From Niche to 150 Employees: The Real Story Behind Building a High-Volume PI Firm with Seth Bader

Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Zoe Zionarus, and I'm very excited to speak with today's guest. So we have Seth Bader, who's the founder of Bader Law, and what are the rare situations where we've got someone who's just talking about the story of the law firm. He's had some incredible growth over the years, some ups and downs to each add-up briefly on the pre-chat. But I think this is going to be a fantastic podcast for anyone who's looking for the real examples of what this actually looks like, growing from scratch to a very sizable firm. So Seth, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, it's a pleasure. I'm glad to be here and excited to share my stories, share some lessons, and exchange ideas. All right. Awesome. Well, there's something in this start of your story that resonated with me deeply, because I also used to be a bulldog owner. When you ended up starting the firm, so basically you had $5,000 in the checking account, laptop, and the bulldog. So take me back to those days. What ended up getting you to start the firm in the first place? Yeah. I appreciate this. 2008 was essentially a recession, and I'd spent five years as an insurance defense attorney knew that that was not for me. But for a few reasons, one, I was not going to be anybody's employee. And number two, oh, two, I was not into billable hours. In three, it really just did not align with my values. What I wanted to do with the world, the impact that I wanted to make, saw an opportunity to really help people, victims of workplace injuries, auto injuries. And so that was really the motivation. It was both an opportunity to make an impact, but also an opportunity to kind of build the life that I wanted from myself. So one of the things I found interesting about your practice is that I see a lot of people that are focused on PI or workers comp kind of separately, but you're one of the few people I've seen that has kind of across the board on that. Can you talk to me about how those two things factor into the practice and why you decided to go after both? Yeah, so the way I built the business is kind of a reverse to what most people do, right? Most, most firms, the most firm owners that have large volume practices, really are automobile, you know, have a PI personal injury attorneys first, and they generally go for the English market. We took a different approach. We started because I was a workers' compensation attorney to start with, with really just focusing on workers' compensation and because of my background and because of the ability to speak Spanish, I really understand the Latino community and the culture. That's where we started our focus. So we actually focused on workers' comp in the Latino community first. And then as our brand was built overall in the community, we then expanded to personal injury. Yeah. I mean, that's a fantastic beachhead. I would say like, you know, that's what I would consider a pretty niche place to start in 2026, but in 2008, that must have been like very, very wide open. Well, if you're talking to the Latino community, it was fairly wide open here in Atlanta. It's not, you know, I'm from Miami originally, the Hispanic community here is nowhere near the sides of the community in Miami, New York, LA Houston, but it was big enough and there really was not a lot of competition for the Latino markets. I thought that there was a great place to start and then in workers' compensation, it was really perfectly aligned because so many Latinos are doing a lot of the construction, a lot of the heavy labor. And I can imagine that's like a relatively more referral oriented practice than your general MBA stuff, just because so many people work together on different jobs, same crews, different companies, that kind of stuff too. So that's interesting. How did you end up getting your first clients? Yes. My first clients, I'm going to take you back 2008. My first clients were referrals, I had met so many attorneys who were claimants attorney, plaintiff attorneys, while I was doing insurance defense, I built some relationships with some of them and the very first calls that I made when I started my practice were to those attorneys that really were like mentors to me and I, you know, offered to help on cases offered to, you know, to take those calm lower end cases, they were generous enough to give me that opportunity and so that's that's how I got my first, my first few cases. Okay, gotcha. And did you cross over to advertising at some point or when did it kind of switch off of the referrals and into different stuff? Because I'm imagining with the size they heard about it, it's kind of cross the referral threshold at some point, right? Yeah, we definitely, and we sent up thousands of clients a year, so we're well passed through referral process or referral, like that's not the majority of our clients, though certainly the best clients still come from referrals, particularly client referrals, former client referrals, but yeah, we actually I started marketing right at the gate now, not in a big way and not in a very effective way, but there were really two ways that I marketed or advertised. The first was I