

[00:27:32] Joey Reeve:
100 percent I think if you could take the pain point and you know your customer better than anyone else So if you could take the pain point and you turn it into literally an engaging humorous character or however, you want to do it You turn them into a profile and you say like essentially hey, this is you We are now communicating to you.

[00:27:51] Joey Reeve:
This is your problem. This is why we’re why we’re helping. We’re the solution to that problem.

[00:27:56] Bobby Steinbach:
Yep. Love it So I want to talk about your Background, you’re not a lawyer, but you are operating in a competitive marketing space I think it’d be helpful if you gave some pieces of marketing advice to lawyers that, you know, given that you’re not a lawyer, you still think it’s like universal.

[00:28:15] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. I’ve given some advice to CPAs, which is not totally different, um, from, from legal and that they’re both professional services. Um, I think, however you could scale to an audience, you know, your message to an audience, like, you know, we talked about it, I, Facebook groups and things like that. I’m a huge advocate for, for webinars.

[00:28:34] Joey Reeve:
You know, if you can, if you could get people into a, into a group setting, uh, you know, and, uh, there’s an app called a web jam, I think, where you don’t actually have to be live on the webinar. You could just interact on, on the chat. Um, yeah, so I, I think the advice I would give is any way that you can build an audience and, and add value, bring free value to them, um, gets them hooked.

[00:28:58] Joey Reeve:
And, and, you know, they remember, and this is something Andrew always told me from the beginning was, you know, how can you add value for free? You know, it doesn’t have to be the core product in this case, you know, for legal, it doesn’t have to be their core service. They don’t have to give free services to bring them in, but if you could give them a clip or a taste of that free value, um, and you can get that message across to, to a hundred plus people in one, in one go, um, you know, all you need is a two, 3 percent conversion rate to, to see a.

[00:29:28] Joey Reeve:
You know, a couple of big contracts. Yep.

[00:29:31] Bobby Steinbach:
I’ve never heard of web jam, but we’ll link that

[00:29:33] Joey Reeve:
in

[00:29:33] Bobby Steinbach:
the comments.

[00:29:34] Joey Reeve:
Web web jam or webinar jam. It’s one of the, I think it’s web jam. It’s pretty cool. There’s this, there’s this girl miss Excel. She’s uh, she’s, she’s great. She, she does sort of similar stuff for Excel teaching Excel learning, but she just, she started in 2020 during COVID and she just crushes it.

[00:29:49] Joey Reeve:
She just, she does these, uh, And, and, uh, you know, she’s, she’s cute as a button, but she just, she brings all these people in and she sells Excel courses to like IBM and like some big, big ass companies. Um, but she Web Jam is, is where I was going with that. Um, I, I did one of her, Cause I was like, she has a phenomenal funnel.

[00:30:10] Joey Reeve:
Um, so I went all the way through it and just web jam. She just, I don’t even think it was her on there. Just some, some assistant, just talking, answering questions as they come in. I love that morning. So these are all pre recorded pre recorded and you’ve selected date on like, Hey, when do I want to join this webinar?

[00:30:25] Joey Reeve:
And then you get an automated email, add this to your calendar. I was like, God, that’s so smart. How, how We have some firms we could add that

[00:30:32] Andrew Nasrinpay:
to

[00:30:32] Joey Reeve:
tomorrow.

[00:30:33] Andrew Nasrinpay:
What was the original touch point though, where you found her? Was it through a YouTube video? Uh, was it a Google search?

[00:30:38] Joey Reeve:
Yeah. No. Uh, Corinne the girl, the one of the, one of the people that works with me, um, she was, she was the one who introduced her to me.

[00:30:46] Joey Reeve:
I mean her, her, her brand to me. Um, Instagram, yeah, she was, she was doing Instagram reels. Um, and I just went all the way through it. Saw in her bio, you know, her, uh, link tree. So all it was was sign up for our free webinar. Webinar took me to a two block landing page with nine total words on it and said, you know, Hey, sign up for my webinar with this video, select your date.

[00:31:10] Joey Reeve:
Um, you know, we selected the date. I was like, I got to see this webinar. Now I got this. And I just, every email she sent me after that, I screenshotted it. Cause I was like, this is

[00:31:19] Bobby Steinbach:
those nurturing

[00:31:20] Joey Reeve:
sequence when they work, they’re gold, they’re gold. They were so, yeah, the nurturing, her, her ability to nurture the lead was so impressive.

[00:31:28] Joey Reeve:
Um, getting the email just like, Hey, add this to my, now it’s on my calendar, you know, now I, now I’m, now I’m getting a reminder, you know, like to have the presence of mind to think in advance, like, Hey, what am I going to do to get them to the finish line? The way she did it, I thought was extremely impressive.

[00:31:43] Bobby Steinbach:
I think that’s direly missing in like most firms that either we work with or that we’ve talked to is like this kind of, they’ve become a lead. They’re not a client. What’s that sequence or nurturing sequence. I think make them like a, a, a signed, uh, case.

[00:32:00] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Same is true on the referral side though. There, there are some of these firms that have brilliant lawyers, and they might do a webinar, but there’s no nurturing.

[00:32:08] Andrew Nasrinpay:
No. Leading all the other attorneys into it, and they would do a lot better if, if they put just a little bit of effort into that.

[00:32:14] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah, I think that’s definitely like a huge gap to be filled. Okay, so Joey the way we usually end these things is with a little game. I know you haven’t seen this game.

[00:32:24] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Yeah

[00:32:27] Bobby Steinbach:
Okay

[00:32:32] Bobby Steinbach:
So we’re gonna ask you three questions about legal marketing Slash terminology and I want you to guess the answer Then I want you to give us three questions about the CPA exam, and we’ll try to guess the answer. Three questions about the CPA. Or to you, whatever. CPA stuff. Okay. Accounting stuff.

