So if someone comes to million dollar author, what do you guys do to get the book out the door and make a million dollar client?

Well, so we work with our clients in two different ways. One, and most of our clients kind of go this. First route is where we write the book for them. And that doesn't mean it's not their ideas. It needs to be 100% your ideas. And we go through an IP extraction process that we've honed over the last 10 or 11 years, and pull all of your unique IP out of your head. In fact, I was working with a client just two weeks ago, and she said, Look, I do all of these different things for all of these people, and she couldn't see the through line and the kind of the organized structure to it, but as we talked through it, we were able to, from the outside, identify and look, you've got this great brandable process. We can create this trademarkable name for it, and these steps, and now it's really clear. So it took this sort of, I don't want to say mess. It wasn't a mess, but it took all of the things that she did and it put it into this organized structure that now someone who is not as expert as she is at what she does can consume it and understand it

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules - Internet Marketing for Law Firms Podcast. I'm Jay Berkowitz. I'm here with Steve Gordon. I'll introduce Steve in two seconds. Steve, thank you in advance for participating in tgr live growth strategies for law firms conference. I know we both had a tremendous success, but we're recording this before the conference, and I think it's coming out after the conference. So if you were there, give us a shout out on YouTube or iTunes and say hey to Steve, if you met him there, I always do one quick mini commercial at the start of the podcast, and today that commercial is for 10 golden rules Internet Marketing for law firms. And that's our company. If you all are not happy with your SEO guys, your web guys, your web host, whatever you call them. We get everyone coming in with different terminology. We do digital marketing, principally for law firms. And I'd love to talk to you. We'll do a free audit. Just hop on 10 Golden rules.com or I'm Jay Berkowitz on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, all the socials. And I'd love to meet you and learn about your practice. And the first audit is free. Please get in touch, Steve, welcome to the 10 golden rules Internet Marketing for law firms podcast.

Jay, great to be here. Thanks for having me on.

And Steve's got an amazing background. He's actually a recovering engineer. We get a lot of recovering lawyers on the show, and he really fell in love with marketing and wanted to do that full time, but his company, million dollar author, helps people become million dollar authors. So Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey and how it all came about.

context, you got to tell us the number and why.

What things were like before that, I was a one and a half person consulting firm. I'm based in Tallahassee, Florida. For those of you who don't know where Tallahassee is, I don't blame you. We don't have a beach or a mouse. Nobody comes here. We have Florida State University, and we're the state capital, and it's the 11th largest market in Florida, which means it's just not a big place. And so I had nothing but local clients. I've driven through it,

if that counts, yeah. I mean,

you hopefully you didn't blink.

That's right. It's not fake. It's not although the campus is beautiful, it

2014 so we're online, we're digital. Yeah, we're online.

We're digital at that point. And so that really started the transformation. So the business doubled that year, doubled the next year, it's been on nothing but a growth trajectory. And some of our clients started asking, Hey, I've always thought about writing a book. Looks like that worked really well for you. Could you help me? And so we did, and we over the next few years, discovered that all of the clients who we could convince to write a book did exponentially better than our clients who were doing any other kind of marketing. And it was easier because it created this durable asset, rather than something that that went away. We used to teach, hey, write a newsletter and post on social, and those things go away after they're sent, where a book is durable. And so we eventually decided, we know this works best, let's just stop doing everything else and focus on this. And so that's how we kind of morphed into million dollar offer, and what we're doing now, that's great.

It's great story. I'll tell my story very quickly. So I was working@a.com called E diets, and we grew the company to 60 million and they asked me to speak at the Direct Marketing Association. So I wrote a presentation called the 10 golden rules of online marketing, because I've had a lot of success with 10 in my career, like a top 10 list, and do it grouping things in 10s. And so I spoke at this conference, and everyone came up to me at the end said, Oh, you got to call us. We want your help doing internet marketing. We want to hire you as a consultant. So the 10 golden rules the consulting business was born at one presentation. And of course, everyone started asking, Are you going to write the book? Are you going to write the book? So I got asked great opportunities to speak at eBay live. Back in the days, they used to have a huge conference with 10,000 people over the eBay community. And so I was one of the keynote speakers at eBay live. And they emailed me and they said, Do you want to sell your book in the bookstore? And I said, Yeah. And so I had about eight weeks to write, self publish and print the book and get it up to DC, where this conference was held. I think necessity is, is the mother of invention, and I had to get it done. And I got it Thank goodness for that.

