How Law Firm Owners Can Build Their Brand and Attract Clients with Ali Awad (Ep. 35)

Transcending conventional boundaries, Episode 35 of The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast titled “Ep 35 – Ali Awad” peers into the world of a maverick law firm owner who did not just challenge the status quo but shattered it. Host Darren Wurz converses with Ali Awad, a man whose unorthodox journey to the legal stratosphere redefines the essence of entrepreneurial spirit in the field of law. For the law firm owner poised at the precipice of evolution, this episode promises to be an indispensable guide, rich with profound insights and practical wisdom.

Ali Awad – the man who established a million-dollar legal practice just a year after starting from nothing but the trunk of his car – sits down with Darren Wurz to dissect the mechanics of success that many only dream of but few achieve. The conversation traverses through Ali’s early realization of the need for hard work born from a modest upbringing, to the meticulous construction of his law firm empire that bolsters his standing not only as the CEO Lawyer but also as an industry innovator.

Throughout the dialogue, listeners are treated to a candid disclosure of principles and tactics that shatter any illusion of success without sacrifice. Ali’s narrative is potent; it’s a testament to the power of resilience, astute branding, and an unwavering commitment to client service.

Listeners will delve into a deeper understanding of:

1. The process of identifying and committing to a specialized area of law and the dividends this focus can yield.

2. The critical aspects of crafting a brand that resonates with growth and flexibility, allowing for future diversification and market command.

3. Strategies for effective social media implementation that transcend mere promotion to establish genuine connections and industry authority.

4. The imperatives of ongoing personal and professional development as cornerstones for surviving and thriving amidst legal industry shifts.

5. Practical guidance on client development, cost control, and the judicious management of resources that safeguard a firm’s longevity and profitability.

Discover the remarkable story of Ali Awad, the CEO Lawyer, and how he grew from humble beginnings to owning America’s fastest-growing law firm. Learn his strategies for success on The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast Ep 35.

Welcome to an inspiring story of determination, hard work, and entrepreneurial savvy on The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast. Today, we bring you an exclusive interview with Ali Awad, also known as the CEO Lawyer, whose rags-to-riches narrative is not just motivational but packed with actionable insights for law firm owners and entrepreneurs. From starting a law firm from the trunk of his car to a seven-figure income in just one year, Ali Awad’s journey opens the playbook for professional and financial success.

The Making of a Millionaire Attorney

Ali Awad’s life epitomizes the American Dream. Growing up in poverty, Ali became self-reliant by age 13, turning a childhood of challenges into his entrepreneurial fuel. His relentless drive saw him owning multiple businesses, but he found his true calling in personal injury law during his second year of law school. Diving into the intricacies of his niche, Ali shares the pivotal moments that led to the creation of his own law firm in 2017, becoming a millionaire by the next year.

Social Media Savvy: Engaging Clients Where They Are

One of Ali’s most significant breakthroughs came from understanding the power of social media. With over 1.5 million followers on Instagram, he has mastered the art of digital engagement. Ali Awad’s approachable style, educational content, and consistent online presence make legal advice accessible and build trust with potential clients. Dive into our podcast episode as Ali outlines strategies to optimize your online reach, regardless of your industry.

Hard Work and Self-Education: The Foundations of Success

In this episode, Ali emphasizes the importance of staying hungry for knowledge and advancement. Whether it’s learning new marketing tactics or understanding the intricacies of the legal field, continuous self-education is vital. He also dispels entitlement mentality, advocating for an ethos of hard work and financial wisdom that’s essential in today’s competitive environment.

The CEO Lawyer’s Blueprint for Business Growth

For law firm owners and entrepreneurs wondering about scalability and growth, Ali Awad shares his recipe for success. Keeping overheads low, focusing on client acquisition, and leveraging his unique brand identity have been crucial in his expansion across eight states. He underlines the importance of selecting a brand that can evolve, providing tips on how to resonate with a growing audience.

Conclusion:

As you tune into Ep 35 of The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast with Darren Wurz and the CEO Lawyer, Ali Awad, you’ll not only be inspired by Ali’s journey from mechanic shop to millionaire but also equipped with practical advice to elevate your practice or business. Remember, it’s not just about what you’re faced with, but how you leverage your adversities to fuel your growth.

