March 24, 2025 • 27 mins
Joel Ankney is an Attorney at Ankney Law.
Joel works with clients to protect their interests and make informed decisions when buying or selling small businesses. He also helps people start, operate, buy, and sell Main Street businesses and buy, sell, and lease commercial real estate.
Ankney Law has helped clients close hundreds of deals in diverse industries. The firm will guide you through your deal by helping you negotiate, draft, and review all deal documents, from the Letter of Intent to the Purchase Agreement to the ancillary Closing documents.
Connect with Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelankney/
Visit Ankney Law: https://www.joelankney.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
Joel works with clients to protect their interests and make informed decisions when buying or selling small businesses. He also helps people start, operate, buy, and sell Main Street businesses and buy, sell, and lease commercial real estate.
Ankney Law has helped clients close hundreds of deals in diverse industries. The firm will guide you through your deal by helping you negotiate, draft, and review all deal documents, from the Letter of Intent to the Purchase Agreement to the ancillary Closing documents.
Connect with Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelankney/
Visit Ankney Law: https://www.joelankney.com/
On This Episode, We Discuss…
- Legal Essentials of Buying and Selling Businesses
- How to Market Yourself Effectively
- Why a Solo Practice Might be the Best Decision for Entrepreneurial Lawyers
- Benefits of Writing a Book on Your Expertise
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When I started my own practice, this small law firm
community is much more collaborative and much more supportive. I
had people who when I said I wanted to open
my own practice, not only did they take me to
lunch to answer my questions, but I had one friend,
for example, bring a copy of his profit and loss
statement to lunch with them and say, hey, here's my
(00:23):
P and L just so you can understand what your costs,
not only the categories, but what the estimated cost might be.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And I just thought, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
How incredible that somebody would share that information with me
to help me get started on my journey.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast, presented by Market
My Market, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today,
my guest is Jewel Ankie, who's an a tern at
anky law Joel, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Could you give our listeners a little background on yourself?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Okay, yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I've been practicing law for a little over thirty three
years now, and in that time I spent my first
twelve years of practice at a couple of big law firms,
and then I left and started my own law practice
about twenty one years ago. And during that time, I've
learned a lot about, you know, how to promote my
(01:31):
practice and promote myself and build a brand. And one
of the main ways I've done that is through publishing
some books that have really boosted my kind of my
recognition and my brand in a specific practice area.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
For anybody out there listening, who is an attorney who
might be thinking about publishing a book, what guidance would
you give them?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Sometimes I think that I probably do things because I
just don't know how difficult they will be. And I
had always wanted to write a book. And as I
look back, I've written three books now, and as I've
looked back, I've kind of been able to, in hindsight
see that I've approached it with kind of a three
(02:13):
step approach. One is just to find some inspiration for
writing the book. And then once I have that inspiration,
is to kind of hone in on the idea of
what I want the book to say, who I want
the book to speak to, and what kind of results
I want from the book myself for my practice. And
(02:35):
then finally it's the implementation, and that's really the grind.
That's where I'm coming up with a writing discipline and
working through the logistics of editing the book and then
actually getting it up on Amazon and publishing it.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You said you have three different books. What were the
themes of those books?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So first book, the idea came from actually having I
have four sons, and I had a son who was
in between high school and college.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
We decided to have him do some research to look
at ten years worth of projects that we had done
in the law firm and the solo practice, and to
see if we could simply identify where we were, you know,
what kind of projects we were working on, where we
were making our money, where we're getting those projects from.
(03:28):
And as a result of that, we realized that we
had been marketing ourselves a particular way. I had been
marketing myself as a startup business attorney, and we realized
that a big part of our practice was doing acquisitions
and sales of businesses and we hadn't been marketing that.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And so.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
With that information, then I started to do some searches
on Amazon and realized that there really weren't very many
books on how to buy a small business, especially books
written by lawyers about the legal side of that process.
And that's where we came up with the idea. We
just thought, you know what, we're going to write this book,
not because we wanted to sell books, but because we
(04:12):
wanted to provide a resource to clients and potential clients,
something that would differentiate us. So that's how we came
up with the idea for the first book, and it
was I mean, it's been my most successful book I've done.
Not only have I sold a lot of books, and
again that's just secondary, but I've been interviewed on a
(04:32):
number of podcasts about that topic. I've spoken at the
Columbia Business School to one of their NBA classes. I've
spoken to the University of Illinois Business School in one
of their NBA classes. And I've gotten clients from all
over the country who have called me and asked me
to represent them because they read my book, and so
(04:53):
that I couldn't have anticipated that result, but it's just
been amazing, the best marketing effort.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Or tactic I've ever adopted.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So then the second book was really the idea that
I had for the first book. I thought I would
write a book on how to start a small business,
but there are hundreds of those books out there. But
then the when COVID hit in twenty twenty, again we
looked at our kind of our some of the expertise
(05:29):
we have inside of our law firm, and we thought,
you know, we represent We've represented a lot of people
who are starting freelancing businesses, whether they're consultants or graphic designers,
web designers, content creators. And so because of the pandemic
and the lockdown and the transitions from office to work
(05:53):
from home and all those types of things, we thought
it would be a good time to write a book
to help people out who were reps thinking about using
that time and space and maybe even just that the
you know that this state of the economy to open
a freelancing business.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And so yeah, we put that book.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Out, and that book from you know, if you compare
the first book in the second book, the second book
has been good, but it hasn't been as if you
want to call it successful. It's been it's brought us business,
but we haven't had the same type of attention that the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
First book got us.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
What advice would you give to a law firm who
needs to get to that next plateau and how has
that changed in the last fifteen or twenty years.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Well, your your question helps me reflect on maybe what
I did during the first you know, five or six
years of my solo practice, where I initially started with
just your your very kind of basic in person networking.