[00:32:50] Bobby Steinbach:
Accounting stuff. All right, first question from us. What do you think the key tam case type might relate to slash be about? Key tam case. Key

[00:33:03] Joey Reeve:
tam.

[00:33:10] Joey Reeve:
You know, uh, I don’t know. Intellectual property?

[00:33:13] Bobby Steinbach:
Not

[00:33:15] Joey Reeve:
even close. Keytan doesn’t even sound like a US based It’s like a fake. Can I get the answer at least? It sounds extremely

[00:33:28] Bobby Steinbach:
Yeah, it’s a whistleblower. So it’s like people who are blowing the whistle on Do we know the origin of this, Keytan? I think it’s an act.

[00:33:35] Andrew Nasrinpay:
I think that was actually during the civil war where there were a lot of government contracts that were, um, false and bad, and they were just stealing government money and that you can get compensated if you work for one of those companies and you blow the whistle on it. Holy shit.

[00:33:50] Bobby Steinbach:
Fun fact. Fun fact.

[00:33:52] Bobby Steinbach:
All right. Fact number two. Actually, it’s not a fact. It’s a question. Uh, what do you think the statute of limitations on a car accident case in New York might be? Three years. I don’t know. What? How’d he get that? How’d you know that? I knew it couldn’t be. Did

[00:34:07] Joey Reeve:
you get in a car accident? No, I knew that it couldn’t be as serious as some of the other statute of limitations, five, seven years.
[00:34:12] Joey Reeve:
I was like. I’m shocked you, I would’ve never gotten that. He

[00:34:14] Andrew Nasrinpay:
probably saw like 20 ads just on the way coming through. Yeah, I probably knew that. I was gonna give him that question. You only have three years, don’t wait.

[00:34:20] Joey Reeve:
Yeah, that’s Andrew’s ad. Sounds like an Andrew ad.

[00:34:26] Bobby Steinbach:
Number three, what’s the maximum amount a doctor can receive as a referral commission for sending a patient to a lawyer?

[00:34:35] Bobby Steinbach:
I should know this.

[00:34:38] Joey Reeve:
My pops would kill me. Uh, I feel like he talks about this stuff all the time. He’s always doing that. Uh, he’s like, God, I, I can’t make more than that. Uh, 5k, I don’t know.

[00:35:00] Bobby Steinbach:
Trick question. Doctors are not allowed to receive referral commissions under federal entity standards.

[00:35:09] Joey Reeve:
I feel like I’ve heard that before, you know,

[00:35:16] Bobby Steinbach:
kickback laws. That was too easy. That was a trick question. Trick question. Trick question. Okay. Well, do you have any questions? Can you ask us some CPA questions?

[00:35:24] Bobby Steinbach:
CPA questions. It could be from your, they could be from Universal.

[00:35:30] Joey Reeve:
Okay. Um.

[00:35:35] Joey Reeve:
Oh, that’s a good CPA question. Oh my God. Um. What’s the passing score of the CPA exam? Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I don’t even. 60%? Andrew, uh, I’m gonna guess 74. 74. 75 is the correct answer, boys. Oh, pretty

[00:35:52] Bobby Steinbach:
close. 74. We don’t get it. We don’t get, oh, you don’t need

[00:36:00] Joey Reeve:
Um, once you pass the first section of the CPA exam, pre 2024 changes, pre CPA evolution changes. How long did you have to pass the subsequent three sections?

[00:36:12] Bobby Steinbach:
One year. Or was it nine months? It was one of the two, I think.

[00:36:16] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Uh, I’m going to guess 18 months. Oh, 18 months is correct. Wait, I was wrong. You can

[00:36:24] Joey Reeve:
put a down one down for me.

[00:36:25] Joey Reeve:
Give Bobby a boo. All right. Last question. Okay. Um, which CPA exam section historically has historically had the lowest pass rates? Was it BEC, Reg, Audit or FAR?

[00:36:42] Bobby Steinbach:
I’m going to go with reg. I’m going to go with far because it sounds like fart.

[00:36:46] Joey Reeve:
Far is correct. Oh, got it. There it is. Far as in fart. Nice. You guys have got to give me the

[00:36:51] Bobby Steinbach:
Killing it.

[00:36:51] Joey Reeve:
Oh yeah, and he gets a negative. He needs a boo. Alright. You guys actually did pretty good. I think we each got one.

[00:36:58] Bobby Steinbach:
You I can’t believe you got the car accident one. Of all the ones To be honest,

[00:37:01] Joey Reeve:
it was a pure guess. I should have got the last one right and the second one wrong. You definitely

[00:37:04] Bobby Steinbach:
should have gotten the last one right.

[00:37:06] Bobby Steinbach:
I’m just doing whatever I want.

[00:37:07] Joey Reeve:
I’m getting the ones out of

[00:37:08] Bobby Steinbach:
me. Yep, that was very good. Joey, this was fun. This is our first in person one, which I actually now want to do more of these. It was great. So let people know where to find you online and all that

[00:37:20] Joey Reeve:
good stuff. Yeah. You find us www dot universal CPA review.

[00:37:25] Joey Reeve:
com.

[00:37:26] Bobby Steinbach:
Check them out. Join us on the next hot docket podcast. Thanks guys.

[00:37:31] Andrew Nasrinpay:
I don’t know why I wave, like I’m like, Goodbye! Bye! We

[00:37:34] Bobby Steinbach:
hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Hot Talker. We’re your hosts, Bobby and Andrew, founders of Mean Pugs, the marketing agency for ambitious law firms.

[00:37:42] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Have questions about marketing or anything we covered today?

[00:37:46] Andrew Nasrinpay:
Email us at barkatmeanpug. com Be sure to subscribe to learn more.