Automation for Attorneys feat. Stanley Tate

Narrator  0:00  

You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis  0:32  

Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge the place online to learn about small business marketing automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. And if you’d like to learn more about what that means or you’d like to become one, please visit automationbridge com/ASP. This episode I had the opportunity to invite Stanley Tate of Stanley Tate Esquire, he’s a native of Chicago, Southside and obsessed with student loan law and typography. Now, Stanley told me in between watching being Mary Jane and The Good Wife, he’s really reliving his dreams of the NBA stardom in trying and failing to cook a perfect pot of rice. But seriously, he helps clients develop their student loan repayment strategy. His firm again is Tate Esquire, LLC, and it offers a variety of student loan debt solutions from eliminating defaults and negotiation, negotiating settlements, defending lawsuits lowering monthly payments and pursuing discharges in bankruptcy. And I may I may have said then you’re like, hey, that sounds like infomercial. Chris, what’s going on? What does this have to do with automation? You all are in forestry. Trust me, when you hear why I went. When you hear Stanley explain what he’s doing in his business. Why his approach? You see clearly the reasoning why had him on the podcast, and it couldn’t have gone any better. Alright, but before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe, and share after. After you listen to this to this podcast in its entirety, I want you to make sure that you know what you’re getting into. I do want you to make a fully knowledgeable and aware decision to join the family of listeners of all systems go podcast. So at the end of this podcast, make sure you subscribe and share for those of you who are listeners, and for whatever reason, just haven’t subscribed yet. We’re in Apple podcasts, Google podcast, you can subscribe on YouTube, there’s no reason to continue to wait. While you’re at it, your five star ratings and reviews would be greatly appreciated. If for any reason you’re having troubles leaving a review, we can do all the heavy lifting for you. If you go to automation bridge, comm forward slash review, wield risk, you can submit your review there and we’ll handle getting it to the appropriate platforms. All right. So let’s jump into today’s content with Stanley where we get to talk about automation for attorneys. Stanley, welcome to the podcast, man. I’m glad that you accepted the invitation. How are you doing? 

Stanley Tate  3:21  

I’m doing well.

Chris Davis  3:23  

Man, I can’t complain. And just for the listeners. I have to qualify this one, this is gonna be a nice change of pace for us. Because I think we have a huge opportunity to highlight Stanley, who I believe exemplifies a lot of the struggles as well as what a triumph can look like in the space, regardless of what industry you’re in. So before I get into that I wanted I also want to tell everybody, I am a lurker online, but I’m not a troll. Okay, so I like to go around and see who’s doing what and Stanley’s website came across to me and instantly grabbed my attention. I went through it, it was focus, he didn’t have all of these extra pages and extra elements. And for the listeners of the podcast, you know, of my struggles with attorneys. You know, my rants that I have in the past that they don’t call you back, they have all of this, hey, fill out this information XYZ and nothing ever happens. So Stanley was a breath of fresh air. So I’m looking forward to diving into it. But before I get ahead of myself, Stanley, give us a little bit about your background and your business.

Stanley Tate  4:36  

Stanley Tate. I’m just a dude from the south side of Chicago. I grew up on Saturday night at the king drive. And I mentioned that specific location because it helps inform the trajectory of my life and how I think about things which is like, you’re not going to be handed anything and the only way you’re going to change your stars to quote a Knight’s Tale. Dope movie, but it’s too

Stanley Tate  5:01  

Take your destiny by your hands and say, How do I make this work? How do I pull myself from here to get to where I’m trying to go. And inside of that, what also understood too is that what’s going to be important is how you carry yourself the integrity with which people see you. And because I knew, if I’m walking the streets of Chicago, like it, people can smell the insincerity on you when they go to try you. So I knew I had to be real about it. And that’s happening for me a lot of my career, which has led me to sort of military led me to law school led me to starting this law practice where I help people with student loan problems. And that’s that part is, is key, that integrity part because there’s so much bs information out there, with people promising the moon to people, and they get so overwhelmed by the choices, and they start to distrust everything. And so my job is to cut through that and connect with you, across this computer screen to where you’re like, I know this dude, I can trust this dude, let’s go. Because at the end of the day is supporting me making the money that I want to make is that I have to have that trust built in as an individual service provider. So like that same night King drive has informed everything going forward to me being a student loan lawyer, which I’ve been doing for the past eight years now. Um, so. 

Chris Davis  6:17  

So I hope my listeners can now see exactly why I have Stanley on because it there, there were no shortcuts. This was not easy. This was not a predetermined path. And you not not only with life, those same skills and determination you had to take to this technological landscape. So walk me through this. You go you’re in the military, you you come out you practice law, get your degree. And now you’re looking at Okay, how do I get clients? What led you to the internet?

