Shamil Shamilov Talks About SEO Process & Repairing Bad Reputation

Thank you. Thank you. Pleasure’s mine.

Very open ended question. But I mean, at one point or another, I was studying political science in university and I was dreaming of a job as a diplomat. And I went abroad. I went to Dublin, actually to Ireland and I did a master’s degree in international conflict studies and terrorism studies. When I came back, I was very idealistic about going to that master’s program. When I came back, I became a realist and I realized, I don’t want to work in anything government related or NGOs. What I thought would be really cool is to be an account manager. I didn’t think of it as a career, what you want to get into. It’s tech or engineering or finance. I thought about, what do I want my day to day to be? And I feel that’s the most important thing because you could be in any field doing pretty much the same thing. And I wanted to be an account manager. And it’s funny enough, I actually moved to Moscow for three months to work for a business development consultancy right after my master’s degree. I wasn’t a big fan. A lot of bureaucracy, paper pushing, emails back and forth. It’s like an office job.
Then I came back to Canada and I lived in Ottawa at the time and I moved to Toronto. A friend of mine introduced me to my then boss and he had a digital marketing agency in Toronto. I joined him in a very aggressive sales position, I would say. This was 12 years ago. I’m talking about a room with no windows, a phone and a yellow page book convincing people to get on Google at the time. And in a year, he made me a partner. So, I started selling. I started selling aggressively. I started maintaining and managing campaigns. We had a very similar structure where the consultant or the sales guy was the same guy as the project manager. And then we had the development staff, so he would be responsible for clients happiness, upsell, and so on. And at the time, people were selling different products. SEO was just, I want to say, starting out as a product to sell on a regular basis. So, it was all more about paid search at the time. And I mean, the industry has evolved ever since. But we did it all. We ranked actually for three years for Web Design and SEO in Toronto in the first position, and we had about 30, 40 people working for us.
I started from consulting to hiring, managing other people and evolved that way. And about four years ago, he and I split ways due to personal circumstances, I guess, on both our sides. And now we are where we are. It’s funny because as we grew the company, we did a lot of… We have clients in virtually every field, from education. I had a huge tutoring franchise that’s nationwide as a client to developers and builders, to lawyers and hair transplant technicians and in vitro fertilization clinics. But he took on the medical side, and it just happened that way. Started working with a lot of lawyers. When we split, it was like a mutually agreed upon, I guess, consensus that I didn’t approach any of his plastic surgeons and stuff at the time. Then he let my… I had a bunch of lawyers I work with. We split. We do have some medical clients to this day, but we’re really trying to focus on legal search engine optimization, web designs for lawyers and so on and so forth.

When he and I split, I would say lawyers were 30 % of my business because the other 70 % were just so spread out, I couldn’t really group them into one category. Now lawyers are probably 60 % of our business. But having said that, we do a lot of home improvement to this day, but we just don’t market. It’s all word of mouth referral. These clients have been with us for a long, long time. To put things in perspective, Mike Holmes, he’s a TV personality. I built him four websites and we still do work for him. It’s almost been eight years since we’ve been working with him. We don’t advertise to take on those clients. We solely focus on lawyers, as you mentioned, and we’ve significantly widened our grasp of what type of lawyers we work with and across which vertices, meaning so both geographically and in terms of specialization. So, I would say we want to focus in that direction and keep going in that direction. Having said that, home improvement is still a significant part of our business. It’s just we don’t advertise or spend any effort chasing those clients.

