IAM1040- Attorney Runs Digital Agency Focused on the Legal Sector

An accomplished attorney and transformational thought leader, Seth Price is a founding partner and the business backbone of Price Benowitz LLP as well as the founder and CEO of BluShark Digital. Seth took a two-person law firm and scaled it to 40 lawyers in less than a decade. Now Seth has taken the same digital power that built the firm to create a best-in-class digital agency focused on the legal sector in BluShark Digital. Seth has been a frequent lecturer and moderator at some of the largest and most influential law conferences in the United States, speaking on the tools and strategies law firms can use to align their business development with changing consumer habits. He has spoken on topics including but not limited to, how to build a firm, ethics, best practices for firm operations, search engine optimization (SEO), and digital marketing as a whole.

• CEO Hack: Having and following processes and systems
• CEO Nugget: You don't know what you don't know
• CEO Defined: Making sure you're there

Website: https://blusharkdigital.com/

https://blusharkdigital.com/seo-organic-ranking-basics-for-lawyers/

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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00:29 – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long long long interview if so you've come to the right place Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:40 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Seth Price of Blue Shark Digital and Price Benowitz. Seth, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be here.

01:05 – Seth Price

Thanks for having me.

01:06 – Gresham Harkless

Definitely super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Seth so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And he's an accomplished attorney and transformational thought leader. Seth Price is a founding partner in the business backbone of Price Benowitz, as well as a founder and CEO of Blue Shark Digital. Seth took a two-person law firm, scaled it to 40 lawyers in less than a decade, and now he takes the same digital power that brought the firm to create a best-in-class digital agency focused on the legal sector in Blue Shark Digital. Seth, great to have you on the show. are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:36 – Seth Price

I am ready. I should just bring you everywhere. If I had somebody introducing me like that, I wouldn't have to, life would be a lot easier.

01:42 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I say all I have to do is just hear about and talk about all the awesome things you're doing. You're doing all the awesome work. So I guess just to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to hear a little bit more on what I call your CEO story. Would that you get started with all the awesome work you're doing?

01:54 – Seth Price

So look, what you said, I was building a law firm. I have a buddy that I went to college and law school with. He's a lawyer's lawyer. He loves being in the courtroom. I didn't. So we, you know, after playing in the first dot com bubble in New York where I tried to scale a legal zoom avo type play, the bubble burst in April 2000, and by January of 2001, everything was gone. Our company, US Law, had 30 million on the table, but just disappeared and had to reinvent itself. And that's when we started Price Penal. It's basically self-taught SEO, built a website, hired a lawyer, built a website, hired a lawyer. And as we were doing this, we're like, man, this is great. But like I saw that it was a market beyond the law firm.

And like anything else, the classic CEO story is you saw a need in the market, but you couldn't find somebody to sell it to, so you did it yourself. Then let's scale it for others. And that was our pitch. I did it for myself. I can do it for others. We have over 150 law firms now. We got plastic surgeons. We are essentially really experts in the local search for professional services. That's been our niche and we just geek out on it. And it was sort of not just self-fulfillment, but self-sustaining.

And you could appreciate this, which is it's 1 thing to create and have employees do something, But in order to keep and retain people, you need to be able to pyramid so that, it looks much more profitable so that as we expand, we were able to keep and retain awesome talent as managers who could then leverage really talented people, homegrown talent that we would train in-house to be able to do the different things that are needed in SEO, right? You know this, right? It has high-quality content, authoritative links, a well-coded site, a well-structured site, and a Google My Business strategy.

And in local search, you do those 4 things, you're gonna hit it out of the park. And so when I first started, every 2 years, I'd lose my right-hand guy or girl. And I got sick of it. So I said, look, I want to be able to have this turn from a cost center to a profit center where I could keep and retain that great talent. And that's been the run we've had at Blue Shark.

04:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. And I think that so many times when we look at, you know, success and what really makes things tick is, as you said so well, it's all about creating that pyramid, having a great team, of course, being able to attract that, that, that great talent, but also keep them there. And I think that's when you really start to hum and reach a different level when you're able to kind of do that consistently on a regular basis and you guys have been able to do that is great.

04:22 – Seth Price

No, it's been fun. And it's funny because you know with owning 2 businesses, you know, the law firm has a lot of legacy issues, like it's been over around over a decade and there's communications, there's different departments, and law firms in general are not an ideal business by any stretch of the imagination. We have ethics rules we got to deal with, we have non-competes that we're not allowed to use, there are all sorts of issues that go on in a law firm that doesn't have, and it's just not really sellable the way a non-law firm business is. In the real world, you have multiple EBITDA and somebody else will take your business. Legal world, that doesn't really work that way.