Stanley Tate  6:55  

Oh, so for me, the way I looked at it is that,

Stanley Tate  7:00  

how are people going to find me? Yeah, and so you talked about the lawyers are like, Hey, you know, join his business networking group, go talk to your colleagues and take the cases they don’t want to take right, or then go talk to cross industry like other legal professionals that are in different fields, and say, Hey, I have a service that helps your clients. So is all this very, like, non scalable way of building your business and building referrals. And it wasn’t reliable, right? You couldn’t determine when you were going to get a referral or not when you were going to get someone contacting you. So I was like, okay, there has to be a better way. And I looked at the Internet, and I’m like, Okay, how do people go about this. And you saw that there, I saw there were some people that did PPC, there are other people that did blog posts. And then when I read their blog posts, like, and then looked at their sites, I was like, yo, the UX is trash. I don’t want to read this site. And it’s not written to the lay person. It’s written from a lawyer, right into as if they’re writing to another lawyer. And I was like, Okay, this kind of sucks. Can I do this better? Now? The thing is, I don’t know nothing about SEO at this time. I know, absolutely zero. So I just start writing. And then that gets me a couple things and everything like that. And but I was like, No, there has to be a better way to do this. Because I believe in evergreen content, like believe in it. Because once that with PPC, once you turn that funnel off, the leads are gone. So what have I really spent for at that point, because now I’m just on this treadmill where I have to keep spending in order to keep those leads coming if I don’t invest in evergreen traffic. So then I looked at like, Okay, how do I get better at this evergreen and I spent money on all type of BS that don’t do anything for it. Yeah. And I talked to all the consultants or thing, but it wasn’t until

Stanley Tate  8:50  

I came across h refs, as a tool. And then I started reading their blog. And then I bumped into spark found other people in the SEO field that I actually understood, began to understand it better. And especially what’s tough is like, you’ll read a lot of these blogs that are geared more towards enterprise level content marketing, they’re not for the one off individual guide, typically, at that’s trying to scale beyond just a simple I got these few pages, right, these elementary things, because I would want it to compete on a large scale. And I was like, How do I do that? So that’s how I got into it was just trying, failing. Paying for stuff that worked. Sometimes a lot of it didn’t work. And if you learn and you iterate, iterate, iterate, yeah, it’s you know, the more you talk, what I’m seeing is, you’re a business man. That’s an attorney. Right? That’s exactly how I describe it to my friends. It’s like right because my boys are like, they’re looking at me like man, you got it easy because you’re a lawyer. I’m like, Dude, this law degree don’t mean nothing. I know a bunch of broke ass lawyers right?

Stanley Tate  10:00  

So, but my ability to hustle my ability to look at this thing and say, Okay, how and what’s key here is looking at the life you want to leave that you want to have for yourself, and then working backwards from there. And I realized me just relying on at the time I was living in St. Louis, I mean, relying on person to person referrals. In the type of industry I’m in, which is a consumer based industry where the average dollar amount per client Ain’t that high. So I gotta have volume in order to live the life that I want. So How do I get to that powerful? And for me, I realized it had to be through organic SEO, through long form through this content is evergreen content is going to exist, that all I have to do is nurture. Sprinkle a little bit every every now and then to keep it ranking. Yeah. 

Chris Davis  10:52  

Yeah. No, that’s good. I want to ask you, were you always business minded? Or was this something that you discovered later on in life?

Stanley Tate  11:04  

Nah, man, I was always about that bread.

Stanley Tate  11:08  

Cuz I didn’t have anything growing up. Like I had few options. So like, you turn to certain industries, that you have to learn how to sell. And that is going to be key because at that stage where I was at, like, as a young man, I’m, I’m not selling a scarce product, I have a commodity and this commodity, it’s you can’t really ship How do you get the price and everything like that? How do you charge what you want? You’re not scarce thing? Yeah. So then you got to learn how to sell and get people to come to you and value your thing differently. And so all those lessons I learned from a kid have informed everything moving forward, where I have to look at it like what is the life I want? How do I get here, this is a business going to law school was a business decision. It wasn’t I was in love with the law. I’m not gonna I love the law now and what it can do it because like the greatest slide magic show ever, but like, the the decision to go to law schools I looked at it was like, yo, if I get this law degree, I can do so much more, it opens up and gives me so many other options in life, because people treat you like you smarter ****, just because you got a law degree, which is crazy, because I know a lot bunch of lawyers who don’t know much of anything. But you get that perception of intelligence, that perception of problem solving. And that was valuable to me at the time. 

Chris Davis  12:29  

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes perfect sense that you can see the parallel of you strategically approach your life. That same strategy you use in business. And I think it’s it’s really what sets you apart. It By the way, everybody Wow, while you’re listening, if you’re on your phone or in front of your computer, I want you to go to Stanley’s website, it’s tateesq Esquire take tateesq.com, and you’ll be able to see exactly what why is website appeal to me specifically in his space, it is to start to give you some context and and give some credence to what he’s saying in his approach to growing his business. So there’s, there’s this, this fearlessness that you have with technology. And and I want to highlight it, Stanley, and this is for everybody listening who was the traditional CEO that would rather hire somebody to do the technology, you get overwhelmed quickly. I want you to talk from the perspective of what is it in you or just maybe a natural affinity for technology, that didn’t make it, it didn’t serve as a hurdle. For you, it was something that you were just like, Okay, I’m going to do this, all of your attorney, friends, all of all of your associates, they’re doing it one way referrals, go get complimentary services, go get the leftovers. And and so you not only had to break from that norm, but you’re also in a very difficult space in technology, where there’s even more liars in fakers. And there’s a lot to navigate. So what was that in you? That was just like, I’m not scared of this? I’m gonna figure this out. 