actually spent some of that $5,000 on a paid ad in a Spanish language sports newspaper. Wow. You talk about niche, like that was niche, it was called the study of sports. I don't know if it's still around. I remember the head of photographer come in, take a photo. It was really a bad photo, but anyway, but it was it was there and I thought I made it as it didn't cost a lot, a couple hundred bucks a month. I don't believe, I'd have gotten a call at you, but I don't believe I got any clients, but the other way, I wouldn't call it advertising, but it was marketing and I don't have some pretty valuable lessons from it was, I built my own website because I couldn't afford to pay a website company, I didn't know anything about SEO. I remember I met with I think one of the original groups, I don't know if it was Thompson Reuters or Fine Lock, kind of this was pre scorpion, pre where you didn't have a lot of like niche SEO companies, there was just like the big players and I remember meeting with them was like $10,000 to build it out for the year, which seemed extraordinary, which I'm not going to tell you how much it's been after a month, just on S, but it's considerably more than what I would have paid in a year. But anyway, I couldn't afford that. I ended up working with a small group that allowed you to they kind of provided the infrastructure for a blog and then I took the blog, which was $200 a month and then I essentially built out an entire website, loaded it with content, loaded it with information, I didn't have a lot of cases. So I just spent a lot of time on creating content, I used what felt like first generation Google translate to translate it all to Spanish, yeah, and I'm sure it was very clunky and very janky, but and I thought this is this is the winning formula, I thought, you know, I'm going to get a lot of clients and I did, but not how you'd expect because not one injured person called me from the website, but over the course of the next three years, I got two calls from two separate lawyers who did a lot of mass marketing and they were looking for a lawyer who to do Spanish workers compensation and both of them send me hundreds and hundreds of cases and really got me off the ground. So for me, the lesson is really one about awareness and you know, you talk about awareness when it comes to marketing. You don't really understand what that is or the value of it, but if you create awareness for yourself or your brand, good things can happen if you don't you don't have that opportunity. But again, I didn't, I didn't know that's, that would be the impact of those, of that website of that content, but it actually worked really, really well because I created awareness and law firms that were looking for referral partners were able to find. Yeah. There's a couple of things I really like about that stage and story and this is something I tell people that are kind of coming to us for whatever reason that they're in the beginning stages. And I always say it's like, you have one of these things like when you're starting out of law firm or any business to be honest, it's like you either have money or you have time. And if you don't have anything, if you don't have either, then you got to raise your rates. But you know, you have the situation where you had not a ton of liquid capital that you had a lot of time and then you were able to put it into that, which is just super cool. I think the other thing that's really interesting and I think this is something that anybody who's wanting to break in is that I see a direct connection between how niche your practice was and how easy was to refer you. I think that people have these pipe dreams of just being like cool, like, you know, I'm going to start buying billboards and be pursuing trucking cases on day one of my law firm and it's just like, well, look, you're going to be spending a lot of money to compete against that. This kind of reminds me of almost like this old school HBS disruption strategy where it's like people who are targeting stuff that larger people aren't able to disrupt the market and work on the stream. That's almost exactly what you did because, you know, if these guys wanted to take all of these cases, they wouldn't be funneling them to you by the hundreds. And but it's you carved out a niche and the other thing that's really beautiful about that too is that like, I'm sure you had skills going into it on on case one. But when you're on case one thousand with that exact thing, it's like, you know, everybody, all the process, all the people who are running the courts and like you legitimately became the best guy to talk about from that over the period of that really, really tight focus. I think it's a stage that so many people mess when they're starting out the law firm. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's no question about it as a couple of things come to mind one. I don't know why the idea of fake it till you make it, you know, came to my mind. I mean, when you don't, I knew the substance, I knew the law, but it's a whole different ball game to actually run a business to handle calls to, you know, to meet with clients to kind of sell them on what you're doing and when you haven't done it before, it's kind of a scary thing to do because you know, they've never done it, but they don't really know that. And I think a lot of it's just having the confidence to go through with it. There was something else you said, and I wanted to comment on it. But yeah, I think the niche practice helps the other thing that was really great about that experience was especially working with other firms that were spending a lot of money marketing is I got to learn what that looked like. I didn't know. I obviously didn't know their numbers, but I was able to experience that volume. I was able to experience, I was able to start at a small scale scaling the business without really a lot of risk out of my pocket, a lot of capital out of my pocket. And again, through the process, I was also able to learn. A lot of folks in this business are not willing to share information, but if you have a good relationship and you're working with somebody you're effectively partnering with them, well, they're more inclined to open, not their books, but open up and share ideas, and that's actually what happened. And I was able to learn a lot about how you acquire cases, how you assess whether it's a good investment and, you know, almost say the rest of the history, but that led to other opportunities and then I started marketing advertising, et cetera. Well, let's transition to there too, because I'm curious. When I'm getting to the point where you have these relationships as partners, was that's almost like a maybe a mentorship type thing, is like, I feel like when you have these relationships, it's like, you know, they're kind of, on some level, they're speaking out of their own interests, if they're teaching you what it is that they do to generate cases that they're going to be referring to you for like a feature I'm assuming. So what do you think was in it for them when I came to getting or sharing this information with you at the end of the day? I think really I think more than anything, it's I think business owners in my experience entrepreneurs actually tend to pay forward. I think that there is this, I had mentors, I had people that helped me get me cases, taught me how to do certain things, helped me avoid certain mistakes early on. And I think that then when it was my opportunity to do the same, and I that's just been my experience, I don't know if that's true of everybody, but I certainly can speak for myself and a lot of my friends, both that mentored me as I was kind of growing my business and those that I've mentored and supported since. Yeah, it's kind of funny you mentioned that too, because it's like, it's definitely something I felt I've had said minutes, it's kind of the same, and obviously we're talking about like running a market agency, but this is weird situation where you don't necessarily have like a, you said it's paying it forward. So I had situations where I would get some great advice or some help or someone for someone, you know, I'd ask myself, like, you know, I'd ask them and say, hey, is there anything I can do for you? And I'm on the other side of this sometimes too, it's like, you know, you try to keep relationships with people who are ahead of you ideally, and then you also will develop relationships with people that are, you know, earlier on the journey. And then it's funny, because I get that same question now, and it's like, is there anything I could do for you? I'm like, no, I'm just like, you know, if they really reason one of the positions that I haven't given you this advice, it's just your excellent before, like give me the advice, you know, the super positive though. But okay, so I want to switch, actually, there's those two things I want to ask. So one is about kind of getting into that situation where now you're marketing for yourself, but just to kind of branch it off from the marketing, because I really want to talk about how your approach is to to people sets. So walk me through your first couple hires and how that ended up going from switching from the guy who is wearing a million hats to, you know, finally building a proper business on yourself. That's the people part is this is an interesting part. And my first few hires, let's see, my first hire was a legal assistant. I don't actually remember how like I put, I don't know if I put an addout or what, but it was a young woman who I think she had just graduated college. She had no legal experience. She came in, we just kind of hit it off and she worked with me for the next almost the next decade. She was phenomenal. I think we learned a lot together. We grew together. And she, she understood my idiosync procedure and my style. So it really, it actually really worked out well. Let me back up. I did not have some kind of hiring strategy, right? Like I just and I didn't understand, you know, I don't understand some of the things I know now about labor ratios and how much you're supposed to pay for for people relative to how much revenue you generate. I didn't even know how much revenue I was going to generate. It was more a sense that there was more than I could handle on my own. And so I needed support. And so and and so that was my first hire. My second hire, I hired an attorney who was working at the court as a mediator. I think he was making about $40,000 a year. And often in an opportunity, I