I think you realize that you can’t please every client, and I feel it’s a lot easier to market in a specific niche because you have some competitive advantages. It’s pretty basic, but in reality, it’s your portfolio. It’s who you work with. I found that a lot of the new digital marketing agencies, and there’s a younger generation always coming up in this, it’s a pretty young industry overall. It’s rare that you see somebody who’s… Starting an agency. It’s usually young people, and they take it all. And I feel like a lot of the contractors, for example, and again, a lot of other industries, they are price shopping sometimes or quality shopping. Where I find that if you go into medical or legal, they want something in someone who’s reputable, who has a portfolio, who has experience, somebody a bit more mature and seasoned. And most importantly, they look out for an agency who specializes in their niche. Because in every niche, if you’re doing home improvement and construction, it’s broad and it fits. Everybody could do it, arguably. I mean, if you’re working with, for example, medical or legal, in my experience, they expect you to specialize in their industry because for medical, it’s a lot of terminology.
Content writing demands specific writers, and you have to know your terminology, both medically and it has to be marketing enough. Same with the law and legal. You’re dealing with different directories, different associations, and content requirements. Content requirements, they range tremendously from state to state as well. Not just jurisdiction. You could say certain things in one state, but you cannot say the same things. When a client engages you the first time and he realizes your knowledge of the industry puts him at ease. For somebody who’s just like… In Canada, for example, cannabis is a huge thing. When cannabis came around, everybody jumped on cannabis. Now it’s crypto. Now it’s actually gambling. Because we… Even Canada legalized online gambling recently. There’s these waves of guys who are trying to chase a niche where law has been established. Again, maybe it’s my academic background, having a master’s degree, or I just seem to get along with lawyers. Two of my siblings are lawyers. My sister came up with the name of the company, arguably speaking. It was a perfect fit, I would say.

You mean what we offer?

The industry changes. And I remember how in the beginning it was web design and got me on Google. People had no idea about distinctions. Nowadays clients are so educated. And as you mentioned, I have friends that work with lawyers and engineering firms, but they pivot towards branding. They will do your website, they’ll do your letterheads, your business cards, they’ll think about your slogans. We at dNOVO, I say it, we only have one product, and that product is to make your phone ring or to get your leads. And however we do it is totally like we have all the tools in place to accomplish that. But it’s not that we specifically offer one product. Out of all our clients, I have only one gentleman who we run paid search only. And he’s a lawyer and he told me, he’s like, Shamil, I’m a couple of years from retirement. I’m not necessarily interested in growing up and blowing up my practice. I want to maintain, I guess, a particular volume of files and that’s about it. But for the rest of our clients, we take a 360 approach. So sometimes, and I encourage it, we design new sites for clients, and we start with the planning, branding, web design.
Obviously, SEO and content planning, content strategy. We work with local map optimization. Reputation is key for lawyers. I would argue to you that it’s more difficult in some of the legal niches than others. But as a rule of thumb, I say to all my clients that we really have one product. And it really then depends on what the client wants, what their situation is, and then certain aspects become more important. Also depends on the size of the firm. You have two locations, you have 10 locations across the country or more, how many lawyers you have, how large is your marketing department? Some people operate five partners. They have maybe an office manager, a couple of legal assistants, very legal, this, that. But other firms have a whole marketing department who you can cooperate with and work with. And they have slightly different requirements, I guess. Each client is absolutely unique. I will say this, it is important to understand where they are in their growth cycle of a law firm, to understand their needs. I’m just saying it out there, some lawyers are very old school and very ethical, very by the book. They care so much about their appearance.
And I would say most of them do, but some care more. How the wording is, what perception people get. There are other industries that are a lot more competitive. And I don’t want to say people have gray areas because we work with clients who are ethically maintained to a certain level, but they’re more open minded and more aggressive in their marketing efforts. And I guess you could probably extrapolate that. Personal injury, for example, is an industry like you’ll see them on billboards on the highways. They’re more open minded to traditional advertising, to more aggressive advertising where a mergers and acquisitions lawyer or a boutique litigation firm would have a completely different perception and what they’re after. We cater to both those niches.

