I picked up a book about law firms. A few pages in, I started wondering who was answering our phones. A personal injury firm spent $100,000 on leads and signed 5 cases. Six hundred leads. Five. The owner blamed the marketing company. The marketing company was owned by Angelo Perone, so Perone made him an offer on that Zoom call. Give me your intake for thirty days, free. Same ads, same budget, same leads from the same sources. If you're unhappy at the end, I'll refund the hundred grand out of my own pocket. Then he staffed the phones with twenty-year-old door-to-door pest control salesmen from Philadelphia. Kids who couldn't define liability. Seven days of intense specialized training. The Pest Control Salesmen closed Fifty-seven cases! The marketing was never the problem. The problem had been sitting in the office the whole time. I don't own a law firm and never will. I read Perone's book, The Best Attorney Never Wins, and found the same common problems in all businesses. Marketing and sales are what make the cash register ring. Nothing else does. The product still has to be good, because word of mouth is the one channel you don't control and it runs both directions. Here are nine of my favorite ideas from the book. 1. Being excellent at the craft is about 20% of the job. Law school teaches law. It doesn't teach acquisition, systems, or payroll. 2. The hard part isn't learning the new skills. It's putting down the one you trained for. 3. The leak is rarely where you're looking. Owners obsess over the top of the funnel because it's visible and it's fun. The money runs out lower down, in a conversation that goes unrecorded, handled by staff who got less training than the receptionist. 4. It’s not close per lead that matters. $50 leads you can't close cost more than $500 leads you can. His clients pay $2,000 to $4,000 a case against an $18,000 average fee, and they wire him millions a month to keep it coming. 5. If you have to look up your CAC, you're already losing. The people winning rattle it off like their own birthday. 6. Your ads are about you and that's the problem. Arms crossed, courthouse, "$100 million recovered." Your buyer is on the couch doing math on rent. Talk to them. 7. Sixty seconds. Call inside a minute and you're 81% more likely to convert, by his numbers. Wait thirty and they've already talked to three competitors. 8. "Send it over and I'll take a look" means "I don't trust you yet." About a quarter come back. Handle the objections live and close while they're still on the phone. 9. Document the process, hire by test instead of resume, then get out of the way. Every hat you wear comes off your multiple. Your enterprise value is a function of how irrelevant you are to the business. It’s a quick read. Two hours, and it's written for an industry that isn't yours, which is exactly why it works. You'll see your own operation with your defenses down.