think I paid him $20 an hour. And he was great. He also stayed with me for a decade of phenomenal. Like probably the top one of the top employees I've ever had just phenomenal guy and just really you talk about like what you're looking for in an employee consistency, reliability and integrity. He had all of it and there was never an issue. So it was really my first two hires were phenomenal. I also hired some family members at the time. And so we had a really small but very robust team. I mean, we really performed at a very high level. Yeah, I guess this actually gives me a really good say where to because it's like whenever I'm talking about these ceilings, I feel like the people who get the farthest are able to kind of appreciate the relationship between might as they like supply and demand, but like fulfillment versus demand. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, you know, and there's this kind of two sides the same coin. If you ratchet up to the point where you can handle 100 cases a month based on your team, but you only have marketing that's going to generate 50, then you could have a short fall. And then people could be sitting idle or you're over as too high. On the flip side, you know, if you're considering 100 opportunities and you only got 50 people or 50 cases where at the team, it can be kind of bad. But it sounds to me because I mean, especially this is kind of with the context that you had. It's like, you've had plenty demand pretty much since you got started. Would you say it's safe to say that you basically hired at the point where the team started to get stretched? Or did you ever hire capacity in advance of some ability to get those cases? Well, certainly early on, we never hired in advance. In fact, I think the solution, I was always, I don't say I, because it wasn't just me, but we were always the solution. And I didn't realize it at the time. It was certainly not deliberate. But looking back, essentially, I had all of us were doing like at least two, if not three, if not four. And in some cases, five jobs, I mean, in today's market, you would never get away with that. Everybody would say, wait a second, you've asked me to do this now. You've asked me to do, you've expanded my job description. You haven't expanded my pay, right? Back then, we didn't know all of us were ignorant. We just did whatever we had to do. If that meant staying late, we stayed late. If that meant learning something new, we learned something new. But no, we did not hire for capacity. We didn't, again, we didn't know. When you start out, you really don't know a lot. You don't know how much business you're going to get. You don't know how long that business is going to continue. You don't know how much money that business is going to generate. So to a great extent, it was just whatever fell right. And again, I was willing, I was always trying to stay as lean as I could. And so the easiest way to stay lean was just for me to do more. And it never occurred to me to think that I probably needed to hire more people to have some more balance. And so I just kind of outworked. I just kept working, working, working. But I think, you know, I think when I look back a lesson for other people that are in that position is, if you have, even if you don't know, like, how to assess capacity, how to assess how much you should allocate to labor, if you are really stretched to a point that you can't do the work and you're really doing as much as you can, you, there's a very high likelihood you need the person. And there's not a lot of risk if you hire the person. And it doesn't work out. Well, you haven't, you didn't even promised them $60,000 a year. You just committed to an annual salary. And if you break that down into a month or two, it's not a huge investment. And more often than not, in fact, every single time what I found was when we made those hires, we could see the work product got better and the capacity and the ability to produce, increase substantially. Yeah. And that's a super good point to set because this is the thing. It's like, yeah, it's like, you're not committing to $60,000 in day one. It's like, I'm going to do the math on that. It's a month or two. That could be five or 10 grand. And it's like, you know, especially if you're on the situation where you're already like, you know, when you're hiring in advance of access to man, it's like, you can probably liquidate that spend pretty quickly when you just have people to take the extra cases. And then you're basically profitable from day one on that higher. I know it's obviously going to be a little bit different with contingency based up because you don't have some time to come in. But, you know, you get your numbers together. And that's, you know, something that you could kind of forecast out in the awesome. Okay. So that's really cool. And then I want to talk about, so you said you didn't have a plan at the beginning, but I know that you're an EOS guy. So at what point did you start looking into systems for running the business as opposed to kind of going and figuring it out on your own? Yeah. So we run the EOS operatives. He's been EOS operating system, which is a Gina Wickman's system, the book is traction. In 2013, I give a shout out to a mentor by the name of