I have a client, he’s a few years older than me, a very successful businessman. He’s a friend of mine. He’s not a lawyer. He’s actually in the construction field. He told me, he’s like, I tell my staff that… He employs over 100 people. He says, I tell my staff that we’re not in the business of construction or home improvement. We’re in the business of customer service. The way we build the novel is at the end of the day, computer related and marketing related stuff for most senior lawyers and partners at the firm is something that’s annoying. It’s a problem, but at the same time they want to address it and they want to have good marketing. But it frustrates them. Technology, generally speaking, frustrates people because it constantly changes. So, I find that we’re in the business of not only marketing, but customer service, whether it is addressing your reputation concerns, making sure you have quick changes on your website, or growing your business, we bring the value proposition. I don’t position myself as an SEO agency who’s going to go from A to B and do these services. We position ourselves as a turnkey partner.
Anything related to your digital, we would solve, address, and if we’re incapable to address it, we will find how to do it. No matter what. I tell my clients now we’re doing A, B, C, fixing your website, doing SEO, doing paid search. I said in six months, we might have other concerns. We do video production as well. So, we have a broad scope of services we offer. So, whatever it is, we’re here for you, that thing.

You’re going to laugh. Internally, we use project management. We tried several ones and I find Trello works the best. Simply because internal onboarding is simple. It’s a robust enough platform where you could make it do different things. There are better tools out there, but they’re more specific and I find that they’re more niche. The difference is that in a digital marketing agency, I have to make a developer coordinate and work with a graphic designer, web designer, and a social media person. And I would argue to you that all of them use different personalities, different ways of thinking, completely different people. When you’re working with coders and you’re building something, it’s very techy. When you’re working with more creative people, they’re different. And you have to combine all that, make it robust enough and easy enough to use. Trello is excellent for us. As far as our clients, we use group chats. We particularly use WhatsApp groups. I know it’s very simplistic, but we tried several times to make a client utilize a platform where they could see the progress, they could see the task, they could see the reporting, and it frustrates them. We took a look at the data, nobody ever… I’m talking specifically about lawyers. You have guys that are heads of marketing in a law firm that could utilize it and use the platform, but they’re so rare because most of the time they know how to use it. They have the access, but they’ll shoot you an email, you know what I mean? And then they’ll text you. So, it’s so fundamentally basic at the levels of communication.
People don’t remember. And I feel like the challenge with all these tools is, if you work and use them internally, you can implement them, right? Because you could tell your staff to use them. You can do training and encourage it. And if you’re working with clients, it has to be convenient for them. I’ll give you an example, like Slack. I love Slack. Good luck having a partner or decision maker at a law firm use Slack. It’s not going to happen. So, it has to be convenient for them. And usually we work within a chat. Obviously, we send monthly reports and we’re always available. We do consultations with the clients on Zoom calls or in person. But for their immediate response, I find WhatsApp works the best. I would say 85 % to 90 % of our clients have the app. I’ll create a group. And you know what I found? Very often they will think that they need something and it will be during the off times. It’ll be either early morning because a lot of lawyers get up early in the morning or it’ll be on the weekend or after hours. And they are not necessarily in front of their computer or they don’t want to type an email on their phone, but they want to remember it.
So, what they do is they’ll send us a message in the team chat, you know what I mean? And somebody will address it, respond to it. And I have all the different departments in there. So, if it’s related to paid search or reputation or graphic design or the project manager, there’s somebody there to address it all the time. And I find that that’s the pillar of our success because it ties into that customer service aspect you and I just spoke of. As far as onboarding, it starts with a consultation. It takes some time to build trust, to do reporting. Nine times out of ten, I get the question asked, What are your packages? What is your pricing? Send it to us. And before, for years, we did something like that. I blatantly refused to do that now, he said, because I said that your boutique, you’re unique. For me to send you packages, it’s disrespectful and disservice to your firm. I said, what I can do is I can spend some time and analyze and build you a game plan of what… But then I’ll present that game plan to you over Zoom consultation. This is what I would do if I was running the marketing of your law firm.
I feel that people respond to that really well. We built a boutique custom program, and I asked them onboarding questions. How many team members? How aggressively do they want to go? Some law firms prefer slow organic growth. Some of them want leads tomorrow. You know what I mean? So, it really depends on a lot of factors.

