Ted DeBettencourt - JuvoLeads

Louis Goodman / Ted DeBettencourt - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Today we welcome Ted DeBettencourt to the program. Mr. DeBettencourt earned both a JD and MBA, and seemingly has made good use of both disciplines. He is the founder of Juvo Leads a chat services company that uses real people to communicate with clients via web-based chat. He is an expert in legal marketing and the effective use of technology in developing client leads. Originally from Martha's Vineyard, he now lives in rural North Carolina, farming and raising four daughters. We'll have a lot to talk about. Ted DeBettencourt, welcome to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:00:59] Ted DeBettencourt: Louis, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here and honor to be a guest of your show here, so thanks for having me on. 

[00:01:05] Louis Goodman: It's a pleasure to meet you. I've been a customer of yours for a long time before I ever even thought about having you on the podcast, so it's, it's a real pleasure to meet you in person.

[00:01:16] Ted DeBettencourt: Likewise. 

[00:01:17] Louis Goodman: Can you explain what your business is, in your words, how you understand your business? 

[00:01:25] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. We're a human powered chat and message answering service. So how our business operates is we go on a law firm website, we pop up, have a conversation with those visitors and convert those conversations into qualified leads.

And why we exist as a business is because what our clients find and what we do from a lot of AB testing is that when you put our service on your website, we're gonna get you at least 50% more leads. And we're so sure of that number that we give every client that works with us. A free 30 day trial so we can prove the data with the data that they're getting a lot more cases that they wouldn't have gotten otherwise strictly because of our chat service. 

[00:02:06] Louis Goodman: How long have you been in this business? 

[00:02:08] Ted DeBettencourt: We started it legal marketing probably since about 2010 in chat specifically, since about 2016. 

[00:02:16] Louis Goodman: I wanna come back to your business, but first I wanna know a little bit about you. Were you a vineyarder? 

[00:02:22] Ted DeBettencourt: I was a vineyarder. Yeah. And our rivals in sports were the Nantucket whalers and we beat 'em my junior and senior year. Nothing, nothing but pride there. So we have a lot of vineyard pride. I grew up there. My father was born there, my grandfather was born there, and his family came over in the whaling ships.

Have you ever heard of their book? Moby Dick? All the sailors in that book are from a island. A bunch of 'em are from an islands in the middle Atlantic called San Miguel. They're from the Azores is an archipelago, little bit off Africa, the middle of the Atlantic, kind of the Hawaii, the Pacific, but not as warm or beautiful, but it is pretty beautiful over there.

But my family's from there. They came to the vineyard and I grew up there and one of my daughters was born there. The rest were born in Boston and we immigrated to North Carolina about four and a half years ago now. 

[00:03:10] Louis Goodman: When you beat Nantucket, what sport was that in? Was it in Harpooning or something else?

[00:03:15] Ted DeBettencourt: Not Harpooning. We don't even have a, at the time we didn't have a swim team, but recently they came out with one. The big sport in the vineyard for at least when I grew up, was football, for sure. 

[00:03:24] Louis Goodman: So after you graduated from the Vineyard High school, where did you go to college? 

[00:03:29] Ted DeBettencourt: I stayed in an island and I went to Rhode Island.

So I went to Providence College in Rhode Island, then did a, lived in DC for a year and then went to law school in Cleveland, Ohio, which is not an islands or it's on a lake, but it's not the same. So I lived in Cleveland and after my first year of law school, I'm like kind of these law and business classes a little bit more interesting, the legal classes.

So I saw they had a program where I could do my MBA in two years. So I got out of Cleat Case Western with three years total, but I had it both JD, MBA and I really liked the business side more so I, I just stayed in business from that, graduating there. 

[00:04:06] Louis Goodman: Did you took a year off between college and law school?

[00:04:10] Ted DeBettencourt: Yeah. 

[00:04:10] Louis Goodman: What did you do during that interim year? 

[00:04:12] Ted DeBettencourt: I worked at a VC fund doing, I did a few jobs, but the two main ones were, I was at a VC fund doing IP research 'cause the patent and trademark office was there. And then I worked at a big sales company doing sales for an organization, just getting my footing, doing the lsat, getting ready for law school.