You know, invite people to go to lunch with me
(07:02):
or breakfast. Make sure that I'm showing up at all
the local networking events or they may not be networking events,
but they may be you know, events like a pitch night,
a startup pitch night or something like that, just to
be in the crowd, just to interact with the people
who are in the same industry that I'm trying to service.
(07:25):
And that's kind of how we started. And then before
we wrote any books, we did some what I would
call it kind of microdos content creation or writing.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I had a couple of.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Different blogs that had you know, fairly short life spans,
but they had some themes to them. I had one
blog that was for creatives, and then you know, I
had another blog that was for small businesses and just
doing that writing those you know, creating that those small
doses of content and then just using my existing email
(08:01):
list to distribute that those small doses of content to
my clients and to people that I had met during
the week. I mean I used to have a practice
where I would collect business cards during the week from
whoever I spoke to, and I would ask them, can
I add you to my email list? And then on
(08:22):
Friday I would send out an email to all those
people that would have a link to.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
The latest blog post.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And it sounds really kind of you know, nuts and bolts,
but it worked really well for you know, six or
nine months, until it kind of the interest kind of
died out and we.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Moved on to the next thing.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
But I think overall, what I would say is that
I never really tried to hit, you know, swing for
the fence. I never tried to hit a home run.
I just tried to play small ball, lots of singles
and doubles and just let them accumulate until you know,
we got more and recognition locally, and then you know,
(09:04):
figure out what we and for us, books were the
next thing, because that aligns with what I like to do,
who I am, and how I like.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
To teach basically, So you came from big law and
then pivoted to opening your own shop. What were some
lessons that you learned in big law and what were
some things you had to throw by the wayside.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
I think that the one of the things that I gained,
probably the biggest thing that I gained from being inside
a big law firm was just the confidence that I
could take on complicated projects and serve clients well and
provide them with the you know, the value that they
needed to reach their objectives.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I was.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
In the law firms that I worked in, I was
given a lot of responsibility pretty early on in my
career for some pretty niche types of project, and in
some instances there wasn't really anybody inside the firm to
provide a lot of supervision or guidance. I did some
(10:09):
really obscure like in one law firm I was, I
did these really obscure kind of anti trust filings, and
and that just gave me that confidence that I could,
I could deal with clients, I could you know, present
that confidence to them so that they.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Would feel comfortable engaging me.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So I think that's probably the biggest thing that I
took from big law and just the all the you know,
along with that confidence, the ability to kind of take
a complex project, break it down into pieces, and manage
those pieces towards the objective. The things that when I
left Big Law that were surprising to me. One of
(10:52):
the things that I loved about leaving Big Law was
that I could try lots of stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I could do.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You know, if I had an idea, or if I
wanted to license a piece of software or something like that,
I could just do it and there wasn't anybody to say,
you know, you can't use that piece of software on
our system because it's not compatible and we can't support it,
and things like that, or you can't use that that,
you know, that piece of hardware on our system, or
(11:20):
something like that. So I love that idea of being
very nimble and being able to do, you know, try stuff,
try lots of stuff. And I've tried lots of things,
and you know, we've we've tried things for a very
short period of time, and we've I call them affordable losses.
You know, at some point I say to myself, Okay,
(11:43):
I can suck this loss up and I can move
on to something else. So that's those are probably the
biggest things that I've felt. The other real freeing thing
that that I was really surprised at was that the
the law firms I worked at were wonderful. I treasure
that experience. I really learned how to be a good lawyer.
But the big firm environment can feel very competitive internally, and.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Even if the firm.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Is wonderful and has I think, a really good culture,
it's still high pressure, very competitive. And I found that
when I started my own practice that this small law
firm community is much more collaborative and much more supportive.
I had people who, when I said I wanted to
open my own practice, not only did they take me
(12:32):
to lunch to answer my questions, but I had one friend,
for example, bring a copy of his profit and loss
statement to lunch with him and say, Hey, here's my
P and L just so you can understand what your costs,
not only the categories, but what the estimated cost might be.