It’s a really good question. Ever since I started in this industry over a decade ago, it’s been changing. In the beginning, it was all about templates. Then because it’s easy, the cost of the client is low, and as the SEO game was evolving and changing, things like speed, speed, things like updates came into effect. So, you started developing these themes which evolved into builders. And now you can have a theme that’s working in conjunction with the builder. I’m talking about WordPress right now. So, we went from Divi eight years ago to Elementor. To now, we only build custom WordPress sites. The Core Web Vitals changed the game. Our own website, it was initially designed on Divi years ago, then we moved it to Elementor. Now it’s completely custom fields, custom coded. And it’s also how you approach the design. The problem with the theme, in my opinion, is that you need a person that will work right away on the theme. And to find that staff is a lot more difficult. Meaning that because you don’t get to use… You could usher a design and make the back end work on a theme, but one of the selling pitches that we used to utilize while selling a theme based or builder based website is that instead of drawing it and then slicing it or designing it and slicing it, you could see as the website is evolving and as I’m changing things live.
The clients would get a link in the early stages and then we see as the process goes. But it was an advantage if you had the right staff that could do that. But you and I know that most of the people are either designers or developers. And throughout the years, I’ve had some phenomenal designers who were trained coders, usually, with the design sense, which is a rarity. They’re like the unicorns because most people are either technical or creative. Nowadays, because of Core Web Vitals and the speed requirements, we prefer to work with… I’m talking about the last three, four years, we only built custom WordPress sites. And one of the biggest advantages is also less maintenance in my experience. Theme builders, templates, I hate that word, but they all require updates. They require maintenance, plug-ins could be heavy, they need updates. With a custom site, it requires a bit more work and maintenance, but if you have the right infrastructures, arguably better for you.

Of course. It’s a really relevant question. You’re right. When the industry was dealing in preferring themes and templates, they were all responsive. But you and I know that they are until they’re not. And there is too much content displayed. So, when you design a site on a Figma or whatever you use nowadays, we design it in mobile as well as the desktop version right away. So, we would show the client which content would be displayed on mobile and how it would look right away. Again, it comes to the niche factor. If you’re in the crypto or tech space or even real estate, I would say that the client will be more aware of the needs of mobile, where a lot of the legal professionals know they have to be mobile friendly. Mobile is important, but they don’t really grasp the concept. They don’t know the statistics behind it. You and I just mentioned it, 50 plus at this point % of searches on a mobile. So, they know it’s important, but they don’t really know what it entails. And most people don’t realize that you could display different content on a mobile device than you would on a desktop version.
As part of our onboarding, we do a lot to educate. We show them the statistics and we focus. Learning is everything. When I tell my clients, when we get technical and we give specific advice, if you’re unaware, it seems odd to you. But if you understand why it’s happening, I tell all my clients, I say in six months, you’re going to be a digital marketing expert. You’re going to learn things that you haven’t learned before. A lot of them have that approach that, Oh, I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to… You just do it and that’s it, that’s all. But unfortunately, for them to see value, you have to educate. And I find that a lot of people don’t bother. It’s a lot easier to just say, Yeah, don’t worry about it, I’ll do it. They don’t explain it. But then that creates conflicts later on. Why is my thing like this and not like that? Then it’s too late to explain to them because you haven’t held their hand along the way. I find that it’s that partnership. Not only do you take care of their technical needs, but you also earn their trust and you don’t disappoint.
It’s Google, it’s a search engine, and there’s Google updates and it’s technology. Things break all the time. Whether hosting could be down, websites could get hacked. I feel like it’s the response and it’s how you respond to those challenges that really solidifies that relationship and establishes that trust and brings the relationship to the next level.