Convert and Continue the Conversation:

Ready to leverage your adversities for professional success? Visit our website to learn more about planning services tailored for law firm owners. Subscribe, share, and follow us for more insights from industry trailblazers like Ali Awad.

Call-to-Action:

Don’t miss this wealth of knowledge that can transform your own entrepreneurial journey. Click to listen to The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast Ep 35 – Ali Awad, and subscribe to our channel for more empowering content. Connect with Ali Awad on social media @CEOLawyer and become part of a community that’s redefining success in law.

SEO Keywords: Ali Awad, CEO Lawyer, personal injury law, successful law firm owner, entrepreneurship, social media marketing for lawyers, financial success, The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast, law firm growth strategies.

Resources:

Wurz Financial Services

Connect with Darren Wurz:

Connect with Ali Awad:

About our guest:

Mr. Awad’s personal injury practice primarily consists of auto collisions, but also involves premises liability and medical malpractice suits. Mr. Awad is fluent in three languages (Arabic, English, Spanish) and conversational in two others (Chinese, Portuguese). These linguistic skills allow Mr. Awad to effectively communicate with a wide array of clients, fostering strong long-term relationships.

During law school, Mr. Awad became a published author on Immigration Law while working as a Senior Editor for a law review journal. He also clerked with a business litigation firm and an immigration firm in Atlanta, GA to gain a deeper understanding of the nuances of client communication in a legal setting. Mr. Awad has studied internationally during his undergraduate and post-graduate career, spending extended periods of time in countries like China, Turkey, Mexico, and Brazil. This diverse international experience helps Mr. Awad connect with people from all walks of life.

Mr. Awad’s hobbies include flying planes (private pilot in training) and building show cars (from antiques to 1500-horsepower exotics). Mr. Awad also holds a black belt in Tae-Kwon-Do and has competed on a regional and national level over the past 15 years.

Transcript:

Darren Wurz [00:00:00]:
I’m going to go ahead and click the record here. I think we’re going. There we go. All right. And in three, two, one. Are you a law firm owner looking to unlock the secrets to building a successful and thriving practice in the age of social media? Well, get ready, because you’re about to hear the story of how one successful personal injury firm owner mastered social media to catapult his law firm to new heights, ensuring financial success and stability for years to come. Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of The Lawyer Millionaire, where we explore the journeys and experiences of successful law firm owners and provide valuable insights to help you thrive in your legal practice. I’m your host, Darren Wurz, financial planner for law firm owners. Today I have the pleasure of introducing our guest, Ali Awad, a renowned law firm owner whose expertise is not just as a personal injury attorney, but also as a business owner and marketer, and that has propelled his firm to great heights. With over one and a half million followers on Instagram, he’s known as the CEO Lawyer. Ali, welcome to the show.

Ali Awad [00:01:13]:
Darren, I’m so happy to be here, man. Like I tell everyone, my name is Ali Awad, and I make my clients a lot of it.

Darren Wurz [00:01:21]:
I love it here. We have the CEO lawyers on the lawyer millionaire. This is great.

Ali Awad [00:01:27]:
Oh, this is going to be fun, man. I can’t wait to jump into this conversation. I’ve been reading up so much about you and your podcast, and honestly, this is something I’ve been really looking forward to. So I hope that we can provide tons of value to your audience and there is nothing that’s off the table. So any questions you have as deep as you need to go to get value for your audience, I am here for it, my friend. Let’s go.

Darren Wurz [00:01:51]:
That sounds awesome. Absolutely. And I’ve been following you for a while on Instagram. I love the stuff you put out. You’ve got a lot of great content. Before we dive into that for our listeners, why don’t you just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and the firm that you run?

Ali Awad [00:02:06]:
Sure. So I have a personal injury law firm based in Atlanta. We currently operate in eight different states. We have about 80 lawyers, paralegals, and staff as of the time of this recording, and we were voted the fastest growing law firm in America in 2021. I started the firm from the trunk of my car 2017 by 2018, became a millionaire by 2020. Realized I need to scale this thing because making money for yourself is cool, but making money for a lot of other people is way cooler. So we’ve been slowly and consistently building our firm. We double in size pretty much every single year, and we’re just having a lot of fun in the process.