Stanley Tate  14:21  

Oh, you know, the big thing is, is what you highlight is that there’s so many bs people trying to pitch us services about what they can do for you from a web design SEO standpoint, right the numbers they can produce for you and I was always like, yo, if you got such killer results, then you don’t need to be out here cold calling people to try to get business right. And if you were getting someone number one results and all this other great work, then they would not stop paying you because it would be an investment for them. They’re like no, this is what I need to do. So something doesn’t ring true here like so you’re looking at us base and I’m watching all my people get

Stanley Tate  15:00  

Caught up in his referral websites, where they’re paying for leads on a monthly basis like this is stupid because you don’t control any of it. And then, so I looked at it from that standpoint, I was like, Look, either I’m gonna go down this path over here, which is I know it’s a treadmill of mediocrity. Or I can sit here and suck it up and try to learn how to do this stuff myself, and failing, iterate, and make it happen. And that’s where like, law school was helpful, because law school,

Stanley Tate  15:29  

look, you had, I didn’t know what I was doing. But you learn how to teach yourself. And you gain that confidence that if I can teach myself, these courses of law, I can teach myself anything. Because the cats who are doing this for the most part that are doing your SEO, your web design, they’re not brilliant, they just know more than you, right. But that’s because I put effort doing it. So if I can take that effort, and I realized too early on, when I was starting my business, the one resource I had was time,

Stanley Tate  16:00  

I got more time, because I ain’t busy with clients. So I got to start getting clients. Until then my resource is time. So I would be at late watching YouTube videos, on blogs, trying to learn how to do stuff at a time I was on like a WordPress website. So I’m learning how to do PHP and to design things the way I want. And I wanted to do it because I knew if I invested in something that looked good, and was easy, people would stay and it will keep coming. I don’t know why I believe that I just did, right. And I just kept iterating from iterating iterating. From there. 

Chris Davis  16:35  

Yeah, I love the work, man there, there is nothing, nobody and nothing can replace it. You know, it doesn’t matter who you work with, what companies you hire, what experts come on, they’re still going to be just that regular grip that’s involved with it. And tell me tell me tell me this, I was looking up some of the history behind like your your website and how it’s

Chris Davis  17:03  

transitioned over the years. Tell me some of the frustrations you faced. And this is for all of my web developers, and web designers that that are listening. Tell me some of the frustrations you faced when you were leaning on these companies to design a website for you. And going through that process.

Stanley Tate  17:24  

So to be fair, I couldn’t even afford companies start off right? Like the individual. And the problem with the individual is that what you don’t realize when you start is that you’re actually hiring, when you hire someone to build a website for you, a lot of times we’re hiring someone to do multiple jobs. And they they’re a cheesecake factory, they can’t be great at everything. So usually, they’re going to trend, they’re either going to be really good at one part, which is they’ll be great at like the design aspect, but suck at coding. So now you got the super bloated site, because they just use some type of like basic builder Site Builder at the time, that sucked, it was bloated with code more, they’re really great at code, but your design is trash. And so you’re not realizing that you’re hiring for four different jobs really is what you need to be doing. And so at that stage, I was hiring individuals who I wanted them to be everything. And then they’re charging such a low rate, that they’re trying to just speed through it and just give you a template a website. And but then also inside of it, they dropped the ball on so many things because they’re overwhelmed because they too want to run a successful business. But they haven’t figured out how to make the type of money, they want to make a charge. And so I wouldn’t be coming to them. If I could afford $5,000. They’re charging like $2,000 for a website. And you think that’s a lot of money at your stage. And it is if you don’t really have a business setup yet that’s generating money. Yeah, but the $2,000 you’re basically setting on fire because you don’t get anything that really has any value to you. So you’re better off just using a studio press theme to start. That’s kind of like what I had to lean into. Because I realized the people that I was working with, their bandwidth was limited, but they were trying to squeeze as much into it. Balls get dropped. You’re not getting before sight performance you want. You’re having to go back to them and say, Hey, can you update this? I’m getting all these Google errors and stuff like that. And it takes them two, three weeks to get back to you. And then it just fall off. They just disappear an extra three months later, like oh, my bad. I have some personal going off. Yeah. Dude my business. don’t give a **** about your personal stuff.

Stanley Tate  19:35  

So those are my frustrations. But then as my business grew and this is the thing when I tell people like they don’t have to be perfect. There’s like Apple got all these all these versions, right? Like the iPhone has all these versions. So we start here we iterate we iterate, we iterate, and over the process as I was having a frustrations I had to learn. I told myself I’m going to learn to do this myself.