Listen, most of our clients are service based. So, whether they’re legal professionals or we do a lot of… We have educational clients, developers, builders, a lot of home improvement, but they’re all service based businesses. We have a couple of e-commerce clients as well, guys that offer both brick and mortar and e-commerce options. And obviously, we work with Shopify and we work with WooCommerce. Even at certain points in the development of the agency, we even work with Magento. But as you said, you have to specialize and pick your battles. You could need completely different staffing, licensing, hosting requirements. It’s more intense. I guess it’s lead oriented as well, but it’s a completely different focus. We do offer support and we work with Shopify intensely as well as WooCommerce. Other than that, we prefer to stick to our niche. We have clients right now who have websites on React and we do some work for them. But again, we want to pick our battles. Very strategic, right? Staffing, right? What are your core competencies? If I know that most of my clientele are sitting on a WordPress site and believe it or not, I don’t know if you heard of Scorpion, it’s an agency in the States.
They have a proprietary marketing platform and a system. Essentially, you log in and everything they do for you, like with analytics, they’re huge. And on one hand, it’s great for them and they have a lot of business. But I’ve had clients approach me saying that we don’t want to work with Scorpion because we’re tied into their system and their infrastructure. And I would argue to you, if Scorpion was as big as Shopify, where it’s a whole ecosystem and the whole world knows what it is, then people would, I guess, be open minded to be within that framework. But until you get to that point, I think you want to work with an open source platform where you could… I tell my clients tomorrow you and I, we don’t like each other anymore and you want to move on. You have all the tools. You’re not relying on my back end or my CMS system. You can go to anyone. I’m working for you because we choose to work with each other, not because I’m holding you hostage or you signed up or locked in for a year with our contract.

Exactly.

I have a theory, I have a theory why it’s happening. And I think it comes back to personality types. I think that if you’re an engineer, a great coder or developer, and I get this all the time, all the time. Like, Oh, my code is clean. His code is not. And I feel like if you build a great product and you have this great system, it’s absolutely, utterly useless unless you could market it, use it, and utilize it properly and convince clients and onboard clients to use it. And it comes back to the needs of your clients. Again, nothing against Scorpion. They’re doing fine and all the hats off to them because they’re one of the bigger ones. There’s many others, as you mentioned. But at the end of the day, an average client who, for example, heard of Google Analytics, would not necessarily want to use a proprietary one stop shop. It’d be a stepping stone for them to jump into that where they know that everything is arguably free and there’s this open source tool. And I find that we work for our clients, we service them, and it’s all about what they need and what they’re comfortable with.
To make somebody logged into a contract or to hold hostage their Google AdWords account, especially when you work with lawyers talking about suing each other. It’s a disaster. Listen, I believe in positivity and positive karma. We have clients, believe it or not. I had one recently. We’ve done work for them for about a year. Covid started and we’ve built up their organic presence to a very high level. They wrote a testimonial for us. We have a link on their website. But one of the partner’s husbands is a marketing consultant, and we worked with him while we worked on their SEO, and he runs their own paid search, and he’s very knowledgeable. He can put together some content and upload it on the website. And when COVID started, we parted ways. We still do favours for them here and there. We have a database that they utilize of subscriptions and associations that they’re part of. Recently, they gave us a referral. They haven’t been a paying client for two years, and they just gave us a referral because they might not need or have the need to spend money with us now. They’re in a very small niche in the legal field.
That’s how we operate. And I feel that if I am trying to help others and make it convenient for them, where a lot of developers or more technical oriented people, they think about, Oh, I’m going to host your website, or I’m going to run your adwords on my account type of thing. That’s not how we do things here, but it works for some. It’s definitely a business strategy. It’s a strategy to retain your clients. I don’t believe in it.