Yeah, there's nothing like a deadline. The fastest we've put one together. We had a client come to us same situation. He had a great opportunity to promote it at Peter Diamandis abundance 360 conference last year, and he came to us about 23 days before the conference.

Oh, my God. And said,

Is this even possible? And we said, well, technically, yes, we can get it done, but we're going to have to drop everything else for a few days. And we were able to actually write that book. And thankfully, he had a lot of the content thought through, captured in video, but we were able to put that book together for him in about 13 days so that we could get it to the printer and printed and delivered. So having a deadline definitely creates

some movement. I remember my old boss when I first started working in technology, where a client was AT and T and they wanted this new promotional materials or something. And he said, Okay, call them back, tell them they can get it good, faster, cheap, pick two. So I guess he got the book. Was good, it was fast, but it probably wasn't inexpensive to do it. No, it wasn't, but when you stopped everything else, yeah, but

on the other side of that, he did a million dollars in new business for his consulting firm in the first 30 days. So I think he came out all right. That's awesome.

That's really great story. And so I want to, I. Just pivot a teeny bit, because at the conference, you're going to be talking to a lot of lawyers, and we work with a lot of lawyers. I assume a lot of our listeners are attorneys. So you really work with a lot of professional services companies. And why is a book the right thing for an attorney or professional service business?

Sure. So I mean, we work with a lot of attorneys as well. And you know, one of the things that I learned when I owned the engineering firm is that selling professional services is fundamentally different, and so a lot of the advice that you see out there on marketing and sales is really geared towards selling products, not selling professional services, because with professional services, we're out there selling, usually ourselves as the principal or as the professional building our practice, and sometimes those tactics actually erode trust, and that's a problem when you have to run back to the phone booth, change into the Superman costume and come out and save the day, the client's got to trust you, and they've got to believe the advice that you're giving them, because if they don't and they don't take action, everybody loses. You've got to market and sell in a way that does nothing but build trust the further they go into and I think that's different. It's not that in selling products. There's not that need for trust, but it's just fundamentally different. It's less relational. And so where a book comes in is you don't have a product as a professional, the product is between your ears. And the way that most people experience that is, they have to come in your conference room or in your office. They probably are writing a check first, or at least they have the fear that that's going to happen for lawyers, especially, it's difficult because most lawyers don't deal with people in great circumstances. They're usually dealing with a problem in their lives that requires they go see a lawyer, and those are usually meaty problems, and so that's a big hurdle. I think maybe, if you're in it every day, maybe you don't realize what it's like on the other side, but there's a lot of hesitation there, I think, for people, and they can't, they're not qualified to judge whether you're better than the guy down the street. And so you need a

way to be able to demonstrate the product, which is your thinking, your ideas, your process, your methodology. And the very best way to do that is to package it in a book, because you can get your whole story in there, and people will push back. People will push back because they say, well, nobody reads anymore. There's no attention span, true. But Jay, have you been to a movie in the last couple of years? Not in a theater? No. But have you watched a movie? Yeah, for sure. Start to Finish

more often than not. Yeah, more than 30

seconds of it. Yeah, yeah. So you have an attention span. You're just not going to put up with stuff that's not interesting to you. Yeah, your prospects will read a book if it speaks to a problem that they're up at 3am worried about, and it gives them a roadmap to the solution, and they'll devour

