Escape from Sludge Mountain: Chapter Four of Authority Philosophy

I believe the number one reason professionals are so bad at marketing, and thus willingly start to scale mount sludge, is that they think marketing is beneath them. 

Myth #1: Marketing and Branding is Beneath Professionals: 

Ironically, that is the number one reason they should bivouac one last night on sludge mountain, and then march their butts back to base camp safety the very next day. If you equate marketing with what’s being offered by sludge mountain, then you are right: it is beneath you. But if you don’t realize there are so many other ways to market and brand your firm, then you’re wrong. Proper marketing, the type taught in this book and offered by Books for Experts, is intended to elevate professionals. There are very few activities that will be better worth your time then creating an authority philosophy and then authority assets, which you will learn how to do in the coming chapters. Most professionals have the impression that marketing is optional, beneath them, or something to carelessly farm out to others, because for a long time good work itself was enough to market a practice. 

Myth #2: Good Work is the Only Marketing and Branding You Need 

Abraham Lincoln never had to hire a marketing firm and look how successful his practice was, most professionals think. Or, heck: the partners who created this firm never had to market, my mother who was a lawyer never had to market, there are other, established nutritionists, chiropractors, ENT doctors, business coaches, who all just did great work and their practices took off. 

You may even know a few younger professionals who make the same claim. Here’s the truth:

Everyone who is successful is marketing and branding, and doing great work is just a part of that equation. Others are either making that claim as part of their marketing plan (e.g. to seem so good at their work they do not need to market), to not have to admit to how much marketing they are really doing, to avoid giving away their marketing secrets, or because they do not define the creation of authority assets as marketing. In other words, if they do not pay for marketing they do not consider it marketing, but writing books, articles, giving interviews, giving keynote speeches, sitting on the right committees, and even riding the circuits as Abraham Lincoln did are all forms of, yes, marketing and branding. Being great at your job is the best marketing in the world, but it’s not enough today. It’s too hard for most of our clients to really know what doing a great job really entails. I have had so many divorce lawyers over the years where I did a great job, but they didn’t realize it because they were too emotional and they thought being overly aggressive or killing great deals and going to trials with dubious odds were better. Doing great work alone gives too much power to others: namely one’s Google-review threatening clientele 

Doing great work is no longer enough because most professional service markets are flooded. 

Myth #3: There’s Plenty of Work to Go Around 

Drive around any town of any size and just count how many law firms there are. How many chiropractors offices, dentists, nutritionists, accountants. Go online and search business coaches, or branding coaches, therapists, or even mindset coaches for professional athletes. Think about how many marketers there are who claim they can help other marketers or business owners. 

Certain professions like medicine have done a decent job at holding firm on the number of those licensed to practice, even if they’ve given other classes of professionals similar abilities to prescribe. But for most professions, whether licensed or not, there is simply too much competition to abandon marketing. If you refuse to market, then you will lose market share to those who do. If you refuse to market through classic effective authority asset methods, then you may gain market share but with the wrong type of clients. Your practice will become “door law,” or “door dentistry,” or “door coaching,” even if you claim to have a niche. That means you will take whoever happens to call or show up at your door, and it is a dangerous thing to not have marketing that both attracts the right kinds of clients, and repels the wrong ones. 

Look at how we practice Books for Experts. We use the very same methods to grow our own business that we offer to others. We turn away clients, even lucrative ones, if they do not seem aligned with our mission here. We tell our clients that if they do not want to take the time to articular an authority philosophy, then there are plenty of generic marketing vendors atop of sludge mountain, and plenty of publishing companies and ghostwriters who will churn out basic books or other useful assets. Here, we only produce work that humanizes the professions, done at the highest standards, while fighting sludge. We know there are plenty of clients out there who feel the same, so we need not spend too much time with those who are not aligned. 

Early in starting this business, I made the mistake of making an office call to an attorney who was considering writing a book. I provided this attorney in advance with brilliant ideas for their practice. This was a mistake, because I was assuming because I knew this attorney personally that I already understood their vision. 

That attorney then spent hours that evening, taking me through their branding ideas, how they hoped to grow their practice, etc. I will admit that it felt at the time, somewhat like a hostage situation. My then undiagnosed ulcerative colitis did not make the situation much more palatable, as this attorney modeled their what must have been half an hour or an hour speech they gave clients while I pretended I was a prospective client. It felt like some funhouse mirror of a client meeting, or even a psychodrama for which I had not signed up. 