And I just thought, you know, how incredible that somebody
would share that information with me to help me get
(12:55):
started on my journey.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
So do you have any advice for anyone who's going
from a big firm starting their own smaller firm.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
That's a great question, because I think that there's a
at least for me, there was this this fear that
I wouldn't be broad enough, that if I were too narrow,
that I might not be able to make enough revenue
to sustain myself and grow. And so when I first
started my solo practice, I you know, I probably well,
(13:25):
I did. I took on some projects that were really
on the fringe of my area of specialty or my focus,
and I, you know, I did Okay, I made my
way through them, and my client was fine, but I
lost money on those projects. And so it wasn't really
(13:46):
a geographic scope that I was looking at, but it
was really more of a you know, inside the big
law firm. I did like three things, and I thought
that when I opened up my solo practice, I would
probably need to expand that to like six or seven in.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Different areas of the wall.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And you know that some of those things, after a
little bit of time, I realized that I could cut
them out and I could get rid of them, and
I could then you know, focus more time on growing
the types of practice that I was really interested in
and also very experienced in. So I would say that,
(14:27):
you know, when you start a small practice, a solo practice,
you're going to be tempted to try and expand your
service offering, and you may even be tempted to say, okay, well,
I know. One of the things, at least that I
see in my social media feeds right now that is
getting pushed to me is that the state planning is
a practice that anybody could just pick up and start
(14:50):
and start a profitable law firm. At least that's how
it's advertised or marketed that. I don't think that's the case.
But if I had, you know, if you've never done
a state planning before, and you're going to start from
the beginning because you think it's going to be a
quick money maker or it's going to become a revenue
stream quickly for you, I don't think that's necessarily. You know,
(15:13):
you're still going to have to have all that ramp
up time to learn how to do it, and to
find the clients and and and and you know. So
that's I think that's the the tendency is to have
this fear that you need to be make a much
broader service offering, maybe not geographically, but you know, just
(15:34):
based on the types of legal services that you're going
to offer, become more of a generalist, for example. But
I've found that it's been better for me to just
try and stay within my niche and and and just
promote that and build that. When I published my first book,
I had never heard of the it's called the Entrepreneurship
(15:56):
through Acquisition ecosystem or community. I had never heard of
this concept. And the University of Illinois picked up my
book to be used in their Entrepreneurship through Acquisition class.
And when the professor contacted me and said, hey, you know,
would you be okay with us using your book in
(16:17):
our class? I was like, yeah, but you got to
tell me what ETA is. You got to tell me
what entret And this was seven years ago, and so
as he explained it, I realized that that was a
community that I didn't know existed, and it was a
community that was interested in my book. And so we then,
you know, geared a lot of our messaging toward that
(16:39):
community for a number of years, and that was our
opportunity and we jumped on it.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
You have helped people start businesses, and one of the
things that you stress a lot is building a support team.
Can you explain that process.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well, I think that a lot of us who start
businesses have a tendency to feel confident enough to do
everything ourselves, and that may just be built into our personalities.
I certainly feel that way myself.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
I've become kind of almost a.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Jack of all trades as far as setting up, especially
when I started my business. You know, I thought, well,
if I don't know what, I can learn it and
I can do it. And so some of the people
that I added to my team very early on, I
added a CPA that was probably my first person that
(17:30):
I called in was a CPA, because I realized I
didn't know that I had to make all these tax
filings every month and every quarter and every year, and
make all these payroll tax payments and things like that.
And so I found a CPA who was very like
(17:50):
flexible in the way that she worked with her clients.
And so I just called her up and said, Hey,
can I buy two hours of your time come to
my office a list of like fifty questions I want
to ask you?
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And she was great. We did that.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
She taught me some things, but then I realized that
there were things that I could turn over to her
and pay her to do those things, and it would
be I'd be making money because I could, you know,
bill more for my time than I was paying her
for her time. And so a CPA was my first ad.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I think.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I mean, when I first started, I had I hired
my own web designer and that went really well. He
helped me. He was also a commercial photographer, so we
did a photo shoot for my website. And we also,
I mean this is years ago, so we had print
brochures because we had print brochures at the big law firm,
so I thought, I need print brochures for my small
(18:48):
law firm too, so we did that. Since then, actually,
my wife has been I mean, in the time that
our practice has been open, my wife has gone back
to school and gotten a degree in marketing, and she's
my marketing She's sitting in the next room listening to
me to make sure I'm doing okay.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
But she has been wonderful.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I've learned so much from her, and she handles a
lot of the marketing side. So I think it's important
to have a marketing person on your team, and they
can have different roles. One of the biggest roles that
Jennifer plays with me is that she's a sounding board
for me. So I have lots of ideas and then
(19:32):
she can take her education in marketing and help me
refine those ideas. And then also sometimes I mean we
have we do these kind of informal morning walks and
a lot of times we talk marketing while we walk.
