More Leads Aren’t Enough.

Why I Put $15,000 on the Line.

Years before I started NoBull, I was working at a Marketing agency. Some law firms would take our leads and turn them into millions. Others would cancel, saying they’d gotten nearly no uptick in new clients—even when they worked in the same practice areas, in the same cities.

The mystery and the tragedy of it nagged at me. I held people’s finances in my hands. I wasn’t even sure whether my Marketing efforts would work—and I didn’t have the first clue why.

The most obvious suspect, of course, was lead quality. But when I looked into it, that theory didn’t pan out. These leads were qualified. They were local people looking for the kind of legal help those attorneys offered.

So I started tracking everything: every call, every form, every live chat, every email.

That tracking exposed how much of our Marketing was wasted effort—and money. A handful of approaches were producing most of the results, while we kept spending on everything else.

Then I followed those leads into the firms. My failing clients’ internal receptionists missed an average of 22% of the calls they received. Very few of those attorneys ever called my leads back or followed up on a voicemail.

There it was! I thought I’d solved it.

All I needed to do was improve our clients’ Intake processes.

Improving Intake improved their results, but some firms with good Intake were still growing slowly. I wasn’t looking for slow growth. I was looking for explosive growth.

Something else was wrong.

With their permission, I listened to consultations at both successful and struggling firms.

My struggling clients would spend hours giving out free legal advice without even mentioning their Sales offer. If they did ask to be hired, it was at the very end—dropping a giant retainer fee like $20,000 without first explaining why hiring their firm was worth it.

Suddenly, all my data made sense.

A few years later, I started NoBull Marketing.

The ink had barely dried on the name when I realized I wasn’t passionate about just Marketing anymore. I wanted to turn what I’d learned into a system we could build inside a law firm.

It wasn’t practical. I was already taking a financial risk starting a company at all, and, heck, I’d already purchased my firm’s signage. I’d always been good at Marketing. Surely, I should let the dream go.

I told myself a dozen times that I should focus on my strengths. But I couldn’t get it out of my head: Marketing, Intake, and Sales were three indivisible components of a single engine. My clients were struggling, not knowing it. I was struggling, ignoring it.

Finally, I talked it through with my wife. We set money aside, knowing that I’d be losing money for a long time while I bashed my head against the new challenge.

To get started, I offered a guarantee:

If our clients didn’t get the results we promised, we would refund their money, including their ad spend.

I did that so I could experiment with my ideas and invite people to work with us in a way that reduced their risk. I also did it to keep myself honest.

One of those firms was an elder-law practice that hadn’t grown in years. They had three office locations, but two of them didn’t generate enough calls to offset the expense. One of the founding attorneys was deeply burned out on Marketing. He’d come to expect lukewarm results that never merited the effort, and he’d nearly given up on growth.

For that firm, I put $15,000 behind our promise to grow their revenue. And we were a brand-new company. If we failed, I’d have to cover that personally—or it’d bankrupt my business.

We put the Marketing, Intake, and Sales systems to work in their firm. We kept testing, tracking, and improving. Then my team prepared the results for our conference call.

I can’t tell you how nervous I was to get on that call.

I’d spent years analyzing successful law firms, but part of me still didn’t really believe that kind of growth could be understood and repeated.

I was astounded.

The owner who’d nearly given up wasn’t just growing again. His firm was expanding at an unprecedented pace.

That’s explosive growth.

And that was the proof I needed. I’d figured it out, and I could do it again.

Now it’s your turn to see how the engine turns. In the book, I’ll show you what has to be built into your Marketing, Intake, and Sales systems, why it works, and where most firms fail.

Client story from the book. Identity withheld for privacy.