Stanley Tate  20:00  

So I don’t have to rely on this person over here. Mm hmm. That stat you said so much. But that responsibility that you took ownership for your business and your success is key. Because a lot of times I see people that just want to throw it up, hey, Bill, my website and like you said in that statement, you’re saying, I need you to be a designer, I need you to be a developer. Oh, and by the way, can you be a marketer too,

Chris Davis  20:27  

all in one, and they can’t, in a novice or a less integris individual will promise Hey, yes, we can do it. All right. But if you if you as a CEO, are not watching them, doing your checks and balances, and it never stops, it never stops. Everybody that I hire, I don’t I don’t learn what I’m not trying to be as good at as them at what they’re doing, because that’s why I hired them. But I need to know enough to properly manage them. Right? So I could say, hey, well, wait a minute, why is that there? Hey, why did you put that there again, and that is the piece that’s missing. And you’ll see that the marketplace is flooded with people who complain about the results that they get, because they don’t take on the responsibility to truly manage the process. And in some cases, jump in and do it yourself. So you, I was surprised when I reached out to you. So all before I go there. So let me just say, I went to the to your website, and it was so engaging in so easy to get the information that I need. So I’m a bad test. Because you know, I know what to look for an XYZ. So I showed it to my sister. I showed it to my wife, they all had the same response. So I said I knew it. I knew, you know, if it’s simple for them, then it then it passes it passes the mark. So tell tell me a little bit let our listeners know. How is the Lead gen flow working? Well, for you to me from the outside, it appears that your website as structured as constructed with is generating you have a lot of quality leads, because your messaging is on point. Is that what you’re seeing on the back end as well? 

Stanley Tate  22:12  

Yeah, definitely. So it This wasnt overnight process, learn what questions you need to ask how you need to present things because like, are too far too often what we do is we just throw a form out there, right, and some people’s forms are ridiculously long. And it’s like I’m not filling this out. So you’re gonna have huge drop off, you look at analytics, and you can see the drop off from start to completion. And so I had a nest where it’s helpful over the time learning, SEO, learning all these other things, I can look at these reports and understand what was going on. So I looked at analytics, and I saw like, okay, these forms are too long. Then you also see if you do too short, you get a bunch of BS leads, and now your time is wasted. Because if you’re automating things, there’s a certain vulnerability that goes into it because your calendar is out there for everyone on the schedule. And you can get filled up with trashy leads right away. And so then you learn, okay, I can’t really rely on this form tool that WordPress has, or this other thing has, I have to move more into like conditional logic, right? And anymore, you consider the design of the form. And so from that standpoint, I have been able to create this thing where it, there is a filtering systematic curves. On the front end, I’m able to use conditional logic as well, to say, actually, this person isn’t a great lead for me, you get this separate access to me. And maybe it’s limited, like I take all my non qualified leads on one day at one batch. So I bust all those bs leads at one time, because there’s still some value there. But you’re really like scraping for gold. At that point, we were paying my intern at that point. And you’re hoping you get a little bit of something. And I’m gonna take that investment because it pays off, but I don’t want them spread throughout the week. I want them batched on one day, because mentally it takes way less out of me knowing that this is my one day of unqualified leads. Yeah. Can we open up the counter for all these other leads who are more qualified based on what it is I said, but that’s a work in progress because we have to understand like, what language you want to point out what are the key terms because there’s not a great way to do it you have to kind of set up and zap here and do these other things to kind of recognize the these key indicators on the back end. So that has been a process but the whole system of building a website that is that generates quality leads in my sleep.

Stanley Tate  24:45  

Dude, I have it good right now. But it’s been like a combination of a bunch of tools and work getting to this point. Yeah, and I love it. And so again, everybody, Stanley and I gently

Chris Davis  25:00  

Literally just met, I was a cold outreach from me to him because I was impressed with everything that he was doing. And just listen to the words that he’s saying filtering systems, conditional logic, batch processing, differentiating the good leads from the poor leads. If you are a service based business, it’s different when I say, you guys may hear, oh, he’s the automation guy, he knows how to do all of that stuff. Listen to Stanley

Chris Davis  25:29  

is your traditional service provider who says, no, wait a minute, I’m gonna do my due diligence to figure out how to do this the right way. One of the things that you you mentioned, I’m a huge fan of,

Chris Davis  25:45  

of pre qualifying, you know, I just don’t think name and email is enough, ever, ever. If I’m going to get on the phone with anybody, I’m going to get some additional information. And a lot of times, as you mentioned, sometimes the length of the form can be a qualifier in itself. And then if you couple that with some really good questions, man, you’re in a good position to every time an appointment is on your calendar, you can ensure a very high close rate. But one of the things that you’ve mentioned it and I just want to highlight this for our listeners, did you hear Stanley say, he doesn’t throw away the quote unquote, bad leads, I think that is so key. Because too often our people just focused on great, great, great and, and don’t have a system in place, it’s not, it’d be different if you were mixing them in every day. And that’s probably how it started out. Right, and you’re getting frustrated, like, I just wasted 20 minutes on the call, is there some way to filter them out. But the fact that you set aside a day to just kind of comb through and make sure there’s no last gold in there? You know, I think it’s something that our listeners really need to pay attention to. And I’m thinking more so of process when when you’re speaking, not technology for some of you who get easily overwhelmed. But there’s a process down, he said, hey, look, I want to filter the good leads, deal with them first set aside some time to sort through the bad ones. And how it’s working, is ongoing. everyday. anytime he could be sleep, he could be on vacation, he could be anywhere. And those appointments can can appear on a schedule. So I want to jump to what I was what I was going to mention. So everybody at this point knows why I was attracted to the website, why reached out to you while you’re on the podcast, and you’re proving to be beyond what I envisioned this podcast would be so thank you for that Stanley.