Yeah, it's very powerful positioning. And you know, a potential client doesn't need to read the book at all. There are four levels that we teach our clients of authority and the pre selling that come with being an author. And the first is that that potential client just sees that you're an author of a book, and they just know that generally about you, but they never get a copy. Maybe they don't even know what the title is, but they ascribe to you the authority of an author. And lawyers are language people. You'll notice that author is the start of authority. The second level is where they see that you have a book, they get a copy of it, but they don't read it. I can't tell you how many clients have come to us, to work with us, because they saw my book, they got a copy of it, but they didn't crack it. Fact, one of the craziest sales conversations I have ever had is a guy from the UK called about two years after. Getting a copy of my first book. And he said, great to meet you. I have your book. I'm not going to read it. I haven't read it. I'm never going to read it, but I want the promise that it says on the cover, and you're my guy. And you know, it took me back at first, you know, this guy in a British accent, saying this from halfway across the world, but it sat on his night. He went to tell went on to tell me, it sat on his nightstand for two years. He had the intentions of reading it, but he saw it in the morning. He saw it at night, and it worked on him. And I owned that little bit of real estate in his world, on his nightstand. So that's the second level, is they never read it. The third is they get it, and maybe they skim, as you say, read a couple of chapters, and that's enough for them. And then the fourth, which is really great, is when they read it cover to cover, they make notes, they highlight and they come to you quoting chapter and verse out of your own methodology, saying You said this. This is what I want. Would you please take me

as a client?

Yeah, those are awesome. I haven't had a book one recently, but I had a guy who's like, Jay, I listened to your podcast. And Hello, Michael, if you're listening to this one, I'm sure you are. Said I listened to every podcast you do. I watched your webinar on the six parts of Google, and I know you can do this better than our current agency. And he called up and signed up, content development, thought leadership, other terms that that we talk about that are so valuable, and a book is certainly very high on that thought leadership pyramid.

Yeah, absolutely. What's

one tip you would give someone who has the book in their head and they don't have the book done,

I talk to people in that situation all the time. In fact, I'll be at the event, at your event to your event here in another couple of weeks, and I guarantee you at least 30% of the attendees will be in that situation. And sometimes, when I go to events more the tip is very simple, get a team. If you walk through a bookstore and look at the aisle of business books, not one of those books got there without a team, and every successful author has one. And whether that is a team that you build yourself, whether that is coming to work with a company like ours, however you do it, get a team, because it's going to give you accountability, and it's going to get things off of your plate that have you stuck. And it's interesting, I've had people who have had books in their head for five years, 10 years, 20 years, and they come to us because we can connect all the dots that have been the barrier for them.

So if someone comes to million dollar author, what do you guys do to get the book out the door and make a million dollar client?

Well. So we work with our clients in two different ways. One, and most of our clients kind of go this. First route is where we write the book for them. And that doesn't mean it's not their ideas. It needs to be 100% your ideas. And we go through an IP extraction process that we've honed over the last 10 or 11 years and pull all of your unique IP out of your head. In fact, I was working with a client just two weeks ago, and she said, Look, I do all of these different things for all of these people. And she couldn't see the through line and the kind of the organized structure to it, but as we talked through it, we were able to, from the outside, identify and look, you've got this great brandable process. We can create this trademarkable name for it, and these steps, and now it's really clear. So it took this sort of, I don't want to say mess. It wasn't a mess, but it took all of the things that she did and it put it into this organized structure that now someone who is not as expert as she is at what she does can consume it and understand it. So that's the first thing that we do. And then we have a team of of writers that will write the book. Usually it takes about 30 days to get the first draft done, because you'll have one writer who's 100% of their time focused on that, rather than you taking, you know, years to do it here and there, and then we have an entire marketing process that goes around it. So even before the book is published, we want to be helping you market the fact that you're writing the book. So we work with attorneys all over the country, one of them based out of Raleigh. Her specialty is in AI and data governance, and she started following those marketing steps before the book was even written. And she got, I think, 16 meetings with companies that are like perfect fit prospects for her, because she started just posting about the ideas and the fact that she was writing this book. And ultimately, she got connected to