I tried studying for the LSAT during college, but my senior year I was having too much fun to quite fully dive in there. 

[00:04:36] Louis Goodman: When did you first start thinking about being a lawyer and then when did you actually first really decide, okay, I'm gonna apply and fill out all the forms and send in the money and really apply.

[00:04:50] Ted DeBettencourt: In college, I was on the debate team in undergrad and I loved it. It was fun, different debates for us, different teams, and I got pretty good at it, so I really loved it. It was a rush standing in front of a crowd, debating with people winning, and if you won, you'd get up and there'd be more and more people you'd stand in front of and give your arguments for.

I just had a passion for it. I said, this is awesome. And so I'm like, all right, what's next steps for this? How do I keep this going? And that naturally led to the closest thing I found was law applied to law school. Got into there, and then I quickly found out for at least my understanding from law school was that it's a lot more writing, a lot more, a little bit less, a little bit less glorious law and order, a little bit more writing and tedious work that I wasn't really looking forward to.

So I pivoted my career at that point. 

[00:05:38] Louis Goodman: What was it about the MBA thing that attracted you once you realized that you could get an MBA and a JD at the same time? 

[00:05:46] Ted DeBettencourt: I tried a few business courses first and like I loved them, so I just found myself really gravitating in the business school courses and really loving it.

So I said, all right, maybe this is more my passion, so let's follow the passion so I can really excel in my career. 

[00:05:58] Louis Goodman: Once you graduated, you had a jd, you had an MBA. Where did your career path take you? And I'm wondering if you could briefly bring us up to date, like from the time you graduated, what sort of business and legal jobs that you had? And bring us up to where you are with Juvo Leads. 

[00:06:16] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. It's really a tale of mostly floundering and firing your foot in through there. I know a lot of people I talked to, I worked at Goldman Sachs, all these elite institutions doing things like that. I did not. So I got out of my JDA, my accelerated JDMBA program.

I love telling myself that I just graduated from Case Western with an accelerated MBA JD MBA. I had a really big head on my shoulders. So then when I went to apply for jobs and kinda looking for jobs, I was, at the time, this was 2009, I was applying to the jobs that were $200,000 a year and up, and surprised they weren't calling me back.

So then I went down to the 150, the a hundred and, I couldn't get any callback, so I was like, all right, maybe this degree isn't as big as I thought it was, so I quickly couldn't get my feet under me. It took me a little while to find my footing. I found myself eventually at a content marketing firm company that was doing not firm agency rather.

They were doing writing content for a lot of businesses. It took me about three or four years. I tried a few jobs in the meantime, just bouncing around. But then I got into this marketing job, which was a good opportunity. I was there for about three or four months, so they were writing content for a lot of law firm websites.

So I had a JD, I had the law background, so they put me in the law department. So what I found is that it was basically just a content mill writing content for firms, but they weren't doing the other side of the business. If you have content, you still gotta push it on the website and then do the SEO, do the PPC, do all that stuff.

So I was there about three or four months and all the clients were saying the same thing. What do I do with this content? Like, how is this helping me? And they weren't doing any of the SEO or the PPC or that side. So I was kinda like, we're doing half the battle here, but then you gotta do all the rest.

So then I was like, why don't we try to develop this in the company? And it was a big company. It was owned by a, they were a $10 million company. They were owned by a hundred million dollars company, which not huge but big. And they had no desire to do that. So on the side, I started working with a few firms to learn how to do the SEO.

So my first few companies, I was just figuring out on the fly reading reports, understanding how to do SEO. So I taught myself how to do SEO for some firms. I realized there was a market for SEO for law firms. So I had a few clients in Boston and all of a sudden I realized if you need to do the SEO, then you have to build, learn how to build a website.

So I had to learn how to build websites. So within the next few years, I took on a few clients, was learning to do the SEO, and then I had a little agency for myself. At my peak, I probably had about 15, 20 law firms I was working with and a few other non-law firms doing the content, the SEO, the PPC. All the things that would help them make better use of that content.