Chris Davis  27:35  

I reached out, I reached out to Stanley and we’re talking and I want to respect this time. I’ve got a 15 minutes live. I’m just telling, Hey, I got student loans. But I don’t have a show. I just want to full disclosure. I just want to say great job on the website, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I and before we got on the phone, I said hey Stanley, who

Chris Davis  27:51  

is your designer available? Who did that? And Stanley’s response.

Chris Davis  27:57  

Stanley’s response was, I did it. And I was I was I was taken aback mainly because of the industry more so than him hims himself is that when you go to an attorney’s website, you could tell us a template? Most most you could there’s two things you could tell Steli it’s a template or it’s some proprietary lawyer software that they have to use. That’s giving them some some visibility online. So tell me about because he because you’ve mentioned UX and, and user flow, you understand the journey and you understand how to optimize a journey online. That’s just some that’s just an expertise that you have. But tell the tell the tell the audience, your approach, what it was like, determining how to build your website and what what you use to do it.

Stanley Tate  28:50  

So as I mentioned earlier, I started off in WordPress, and I know enough to get stuff done there. But then it gets to a point where you’re like, Okay, I need to hire someone to really achieve the look I want. So I started with this company in England, and I found it and they were dope. And but then I was okay, I need to work on a UX here because there’s some things here, like I think we can improve. So then I met this dude, Ryan Stewart who was in the SEO space.

Stanley Tate  29:18  

I looked at his website, I was like, oh, his do some good things here. And let me reach out to who his UX person is. And so I remember like I sat down and I hired this UX person to go through an overhaul some things in WordPress. And while he was doing that, and his WordPress so WordPress designer takes like six to eight weeks sometimes just to get a landing page back, which sucked during that time, I came across the web flow. And I was like,

Stanley Tate  29:47  

my mind was blown, because here’s this tool that I was like, Yo, this is actually I think, going to be the future of how this works because you can iterate right there you can get something from design.

Stanley Tate  30:00  

So production an online in an instant. And I was like, okay, maybe I can use this tool. So while this designer was working on as UX upgrades to my WordPress, I started sketching out what my future website would look like. And then I started using figma. Because I could play around, it’s just pretty simple tool to use, like Photoshop, basically. And I started sketching it out. And I was like, Okay, what are the things that I want? What, how do I want to look, and then I ended up designing the whole thing. And I started building it in web flow. And I was like, Oh, this looks really good. But I don’t want to actually like even a web flow is a really great tool, there’s still a learning curve there to do certain things. So then I ended up reaching out to the company to do the build, but I had did all the design work already. And the one thing that is design that got kind of troubling, this is kind of where you initially reached out to me about is how you found me, I think, was you, you saw me on video ask which is a tool.

Stanley Tate  30:57  

And the reason why it came about is I kept looking at the hero image as I was building the design, I was like, this hero sucks is either gonna be a static photo of me, or it’s gonna be a generic photo of somebody, or it’s gonna be like this video loop in the background that does nothing. And I was like, how could there’s got to be a way to do something better. And I remember saying product, video hunt, of video, ask on Product Hunt. And at that time, it was just like a way to get testimonials. That was the way they were using the tool or to do client interaction. And I was like, wait, I think we should be able to use this tool to do like a choose your own story. Kind of like a Hardy Boys mystery. Yeah. And I was like that actually be really dope to put into hero if we can just embed that there. Because ultimately, you want to ask me questions. You don’t want to have to go searching and going into the search bar you what you’re here for, because I have narrowly defined my services. I know what you’re here for. And because I have that background work, I know what questions you’re going to ask. And so now I can lead you on your own journey through asking the questions you want, using this tool video as so like, once I had that tool, I was like, Oh, great, we got this, this is going to be the new hero here. And it’s like, that was it. And I realized then like this series of like lessons I learned over time. And then as no code tools were building up, I was like, I could do a lot of this myself, because I know what good design would look like. Because you follow your heart has some negative space has some big excellent I worked with so people could actually read, write simply and then have like a balanced color scheme. And I was just building upon the lessons that already learned over time from working alongside designers, developers, I’ve learned from them. And I was like, Okay, here’s what I need to have. Um, I love it, man. And, and I’ll highlight this, I worked at Lee pages, where we gave templates, landing page templates. And it was amazing how many people could take a functional design, like you mentioned, negative space, bold tags, easy, easy to read, and just totally destroyed. So I’ve learned that some in terms of design, some people just have it, and some people don’t. And I think with what I’m hearing from you too, is you’re really in tune with your strengths, you know, with the things that you can do really well. And then you’re not afraid to say okay, well, look, I’ve taken it this far. This is where my strength ends, let me bring somebody on to take it to the finish line. You know, it’s kind of like,