And one of the mantras I guess is that I
remind her to keep telling me is don't do don't
(19:55):
do anything drastic, you know, don't I always have like,
let's do something really big, let's try something big, and
then she helps me scale it back down. But I think,
I think marketing is really significant to have somebody on
your team who can help you with generating marketing ideas
and then also executing them as well.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
What would your advice be to a lawyer who's just
starting out and has a marketing budget.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
What I've seen is that it's an attention economy, and
it's hard for somebody who is small and has a
small budget to buy enough attention because you're competing with
people who have a lot bigger budget. And so I
think it's good to try two or three things at
a time where you can try and build or attract
(20:43):
some of that attention to you, and that may be
you know, for us, for example, I'm not on a
lot of I'm on social media, but I'm not promoting
my practice on a lot of different channels. I think
there's this tendency just kind of this fear of missing
out and you feel like you have to be everywhere,
and in my experience, that becomes very overwhelming, not just
(21:05):
from a you know, a dollar budget perspective, but also
from a time budget perspective as well. And so we've
tried to pick and choose the things, like you say,
We've tested a few things. We found that LinkedIn works
really well for us because a lot of the people
who are listening to us or who want to hear
from us are on LinkedIn, and that's where they go
(21:27):
to to find, you know, information or to engage in
conversations and things like that. Books have been great for us,
and we use we we kind of repurpose the books
by using excerpts to create content for a blog, you know,
a blog on my website. And I'm testing right now substack.
Substack is a new thing that I'm I'm looking at
(21:50):
and we're going to test it in a couple of
different ways, but it's fun.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
It's what we do.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I write a lot, and so that works really well
for me. And then podcasting, I mean, frankly, we have
had ideas about launching our own podcasts, but we found
that we really enjoy being on other people's podcasts and
providing information that way. And I think, you know, for
(22:16):
the first book, I think I've been on about twelve
or fourteen different podcasts about small business merger and acquisition work,
and it's been a lot of fun, and it's been
it's helped me get, you know, grab that attention, and
it doesn't cost me hard.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
You know, I don't pay to be on.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
A lot of podcasts or anything, so it's the budget
from a dollar perspective is very low.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
You seem to be really open to new things. Do
you just come across something new and say, this is
something new, I'm going to learn it.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I Well, I'm fortunate because I kind of have a
built in support group. I have my wife, but I
also have a my youngest son, and I have four
sons who are They're all adults and they all are
in different professions, but I bounce a lot of ideas
off of them. Substack For example, one Sunday evening, I
(23:09):
was with my youngest son, he's twenty two, he's a videographer,
and he I said, you know, it would be really
cool if I could find I have I've been writing
a lot, and it would be really cool if I
could find some sort of a platform where I could
serialize my writing. And he said, oh, you want a
substack And I was like, I've never I mean, I
(23:31):
think I've heard that term. I've heard about it, so yeah,
I just I'm a very curious person. So I just
looked into substack and got myself an account and started
poking around and setting things up and watching some YouTube videos.
There's plenty of, you know, information out there to kind.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Of teach yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
But that's kind of a lot of our ideas spring
from the questions that.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
We ask ourselves about.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You know, here's a I mean another interestingly, another question
that we had asked ourselves was how do we with
all the work and the inquiries we're getting from the
first book? Is there a way is there a platform
for us to refer those people out to other lawyers
(24:19):
across the country. Last week I came across overture and
I then listened to the podcast episode that you guys
did with them, and you know we're going to be
talking Wednesday, So I'm like, you know a lot of that. Yes,
I'm a very curious person, and I'm also a person
that I think asks a lot of questions to myself
(24:41):
and looks at things from the perspective of, you know,
how can I frame the issue or the challenge, and
then once I frame it, how can I find the answer?
And how can I learn about it? And a lot
of times You're right, I do try and take a
lot on myself. That's a perhaps a weakness that I have.
But other times I'll look to you know, I have
(25:03):
a couple of sons. I have one son who's very
good at audio editing and he audits a podcast for me,
and he's going to audit or edit my audio book
for the next book.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
My wife helps me.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
I have my son, the other son, who's a videographer,
so I've learned to kind of get them involved as
well instead of trying to learn everything myself. There's no
way I want to learn how to use Adobe Premiere
Pro to edit video. I mean, it's really fascinating, but
I'm better at practicing law.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Well, Joel, we're just about out of time. I'd like
to thank you for the time he spent with me.
Are there any parting words or books coming out that
you can point our listeners towards.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Well, we got in touch because I just published a
book a couple of weeks ago called Raincatcher, And it's
really it's not a how to market your law practice.
That's really not what it is is. It's a book
about experiences that I've had over the last thirty thirty
plus years about marketing my services. It's really more of
(26:09):
a memoir approach to say, you know, here are things
that I've tried, and here's what the results have been
for me. And there's some themes in there and stuff.
So we're really excited about that, and that's the latest
book that we've published. We're not sure, like what's going
to happen with the book. It's not a book that's
(26:31):
going to bring me more legal work, I don't think.
But it was a book that I felt that I
really wanted to write to share the experiences that I've
had and hopefully give people maybe some hope or some
tips or some ideas or that will help them along
the way.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Any email or website you would like to point people towards.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
They can find me by just typing my name in
Joel Ankney dot com and it'll take them right to
my law firm website and all my contact information is there.