I woke up early the next morning, having not gotten home until probably around midnight, and fired off an email to that attorney that I could not assist them. I felt put off by allowing such a long, free consult, early in the beta phase of my business as it was. I was frustrated that I gave out 10.0 ideas, ones that would help this lawyer achieve all their ambitious goals, and that they either did not see their brilliance or did not feel such ideas were aligned with their branding. I was frustrated, and upset, and felt frankly troubled in some existential way about the entire meeting. 

But I was wrong on one account: this was a client who already took the time to develop a brand. This was a client who had an authority philosophy. This was exactly the type of client I claimed I wanted to work with, but because I was too busy focusing on my own authority philosophy, I missed one right before my eyes. That meeting taught me that I needed to charge for any consult that went longer than half an hour, to never give away my brilliant ideas for free, to never assume I knew better than my clients when it came to their own authority philosophies, and to charge way more for my services because doing this type of work, creating authority assets for those with legitimate authority assets is extremely time-sensitive and high-touch, high effort work. Which is exactly why the sludge marketers would never touch it. 

What I learned from that early, failed attempt to connect was that I needed to work on my own authority philosophy. That without clear objectives about the type of clients I wanted to work with, my consult process, pricing, and the type of work I would be offering that I would never be able to build this into the eight figure business I promised myself I would achieve to make it worth walking away from the law. I had thought that my making brilliant offers, by doing great work, and by creating my own authority assets that I could grow the business from something I sketched on a legal pad in my home office into a major player that disrupted marketing sludge, humanized the professions, and altered the commodification of attorneys and other professionals. What I learned was that none of this would be possible without locking down an authority philosophy. I went into deep thought mode for over a month, and the authority philosophy was born from the embers of that failed consult. To do so, I had to make time I didn’t really have. 

Myth #4: There’s Not Enough Time 

The number one excuse most professionals make for not creating an authority philosophy and not marketing without sludge mountain shortcuts is a lack of time. Professionals are too busy doing the work, so they cannot possibly be expected to be visionaries who come up with authority philosophies, let alone implement them, they cannot write authority assets because they are too busy being the expert to show their authority. Far easier to outsource marketing to some SEO or PPC firm, one that is promising quick results. Spray and pray advertising is the name of the game. And if you’re getting even a 2x ROI at the moment on the marketing then so be it. Time is money, and most professionals are smart enough to know that time is ultimately more valuable than money, as money is somewhat infinite and us humans lack even the lifespan of giant tortoises, oh cruel irony! 

I’m with you, and I assure you that a recent diagnosis of ulcerative colitis makes your forth-two year old author feel the cruel winds of mortality more than most. But have you ever considered just how much time sludge mountain marketing is really costing you? 

First, you need to manage your sludge marketers. Though note they will probably spend most meetings attempting to manage you. You will need to sit through redundant marketing sessions where they show you data you may not fully understand, talking about how your website traffic has grown 14% this month, that your SEO longtail keywords are increasing, that the current trajectory is strong. Because do they ever admit to it being anything else? And oh, yeah, if there is a problem then the answer is you spending more money to fix it. 

Right?

That’s the time cost your thinking about, but what you may not be considering is performing a time audit for your entire business. Getting the phone to ring is what most sludge marketers promise, and some even deliver, but who exactly is on the other side of that line? Sifting through lackluster leads via PPC campaigns is like panning for gold. There is a lot of sludge you need to sift through to find the sparkling rocks you’re seeking, and even then it may be pyrite. 

Whatever, Carl, you may be thinking. That’s why I have client intake staff. They are among the lowest paid employees we have and it’s well and good for them to deal with some bad intake calls from time to time. Well, great, you’re thinking like an entrepreneur if you have that thought and that’s more than most professionals can say about how they run their businesses. But don’t pretend there is no cost to bad leads even if you have a strong, client facing team taking those calls. Because have you ever noticed that your client intake specialists burn out like yesterday’s fireworks? How long do they last on average? One year, maybe two? And then it’s incumbent upon you, or your office manager to replace them, which takes time. And oh by the way, you never notice many of your bad Google reviews don’t even come from clients, but tire kicking miscreants who call your office cold based upon PPC or SEO and then leave a bad review for your receptionist when they admit you don’t practice in a different practice area and certainly not for free. And don’t those callers sometimes create problems that the client intake specialists cannot handle, so they bring it up the latter to your office manager, other firm attorneys, or even you? Do you ever measure how much time is lost to that sort of nonsense? 

Then when the clients are actually hired, maybe you’re just getting clients aligned to your practice area, not to your firm itself. In other words, you are practicing “door” business, even if you have a niche. Authority assets help to prequalify, so by the time they call they know exactly what you do, exactly who you are, and most importantly, exactly what you stand for. Your bio, your expertise, and your philosophy are all on full display. And I challenge any PPC ad to the Pepsi Challenge any day if they think they can pull off that type of marketing. 