So in building Blue Shark from scratch and having an amazing co-pilot in the form of David Breton, who was our intern at the law firm and is now president and shareholder of Blue Shark. The idea is that we can basically from scratch build the thing and do many of the things I couldn't do at the law firm. I don't know if you're familiar with Vern Harnish, scaling up, he was a guest on my podcast a few weeks back. And after reading the book, I was like at the law firm, I always get upset because there's so much stuff I know I should be doing, but I can't get done based on personalities and business structure and everything. Whereas I turned around a blue shark and like, man, this president who's never even read scaling up is freaking doing most of what's in there.

We have our teams, we have our team culture, we're hitting the ground running with all these different things. And that has been part of what I've loved most. And part of it has been, and it was apropos for your podcast, as the CEO or founder, taking a step back, not getting in the weeds, until recently, much of our employee force were millennials. Everybody's aging now, so they're getting older. But many of the people we hired were people I couldn't connect with. And there were people when I spoke, I think that psychosomatic shock, they thought their dad was talking to them. And I found that if I could, rather than speak directly to them, speak to managers and let those managers handle stuff, it really created a structure and a culture.

And there's stuff where, you know, somebody who in my world, yeah, fire this guy tomorrow, they'd be like, no, you can't do that. This person is connected to these people. Let's do this, this and this. And so I've sort of allowed them and given them the rope, you know, to be able to connect and create a culture that as the CEO, I'd like to say, yes, yes. I cannot take credit for the awesome culture we have because I've my instincts and gut wouldn't comport as well with the millennial culture. And I feel like the people that we have in place have done an exceptional job of creating that environment that allows people and allows us to row in the same direction, learned a lot, I think, from the people working with us, and that I could not have done that alone.

07:11 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I think so many times the more we learn, the more we realize like this is our lane, this is what we do best. And we're able to kind of stay in that zone of genius, so to speak. We realize that it is the teamwork, it is the people that we have that are managers, employees, whatever, and however that might be termed is really what makes things go and we can kind of get out of our own way, which a lot of times can happen. So I know you touched a little bit upon both of the businesses. Could you tell us a little bit more about each and how you serve the clients that you work with and what you would consider to be either your personal or even the businesses, what I like to call a secret sauce or thing that you feel sets you apart?

07:45 – Seth Price

Sure, so on the law firm side, we're a business-to-consumer law firm. If somebody has been injured, they're arrested, they, somebody has died, all different personal life, you know, divorced, these are things where we can help. And I think that our secret sauce is, very early on a mentor of mine took on the philosophy that we are a plumbing service, not a law firm. In the sense that like the hot water heater in your basement explodes, what do you do? You pick up the phone, You search, you pick up the phone, so you need to be found. Because before we entered the market, the marketed firms were not great. There are many good ones now, but when we first entered the internet space, people were not mixing great marketing and great practice of law.

So that's the first piece. The second is having an intake team that can slice and dice and figure out what is viable and get them the help they need. So the law firm, that's been our one-two punch. And so for entrepreneurs, it looks like you have an extensive network. If anybody has questions in the legal space, even if we don't do it, happy to sort of figure out where we can get you the help you need. In the digital space, we've stayed in our lane. We've really focused, we don't do e-commerce, we've focused on search and even local search professional services. And that's where we've dug deep, We're really good at it.

And what I feel is that by creating an environment where we can allow, we've scaled to the point where there's a division that does links, a division that does content, not just a person. And that, as you know, being in the space, so many people will sell SEO without doing the heavy lifting that's needed to execute. Because you get this, you get a, somebody comes to us, wants to be a client, and we run a set of reports and we're like, oh my God, this guy's had a link built in a year. And you're like, what the F? Or, their content package is regurgitated news blogs that went out the door 7 years ago. So the idea is, you know, by providing that value, it's look, as you know, it's not as sexy a game SEO because if done right, the margins are okay, but they're not tremendous. It's not a SaaS-based model.

And there's a lot of SaaS-based models coming into the SEO space. I feel that at least for the time being, there is still this need for a higher level SEO to be done, which can't be done in an automated fashion. It takes actual labor, domestic labor that's gonna sit and do strip. Not that you can't layer different tasks from overseas, but you wanna make sure that Google is looking for authority and that you wanna make sure that the authority that you're demonstrating is not cringy. It's not broken English, but it's instead actual authority that demonstrates this person's best answer to a question.