Stanley Tate  33:36  

that’s exactly how I look at it. But But what I’m actually doing is saying,

Stanley Tate  33:42  

you know, I picked up camera I picked up, I wanted to take better photos from my blog and stuff like that, right. And so I was like, I’m gonna learn how to take photos. And because my disposable income started to increase, so I could buy a good camera and I could buy a good lens, right. And I can get this depth of field. And people think that’s pretty just because you got depth of field. And by taking these photos, and people now want to start to hire me for to do their photos. And I thought about it. And I was like, I am just better than you. And so you want to pay me that’s great, but I’m not as good as the person you actually need to hire to do this thing. So I’ll get you 90% there. But that last 10% that last 10% makes all the world of difference. It takes you from just average, to Whoa, what is this? And so when I look at like how I do things, how I build things, I can get myself 90% of the way there but then I have to decide, is this something I want to spend then to get that last 10% and when it comes to something like coding for websites like that, I believe you should do it because here’s what people don’t think about what their website what your website if you are someone who depends on organic traffic or you

Stanley Tate  35:00  

filtering everyone through your website, your website is an employee, and you have to spend on your employee every single year. So I set aside a budget for it right? Like because this is my employee, this is my secretary, this is my marketing channel. This is this is everything to me. So why would I spend 10 1520 $40,000 a year maintaining my employee? Because that is what it is. And so then it’s just like, how do we break up this budget? Where do we go to say, okay, who pushes me over the top, and I get the full value because there’s diminishing returns on a bell curve, you get to a point where you just spend money just to spend money, but there is something to be said about No, you should spend up to here because that makes perfect sense of where you’re at. Yeah, yeah, man, man, man.

Chris Davis  35:51  

Thank you.

Chris Davis  35:52  

Well said You’re welcome, bro. And you you you walk the walk, man and you shoot you walk walk better than you talk it. So it’s like, as good as it sounds. Everybody just know that the the process and the results speak for themselves as well. So Stanley, I can’t thank you enough man for for accepting the cold invite coming on. I know, I am 100% sure, the listeners of this one are blown away. Because if you are an example of somebody that is not afraid to do the work, do that 90%. But when you said that 10% 10% makes all the difference. People may not be able to understand what 10% is missing, but you feel it. And when it’s there, you feel it. So thank you for highlighting that. I know I mentioned it, but I want to give you the opportunity just in case there’s somewhere else. People who are listening, if they want to get ahold of you in any capacity. I know your profession is is helping with student loan relief. And I think just the the state of the of society that we’re in, there’s probably a lot of listeners that have gone to college or have kids that may be in in that situation. Or if they want to just follow you and just stay connected with you. Where should they go?

Stanley Tate  37:08  

Just you can come to our website, tateesq.com there, you’re subscribed to a newsletter when you contact me or anything like that we have all that set up. There’s also a need to add the link to the newsletter, because that’s something I’ve decided to do this year because I had it took me a while to convince myself that I need to have a newsletter as a lawyer, but there’s a way to write it because no one wants a newsletter from a lawyer, right? So you got to figure out a way to connect with people in a relatable way. And I finally got that part now. So like we’ve been rolling that out here, but tateesq.com is a website if you need to do now, feel free to sign up for a free 10 minute phone call. If you just want to like reach out to me find me on LinkedIn, Stanley tait, student loan lawyer, I’m right there. Or you can catch me on my YouTube channel, as well as number one student loan lawyer. So that’s what I got for you. Great, great. Well, listen, everybody, all of the all of the links will be in the show notes. As usual. Make sure you share this episode, everybody. Thank you again, Stanley, for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. Are you welcome, boss, man, I appreciate you having me. All right.

Chris Davis  38:12  

Thank you for listening to this episode, did you not get tremendous value out of what Stanley was saying? Or displaying or teaching teaching probably is more accurate, on how he built his business. I cannot stress enough, I cannot stress enough. You cannot put the responsibility of your success and business growth in anybody else’s hand but your own. Even if I were to work with you in a client capacity, there is still going to be work required on your end that I cannot do for you, my students, people who enrolled in my programs, there’s still work to be done. It does not matter who you are, where you are in business, you need to understand when you say I want to be an entrepreneur, you not only signed up to wear all those hats at the time. And though you may take the hats off as time goes on, you’re always responsible for every area of your business and the people that you put in place to operate those areas, including technology. Okay, so I think Stanley was a great example of that. I had you CEOs in mind, as well as you serve as providers, because you need to understand the plight. For those of you who are just promising too much. You’re doing too much. You’re true. You think that giving away more is going to somehow qualify you to make more and that’s not the case. We are in the day and age now where people need specific results, specific outcomes. We don’t care. It’s successful people don’t care about more. They just care about more things working. Okay. So keep that in