the perfect person at Apple of all places, like it was like a moon shot introduction. Yeah, yeah. So these are the sorts of things that we kind of bring to the table. So that's the first way. The second way we work with people

is you can become a million dollar author before the book even gets printed. So that's

my goal. About About 60% of our clients. Will ROI their investment to get the book done before we publish great My goal is to get it to 100% we're working that way. But the other way we work with people is and a lot of the lawyers we work with choose to go this route because they're writers. Will guide you through the writing process. Give you an editorial team to support you in that give you that method that I use to write my book in about an hour a day in 30 days, and then give you all of the design and the marketing and all of that to make it easy.

What's the single best reason someone should write a book

right now we're at an inflection point, and there are a lot of professionals that are going to get left behind because of AI. And what we're seeing Jay is a split in the market. What we're calling the processing layer is where I think most professionals are, where you do work, and it's what you bill for, right? It's reviewing contracts, it's it's doing that sort of work. And then there's another layer, the authority layer, and AI is going to eat the processing layer. It already is. The authority layer is going to be more durable, and that's where you have your unique named process to do what you do that is unique to you, and that's going to be durable. As we go forward, people will pay for that.

So a lot of this is in EOS. So you familiar with the book traction? Absolutely, yeah. Entrepreneur operating system. So coming up with your proprietary process, figuring out your core vision, your core values. We talked a little bit earlier about a lot of the smart folks I see read a lot of books. A lot of folks have their own book successful people, and some of the most successful companies I meet are running EOS or a similar operating system. So you're just talking about the some of the core components of success, right?

Absolutely, it's not new to say if you want to really be successful in any business, you want to create your own intellectual property and created in a way that can be branded and trademarked.

I love it. So what are some of the other auxiliary benefits once the book's done? What do you see is benefits of getting it done?

So the first getting the book done, everybody thinks the that writing the book is the project that just gets you to the starting line of the race. The race then is, how do I use the book to grow my practice? And that's where the marketing piece comes in. The very first thing that I think is really surprising to our clients is what we call the author effect. And I'll get these text messages from clients the first time they share the book with colleagues or with potential clients or even with sometimes friends and family, they immediately change. In the eyes of those people, they're the same person. This is why it's so shocking to them, because they haven't changed, but the perception is completely different. They're regarded more highly, and part of that Jay is because when surveyed, 84% of Americans. I don't know if you know this, 84% of Americans say they have on their bucket list write a book. And so the minute you even say you're writing a book, certainly it gets better when it's published, but the minute you even say you're writing a book, you become a leader in the mind of 84% of the people that you talk to. And so that perception is really magical when it comes to business development, because you now set apart completely. You know, you mentioned earlier, being the one who wrote the book. That's powerful positioning. You don't have to sell much from there.

So I mentioned earlier this concept of thought leadership, authority, personal branding, a lot of that is interconnected, Venn diagram. What are some of the other things? So once you've got the book, what do you do next?

First you got to launch the book, and so you want to launch it so you get bestseller status, usually on Amazon. Full disclosure for everyone watching this, all the best seller lists, New York Times, the USA Today, Wall Street Journal no longer has theirs, but USA Today, and then Amazon, they're all games. It's just a matter of how much you have to ante up to enter the game. Amazon's is the lowest and the easiest, and we always want our clients to get to get to that status that way. If you go and speak anywhere, you're introduced as a best selling author. So that's the first thing we want to do. And then we want to launch that book to your audience.

You need that screenshot exactly number one on business books or your category, or at least, can you take the screenshot? Yeah, then it's that I got that check mark a couple times.