Ken Hardison who runs Pilma. And at the time, he told me about, he called, he actually called them Ken's babies. It was kind of weird, but it was like essentially all of his processes, his procedures, his KPIs, all of this. And that was the first time I'd ever seen anything like that. I mean, it seems so, so elementary now for how you run a business, but at the time, it seemed like revolutionary to me. Like, wow, this is, this is amazing. And it really planted the seed that we needed to do something like that. But at the time, I didn't have a COO. I didn't have the bandwidth. So it's very, very difficult to like install that. Again, didn't know what I didn't know at the time I needed. We were probably at about two million in revenue a year. And there was more than enough to pay for an office manager and some kind of operator. But I made the mistake of not doing that. And so consequently, we didn't fill that the processes. We didn't have an integrated operating system. We didn't have a budget. And so in an event a few years later, I joined some mastermind groups where I was able to learn from other firm owners who had been there and done that. I learned about EOS. And I actually went off site on my own to try to implement on my own. This was 2015. Never got it off the ground. I actually ended up bringing on a partner to kind of lead the operation. And during that time, we didn't have an integrated operating system. The partnership has since ended. But we didn't have an integrated operating system. And I think that that was one of the reasons that the firm really suffered during that period of time, because we were scaling so far. We're growing so fast. We weren't really scaling. infrastructure we weren't scaling systems and processes. And I think that that really was to the firm's detriment. And then over the last two years, we've been in a business transformation where we have been installing EOS and it's going really, really well. I mean, it's by no means an easy thing to do, especially when you've grown so big. So my advice to anyone who's got a business is really start thinking about whether it's EOS, whether it's scaling up, there's an English one called pinnacle. There's all kinds of systems. Like, I don't think any one of them is the right one. It's just the right one for you, but having an integrated intentional system or plan to operate your business, I think is essential. And I don't think it's ever too soon. Yeah. Well, it's really interesting to bring that up to you that we actually got on EOS a couple of years ago as well too, like probably like similar timeline. But honestly, to your point too, it's like, you know, there's one of the things they hear about whenever it comes up with other business sounds. Oh, did you guys hire an implementer? You guys sell them and that thing. And it's kind of one of these interesting discussions that people have. But the other thing I think is really useful about it. And it's like, you know, I think if you could hypothetically take some person who's a business genius who can come up with some kind of a system that's going to work as well as EOS or better, it's probably still better to be in a system like that because you have shared language and shared systems and stuff that you can talk to other people that are doing it out. And it's really fantastic, especially is one of these super weird things. We had a really awesome guest on the podcast not too long ago, but Brooke Lively. So she ended up she's been the only EOS certified person for legal on it. It's funny because the way that she ended up noticing it was she was doing a lot of the CFO and financial stuff. She figured that all the people that have law firms are going up under the right. We're all doing EOS. It's one of these really, really fun things when you start looking for this. It's like when you want to buy a Jeep and you see geeks everywhere on the road, you're like, damn, everybody's on this stuff. So it's kind of like situation. I want to dig into that that period though too, because it's also a total coastline of this thing. The more of an operation that you have, the more cumbersome it can be to kind of rip out and replace stuff with these different forms of standards and meeting cadences and KPIs and all this stuff too. But talk me through the period between when you ended up having those kind of struggles and what all ended up happening and how you like, that kind of whole period of getting ahead of your seas. Because I've definitely been in that position myself of the business. We definitely had guests on the podcast that they don't know one of those things. And it is one of those things that end up breaking people. But I think the people who get on the other side have way more wisdom of how to do that. And so I think everyone kind of runs into it on some point. Yeah, so I'm not exactly sure which period. I'll kind of cover what I consider the whole period that I think covered what you're talking about. In 2018, our inventory was growing wildly and fast. I had no idea. I really didn't know how much business I had in the pipeline. I didn't know how many people I needed. I was talking to consultants. They were telling me you needed more people. We hired one or two people. We probably needed about 50, five