Darren Wurz [00:02:52]:
Wow, that’s incredible. From the trunk of your car. Now I got to hear this story. Take us back to the beginning and tell us how did all this start for you and walk us through where you are today.

Ali Awad [00:03:04]:
So this started in 1995 when I was five years old, and my dad at the time was an engineer, and he worked for this company that required him having a color printer at home. So in 1995, my dad had this color printer, and I was starting to play with the computer. This is back when we had the old school Macintosh computers that had the big bubble on the back. So I’d go online, and back then we’d use Yahoo. Not so much google And I would search Dragon Ball Z, because Dragon Ball Z was the cool thing when you’re in elementary school. And when I’d search, I distinctly remember only like five or seven images coming up. And I started looking up these pictures, and I would print off these pictures of these Dragon Ball Z characters, some in black and white, some in color. And I would put them in these plastic sleeves. And so that no one would know my source, I would actually take scissors and cut the URL off the bottom of the page. Because when you print something off the Internet, the URL is printed on the bottom. So I distinctly remember at age five, printing off these pictures, taking them to school, and selling these pictures for two, three, $5 to the kids in school. And from that point on, I’ve been all in on entrepreneurship.

Darren Wurz [00:04:24]:
Wow. So it was really, for you, a story about entrepreneurship. You wanted to be a business owner, growing businesses, and as I understand it, you have several businesses. Did you know that you wanted to get into the field of law? When did that decision come about for you?

Ali Awad [00:04:42]:
So I had seven different businesses before I became an attorney. And one of the successful businesses, or more successful businesses, was the car audio and retail business. So my brothers and I had a couple of retail stores. We would sell rims tires, electronics, flip down monitors. We’d install Headrest TVs. We would do custom work like paint and interior. And I definitely became an expert at wheels and tires. Before I got to college, I had sold, mounted, and balanced over 10,000 sets of tires, my bare hands. I became an expert in wheels and tires. And it wasn’t until a couple of years into the wheel and tire and car audio business that I realized there are some limitations in this business. Because it requires such a high level of knowledge, it’s very difficult to scale this business, which meant only I could run the business myself. And as a result, I was limited in my income capacity, and my income was directly correlated to the amount of time that I would spend. So it became very hard to build a business separate from the fact that it was a dying industry. More and more cars were coming out with nice wheels and nice tires, so no one was upgrading. There was a phase in the when beating down the block with 415 inch Subwoofers was the thing. Right. I grew up in Dalton, Georgia. Predominantly Mexican town. So wheels, tires, neon lights, and TVs, we’re all about that life. But it was a dying industry. People were moving away from it. It became more competitive because Amazon was starting to sell so much more on electronics. And it turned into an industry where only the elite installers and the super exclusive experts in the field were the ones that were making money. And it was very hard to scale that business. So by the time I was in college, I decided to basically relinquish the entire business and give it to my younger brother and focus 100% on becoming an attorney. And it wasn’t until my second year of law school, after interning at an immigration firm, after working at a business litigation firm and a real estate firm, finally, I became exposed to personal injury and realized this is big enough for me to dedicate all of my time into and it’s big enough for me to let go of everything else. And even though I was a good entrepreneur and I was a good business person, and I was good at making money before I decided to leave, good to become great.

Darren Wurz [00:07:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s cool. You had some exposure to other areas of the law. You found personal injury. You said, this is my niche. This is what I want to do. How did you get started? You said from the trunk of your car. What was that like those initial few days? Right. Tell me about that.

