Times of crisis are either an excuse to shut down — or an opportunity to step up. Ken Peck of The Peck Law Firm is taking the opportunity to give more to his audience, provide more value to his clients, and improve efficiency in his team.
Check out Ken’s full conversation with Crisp Founder & CEO Michael Mogill in the latest installment of Leading Through Adversity:
4:05 – Economic disaster. We’re facing an economic disaster, not a health disaster. If you look at the latest numbers from the CDC, they reflect that in the current flu season, roughly 52 million people have been afflicted by the flu in the United States and as many as 62,000 may have died. When you look at those numbers compared to the numbers now, the flu has been the health disaster of the United States this year, and it’s getting no coverage. Our economy was functioning quite well with that degree of illness in our society. I speak as someone who is the poster child for this illness, not only at my age, but I have asthma. I’ve had a history of having the flu and pneumonia two years ago.
5:59 – ABC of opportunities. I summarized it as ABC to make it simple. We need to Affirm our relationship with our existing customers, our vendors and our relationship with our employees to give them a sense of direction that we know what we’re doing. We also need to take this time to Build our networks that include people who are sitting at home and lawyer networks by sending a variety of pieces of information to them. We’re going to implement about a three or four-part, maybe a five-part emailing plan to a list of 300 mental health professionals to try to become the authority in our community for mental health related issues that arise and result in divorce or other family law problems.We also need to Convert. We need to convert the mindset of people to thrive instead of looking around to survive.
8:22 – Initiate never react. We always look and live by a basic principle: initiate, never react. We’re trying to come up with initiatives and innovative ways to do business. For example, my firm may have been the first one in this city of Charleston to start implementing settlement conferences via Zoom. There’s a variety of other ways that we’re trying to innovate. Our marketing certainly is different. We’ve found that you can’t swim against the raging river, so we’re shifting our marketing focus to realize that the only thing people are interested in reading right now is something related to coronavirus. So we’re posting articles at each of our various social outlets as well as our website and through email. We’ve become a source of information on coronavirus as it applies to family law.
11:44 – Restrictions on Google and Facebook. We’ve encountered a problem that Google and Facebook are placing on content, whether it be an ad or any content that’s published. Google, for example, has a policy right now that they filter and bump out any attempt to put a Google ad up that mentions coronavirus or any variant of that term. We’re trying to find a way to work around that to get up ads that would relate to that topic. Facebook, we’re seeing some similar sorts of problems, although the volume of impressions that people are seeing with Facebook has shot through the roof.
15:27 – Thriving mentality. We look at what people are interested in and how we can serve that need, instead of looking at a survival mentality, we need to look at a thriving mentality. That’s what we’re doing right now. We’re looking at our typical customer and trying to develop different marketing schemes now and in the future that will appeal to that audience. At the same time, internally, we’re looking at different ways to make our operations even more high tech and more efficient.
16:20 – Two theories. There’s two theories of what’s going to happen with family law. Theory number one is that the divorce rates and family law cases are going to nosedive as they have in the United States with prior recession. The other theory is the Chinese theory, that they’re going to skyrocket as apparently they have in China. I’m inclined to believe in the skyrocket theory for this reason. This is going to be a short-term economic crisis. It’s going to be brutal. The latest estimate is 10 million people already unemployed. But it’s going to be a two-month brutality instead of an 18-month to three-year brutality.
If you agree or disagree with anything said here, Michael wants to hear about it. Text him at 404-531-7691 to let him know.