zero. But again, didn't know that. And it was still stuck in the mindset of a founder who had $5,000 in the bank and foolishly spent a few hundred dollars a month on a study of sports to try to generate a business like. So it's hard, I think, for a founder to flip that switch and realize that when you have enough inventory, I don't see even more. When you have enough work, you can actually afford to pay for staff. You just have to be willing to pay that money up front. And in some ways, in the contingency fee space, you have to look at your cases almost like accounts receivables. And I give credit to a friend of mine who explain that to me. So the money is there. It's just not unlocked yet, but you can unlock it without the people. So if you hire the people, you can unlock it in any event. So we got to about 25, almost 30 people when I brought on a COO who again was my partner at the time. And we just grew really fast because we hired so many people. We were able, as I mentioned, to kind of unlock that revenue. And so, and from there, you're able to reinvest back into marketing. The problem is if you don't have a real system in a real structure with an organization, a true organizational chart with roles, responsibilities, processes, KPIs, expectations, it becomes very, very messy. And what ends up happening is what I think happened to us, which is you become very people dependent. Right. And so I felt like we had a lot of rock stars. I mean, there were a lot of, I mean, really, really talented people that were in the organization at the time. And some of them actually were not only like, I mean, I'm not going to say they were hall of fame. I mean, they were like true, like true rock stars. They could kind of do a lot. And the problem is, as long as you have them, we're essentially are the system. They were sort of a larger version of what we had earlier on when I said that, you know, everybody was doing a little bit of everything. Well, thanks. Yeah. But then the challenges that if one of those individuals leaves, then the system and the processes break down in a very significant way because they were effectively the process. They were the system or at least a huge part of it. And if you don't have things documented, if you haven't, you can't just plug somebody in to continue to do the work. And then things tend to break down. And I think there was a, I mean, that's just one of one of many challenges that we encountered. I would just say that it's very, very hard to scale without a true plan, without a system, you know, for every aspect of the business, I think you also need data. And we did our best to to gather data, but we didn't really have the right data. It wasn't really accurate data. And it really, more importantly, it wasn't actionable data. And so if you, if you have a lot of data, but you can't do anything with it, then it's just a bunch of numbers. Right. You're bringing up a couple of things that I'm thinking about right now. And it's it's one of those things. And honestly, God, I've been the same thing myself. But there's this great, I love it. Some, you know, what got you out of Egypt won't get you to the promised land. And a lot of the times to, like some of those people that are fantastic all-rounders, I got to give credit to people that are sometimes like, you know, second, third, empire at a firm because they have as much flexibility, a lot of the times they're an entrepreneur and everything, but name and sometimes equity. There's a lot of roll it. But sometimes those people who are great at getting things off the ground are sometimes they're not going to say the worst, but it's like, you know, sometimes that those same strengths make it very, very difficult to follow through on some of those things. And you're also kind of bringing something up that I've thought about a lot in the past, which is this tension between, you know, talent and systems. And when you have systems, it's great. I'm like, I actually use this example in the Beyond Intake book. It's like, you know, I think people tend to pedestalize a lot of stuff like closing, for example. I mean, just feel like you're dependent on this pre-Modern closer. But in reality, it's like, if you look at the strongest organizations, I use like the, you know, the US Marines, right? It's like, or like the Navy Seals. It's like, you know, they're going to, they have people that are incredibly talented, special forces people, but you know, they're making a new class every single time. They got the selection. They got the training. And these people can be incredible and talented. But it's like having a process to do that is in a point where you're not really like dependent on that. And like, to your point, it's like one, it's tough to have those situations. And like, I've definitely been in the position where it's like, you know, you have something like, hey, you know, write down your stuff into an SOP and they're like, no, I'm crushing into my job. I don't want to do that. And then what are you going to do? Because you're dependent on that person. So you wind up in these crazy, like, chicken and egg situations. Yeah. I mean, so, so much comes to mind, but I think, again, to, to scale, to do it, to grow and to be excellent, you have to have systems. You