Ali Awad [00:07:30]:
So I graduated law school in 2015 at age 24. I had my law degree, my doctorate in law, and my master’s in business. And I just wanted to work. It didn’t matter what I was doing. I just wanted to be busy. And so I interviewed with over 100 different firms. I was even flown to Dubai to work for this international law firm. Went through their round of interviews, didn’t get accepted, flew all over the country to try to get interviews and try to get a job offer. Nothing clicked. So finally, after graduating law school, passing the bar, getting my license this is five, six months after taking the bar exam, I’m just like, okay, well, my brother is a lawyer. How about I just go and figure out how to bring in personal injury cases and I’ll bring them to his firm, and I’ll give him 50% of the fee just for me to be able to use his letterhead and basically work underneath him. So I basically forced myself into his firm and said, look, I’m going to bring you in business, and that’s how I’m going to work for you. And then I emailed every single GSU alum from georgia State University, just for coffee, lunch, anything. I want to work. Give me your shittiest cases that you have. I will do whatever it takes. And one person responded, and he took me out to breakfast and gave me this massive case file for a premises liability case. I remember pulling up to his office and talking to him. I was so excited because I’m like, wow, this could be the case that makes my career, and it’s the first case, and blah, blah, blah, I won’t ruin the ending. But it didn’t work out the way that I had planned. I worked on that case for many years, and instead what happened was the lawyer that was working on that file before ended up having a job posting. And so I called the previous lawyer on the file to see, hey, what’s going on with this case? Can you give me some information? Why are you no longer representing the client? He said, look, the money you don’t take is way more important than the money you do take. This is a case that you probably shouldn’t work on. It’s going to be very difficult. You might invest many years in it and get no result. I’m like, dude, I don’t care. I’m hungry. I’ll eat dirt if I have to. I need something. Well, he turned out to be right. And two weeks later, I interviewed at his firm, and he hired me on the spot. So that was the first job that I had out of law school for about 14 months, from December 2015 to February 2017. I was making 40 grand a year as an attorney. I was bringing in business. I was handling the phones. I was doing the intake. I was signing up the clients, setting up with treatment. But really, that was my cost of education after law school, because you don’t learn how to practice law in law school. You learn theory. You learn different ways to think, but you don’t know how to actually do the work unless you’ve actually worked in a firm. I said, Look, I just need the skills. I don’t really care about the money right now. I just need to develop the skills. And when it got to a point where the cases that I was generating and the money that I was bringing in for the firm greatly exceeded how much I was making and it was time to negotiate my salary, he wouldn’t agree to give me my bonuses, so I decided to walk away. And, yeah, I didn’t have an office, didn’t have a website, didn’t have even business cards. But I had my phone, my laptop, and I had my car, and that was enough to start my firm in 2017.

Darren Wurz [00:10:54]:
Wow. So much good stuff there. And I can relate so much to that. A lot of hard work. Just kind of getting started, doing whatever it takes, the networking. That story reminds me so much of when my dad started in the business, he said, Back in those days, you made phone calls in the phone book, and he made 100 calls and got completely rejected. And then it was that last phone call, somebody finally agreed to meet with him.

Ali Awad [00:11:25]:
Yeah, that’s how it is, man. Like, just one more rep that concept of just do one more, one more phone call, one more email, one more video post, one more call. It’s worth it. Probably something that a lot of people don’t know about me is when I started my first job as an attorney in 2015 and 2016, I was working Monday through Friday at the law firm. Had my 40k annual salary, but on the weekends, I would go and sell electronics at the flea market because that was the skill that I had. I knew that I knew how to sell. I knew what people wanted. I would go and load up a truck full of electronics and used tires and whatever I can get my hands on. I’d go to the flea market and make as much cash as I could, and I did that pretty much every single weekend. Then in addition to that, I partnered up with a couple of my cousins and opened up a tax office to do tax returns and tax refunds for people in tax season. So that was from, like, January to April of 2016. So I was still working three jobs, but the job of being an attorney was just for the education. The other things were to make money and start slowly build my way out of debt. So I think that’s something that a lot of people miss out on is just because you’re doing one job. 40 hours is part time. Working 40 hours is less than a quarter of the amount of hours available in a week. 42 is a quarter of the hours. So what are you doing from 06:00 p.m. To 09:00 p.m. Every single day? Where are you investing your money? I didn’t go out with my friends on weekends, and I even have posts on my social media, like, basically just dogging people, like, Dude, what are you all celebrating? Why are you going out every weekend? What are you celebrating? You’re not celebrating your success. You’re celebrating your birthday. You’re 26 years old, dude. Why are you still going out and celebrating your birthday? You haven’t earned it. Go and be beneficial to society before you turn 35, 40, 45, and realize, damn, I wasted all my 20s just going to clubs and partying and drinking and pissing all my money away. And that’s the thing that I knew that all of my friends were doing, and I had that massive advantage over everyone else. It wasn’t that I was smarter or harder working or the best student nowhere near the top 10% of my class, but I knew that they were taking time off when I could just continue pushing that envelope and over time, the degree of separation was so large that it was impossible for them to catch up. And now they interview and work for me.