So that existed. So that started in about 2011, 2012, and then in about 2016 or so. All my law firm clients started getting hit up by chat companies, like the ones that are probably reaching out to you now saying, Hey, we're we wanna do your chat? So I took their bait. I tried a few of them for my clients and it worked great.

My clients were getting more leads for chat. I started answering chats myself for my firms. And when I started doing that, 'cause I was tracking all the calls, the forms, the chats I was tracking for the firms, I saw my leads went up about 50%. It turns out when you do things the right way, when you answer chats fast, when you answer chats well, when you only send 'em leads that they want and you don't try to block their phone bar or take up half their website with chat, even your firm's a lot more leads.

So what started is me answering chats for my 10, 15 firms in Boston has now turned into us answering chats for about 1100 firms around the country. And I'm proud to say I'm no longer a chat agent, just the operations guy behind the scenes. 

[00:10:00] Louis Goodman: How many chat agents do you have working for you now? 

[00:10:03] Ted DeBettencourt: A little under a hundred.

[00:10:04] Louis Goodman: Just to be clear, in case anybody you know doesn't know that the chat is that thing that pops up on a website and asks you if you wanna chat. And most of these, as I understand it, and certainly my experience with them, has been dealing with some kind of a bot, some sort of software that mimics a human being typing, but Juvo Leads, there really are people who are answering these chats and doing the chats. Is that correct? 

[00:10:38] Ted DeBettencourt: Yeah, that's correct. Our motto is actually, and I say this as much as I can, our motto is butts, not bots. That's butts in the seat, not bots in the cloud. Real people answering chats. 'cause what we find is when there's a lot of companies that use robots out there, or say they're using robots, but it's like a scripted AB response.

And what we find is that by having humans, we can convert a lot more leads into more conversations, into leads. Because at the end of the day, we're working with law firms, law firm leads are worth a lot. So if we can squeeze an extra 50, 60, 70% of conversions outta your traffic, it's worth it. What we find is that a lot of times when people are looking for a lawyer, they're not just sitting on the web going to the website and saying, hi, I want a consultation.

They're saying, hi, I have this problem. Here's something bad that's happened to me, a loved one or a situation I'm in. Is this something you can help us with? So 62% of our chats start with a conversation. So what we do first is we empathize with what they're going through. Build trust with them by reassuring them that they're in the right place.

If you're a personal injury matter, you're gonna know that a personal injury matter can help you. If you're a criminal lawyer, you wanna know that you can help criminal people that have been charged with a crime. So we want to build trust, empathize with them, then have that conversation with 'em to qualify 'em into a lead.

So it's really about having the empathetic conversation, show compassion for what they're going through, reassure them they're in the right place, then qualify and based on the rules that the firm gives us. 

[00:12:04] Louis Goodman: And then once that person who is called in has gotten to talk to one of the chat people and has given them the information, how long does it take for the chat person to send a text or an email over to the person at the firm who is going to be getting back to them and being able to talk to them specifically about their issue? 

[00:12:27] Ted DeBettencourt: Great question. About 20, 25 seconds. So once we save it, so let's say we, we make it through the full conversation, then we save the lead.

The law firm is gonna get contacted from us in any one of seven ways. We're gonna email them the lead. Text them the lead if they want. We're gonna call them to say, Hey, you got a new chatter? Press one. They press one. They're boom, they're talking to that chatter. We're gonna add it to your CRM comes to our dashboard. For a lot of our clients we're even signed retainers right through chat. So boom, you have a good case. Yep. We'll sign you up. We'll literally do this document signing with them through chat. And then finally we can even book consultations on law firms' calendars. 

[00:13:05] Louis Goodman: You have talked a lot about growing businesses and scaling. Can you explain how that works?

[00:13:13] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. For ourselves or for our law firms? 

[00:13:16] Louis Goodman: Let's talk about doing it for law firms first, and then let's talk a little bit about how you worked your business and scaled your business. 