also have to have talent. And I do, I do really subscribe to the, the theory that A plus talent or A talent, you know, one A plus player is probably better than three or four. So you're not probably definitely better. And I think that you can't, you cannot win without talent. I don't care what's, I mean, I'm a sports guy. You can look at any sports team. I mean, there are, there are coaches in the, the win coach of the year. And then when, when, you know, the top players end up moving from one, you know, one team to another, all of a sudden, they're not really great coaches anymore. System hasn't changed. That doesn't mean that they're not a good coach. That doesn't mean that they're not a good system. They don't have a great system. It just means you cannot do it with, you really have to have both. But if you just have really great talent, I mean, it goes both ways. If you're a really great talent, you don't have a system that's not really going to work either. That will, that will get you, that will get you far, but it won't get you as far as you want to go. As you said, get you out of Egypt, but it won't get you the promised land, you know? I want to ask you as far as how your thoughts are, because I remember when you were talking about that second heart, you had the attorney, it was consistency, determination, integrity. I think, have you changed what you look for in employees today versus what was, you consider a great employee in those early days? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you really, the question is around like your number one is like, what are your values? And are you hiring for your values? I don't think that at the time we were very intentional about it. Thankfully, the team that we had early on really was aligned. And we were, and I don't know if that's because everybody, like, organically came in aligned, or we were just such a close-knit group that we kind of like, like I rubbed off on them in vice versa. But we really weren't that intentional about it. We were intentional about trying to hire good people. And I think that through the interview process, just naturally, we found people that were aligned, except for one who got really upset and threw a plate at me in one time. Wow, okay. Oh, that was about, but anyway, but I think that as we grew, it became harder and harder because things were moving so fast. And there came a point where I was no longer at doing the hiring. I was not even having the conversations with the individuals. And again, if you don't have a system in place, and if you don't have the right people in place to manage the hiring process, then the hiring is not going to go well. And so what ended up happening is we hired a lot of people that were sometimes grossly unqualified. And sometimes highly qualified was just totally misaligned with the values of the organization. On the other hand, we also hired a lot of really amazing people that were talented and were completely aligned. But it was, at that point, it was just a number of interesting. So yeah, well, they need your kind of illustrating a point to it. It's kind of funny too. And I feel like this is one of these plateaus that people have to cross to get to stop saying province land. But you know, a good place or you're kind of on the far side of things. But you almost have, I feel like everyone's got kind of this like window of beginner's lock. And that's why it can be easier to get to your first million. And it came to go from Lino, like the two to five to 10 plus like range because you have to distance it from yourself. Like you can will power, you can lead by example, you could be the person running the meetings until you have a certain size team. And but then it's like to get to that next level. It's got to go beyond you. And that's where the systems are the only thing that can really, you know, carry you to that that point. And I honestly should ask this a lot sweeter. As far as like the picture of today, you know, let's just talk about where the firm's gotten since the end of starting in 2000. We can talk revenue employees whatever comfortable sharing. Yeah. The firm has evolved a lot over the last 18 years firm is 18 years old, which is crazy. I don't know. I said, yes, yes, again, I have no idea how, but I'm turning a 50 years old 50 in just a few weeks, which is mind-blowing to me. The firm like just like you as an individual grow evolve change. The business grows, evolves and changes. And it's a very fit to do extremely different business today than it was certainly when I started, but really even just a few years ago. The industry has shifted so much. It's a it's a feels like I'm in a running a completely different business and a completely different industry today than I was just a few years ago. And the competition is much more intense. The competition is not just more intense from law firms, but it's the competition is coming from other marketing agencies probably like yours from, you know, from from private equity from firms that are coming in from around the country, from businesses that are, you know, MSOs, managed service organizations, which are sort of a unique way for non-lawful ownership to exist in the space. Artificial intelligence like it's a complete, it's a completely, feels like a