The trade secrets. It’s funny because when you work in the field for a long time, you have an update and then you have the speed and the mobile friendly and the mobile first. And then you have your Pandas and your Penguins. At the end of the day, it’s just like what you and I were talking about, philosophy. You do good with your clients, you do well for them, you don’t hijack their accounts or hold them hostage to you. You let them go if that’s the way to go. Call it Carbon. I find that with Google, in my opinion, it’s the same in my experience. It’s the same thing. What has changed in the last 10 years? I’m talking about once Google weed it out, all the gray hats and black hats. Build good content, build fast websites, build mobile friendly websites. Make sure you have engaging information on the website. Your social media, your videos definitely help. Has link building changed? Absolutely. It went from all kinds of black and gray SEO to PBMs being punished and to entire networks of websites getting penalized. A couple of years ago, was it the medical update where the medical websites got hit?
But at the end of the day, it goes up and down. And it comes back to my point, I make my clients realize early on that there is us and our expertise, and we’re really good at what we do, there’s them that instill their trust in us and work with us and trust us to not only maintain and update, but to make the money, to make sure that their phone rings, as I like to say. And then there is Google. I always use an example of all these hurricanes that come. We have craziest tools to predict the weather. We’re sending people into space, but then you’ll have a storm that nobody seems to inspect, and Mother Nature has the last laugh. So, I find that Google is like that. Unfortunately or not, we have competitors that do this all the time. They’ll overtake certain niches for six months, sometimes a year. You’ll see a website, who’s like two years old, just go up there with thousands of backlinks, very mechanical content. But is it engaging? Are they converting the traffic that they have into sales? And what client says they’re getting with that approach?
And they’re there today and they might not be there tomorrow. And I’ve seen it over and over again. I think it’s getting up every morning and having consistent effort to do the best you can for your clients website and SEO. Build good content, push social media. If a client is interested in video production, YouTube marketing, obviously your retargeting helps. Track your KPIs, track your deliverables, try to lower your cost of client acquisition, and natural organic growth. I always say it’s a long term game. And clients appreciate it now. Ten years ago, they weren’t. It’s all about who can get me up there. People didn’t know what penalties were and Google bans. But I guess it’s a good thing. The client is a lot more educated, so you can really separate a good sales guy versus somebody who actually delivers and has a good product. The fly by night tactics, they still work, some of them, but your clientele becomes more and more educated and they’re looking for a partner they could trust and work with for a long time. And it’s just like the stock market. I recently played in the stock market, and if you continuously invest long term, the market always goes up and it’s very difficult to beat the market.
I would argue, probably impossible for 95 % of the people. It’s the same thing with SEO. You could try to be smarter than everybody else, but there’s a chance that it’s going to only last for a particular time.

In the medical field, there’s a term called practice management. It refers to their consultants who help doctors run successful businesses. And it’s not commonly used in the legal profession. I mean, there are professional consultants and business coaches, but it’s not really referred to as practice management. But I would argue to you that part of our offering to the client is that for any business. And where most people when they do the onboarding of the client, they talk about how old is your website, how many people you have. I focus more on where you are in your professional development, both budget wise, where do you see yourself now in six months, in a year, in five years? I always ask, what’s your logistical infrastructure look like? People first were shocked by that question. I said to them, Are you working by yourself? You’re just starting out. You have one assistant. Are you guys two lawyers? You’re swamped. We have law firms that have marketing departments that we work with. Our work there is a bit more looking a lot more like a consultant where we create the plan, we do the link building, we do certain things, but certain things are done in-house.
We teach, educate, and instruct their team how to do it because they have a team. Some other clients, they’re like, No, I need you to take care of everything. Some people are aligned and they have their own traditional media guys. Their graphical stuff is done. Even web changes or their IT support is done, obviously, by somebody else. Same with social media. For lawyers, social media, in my opinion, a litigation lawyer or a corporate lawyer would need social media for appearance. You want to make sure it’s relevant, you update it regularly. You can run some branding campaigns on it. Is a CEO of another company going to call you about a merger and acquisition because you saw your ad on Instagram or Facebook? Not very likely. But if you are a respected firm, when people research you and look at your website, they often go and look at your social media and look at your overall presence. So, it’s very important. If you’re dealing with immigration or personal injury law, I would argue to you that social media plays a bit more aggressive and strategic role in those vertices. They advertise a lot heavier. It really depends on the niche, the logistical capabilities, and financial capabilities.
And some people are like, Listen, we’re swamped, we’re busy as is, but we want the trickle down effect. We want new business to come in from the Internet. What I’m hinting at is they might not necessarily be interested in paid search solutions. There is a consensus in the industry that, and I’m sure you heard of that, that for professional services, I’m talking about your trust is involved, lawyers, doctors, organic search leads are of better quality than paid search leads. It’s not necessarily true all the time, but that’s the consensus. And again, because lawyers… I mean, generations are changing, but the majority of the decision makers are more seasoned individuals. They tell me themselves, right? I never click on the paid search. It’s all about organic cost. So, we try to align their vision of their law firm. It’s very difficult to take somebody who’s 65, who has a 35 year career in law, who’s sitting on boards and advisory boards, and who’s like, creme de la creme of a particular, he’s known in the industry. It’s difficult to convince him to run a social media tacky marketing campaign. He won’t have it. It’s aligning division, I would say to you, is the first thing.
Man, clients are so different from one to another. Both mentality, too, West Coast law firms versus Chicago based law firms have different values, different visions, and different types of business ethics and how aggressively they do marketing or not.