Darren Wurz [00:14:00]:
Wow. Yeah. The hard work and being self employed and being a business owner, you can put more energy into it and you can drive those results if you have that drive and that perseverance. And you grew your firm, you scaled it. I’m curious about what that process was like as you were scaling and as you were hiring. What lessons did you learn along the way and what challenges did you face that looking back, you’re like, boy, I wish I knew that as I was scaling and building the practice.

Ali Awad [00:14:34]:
Yeah. So two things you must definitely do if you are trying to build your business. Number one is focus on client acquisition. Make that money. Bring in as many customers as you possibly can. Learn as much as you possibly can to maximize the value of those cases of those customers. Whether it’s lifetime value you’re selling products, whether you’re an attorney that offers a service, there are ways for you to maximize the value to the client and to your firm. And number two, keep your costs low. You don’t need a fancy office. You don’t need a fancy website. You don’t need to invest another 1015 $20,000 a month in anything else. All you need is a little bit of grit, more hard work, and use your phone. Almost all of us have 500 to 2000 people on our personal Facebook pages. And I guarantee you there’s someone on there that could potentially be your client and it’s your fault if they go somewhere else when they need the service that you provide because you have failed at marketing. So focus on getting clients, keep your costs low and let everyone know what you do. It’s very simple.

Darren Wurz [00:15:34]:
That’s great advice. There’s an old story. Who was it? It was Henry Ford bought a life insurance policy. And the guy he golfed with every day for years and years and years and years was an insurance salesman and he bought this insurance policy and the insurance salesman came to him and was like, hey, why didn’t you buy it from me? What’s the deal? And he said, well, you never asked.

Ali Awad [00:16:02]:
Wow. Yeah. Never asked or probably even never even told him that that’s what he specializes in.

Darren Wurz [00:16:08]:
Might not have. Absolutely. So, yeah, let’s get into those are great tips for growing and really good solid advice. I want to talk a little bit about your social media strategy because that is really working well for you and obviously you’re doing some really good things. How have you effectively been able to use that to reach and engage with potential clients?

Ali Awad [00:16:34]:
So do you know what the number one complaint is for lawyers? Number 1 bar complaint. It’s that they don’t answer their phones and they don’t respond in a timely manner. And over the years this has created a separation between clients and their ability to access legal services in a way that they feel comfortable. Well, we spend if you get these reports from your iPhone, it’ll tell you that you’re spending six, seven, eight, 9 hours a day of screen time every single day. Think about how many hours that is per day. Outside of whether you’re going having food and using the bathroom and showering and exercising and doing anything else. That is the majority of your day. So if you focus on meeting your clients where you are, where they are on their phones, they will find you and they will connect with you. So my goal with social media was not to build a following of millions and millions of people. It was to give better access to legal justice and to attorneys. And most of my content is me wearing a T shirt or a polo shirt. I’m not in the fancy suit and trying to look like I’m a highfalutin person. I’m a normal guy, I’m one of you. We’re the same people. And if I talk to you in the language that you want to be talked to, imitation is the nearest form of flattery. I’m not using big words just to sound super smart. I’m doing this because I know this is the language that we can understand colloquially. Doing this and showing up every single day on social media is the creation of your brand. And when you have a brand where people feel like they can connect with you, they feel like, you know what, that’s a dude that I’d be cool to just kind of hang out with even if they weren’t my lawyers. What that really does is it establishes credibility and establishes trust. And there is a very strong positive correlation between the clients that trust you and their overall result. Because if they trust you, they’re going to stick with you, they’re going to follow your instructions, they’re not going to mess up their case. They’re going to do everything that you tell them to do. As a result, they also end up getting higher value cases because they’re following the instructions of the lawyer. And so we don’t have to buy leads or do random marketing. I don’t have a single billboard, I don’t do TV ads. I don’t do a lot of the traditional mail in stuff. We don’t have runners like a lot of firms do. Whether or not that’s unethical is besides the point. It’s just what other people do. We just focus on one thing, like we’re on social media. You have access to me, you shoot me a message, I’m going to respond, and I’m there every single day. And people resonate with that message.