Chris Davis  40:00  

Your mind as a CEO and as you service provider as you go in and continue to transact in the marketplace, and also, who needed to hear this, I believe, you know, everybody needs to hear this. But for the most part, who is that friend that associate that family member, that business that you just came across, that’s traditionally service base, they have somebody who isn’t, is operating it that may know a little bit about the internet. But you know, they may be spending too much for a on agencies and outside help share this with them. This is how they’re going to save some money and get a higher quality of service. All right. And if you found today’s episode, valuable, make sure you share for my first time listeners, this is where you subscribe, make sure you go to either Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe and leave your five star rating and review. episodes like this are released weekly, on Thursday. And you don’t want to miss out here at automation bridge. We’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. If you didn’t know there is a difference between digital marketing and marketing automation. and small businesses. They’re in need of people who understand how to extract in and optimize marketing strategies with and match them with the best technology to deploy automated systems in their business for rapid growth. That’s what an automation service provider does. We specialize in process optimization, technology and systems building. It’s different, it’s a different, more detailed practice than digital marketing as a whole. So if when you hear that if you’re a digital marketer, and you want to scale your marketing efforts, if you’re an aspiring professional that wants to provide the service of automation, just from the jump, what I want to do is I’d invite you to go to automationbridge.com/ASP, and take the next steps to talk to myself or someone on my team to ensure you be a good fit for our automation service provider program. Where we have a structured framework process and program to take you through and equip you with all of the foundational elements that you need to have a profitable career as well as ongoing coaching and training to ensure that you’re you’re you’re getting the tutelage accountability and guidance that you need to reach success quickly. Okay, that’s automationbridge.com/ASP. Also, we’re accepting guest for the podcast. So if you know of a business owner like Stanley, who his tradition is in a traditional space, but is using automation in a really effective way, let them know about this podcast and let them know to become a guest I should say on the podcast. If you’re a SaaS, founder of marketing or sales software, we’d love for you to come on and talk about your journey as a founder as well as your software. Okay, then lastly, if you’re a marketing automation consultants and you’re getting results, you you’ve got to streamline have approved a streamlined process proven framework, just you figure some things out. I like to share or invite I should say, all three of those audience collectively to become a guest at automationbridge.com/guest. Listen, I need you all to understand that the time is now I need you to act urgently on both sides. There’s business owners that need help and they need to get their management together. So they need to get their learning in place so they can better manage people who they bring on. And they need people who understand how to build these systems in their business the right way. That is now the time is here. The need has never been greater than what it is and it’s not going anywhere to our benefit. So again, make sure you go to automationbridge.com/ASP to become part of the solution. All of the show notes and podcasts are accessible at automationbridge.com/podcast. You can subscribe there and listen to all other episodes at your leisure. So until next time, I see you online, automate responsible

Narrator  0:00  

You’re listening to the All systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis  0:32  

Welcome to the All systems go podcast. I’m your host Chris L. Davis, the founder and chief automation Officer of automation bridge the place online to learn about small business marketing automation, where we focus on turning digital marketing professionals into automation service providers. And if you’d like to learn more about what that means or you’d like to become one, please visit automationbridge com/ASP. This episode I had the opportunity to invite Stanley Tate of Stanley Tate Esquire, he’s a native of Chicago, Southside and obsessed with student loan law and typography. Now, Stanley told me in between watching being Mary Jane and The Good Wife, he’s really reliving his dreams of the NBA stardom in trying and failing to cook a perfect pot of rice. But seriously, he helps clients develop their student loan repayment strategy. His firm again is Tate Esquire, LLC, and it offers a variety of student loan debt solutions from eliminating defaults and negotiation, negotiating settlements, defending lawsuits lowering monthly payments and pursuing discharges in bankruptcy. And I may I may have said then you’re like, hey, that sounds like infomercial. Chris, what’s going on? What does this have to do with automation? You all are in forestry. Trust me, when you hear why I went. When you hear Stanley explain what he’s doing in his business. Why his approach? You see clearly the reasoning why had him on the podcast, and it couldn’t have gone any better. Alright, but before we jump into it, if you’re new to the podcast, make sure you subscribe, and share after. After you listen to this to this podcast in its entirety, I want you to make sure that you know what you’re getting into. I do want you to make a fully knowledgeable and aware decision to join the family of listeners of all systems go podcast. So at the end of this podcast, make sure you subscribe and share for those of you who are listeners, and for whatever reason, just haven’t subscribed yet. We’re in Apple podcasts, Google podcast, you can subscribe on YouTube, there’s no reason to continue to wait. While you’re at it, your five star ratings and reviews would be greatly appreciated. If for any reason you’re having troubles leaving a review, we can do all the heavy lifting for you. If you go to automation bridge, comm forward slash review, wield risk, you can submit your review there and we’ll handle getting it to the appropriate platforms. All right. So let’s jump into today’s content with Stanley where we get to talk about automation for attorneys. Stanley, welcome to the podcast, man. I’m glad that you accepted the invitation. How are you doing? 

Stanley Tate  3:21  

I’m doing well.

Chris Davis  3:23  

Man, I can’t complain. And just for the listeners. I have to qualify this one, this is gonna be a nice change of pace for us. Because I think we have a huge opportunity to highlight Stanley, who I believe exemplifies a lot of the struggles as well as what a triumph can look like in the space, regardless of what industry you’re in. So before I get into that I wanted I also want to tell everybody, I am a lurker online, but I’m not a troll. Okay, so I like to go around and see who’s doing what and Stanley’s website came across to me and instantly grabbed my attention. I went through it, it was focus, he didn’t have all of these extra pages and extra elements. And for the listeners of the podcast, you know, of my struggles with attorneys. You know, my rants that I have in the past that they don’t call you back, they have all of this, hey, fill out this information XYZ and nothing ever happens. So Stanley was a breath of fresh air. So I’m looking forward to diving into it. But before I get ahead of myself, Stanley, give us a little bit about your background and your business.