completely different business. Where we're at today is we have about 150 members of the team about half of them are I guess what you would describe as a global team members or virtual staff offshore. And then we have 7580 right there in Atlanta and our headquarters. And yeah, we went through a pretty significant transformation over the last two years where we've effectively broken everything down and rebuilt everything, processes systems, people, leadership. And it's been a it's been a journey. It's been a very gratifying experience, but also one that has been filled with a lot of challenges and frustration, but but I think that's just part of it. If you're not willing to to break things down every periodically and let's start over, but really rethink everything, then I don't think you have an opportunity to really get where you want to get to. I think there's another mentor of mine. He described something to Seth Goden right so that in one of his books called The Dip. And essentially that the idea is that if you things might be okay, status quo might be good, but status quo is never going to be great. And if you really want to get to greatness, you have to take a step back or take a step away. Or break things down to kind of go back two or three steps to move forward a dozen. And I think that that's kind of like what we've gone through over the last two years is really being very intentional about making that dip so that we can propel forward. And now we're starting to experience that, you know, that growth and that I don't know if the word is propulsion, but like, you know, where we're like we're really starting to experience the benefit of the investment of time, money and effort that we've made over the last two years. Yeah. Well, I would actually recommend anybody listening to this. If you're not familiar with the book, just Google the dip graph. And it's really an interesting thing to have. But I got you know, I kind of like all the fun part of the hockey stick, which is where you guys are, you know, if you get on this work that's happened the last couple of years. So I guess my last question for you, Seth, is what do you think is like, what's next? Like, how do you try to take this thing and where do you kind of see the firm growing in the next couple of years? Yeah, I appreciate that. I think there's an opportunity despite all the competition here in the market here in Atlanta and Georgia and nationally. I still think that there's a place for a firm like ours that provides really high quality work that provides a great client experience that leverages technology to to only provide the experience, but also help with the result and also provide a great employee experience. I think that there's still a space for a firm like ours. And you know, we have varied big goals to be one of the largest firms here in Georgia doing both workers' compensation and personal injury in both English, Spanish and really other markets as well. And yeah, we want to bring on the best talent. We want to provide the best experience for them and for the for the clients. And yeah, so we're really excited. We're also, you know, well, next time if we have another call we could talk about marketing, but like we've definitely done a pretty dramatic shift in how we do our marketing and really have leaned heavy into the digital marketing space and we have a lot of innovative things coming out as well. You know what? Actually, you know, I have to say, well, also I'll say this still, we'll keep my out for the beat a lot from going regional. And you know, you got some definitely some stiff competition there in the South East, but I mean, with everything that you got in place, it seems like you got a really, really good platform to end up doing that. So, Seth, thank you so much for taking the time to kind of, you know, share your story and and take people through the journey. For people that are picking up what you put down, like what's the best way to get in your world? Anybody can email, call very accessible. Again, as I mentioned, I'd love to pay it forward. I'd love to exchange ideas with other lawyers. I'd love to build referral opportunities, networking opportunities. Anybody who wants to reach me can email me at [email protected] and you can, you can call me to him, debating whether to give myself one or not, but. Yeah, man, email up for the cell phone. I'll also, I'll make that decision for you. Seth, Seth at Bader Law, you can also find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. And like I said, I'm happy to exchange ideas. I know a lot of people in the space and have made millions and millions and millions of dollars worth of mistakes in addition to generating of millions and millions in revenue. And I'm so I'm happy to share those ideas and experiences with others. All right, that's super generous, Seth. You know, super appreciate that. Anybody using the space to want to reach out? Absolutely. We'll have that information in the show notes. And for everybody else, we'll see you guys next Tuesday at AMU eastern on the law firm growth podcast. Thank you. Thank you for listening to the law firm growth podcast for show notes, free resources and more head on over to casefuel.com/podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.