You’re going to laugh, but I think the first step is to make sure that the client realizes the detriments of a negative reputation. Some of them realize it because they’ve had a bad experience and that’s why part of the services we provide is to fix it. But some of them don’t. I feel like to have the right mechanisms within the firm, we’re going back to practice management to avoid angry, unhappy clients and to do everything in our power not to allow this to happen again is to catch it early on and to reach out and try to alleviate the potential negative review or negative, even worse article on some publication about you. And I think that’s number one, because you and I know we can do all the greatest marketing, but somebody doesn’t pick up their phone or they provide bad service or they don’t get back to you. It’s just a Pandora’s box for negative reviews and bad feedback. So, that’s number one. Number two is we try to be proactive, meaning that you would do review generating campaigns, like outreach campaigns on several vertices and several clients to make sure we dominate the first page of our brand searches.
So, when somebody looks us up, we don’t have to… What’s the word I’m looking for? We don’t have to repair it. If you have all the right reputation and you have your five stars and positive reviews, it’s a lot harder to ruin it, right? Because one negative review might not necessarily be as detrimental. Where if somebody neglected their reputation, yeah, they have some positive reviews. And then somebody goes in on, arguably speaking, yells and puts a one star. All of a sudden it’s just very apparent and it causes grief. That would be the second step is to make sure that we… The first step was to make sure that we respond and we’re responsive and we don’t get negative reviews on the client side, the second one to have a strong positive presence that even one or two or three negative reviews would not really slant things in our favour. And then sometimes it is pushing down those negative reviews and those websites, reaching out to clients or webmasters asking to remove the reviews because a lot of them are unreasonable. It’s very rare that out of the 10 negative reviews, I would argue with you that at least five are either fake or people don’t leave their name or it might be competition.
They’re not really… Or even if they are real, they are real, not based on the service, but based on experience. I called them, nobody called me back. You never engage them. You never did business with them. They never served you. And it happened to me. I had a client on the phone, a lady who was… I remember this like it was yesterday. She did personal training, some very sophisticated… And she was asking for a quote on the website. And I gave her the broad spectrum and said, What do you want on that website? And she started talking about booking softwares and client reminders and outreaches and integrating it with this API and that API. And I gave her a broad spectrum. I said that in the industry, it could go from here to there. I literally spent 40 minutes on the phone and I was not trying to be condescending or I was trying to be educational. I said that maybe we’d started this and then we would build it up because from what I gathered, she was just starting her business. She hung up the phone with me and wrote a review on our website.
This is the old company that I was in when I had a partner that I implied or she felt that I implied that she has no money. This is a cold call. I spent 40 minutes of our time. We got really specific. I showed her samples, and we started discussing. And I was so appalled. I picked up the phone and I said it wasn’t my intention whatsoever. I’m so sorry that you took me that way. And she said, Well, that’s how I felt. And she hung up the phone on me. She was mean. What I learned that day is that you can’t please everyone. And some people are just crazy. And I never did business with her. Most people, they take 24 hours to respond to emails if that. I, arguably speaking, was one of the executives of the company that spent 40 minutes trying to provide her advice, and this is what I got. So just imagine, it was a growing experience for me, but I’m in space, I know how it works. Sometimes clients get this negative review, they’re furious and they start, you know, the first reaction. I don’t even know this person.
How could they? They get angry. How can I sue them? What can I do? And I tell them that you can’t avoid it. It’s going to happen. But it’s like overall philosophy and positivity. You don’t let this thing stick on you. You smile, you shake it off, right? And you please 10 other clients that you get 10 other positive reviews from. Because dwelling on it, in my experience, you reply to the review, they’ll go write three more. You’ll flag the review, let’s say you get it removed. If they’re angry enough, they’ll ask half their family members or their colleagues or their friends to write more negative reviews. It’s a downward negative spiral. Stay positive, do good work, and do proper reputation management.