But they can reach me on LinkedIn too. I'm very
active on LinkedIn and if they have a pretty unique name,
so if you just type it in, I should pop up.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
Sounds good, Joel, thanks for the time.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Thank you, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast, presented by
Market my Market. You can check out additional episodes and
recaps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
When I started my own practice, this small law firm
community is much more collaborative and much more supportive. I
had people who when I said I wanted to open
my own practice, not only did they take me to
lunch to answer my questions, but I had one friend,
for example, bring a copy of his profit and loss
statement to lunch with them and say, hey, here's my
(00:23):
P and L just so you can understand what your costs,
not only the categories, but what the estimated cost might be.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And I just thought, you know.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
How incredible that somebody would share that information with me
to help me get started on my journey.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
You're listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast, presented by Market
My Market, the go to podcast for learning from the
experts and the legal community about effective ways to grow
and manage your law firm.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Legal Mastermind podcast. Today,
my guest is Jewel Ankie, who's an a tern at
anky law Joel, Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 4 (01:04):
Could you give our listeners a little background on yourself?
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Okay, yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
I've been practicing law for a little over thirty three
years now, and in that time I spent my first
twelve years of practice at a couple of big law firms,
and then I left and started my own law practice
about twenty one years ago. And during that time, I've
learned a lot about, you know, how to promote my
(01:31):
practice and promote myself and build a brand. And one
of the main ways I've done that is through publishing
some books that have really boosted my kind of my
recognition and my brand in a specific practice area.
Speaker 4 (01:46):
For anybody out there listening, who is an attorney who
might be thinking about publishing a book, what guidance would
you give them?
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Sometimes I think that I probably do things because I
just don't know how difficult they will be. And I
had always wanted to write a book. And as I
look back, I've written three books now, and as I've
looked back, I've kind of been able to, in hindsight
see that I've approached it with kind of a three
(02:13):
step approach. One is just to find some inspiration for
writing the book. And then once I have that inspiration,
is to kind of hone in on the idea of
what I want the book to say, who I want
the book to speak to, and what kind of results
I want from the book myself for my practice. And
(02:35):
then finally it's the implementation, and that's really the grind.
That's where I'm coming up with a writing discipline and
working through the logistics of editing the book and then
actually getting it up on Amazon and publishing it.
Speaker 4 (02:50):
You said you have three different books. What were the
themes of those books?
Speaker 1 (02:54):
So first book, the idea came from actually having I
have four sons, and I had a son who was
in between high school and college.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
And.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
We decided to have him do some research to look
at ten years worth of projects that we had done
in the law firm and the solo practice, and to
see if we could simply identify where we were, you know,
what kind of projects we were working on, where we
were making our money, where we're getting those projects from.
(03:28):
And as a result of that, we realized that we
had been marketing ourselves a particular way. I had been
marketing myself as a startup business attorney, and we realized
that a big part of our practice was doing acquisitions
and sales of businesses and we hadn't been marketing that.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
And so.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
With that information, then I started to do some searches
on Amazon and realized that there really weren't very many
books on how to buy a small business, especially books
written by lawyers about the legal side of that process.
And that's where we came up with the idea. We
just thought, you know what, we're going to write this book,
not because we wanted to sell books, but because we
(04:12):
wanted to provide a resource to clients and potential clients,
something that would differentiate us. So that's how we came
up with the idea for the first book, and it
was I mean, it's been my most successful book I've done.
Not only have I sold a lot of books, and
again that's just secondary, but I've been interviewed on a
(04:32):
number of podcasts about that topic. I've spoken at the
Columbia Business School to one of their NBA classes. I've
spoken to the University of Illinois Business School in one
of their NBA classes. And I've gotten clients from all
over the country who have called me and asked me
to represent them because they read my book, and so
(04:53):
that I couldn't have anticipated that result, but it's just
been amazing, the best marketing effort.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Or tactic I've ever adopted.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So then the second book was really the idea that
I had for the first book. I thought I would
write a book on how to start a small business,
but there are hundreds of those books out there. But
then the when COVID hit in twenty twenty, again we
looked at our kind of our some of the expertise
(05:29):
we have inside of our law firm, and we thought,
you know, we represent We've represented a lot of people
who are starting freelancing businesses, whether they're consultants or graphic designers,
web designers, content creators. And so because of the pandemic
and the lockdown and the transitions from office to work
(05:53):
from home and all those types of things, we thought
it would be a good time to write a book
to help people out who were reps thinking about using
that time and space and maybe even just that the
you know that this state of the economy to open
a freelancing business.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
And so yeah, we put that book.
Speaker 1 (06:14):
Out, and that book from you know, if you compare
the first book in the second book, the second book
has been good, but it hasn't been as if you
want to call it successful. It's been it's brought us business,
but we haven't had the same type of attention that the.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
First book got us.
Speaker 4 (06:34):
What advice would you give to a law firm who
needs to get to that next plateau and how has
that changed in the last fifteen or twenty years.