Darren Wurz [00:19:07]:
Know what you do and do it well. And what a great point. We all think and we all talk about not having enough time, but you’re right. We get those iPhone reports and it’s like, oh, you spent X number of hours. Social media. What were you doing? Just scrolling. You could have been doing all kinds of other things to maximize your presence there, engaging with people and building that. So that’s really a great thing for a lot of people to think about.

Ali Awad [00:19:41]:
And look, I’ve been there. I’ve been on the couch and binge watched Complete Seasons on Netflix. I’ve been at home and just completely wasted days and weekends. There are definitely times where you should relax and turn your brain off and just forget about everything else and just relax. But that shouldn’t be the norm every single day, and you should feel a little bit of guilt when you’re doing it too much. Like, you should take it personally. You should think that you’re capable of more and you should be hard on yourself because if you know you’re capable of more. I heard that the definition of hell is when you die, you meet the person that you could have become. And I want the person that I could have become to be very similar to the person that I am when I pass away. So put down that remote, put down that phone, and get to work.

Darren Wurz [00:20:40]:
Challenging words, for sure, Ali, but that’s the truth.

Ali Awad [00:20:46]:
I don’t want to sugarcoat it, man, because we have this millennial generation, Gen Z generation. I’m not just kind of over generalizing people, but there’s a generation of entitlement. There’s a generation that did not necessarily work for what they have. Their parents worked and they gave them the house and the cars and kind of, like, set them up and they didn’t have to work with their hands and learn the value of hard work, learn the value of money. I’m sure as a financial planner, you see people that end up with this windfall of money or their parents pass away and they have this millions of dollars worth of fortune, and they squander it, because just because you have money doesn’t mean you know how to manage it or multiply it. And so it’s the same thing. It’s a muscle. Hard work is a muscle. You can take my firm away, take my money, take everything away. I’ll be right back here in a year’s time, and probably better because I’ll have much less baggage.

Darren Wurz [00:21:38]:
Yeah, I love it. It’s very inspirational. And it’s so true that Adversity can be such a great teacher that way. There’s so many examples of that, of people who and you see it all the time. People maybe have a large inheritance or something and have life kind of set up for know, whereas maybe someone who came from a place where they didn’t have those things. Adversity has been a great teacher. Now, that’s not always the case, but it can definitely be a great motivator and a great factor to inspire. Kevin O’Leary I was listening to him a little while ago, and he was talking about how his mother, as soon as he graduated from college. She said you’re cut off. That’s it. You got to go find a job. You get not another dime from me. And that might seem very harsh, and it is, but that was inspirational to him because he’s like, okay, now I got to go, and I got to make it happen.

Ali Awad [00:22:39]:
Look, I have the benefit of growing up poor. I have the benefit of my parents not being citizens of the United States, and my dad not getting his citizenship until 39 years of living in the United States. I have the benefit of having to learn a second and third language. I have the benefit of having to acclimate to a society where I didn’t feel like I belonged, and I had to change my mannerisms and change the way that I spoke and learn new languages just to assimilate. Those are massive advantages that didn’t seem like that at the time. But the biggest advantage that I have is that my parents didn’t give me anything. And by age 13, I was self sufficient. I was working in the mechanic shop. Every day after I’d get out of school, I’d take the bus to the mechanic shop. I’d be the one changing tires. I’d be the one plugging them. I’d be the one installing new rims. If a client wanted new tires that we didn’t have in stock, I’d sell them the tires and get someone to give me a ride to the local Walmart down the street. Get the uniroyal firms or the Tiger Paw tires, whatever they are, bring them back to the store, sell them, install them, get the cash, and move on. I was the guy that was selling things online so I could support my family and help them. So it wasn’t, hey, you turned 18, and now we’re cutting you off. It was, I’ve had this seven figure work ethic forever. Just on a three figure budget.