[00:13:26] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. So for law firms, it really depends on what stage you're at. So when you're a smaller firm, maybe you're a solo starting out, you're answering your own phone calls, and what you're gonna find pretty quickly is calls come in all hours of the day when you're doing 12 different things at once, and you don't have enough time to follow with those leads. So the first step, the first thing you grow in a law firm is when you're at that stage where you have enough business and you want to keep growing.

The most important hire you ever make is the first person that's gonna answer the phone. That's not you. Once you have that person in place. Then you gotta measure that and manage their success. 'cause even when you have a few people in place, the big difference between firms that we see that grow and the ones that don't are the ones that don't measure their intake.

What a lot of firms find is if you listen to your phone calls from your intake team, you might not like what you hear. So getting that part of your business managed and measured properly is one of the key successors for growth. And that's true for whether you're a firm with, answering yourself, and you probably know how those calls are going. Or you're a firm with 20 intake personnel answering 'em all around the clock. It's the firms that measure their intake and know their wanted lead to signed rate, that know their lead to wanted lead rate and know their website traffic to total leads rate.

Those firms that measure that and manage that process are the ones that we see grow. 

[00:14:52] Louis Goodman: Let's talk a little bit about legal marketing and kind of the evolving landscape for marketing legal services. You've said that it involves a mix of SEO and pay per click, PPC, some other strategies. I'm wondering if you could address those issues for the people who listen to this podcast who are primarily lawyers.

[00:15:15] Ted DeBettencourt: Yeah. It's gonna really depend on your tolerance for timeliness. So SEO, no matter who you go to, if you ever get a promise that you know you get your first page in a month, they're either lying or they're gonna get your first page for something that's unrelated to the cases you want. So SEO takes a lot of time to build up, and if you do it, hope that it takes nine to 12 months, but it can take longer depending on your market.

So then if you want leads today, it's a pay per play world. So the first step place you always start is Google with their pay per-click leads and Bing's pay per-click leads. After that, you wanna move into the LSAs. That's the local service ads, that's a new ad type in Google. After that, then you move into the less direct response.

So that would be the billboards, the radio ads, the TV slots, the OTC, all the other types that's more brand awareness. So there's a lot of big plays in the brand awareness that's usually for firms that ha have already not conquered, but have already have the well-established foothold in, in the SEO side, in the pay-per-click side, in the LSA side as the way to take it to the next level.

[00:16:24] Louis Goodman: I am in northern California, and I'm not sure how things are in North Carolina, but in here in Northern California in the personal injury world, which I am not in. I see, I don't know, four or five firms that are doing an incredible amount of billboard advertising, advertising on the sides of buses, advertising at sports arenas.

And I know that this advertising is insanely expensive, and I'm just wondering if you can tell me how that works and how these firms can afford to do this level of advertising. 

[00:17:08] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. They first, I don't wanna say mastered, but they know their cost per case from organic traffic, from direct traffic, from PPC, LSA, Google Ads.

Once you have a ballpark of that, there's no direct way to track. You can try by putting like a phone number, text this number to this billboard, but it's not perfect data. So when you're doing marketing and judging your marketing based on performance, you kinda gotta look at two things. One, the long tail, the long run for it, and you can't judge every billboard or every activity in its own sake, because what happens, and this is called an attribution issue. So a, a client will see, touch, know your law firm generally about eight times before they reach out to become a lead, whether they chat with you, text with you, call you, or fill out a form. So there's gonna be eight touch points.

How do you attribute that billboard if it's one touch point of eight before they raise their hand and say, Hey, I have a case. So it's really hard to do. So what most firms do is they judge it in either a quarterly or a yearly basis. So let's say you're spending a million bucks a year in and you're spending on billboards, on TV ads.

It's hard to judge the difference between the billboard and the tv. It's all gonna reflect in your direct traffic. So when you see your direct traffic in your branded traffic, your leads from that increase, you can't attribute it to the, the billboard in 4 95 or 95 north. You can't attribute, you don't know what it's from, but you just know that your overall direct traffic and overall leads are up.