10:24 – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate those secret sources. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:36 – Seth Price

Great question. You know, I think that I have somebody who takes stuff from different from different sort of sources. We mentioned Verne Harner scaling up, you know, somebody who spun out of him, the whole traction EOS world, and the idea of using the huddles, using the touch points, moving rocks. And what I try to do is just figure out which of these different things works and leverage those. And I think that like anything else, it's having a system.

And if you follow the system, great, you may wanna make tweaks, but having some sort of process in place to allow yourself to move forward, is 1 of those things that make sure that your team has bought into that so it can be executed. And you could see very clearly, that when the team functions and buys into it, it is great. And we've been really stressed with the pandemic, everybody went virtual. Great. But a lot of those those touch points that were happening, demonstrated that if you didn't have the discipline to have the meetings, they weren't going to happen organically.

And I think that's been probably the biggest lesson for me of this time is making sure that I go back and sort of say, okay, great. , I could see a lot of my weaknesses because things that were not happening were because, hey, we didn't see them in front of our faces. And a year into COVID plus, I'm now starting to see some of those break points. And that's, so go back to your question, the hack is, I think it's to figure out what your systems are and then follow them.

12:10 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice, it might be something you would tell a client if you or something were to happen to a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

12:22 – Seth Price

I think the piece that I've gotten to know over time is you don't know what you don't know. And the sooner you get to that point, the better. And so look, there's stuff that I know that I know, but you don't know what you don't know. And that happens in life in general on a regular basis. And that the sooner that you embrace that, you know, constantly sort of, how do I improve? How do I find, you know, expertise that can help me move the ball forward? I think that that's the piece that I wish I had personally grasped earlier. But it's something that the longer I live, the more true it is.

12:57 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Seth truly appreciates that. And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Seth, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:09 – Seth Price

You know, I think that I'm going to take this back a step. A friend worked for the governor of Maryland a few years ago, and I was always amazed, what does the governor do? And in 1 sense, he's like the chief cheerleader for the state. You know, he does trade deals, he opened cuts ribbons. And I feel like when done at the highest level, you are the person who is just sort of making sure that everybody within your team is there and the outward brand for the world.

I mean, there's a lot of E-Myths, we had Michael Gerber on my podcast not that long ago, so there's the idea of where you want to go next. Yes, that's a huge part, but let's put that aside for a second. I think that making sure that you're there to solve problems, to be there for your management team, to help motivate and lead the greater organization, and be the face outside. Those are the things that I think are most essential for a great CEO.

14:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you for sharing that. And of course, dropping the E-Myth and having Michael Gerber on your show, because I think that gives you a full idea of exactly what it means to be a CEO, entrepreneur, and business owner. But I think I love how you made that analogy between the governor and being at the ribbon cuttings and being the cheerleader, because I think so many times we're in the people business and we forget that sometimes where we're thinking about analytics and numbers and all of those things, but sometimes you need to be the cheerleader for the people, the organization, the mission, whatever that might be, but you also may need to be the stern person. And that balance beam act that we kind of talked about a little before is a lot of the hats and roles and perspectives we need as leaders to really kind of go and take things to the next level.

14:40 – Seth Price

Absolutely.

14:42 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, Seth, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know and of course how best they can get a hold of you, hear about your podcast and all the awesome things that you and both your businesses are working on.

14:57 – Seth Price

I appreciate it. I'm easy to reach Seth at either pricebenowitz.com or bluesharkdigital.com. You know, I geek out on this stuff. So feel free. It doesn't need to be to purchase something. If I could be of advice, either from the legal or digital space. And I have 2 podcasts that are out there. 1 is the SEO Insider, where we geek out on stuff like hardcore SEO stuff with someone like the National Thought Leaders and the other is Max Growth Live where we talk about law firm growth. So really the sister, the companion to everything we've talked about here.

We geek out about SEO on 1 day and on the other day, we talk about what are the things that are needed to build a professional services organization. And it's been a fun ride and really appreciate the opportunity to sit here and chat with you today. Got to have a great conversation where we, not whenever you talk like this and you have a conversation it makes you think about hey you know these are the things I'm aspiring to do which are the ones I may be coming up I'm short on and what do I what's my homework based on this conversation so I appreciate that opportunity.

15:57 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely I appreciate you for giving us the opportunity to geek out a little bit. And I know we kind of scratch the surface on everything, which is why I love you have your podcast and information. You left yourself open to people being able to reach out as well too, because I think as we learn, we become greater by a lot of times the things we take in the environment of things that we have around us. So I appreciate you for spending some time with us and holding that space and as well creating so much valuable content. So appreciate you my friend and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:23 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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