Darren Wurz [00:23:58]:
Yeah. Good stuff. Well, we’re coming closely to the end of our time here, but I do want to ask you, is there anything else that you want to share with other law firm owners? Now that you’ve reached this level of success and grown your firm and you’re continuing to grow it, are there any other words of wisdom that you have for other law firm owners who are trying to grow their firms as well?

Ali Awad [00:24:34]:
This morning, I got notified that one of the attorneys that we’d referred a case to was not responding to the emails or calls to the client that we referred to him because we don’t handle that specific practice area. And as a result, the client terminated that attorney and went somewhere else. Now, obviously, I am going to get a referral fee, or I would have gotten a referral fee in this situation. And I care about my reputation. I want my clients, if they reach out to me, the referral partner that I pass the case to is going to do a phenomenal job because it’s in their best interest not just to maximize the revenue for themselves, but also to have a customer for life. Because I’m giving you this customer, this client, they’re yours now. And even though we have systems in place to follow up with clients, send them swag even after we refer them out, for the most part, I expect that there’s going to be a drop off rate where the likelihood of them returning back to my firm is a little lower because we referred it out. And that’s okay, because that’s not a practice area that we specialize in. But by and large, most lawyers, most doctors, most professionals are not hungry. They think that because they’ve succeeded by getting this degree that they are automatically in this upper echelon of society and hard work is no longer necessary. And I promise you, all the people that you truly admire, the people that you look up to, whether it’s in business or financially, they have put in the work that’s the only advantage they have over you is that they are willing to work more than you. And so as long as you’re willing to put in the effort and constantly educate yourself and constantly grow and invest in yourself. The best investments I ever made were paying people to be in their rooms, paying for friends, and paying to get to know those people, being in those masterminds, investing in my education. As long as you continuously invest in yourself and grow and put in the work, all the people that you aspire to be like will eventually be at the same level. And at that point is when you realize there’s nothing special about anyone else. I have everything, if not more than what everyone else has. I need to focus, get to work, and everything will be all right in the end. And if it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.

Darren Wurz [00:26:51]:
Stay hungry, folks. Great words. Thanks, Ali, for joining us. Unfortunately, we’re at the end of our time here, but I would love for you to share with our audience how they can find you, learn more about you, or get in touch with you if they’d like to.

Ali Awad [00:27:04]:
Sure. I’m CEO lawyers on Instagram and all social media handles. A good little tip on branding is pick a name that you can grow into. Pick a name that is big enough to where 5,10, 15, 20 years down the road, you still feel like there’s room to grow. If you call yourself Southwest Dakota Criminal Defense Attorney, you haven’t left much room for expansion. There your name you can always grow into. I choose to not advertise my name because Ali Awad sometimes is a little bit harder to remember. And then when you put it all in one phrase, it looks like Aliyah. So I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to go with CEO lawyer. But when you do pick out a name and pick. Out a brand, reserve all the social media handles. They’re free reserve the domain name. If it’s $10 a year or 10,000 a year, it doesn’t matter. That’s a brand you’re going to invest into and then protect it with trademark, because this is something that you’re going to invest a lot of time and energy into. So CEO Lawyer is where you can find me. And if you just Google me, I’m sure you’ll get tons and tons of hits. And I appreciate you guys even taking the time to listen to me, and hopefully we’ll cross paths and meet each other soon.

Darren Wurz [00:28:10]:
Absolutely. Well, thanks again, and thank you, the listener. That brings us to the end of another insightful episode of The Lawyer Millionaire podcast. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Ali’s Journey and Experience provides us with some valuable lessons on building successful law firms and leveraging social media and hard work to expand your reach. If you found today’s episode valuable, please share it with your friends and colleagues. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Lawyer Millionaire podcast. Are you an ambitious law firm owner with big goals for your future? With high touch planning? My mission is to empower high performing law firm owners like you to achieve your goals, live the lifestyle of your dreams, and find peace of mind. Let’s partner together to create and execute a financial plan, optimize your taxes, master your cash flow, and exponentially grow your net worth so you can secure your future and your legacy. Learn more and schedule your free consultation@thelawormillionaire.com and start your journey to financial success today. Thanks for tuning in. I’m your host, Darren Wurz, and I’ll see you next time.