Speaker 1 (06:41):
Well, your your question helps me reflect on maybe what
I did during the first you know, five or six
years of my solo practice, where I initially started with
just your your very kind of basic in person networking.
You know, invite people to go to lunch with me
(07:02):
or breakfast. Make sure that I'm showing up at all
the local networking events or they may not be networking events,
but they may be you know, events like a pitch night,
a startup pitch night or something like that, just to
be in the crowd, just to interact with the people
who are in the same industry that I'm trying to service.
(07:25):
And that's kind of how we started. And then before
we wrote any books, we did some what I would
call it kind of microdos content creation or writing.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I had a couple of.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Different blogs that had you know, fairly short life spans,
but they had some themes to them. I had one
blog that was for creatives, and then you know, I
had another blog that was for small businesses and just
doing that writing those you know, creating that those small
doses of content and then just using my existing email
(08:01):
list to distribute that those small doses of content to
my clients and to people that I had met during
the week. I mean I used to have a practice
where I would collect business cards during the week from
whoever I spoke to, and I would ask them, can
I add you to my email list? And then on
(08:22):
Friday I would send out an email to all those
people that would have a link to.
Speaker 2 (08:26):
The latest blog post.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
And it sounds really kind of you know, nuts and bolts,
but it worked really well for you know, six or
nine months, until it kind of the interest kind of
died out and we.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Moved on to the next thing.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
But I think overall, what I would say is that
I never really tried to hit, you know, swing for
the fence. I never tried to hit a home run.
I just tried to play small ball, lots of singles
and doubles and just let them accumulate until you know,
we got more and recognition locally, and then you know,
(09:04):
figure out what we and for us, books were the
next thing, because that aligns with what I like to do,
who I am, and how I like.
Speaker 4 (09:12):
To teach basically, So you came from big law and
then pivoted to opening your own shop. What were some
lessons that you learned in big law and what were
some things you had to throw by the wayside.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
I think that the one of the things that I gained,
probably the biggest thing that I gained from being inside
a big law firm was just the confidence that I
could take on complicated projects and serve clients well and
provide them with the you know, the value that they
needed to reach their objectives.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
I was.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
In the law firms that I worked in, I was
given a lot of responsibility pretty early on in my
career for some pretty niche types of project, and in
some instances there wasn't really anybody inside the firm to
provide a lot of supervision or guidance. I did some
(10:09):
really obscure like in one law firm I was, I
did these really obscure kind of anti trust filings, and
and that just gave me that confidence that I could,
I could deal with clients, I could you know, present
that confidence to them so that they.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Would feel comfortable engaging me.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So I think that's probably the biggest thing that I
took from big law and just the all the you know,
along with that confidence, the ability to kind of take
a complex project, break it down into pieces, and manage
those pieces towards the objective. The things that when I
left Big Law that were surprising to me. One of
(10:52):
the things that I loved about leaving Big Law was
that I could try lots of stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
I could do.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
You know, if I had an idea, or if I
wanted to license a piece of software or something like that,
I could just do it and there wasn't anybody to say,
you know, you can't use that piece of software on
our system because it's not compatible and we can't support it,
and things like that, or you can't use that that,
you know, that piece of hardware on our system, or
(11:20):
something like that. So I love that idea of being
very nimble and being able to do, you know, try stuff,
try lots of stuff. And I've tried lots of things,
and you know, we've we've tried things for a very
short period of time, and we've I call them affordable losses.
You know, at some point I say to myself, Okay,
(11:43):
I can suck this loss up and I can move
on to something else. So that's those are probably the
biggest things that I've felt. The other real freeing thing
that that I was really surprised at was that the
the law firms I worked at were wonderful. I treasure
that experience. I really learned how to be a good lawyer.
But the big firm environment can feel very competitive internally, and.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
Even if the firm.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Is wonderful and has I think, a really good culture,
it's still high pressure, very competitive. And I found that
when I started my own practice that this small law
firm community is much more collaborative and much more supportive.
I had people who, when I said I wanted to
open my own practice, not only did they take me
(12:32):
to lunch to answer my questions, but I had one friend,
for example, bring a copy of his profit and loss
statement to lunch with him and say, Hey, here's my
P and L just so you can understand what your costs,
not only the categories, but what the estimated cost might be.
And I just thought, you know, how incredible that somebody
would share that information with me to help me get
(12:55):
started on my journey.