So you gotta take the long view. When you do more indirect sources that are more about brand recognition than you do from like pay per click. So you know, with pay per click you spend 10,000 bucks and you know exactly how many leads you get, how many cases signed from it. That's a lot easier. But for that, for those higher in the funnel touch points, it's a lot harder.

[00:19:03] Louis Goodman: I'd like you to talk a little bit about your own experience as a business person, opening a business, developing a business, growing a business. How has that worked out for you? For Ted? 

[00:19:15] Ted DeBettencourt: It's been great. I don't have a boss, which is good, or I tell 'em, aside from my wife, I tell my kids, when you have clients, you don't have a boss, but all my clients are a boss to an extent.

So it's a little different than traditional nine to five in the sense that you run your own ship. I have a partner, I'm a 50 50 co-founder. He and I bounce ideas off each other all day every day. There are definitely advantages to having your own business, but there are certainly a lot of, as many disadvantages.

I get emails from at midnight from clients with all manner of issues that can prop up. And since we're a 24 7 business. When a chat comes in that wasn't handled or they thought we should have been answered, done something differently, or, I don't know why we're using, there's a million things that can happening when you're 24 7 business and we're always answering chats, so we gotta answer those messages then.

So I'm often up late at night answering text messages, phone calls, emails from clients. So that's probably the disadvantage. The advantage is that we're growing the business. So when we first started, it was literally just me answering chats for about 10 firms in Boston and now we're over a little over about 1100 clients around the country, and revenue's been good too.

So we've grown at least a hundred percent in the past three years. Wow. So each year we're, we've been growing at a healthy rate, and that's been fun for sure. 

[00:20:33] Louis Goodman: I want to shift gears here a little bit and ask you what do you think's the best advice you've ever received and then let me turn it around a little bit and ask you what advice you would give to a young person just starting out in a career or a business, and you could answer either one or both, or any way you want.

[00:20:55] Ted DeBettencourt: I don't even know it was the advice I received, but the Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up. A few times when we were starting, when we first started, I was answering chats. I was probably chat agent number one until we had enough clients to justify hiring somebody. And chats come in 24 7, 365.

So when a chat comes in at 2:00 AM and I'm waking up to answer those chats, it wasn't fun and I wanted to give up and said, Hey, this business isn't working. I'm tired of this. Let's not do this. But we didn't. We just kept doing it and we hired a few people and hired a few more. But the don't give up.

Don't give up. Don't give up would probably be the best advice that I've gotten in that way. To a young person starting at their own firm or starting their own business. Don't give up. Don't give up. Don't give up, but work harder than you think you've ever worked before and then work even harder. The competition is, and if you think there's any shortcuts in life, there's not. Work harder than everybody else, and that will put you, give you the best chance to succeed. 

[00:21:56] Louis Goodman: What has your family life been like and how has the career fit into your family life? Your family fit into the career. I know your girls are very important to you and I'm wondering if you could just comment a little bit about your family situation.

[00:22:10] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. I have four girls, 6, 4, 3, and one. And my oldest is six. So, I don't have all that much experience with the family life side, but I work from home. I'm in my office that's near the home. They come and visit me all the time, probably more than I, more than they should. I open up popsicles, wrestling with 'em, have lunch with 'em, so I've been blessed in that way that I can spend time with 'em throughout the day.

I'm a dad first, a businessman second. My wife, my kids will tell me that first. A lot of the people that we know, like they have jobs that take them away from their family a lot of the time. I've been blessed that I'm home most of the time. I do go to conferences fairly often and those are three days here.

Two days they're away, but for the most part, I get to spend a lot of time with my kids and having a business that I can do that with has, has been really great for the family life. 

[00:23:03] Louis Goodman: You moved to rural North Carolina and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what, what prompted that and a little bit about what your setup there is.

[00:23:15] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. A lot of it was financial. I was doing the agency side. I was transitioning to Juvo Leads, not putting a lot of time into agency growth. And I'll be honest, the first three or four years of Juvo Leads, like we didn't know what we were doing. We knew how to answer chats, but we didn't know how to grow the business.