Prequalified clients make the rest of the engagement easier, and more lucrative. They will not fight your initial retainer or fees, indeed they will pay a premium. Because they do not just want any old divorce lawyer, or nutritionist, or marriage therapist, or forensic accountant: they want you. They will be more likely to be satisfied with the services because they now perceive you as the authority. They will continue to pay their bills and be more likely at the end of the engagement to refer you other great prequalified clients and to leave great reviews. Your staff will be happier, and thus less likely to demand a hazard pay salary bump or to leave because they are not dealing with miserable door clients all day long. Less rancor in the ranks means more time for you. All because you pivoted to creating and implementing an Authority Philosophy and creating authority assets that last, rather than toothless PPC campaigns, boilerplate blog posts, or the usual dreck that ultimately costs you not only money, but time. 

Perhaps the above all seems intuitive, now that you think it through. But please do not feel upset with yourself for not seeing the full picture clearly before now. Because the biggest myth of all is that any of this is easy.

Myth #5 There’s Great Marketing Mentorship Already in House 

As a first generation college student, let alone lawyer, I was amazed by how little mentorship there was in our profession. In my first job as a freshly minted divorce lawyer, I’m pretty sure I spent most of my time locked in a closet sized, windowless office (correction, it literally had been an office before they hired me) apparently “learning” how to practice law by osmosis. I had received more mentorship on how to properly mop a floor in the summers I had spent in high school and college working with my dad as a school janitor than I had from this well-respected boutique firm. They were simply too busy, and I was too green, so they locked me away in the closet and hoped I would either pick it up or leave. I started turning my attention to trying to bring in clients, and this was actively discouraged. I felt trapped, bored, and more than a little depressed about the disconnect between what I thought practicing law would be and what I was actually tasked with each day. 

So, I left and started my own firm. Despite having only one year experience as a law clerk and one year “experience” drafting pleadings and motions from the closet. I’m not sure who was more relieved the day I gave my notice, the partners or me. 

But what that job gave me was the understanding that in most professions, mentorship is lacking. Certainly, in most law firms, mentorship is lacking or even nonexistent. I realized that if I wanted to learn the law, I would need to do it myself. Through taking smaller cases and learning them inside and out, working my way up, the way one might with starting a new weight program. I rented space from a solo attorney who happened to have some overflow work and who ironically became more of my mentor than any boss I’ve ever had. He taught me street smarts and the law, and probably kept me from inadvertently committing malpractice on a monthly basis. From his connections, and my own growth as an attorney, I was offered and eventually accepted the best job of my legal career: joining a prestigious local firm where I got to serve as deputy county counsel for Somerset County, New Jersey for several years (before the politics shifted) and where I became a respected young attorney in the community, trustee of the local bar association, and named partner at my firm. But even there, marketing was not something I was taught. The firm’s partner had risen to county counsel through years of good work and loyalty to his party, but he was as much left to the whims of politics as I was. When the politics shifted, for the first time in twenty-two years, my boss was made a judge as a soft landing and I was back on my own. 

Here’s the proper order of how to create a lasting business:

First: Create an Authority Philosophy

Second: Market the Hell Out of that Authority Philosophy by creating authority assets. Become the known authority in your practice area. 

Third: Ensure you have the right systems, staff and a locations in place to handle the work at a high level. 

Fourth: Profit. 

Sounds, simple, right? But most professional service firms do not provide you with the nuances of how to really create authority assets. Even big firms may have a marketing team in house, but there is often not much outreach between that position and employees there. Which is odd, because the ability to bring in clients is actually the number one driver of success and earning a higher income in most professional service firms. Very few practices market themselves, these days. Even if you’re in a big firm, you should be taking the steps to be seen as the authority in your field. This brings in more research grant funding, more clients, more press, a flywheel of success that eventually begins to feed on itself. 

Authority = Expertise + Narrative + Authenticity. You’ll see me reference this equation I created over and over again, because it’s seemingly simple and yet so unintuitive to most professionals. We are so afraid to share details about ourselves unless they make us look like Super Man, or Wonder Woman, or both. 

But do you really think less of me, having read this chapter, because I admitted to having ulcerative colitis, to being a junior lawyer working from a closet painted the color of a greenscreen, as though I was part of some humbling social experiment? Do you think less of me because I admitted, as someone who holds himself out as an authority architect, that I missed opportunity staring right at me because I had not yet locked down my new business venture’s own authority philosophy cadence? 

Hopefully not, because that type of authenticity, and narrative at work, is what makes businesses like mine (and soon to be yours) sticky, successful, even revered.