Speaker 4 (12:57):
So do you have any advice for anyone who's going
from a big firm starting their own smaller firm.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
That's a great question, because I think that there's a
at least for me, there was this this fear that
I wouldn't be broad enough, that if I were too narrow,
that I might not be able to make enough revenue
to sustain myself and grow. And so when I first
started my solo practice, I you know, I probably well,
(13:25):
I did. I took on some projects that were really
on the fringe of my area of specialty or my focus,
and I, you know, I did Okay, I made my
way through them, and my client was fine, but I
lost money on those projects. And so it wasn't really
(13:46):
a geographic scope that I was looking at, but it
was really more of a you know, inside the big
law firm. I did like three things, and I thought
that when I opened up my solo practice, I would
probably need to expand that to like six or seven in.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Different areas of the wall.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
And you know that some of those things, after a
little bit of time, I realized that I could cut
them out and I could get rid of them, and
I could then you know, focus more time on growing
the types of practice that I was really interested in
and also very experienced in. So I would say that,
(14:27):
you know, when you start a small practice, a solo practice,
you're going to be tempted to try and expand your
service offering, and you may even be tempted to say, okay, well,
I know. One of the things, at least that I
see in my social media feeds right now that is
getting pushed to me is that the state planning is
a practice that anybody could just pick up and start
(14:50):
and start a profitable law firm. At least that's how
it's advertised or marketed that. I don't think that's the case.
But if I had, you know, if you've never done
a state planning before, and you're going to start from
the beginning because you think it's going to be a
quick money maker or it's going to become a revenue
stream quickly for you, I don't think that's necessarily. You know,
(15:13):
you're still going to have to have all that ramp
up time to learn how to do it, and to
find the clients and and and and you know. So
that's I think that's the the tendency is to have
this fear that you need to be make a much
broader service offering, maybe not geographically, but you know, just
(15:34):
based on the types of legal services that you're going
to offer, become more of a generalist, for example. But
I've found that it's been better for me to just
try and stay within my niche and and and just
promote that and build that. When I published my first book,
I had never heard of the it's called the Entrepreneurship
(15:56):
through Acquisition ecosystem or community. I had never heard of
this concept. And the University of Illinois picked up my
book to be used in their Entrepreneurship through Acquisition class.
And when the professor contacted me and said, hey, you know,
would you be okay with us using your book in
(16:17):
our class? I was like, yeah, but you got to
tell me what ETA is. You got to tell me
what entret And this was seven years ago, and so
as he explained it, I realized that that was a
community that I didn't know existed, and it was a
community that was interested in my book. And so we then,
you know, geared a lot of our messaging toward that
(16:39):
community for a number of years, and that was our
opportunity and we jumped on it.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
You have helped people start businesses, and one of the
things that you stress a lot is building a support team.
Can you explain that process.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Well, I think that a lot of us who start
businesses have a tendency to feel confident enough to do
everything ourselves, and that may just be built into our personalities.
I certainly feel that way myself.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
I've become kind of almost a.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Jack of all trades as far as setting up, especially
when I started my business. You know, I thought, well,
if I don't know what, I can learn it and
I can do it. And so some of the people
that I added to my team very early on, I
added a CPA that was probably my first person that
(17:30):
I called in was a CPA, because I realized I
didn't know that I had to make all these tax
filings every month and every quarter and every year, and
make all these payroll tax payments and things like that.
And so I found a CPA who was very like
(17:50):
flexible in the way that she worked with her clients.
And so I just called her up and said, Hey,
can I buy two hours of your time come to
my office a list of like fifty questions I want
to ask you?
Speaker 2 (18:03):
And she was great. We did that.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
She taught me some things, but then I realized that
there were things that I could turn over to her
and pay her to do those things, and it would
be I'd be making money because I could, you know,
bill more for my time than I was paying her
for her time. And so a CPA was my first ad.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I think.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
I mean, when I first started, I had I hired
my own web designer and that went really well. He
helped me. He was also a commercial photographer, so we
did a photo shoot for my website. And we also,
I mean this is years ago, so we had print
brochures because we had print brochures at the big law firm,
so I thought, I need print brochures for my small
(18:48):
law firm too, so we did that. Since then, actually,
my wife has been I mean, in the time that
our practice has been open, my wife has gone back
to school and gotten a degree in marketing, and she's
my marketing She's sitting in the next room listening to
me to make sure I'm doing okay.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
But she has been wonderful.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
I've learned so much from her, and she handles a
lot of the marketing side. So I think it's important
to have a marketing person on your team, and they
can have different roles. One of the biggest roles that
Jennifer plays with me is that she's a sounding board
for me. So I have lots of ideas and then
(19:32):
she can take her education in marketing and help me
refine those ideas. And then also sometimes I mean we
have we do these kind of informal morning walks and
a lot of times we talk marketing while we walk.
And one of the mantras I guess is that I
remind her to keep telling me is don't do don't
(19:55):
do anything drastic, you know, don't I always have like,
let's do something really big, let's try something big, and
then she helps me scale it back down. But I think,
I think marketing is really significant to have somebody on
your team who can help you with generating marketing ideas
and then also executing them as well.