The agency side, I got all my clients from word of mouth referrals. So, as I'm sure with chat, 'cause I'm guessing a lot of chat companies have reached out to you. They were very aggressive on sales. So I didn't understand really how to do that. So it took us four years to get any traction. And we didn't have, we weren't, we didn't know what we were doing because we knew we had to answer chats.

We didn't have to grow the business. So there was a three or four year period there where the agency was pretty much done, had a few clients that were hanging around. But there were new clients coming in. The Juvo Leads was growing ever so slowly. And then my wife was working full-time. I was living in Boston.

We actually had a funny living situation, so we had moved all around Boston. We were living in a town called Canton in the suburbs. And then my wife, we had one kid and we started that cost $2,000 a month for childcare. We're gonna have a, we got pregnant with kid number two, that was another $2,000 a month we were gonna have to spend.

We were spending about $3,500 a month on a not great apartment. And the apartment was funny. It was right next to the train tracks or the commuter row rather. And when we got showed the house, it was like a duplex. That split house up and down split we're on the left side next to the train tracks. And when the train would come by, it wasn't very loud 'cause it just goes 30 miles an hour.

But then. The bullet train would come by, and we didn't see the house when the bullet train came by, but then the first time the bullet train came by, it was so loud, it shook the house and we thought we were getting attacked. We thought it was getting bombed. So like the first time it came by, like we ducked and we thought uhoh we're under attack.

I don't know what from, but it was outrageously loud. And that was for $3,500 a month in Boston. And we just looked at the numbers one day. I remember being on the commuter rail back to work. I was working at a work bar at the time, like a coworking space. And I just remember calculating the numbers, like these numbers aren't adding up.

Like, how are we gonna buy a house in Boston? How are we gonna afford two kids of that? My wife was pregnant, she was gonna take more time off of work. We're like, all right, how's this all working out? And the numbers weren't adding up. So then we said, all right, what are there other options? Like we either rent or grow the business really quick.

And we were trying, but we weren't there yet. So one of her coworkers suggested North Carolina, and we said, all right, let's take a look. So we flew out here and drove around, and we saw houses that were twice the size for a third, the price. And we said, oh, if we got this, we wouldn't have to, we could, A, buy a house, B, she wouldn't have to work anymore.

And C, we could have more children, and eat too. So we said, oh, this is a good formula. We bought a house in Morrisville, North Carolina for a little over two 50, and then the business took off, thankfully. And so about four months ago, we bought a farm about 40, 30 minutes north of that in a county called Kataba.

We got a little under 10 acres. I got a cow, 26, 26 chickens, 10 ducks, five turkeys, and 20 Guinea hen. So they're running around with the kids, the dog, and we're enjoying the farm life nowadays. 

[00:26:29] Louis Goodman: Oh, that's fantastic. What sort of recreational pursuits do you have? Anything that you like to do to get your mind off of Juvo Leads and business building and lawyers? 

[00:26:40] Ted DeBettencourt: Chasing little girls around? We do soccer, we do school. We're very active in our church, but mostly it's just about spending time with the kids. I used to have hobbies and do fun things like that. Mountain biking, weightlifting, doing all that fun stuff. Now it's. If I'm not doing something work related, it's spending time with the kids and helping 'em and get the most outta life.

[00:26:59] Louis Goodman: Is there anyone who, who you'd like to meet from the either who's alive right now, or somebody out of the historical past? Is there someone you could think of who you would really like to meet? 

[00:27:11] Ted DeBettencourt: King David. I'll go with him. He's a cool ruler. I like the Old Testament stories. Read that one and we're watching the, we're watching the David Show on tv and I don't know, I think that's a pretty cool story. So meeting him would be pretty cool. 

[00:27:23] Louis Goodman: What mistakes do you think lawyers make in the marketing of their firms? 

[00:27:29] Ted DeBettencourt: Focusing on the marketing side and ignoring the intake side. We see so many firms that will get 'em a ton of leads, their SEOs, getting 'em a ton of leads, but they're not converting enough leads into cases.