Let’s do it.

In my life or in any time zone?
1970s.

I’m a political science major. Right after the Vietnam War, ’60s, era of love. I find that for me personally, it was a very interesting political turmoil era. Socialist movements in Europe, completely different Europe, different North America, the American dream. So, I thought it’d be a cool period to live in.

Talking, definitely talking.

That’s a tough one. What motivates you to get out of bed? I think we all set goals and our goals, and our goals. If we’re younger, they’re more materialistic. Arguably, I want to be successful. I want to provide for my family. Now, there are more accomplishment based and value based. You want to occupy a certain niche. You want to do certain things. I guess it’s a philosophy. I’m a big proponent of the miracle morning. It’s a book that I actually recommended to a client. I read it and it’s all about doing the things that are good for you, like affirmation, meditation, exercise, reading, jotting down your ideas, but do it all in the morning. And that way it’s like a routine that sets you up positively on your day. And also I’m a lot more driven now by having the flexibility to not only grow the business, but know that I provide and I employ X people and their livelihoods and their growth and their development. It relies on me and arguably success. And it’s a feeling of satisfaction. Very important with who you work with, the team, to make sure that you move forward as a team.

We do some work south of the border already. I’m talking about the United States, but I’ve been a member of the Lawyer Marketing Association. It’s a North American organization and I’ve been to a number of conferences, Florida, Texas, San Francisco. I’m planning to spend more time south of the border to set up a physical office in Florida and to, I guess, expand that way because when I started the Novel, I can’t say I started it because I already had a large pipeline of clients and staff. It was rebranding, if anything. We have clients in a large portion of Canada and a couple of states in the states. Now we cover Canada Coast to Coast. We have clients in every province. I think that’s the next logical move.

Easy does it. Slow, consistent effort every day. It’s a long term game. I was listening to a Joe Roman podcast on training, and they were comparing the North American school of wrestling with the Russian school of wrestling. And they were saying that in North America, it’s all about training super hard, twice a day, going 90%. And then let’s say four or five days out of the week, where in the old Soviet style of wrestling, you train every single day, but you go at your 70% and you may be doing six days out of the week. And the gentleman was Faraas, the hobbyist I was talking to. He was the Joe Rogen, he’s a coach for St. Pierre. He said that over the long goal, over the long career as athletes, in North America, athletes get their peak quicker, they get injured quicker, and they burn out quicker. I find that just like you asked me, what makes you get up every morning? I think focusing on what makes you get up, being happy inside, and bringing positivity, energy, new ideas, and self growth. Do it every day on a consistent effort rather than try to peak, burnout, start overly drinking.
And I feel that if you could figure out your basis, your pillars that make you happy and make you get up every morning, and you look at long term goals and it gives you eternal happiness, as far as business advice, a lot of people, they’re here one year, then the next year something happens in their life or they peak and they change industries and then it t’s they’re not stable and they’re not consistent. So, every day consistent effort. That’s definitely true.

Thank you. Thank you, brother. Thank you.