Speaker 4 (20:17):
What would your advice be to a lawyer who's just
starting out and has a marketing budget.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
What I've seen is that it's an attention economy, and
it's hard for somebody who is small and has a
small budget to buy enough attention because you're competing with
people who have a lot bigger budget. And so I
think it's good to try two or three things at
a time where you can try and build or attract
(20:43):
some of that attention to you, and that may be
you know, for us, for example, I'm not on a
lot of I'm on social media, but I'm not promoting
my practice on a lot of different channels. I think
there's this tendency just kind of this fear of missing
out and you feel like you have to be everywhere,
and in my experience, that becomes very overwhelming, not just
(21:05):
from a you know, a dollar budget perspective, but also
from a time budget perspective as well. And so we've
tried to pick and choose the things, like you say,
We've tested a few things. We found that LinkedIn works
really well for us because a lot of the people
who are listening to us or who want to hear
from us are on LinkedIn, and that's where they go
(21:27):
to to find, you know, information or to engage in
conversations and things like that. Books have been great for us,
and we use we we kind of repurpose the books
by using excerpts to create content for a blog, you know,
a blog on my website. And I'm testing right now substack.
Substack is a new thing that I'm I'm looking at
(21:50):
and we're going to test it in a couple of
different ways, but it's fun.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
It's what we do.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
I write a lot, and so that works really well
for me. And then podcasting, I mean, frankly, we have
had ideas about launching our own podcasts, but we found
that we really enjoy being on other people's podcasts and
providing information that way. And I think, you know, for
(22:16):
the first book, I think I've been on about twelve
or fourteen different podcasts about small business merger and acquisition work,
and it's been a lot of fun, and it's been
it's helped me get, you know, grab that attention, and
it doesn't cost me hard.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
You know, I don't pay to be on.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
A lot of podcasts or anything, so it's the budget
from a dollar perspective is very low.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
You seem to be really open to new things. Do
you just come across something new and say, this is
something new, I'm going to learn it.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
I Well, I'm fortunate because I kind of have a
built in support group. I have my wife, but I
also have a my youngest son, and I have four
sons who are They're all adults and they all are
in different professions, but I bounce a lot of ideas
off of them. Substack For example, one Sunday evening, I
(23:09):
was with my youngest son, he's twenty two, he's a videographer,
and he I said, you know, it would be really
cool if I could find I have I've been writing
a lot, and it would be really cool if I
could find some sort of a platform where I could
serialize my writing. And he said, oh, you want a
substack And I was like, I've never I mean, I
(23:31):
think I've heard that term. I've heard about it, so yeah,
I just I'm a very curious person. So I just
looked into substack and got myself an account and started
poking around and setting things up and watching some YouTube videos.
There's plenty of, you know, information out there to kind.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
Of teach yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
But that's kind of a lot of our ideas spring
from the questions that.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
We ask ourselves about.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
You know, here's a I mean another interestingly, another question
that we had asked ourselves was how do we with
all the work and the inquiries we're getting from the
first book? Is there a way is there a platform
for us to refer those people out to other lawyers
(24:19):
across the country. Last week I came across overture and
I then listened to the podcast episode that you guys
did with them, and you know we're going to be
talking Wednesday, So I'm like, you know a lot of that. Yes,
I'm a very curious person, and I'm also a person
that I think asks a lot of questions to myself
(24:41):
and looks at things from the perspective of, you know,
how can I frame the issue or the challenge, and
then once I frame it, how can I find the answer?
And how can I learn about it? And a lot
of times You're right, I do try and take a
lot on myself. That's a perhaps a weakness that I have.
But other times I'll look to you know, I have
(25:03):
a couple of sons. I have one son who's very
good at audio editing and he audits a podcast for me,
and he's going to audit or edit my audio book
for the next book.
Speaker 2 (25:16):
My wife helps me.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
I have my son, the other son, who's a videographer,
so I've learned to kind of get them involved as
well instead of trying to learn everything myself. There's no
way I want to learn how to use Adobe Premiere
Pro to edit video. I mean, it's really fascinating, but
I'm better at practicing law.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
Well, Joel, we're just about out of time. I'd like
to thank you for the time he spent with me.
Are there any parting words or books coming out that
you can point our listeners towards.
Speaker 1 (25:47):
Well, we got in touch because I just published a
book a couple of weeks ago called Raincatcher, And it's
really it's not a how to market your law practice.
That's really not what it is is. It's a book
about experiences that I've had over the last thirty thirty
plus years about marketing my services. It's really more of
(26:09):
a memoir approach to say, you know, here are things
that I've tried, and here's what the results have been
for me. And there's some themes in there and stuff.
So we're really excited about that, and that's the latest
book that we've published. We're not sure, like what's going
to happen with the book. It's not a book that's
(26:31):
going to bring me more legal work, I don't think.
But it was a book that I felt that I
really wanted to write to share the experiences that I've
had and hopefully give people maybe some hope or some
tips or some ideas or that will help them along
the way.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Any email or website you would like to point people towards.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
They can find me by just typing my name in
Joel Ankney dot com and it'll take them right to
my law firm website and all my contact information is there.
But they can reach me on LinkedIn too. I'm very
active on LinkedIn and if they have a pretty unique name,
so if you just type it in, I should pop up.
Speaker 4 (27:13):
Sounds good, Joel, thanks for the time.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Thank you, it was a pleasure.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Thanks for listening to the Legal Mastermind podcast, presented by
Market my Market. You can check out additional episodes and
recaps at Legalmastermind podcast dot com.
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