A lot of firms think they have a not enough leads problem, but what they really have is not a good enough intake process. So it's the firms that are able to identify that process, measure what they're doing well, what they're not doing well, and manage that process. So the difference between converting 60% of your wanted leads to 90% of your wanted leads is could be millions of dollars each year, even for a small firm, so many lawyers put the cart before the horse and say, I want more leads. I want more leads. If you're converting 60% of 'em anyway, what's the point? You really need to focus on that part first. 

[00:28:17] Louis Goodman: Let's say you came into some real money, three or 4 billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life?

[00:28:26] Ted DeBettencourt: Probably become the philanthropist to some extent. I'm not gonna give it all away. I'd still work. We joke about this all the time with, we've had buying offers since our numbers have increased and both my partner and I, we joke, like one, we need walkaway money to never after work again. And two, my wife's gonna make me get a job.

I'm best suited to be working and then I'm gonna have to find a job. Build another job that I like. I love what I'm doing now. So really like it would have to be an ungodly amount of money on the buy side because I'd then have to create another company getting to do what I'm doing now, which is talking to lawyers, helping their fix their lead process, their intake process, getting that side figured out.

I love what I'm doing, so it would take a real lot of money for me to have to change that around. 

[00:29:14] Louis Goodman: Let's say you had a Super Bowl ad someone gave you 60 seconds on the Super Bowl and you could have that opportunity to have a really big audience. What would you wanna say to that big audience in a Super Bowl ad?

[00:29:31] Ted DeBettencourt: Is it about my business? Or like, uh, 

[00:29:34] Louis Goodman: could be absolutely anything you want. If you want your Super Bowl ad to say, sign up for Juvo Leads, I'm totally good with that. 

[00:29:43] Ted DeBettencourt: Yeah. I guess there's a lot of lawyers listening. I would have to probably just pitch our business as to why we're better than who else is out there.

[00:29:51] Louis Goodman: Ted, if someone wants to get in touch with you, wants to talk to you about your business, or wants to talk to you about Juvo leads, what's the best way to get in touch with Ted DeBettencourt? 

[00:30:03] Ted DeBettencourt: Sure. Go to Juvo J-U-V-O leads LEAD s.com. Pop on the website. Start a chat with our human powered chat agents. Tell 'em how we can help you and we'll follow up and set up a meeting and I show you how our service can work for you.

[00:30:20] Louis Goodman: Can they say that they heard you on Love Thy Lawyer? 

[00:30:23] Ted DeBettencourt: They absolutely can, and we didn't even give 'em a discount if they came to us and referenced that. 

[00:30:28] Louis Goodman: Ed, is there anything that you wanna talk about that we haven't discussed? Anything at all that you'd like to touch on? Anything that you'd wanna bring up?

Anything at all? 

[00:30:37] Ted DeBettencourt: If you're trying to figure out your law firm first look at leads. Those are important, but then not enough firms double down in their intake. Understand what's working and what's not in your intake. Listen to your phone calls. The good ones. The bad ones. You're gonna find some things in there you don't like, but unless you measure your intake, you can't manage it unless you measure your SEO.

You can't manage it unless you measure your lead performance from chat, from phones, from forms, you can't manage it. So the first step is understanding your numbers. We always work best with firms that know their numbers. So when we get in there and we give 'em a 30 day free trial and we say, Hey, I'm gonna get you 50% more if you don't know your numbers.

50% more of an unknown factor is still an unknown factor. So we really like to work with firms that know their numbers so we can show value, but it always starts with firms understanding their own numbers. So if you're a firm listening, make sure you understand your numbers measure. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So yeah, start with that. 

[00:31:37] Louis Goodman: Ted DeBettencourt. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. 

[00:31:43] Ted DeBettencourt: Likewise, Louis. It's a pleasure to have a, be a, an honor to be on the show and a pleasure to have you as a client.

[00:31:48]Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:32:28] Ted DeBettencourt: Oh, what's it called? I can't even think of it now. Sorry, I couldn't think of that word.