Yeah, it's that forever. My My first book was number one business book on Amazon for a week. Every time I get introduced on a stage, it it includes that, so it's powerful. So that's first. Once the book is done, you want to launch the book. And I think this is something that people. They get wrong, because they see big book launches, they see people like Dave Ramsey or Oprah or ex presidents launch a book, and it gets out to millions of people right away. And that's great if you have the kind of platform where you can reach that many people, but the reality is, most of us don't, and so how can we launch the book in a way that's actually going to be effective for your business? We take a different approach, so we want to get that book to the people who are closest to being able to do business with you, and there's four types of them. The first are any potential clients that maybe had inquired about working with you in the last year or two, but for whatever reason they didn't become a client, they're probably still sitting there with that problem unresolved. And so just sending them a copy of the book is usually a really effective way to re engage in conversation. The second would be all of your current clients, because they're your biggest fans, and birds of a feather flock together. And so we have an entire referral approach using the book, where your clients are effectively introducing you through the book, and it's super powerful, and it's something that they actually like doing, because they get great feedback on it. The third group are your past clients that left for whatever reason, but you want to win them back. And again, it's a very powerful way to open the conversation. And then the fourth group are all of the centers of influence, okay? And so we all have networks with all of the all of these professionals who the hope is that they're going to refer some don't, most don't, honestly. But what I found is they'll use

the book as a way to introduce you, and they'll do it because, not because you're going to get business out of it, but they'll do it because they want to be associated with the one who wrote the book. It gives them some social capital to say, hey, my my friend, my colleague, is now a best selling author, and this is his book, and I want to share it with you. And because, as I said, about eight out of 10 people in the country want to write a book. They get excited about the fact that you've written a book. They want to be a part of that. So it's very easy to get people enrolled in helping you.

Yeah, I was also talking about other things. So speaking comes with writing the book. Podcast interviews comes with writing the book. Media interviews higher level than podcast interviews. What would you say are some of those other things on the on that future?

Yeah, well, those are certainly three big ones that come referrals. People don't really understand the power of of driving referrals once you have a book, and I think those are really great. All kinds of opportunities for collaboration open up. And so partnering with other firms, where you can be their go to for what you do, it's far easier for them to justify that kind of relationship when you're the one that wrote the book?

I'm using something called manus.ai we don't use AI in writing any of our books. In fact, we certify all of our books as written by human which is a certification we've created and trademarked, but we do use AI in a lot of our business operations, and that's been really effective. And what

does manage do for you? It

does all kinds of things right now. It's sort of my executive assistant on top of my my human executive assistant.

Great. Do you have a personal wellness or fitness routine?

Yes, I'm in the gym five days a week.

Love it. And what do you recommend is your best business books?

So my my go to, the one that I go back to, probably more often than not, is Think and Grow Rich. Might just find it's outstanding for mindset. That's interesting. I was

the all in podcast, and This Week in Startups, those are kind of the two that I listen to religiously.

So both of those are headed by Jason Calacanis, and I'm always proud. To say that I had Jason on this podcast, you're going to have to go way back to one of our early episodes. And he was doing a startup called Mahalo. And the one thing I remember about that podcast, we were doing it in person at a conference where we were both speaking, and some guy saw Jason, and he was injured, and so he was, like, driving a scooter, but he didn't know, like he wasn't a regular electric wheelchair driver, and he smashed into us. Oh, no, so, but we, I left it in the recording. It was unfortunately back in the audio only days. But love all in and and twist, who's your NFL or sports team?

Well, so I, I grew up in Florida. I grew up in Jacksonville before the Jacksonville Jaguars existed. So I grew up a Miami Dolphins fan, and in the immortal words of Darius Rucker, the dolphins make me cry. Well, thank

So we're always looking to connect with people who are on the the front lines of thinking and practice with AI. We think that it's going to fundamentally change the way we all work. And again, I don't think it's going to replace the book that you write. Don't have aI write your book, people, we're already seeing increased demand for human written content. People want your insight, but AI is going to be an Excel and written a lot of other ways.

And last question, Where can people get in touch with you.

Really easy. You go to million dollar author.io, and that's our website. You can find all kinds of information about what we do and our process, and you can get us there. You can go to YouTube at Steve Gordon official, and you can also find me on LinkedIn at Steve Gordon,

Steve, this was great. Thanks so much for your time today.

It's been awesome. Jay, great to see you.