Stanley Tate  4:36  

Stanley Tate. I’m just a dude from the south side of Chicago. I grew up on Saturday night at the king drive. And I mentioned that specific location because it helps inform the trajectory of my life and how I think about things which is like, you’re not going to be handed anything and the only way you’re going to change your stars to quote a Knight’s Tale. Dope movie, but it’s too

Stanley Tate  5:01  

Take your destiny by your hands and say, How do I make this work? How do I pull myself from here to get to where I’m trying to go. And inside of that, what also understood too is that what’s going to be important is how you carry yourself the integrity with which people see you. And because I knew, if I’m walking the streets of Chicago, like it, people can smell the insincerity on you when they go to try you. So I knew I had to be real about it. And that’s happening for me a lot of my career, which has led me to sort of military led me to law school led me to starting this law practice where I help people with student loan problems. And that’s that part is, is key, that integrity part because there’s so much bs information out there, with people promising the moon to people, and they get so overwhelmed by the choices, and they start to distrust everything. And so my job is to cut through that and connect with you, across this computer screen to where you’re like, I know this dude, I can trust this dude, let’s go. Because at the end of the day is supporting me making the money that I want to make is that I have to have that trust built in as an individual service provider. So like that same night King drive has informed everything going forward to me being a student loan lawyer, which I’ve been doing for the past eight years now. Um, so. 

Chris Davis  6:17  

So I hope my listeners can now see exactly why I have Stanley on because it there, there were no shortcuts. This was not easy. This was not a predetermined path. And you not not only with life, those same skills and determination you had to take to this technological landscape. So walk me through this. You go you’re in the military, you you come out you practice law, get your degree. And now you’re looking at Okay, how do I get clients? What led you to the internet?

Stanley Tate  6:55  

Oh, so for me, the way I looked at it is that,

Stanley Tate  7:00  

how are people going to find me? Yeah, and so you talked about the lawyers are like, Hey, you know, join his business networking group, go talk to your colleagues and take the cases they don’t want to take right, or then go talk to cross industry like other legal professionals that are in different fields, and say, Hey, I have a service that helps your clients. So is all this very, like, non scalable way of building your business and building referrals. And it wasn’t reliable, right? You couldn’t determine when you were going to get a referral or not when you were going to get someone contacting you. So I was like, okay, there has to be a better way. And I looked at the Internet, and I’m like, Okay, how do people go about this. And you saw that there, I saw there were some people that did PPC, there are other people that did blog posts. And then when I read their blog posts, like, and then looked at their sites, I was like, yo, the UX is trash. I don’t want to read this site. And it’s not written to the lay person. It’s written from a lawyer, right into as if they’re writing to another lawyer. And I was like, Okay, this kind of sucks. Can I do this better? Now? The thing is, I don’t know nothing about SEO at this time. I know, absolutely zero. So I just start writing. And then that gets me a couple things and everything like that. And but I was like, No, there has to be a better way to do this. Because I believe in evergreen content, like believe in it. Because once that with PPC, once you turn that funnel off, the leads are gone. So what have I really spent for at that point, because now I’m just on this treadmill where I have to keep spending in order to keep those leads coming if I don’t invest in evergreen traffic. So then I looked at like, Okay, how do I get better at this evergreen and I spent money on all type of BS that don’t do anything for it. Yeah. And I talked to all the consultants or thing, but it wasn’t until

Stanley Tate  8:50  

I came across h refs, as a tool. And then I started reading their blog. And then I bumped into spark found other people in the SEO field that I actually understood, began to understand it better. And especially what’s tough is like, you’ll read a lot of these blogs that are geared more towards enterprise level content marketing, they’re not for the one off individual guide, typically, at that’s trying to scale beyond just a simple I got these few pages, right, these elementary things, because I would want it to compete on a large scale. And I was like, How do I do that? So that’s how I got into it was just trying, failing. Paying for stuff that worked. Sometimes a lot of it didn’t work. And if you learn and you iterate, iterate, iterate, yeah, it’s you know, the more you talk, what I’m seeing is, you’re a business man. That’s an attorney. Right? That’s exactly how I describe it to my friends. It’s like right because my boys are like, they’re looking at me like man, you got it easy because you’re a lawyer. I’m like, Dude, this law degree don’t mean nothing. I know a bunch of broke ass lawyers right?

Stanley Tate  10:00  

So, but my ability to hustle my ability to look at this thing and say, Okay, how and what’s key here is looking at the life you want to leave that you want to have for yourself, and then working backwards from there. And I realized me just relying on at the time I was living in St. Louis, I mean, relying on person to person referrals. In the type of industry I’m in, which is a consumer based industry where the average dollar amount per client Ain’t that high. So I gotta have volume in order to live the life that I want. So How do I get to that powerful? And for me, I realized it had to be through organic SEO, through long form through this content is evergreen content is going to exist, that all I have to do is nurture. Sprinkle a little bit every every now and then to keep it ranking. Yeah. 

Chris Davis  10:52  

Yeah. No, that’s good. I want to ask you, were you always business minded? Or was this something that you discovered later on in life?

Stanley Tate  11:04  

Nah, man, I was always about that bread.

Stanley Tate  11:08  

Cuz I didn’t have anything growing up. Like I had few options. So like, you turn to certain industries, that you have to learn how to sell. And that is going to be key because at that stage where I was at, like, as a young man, I’m, I’m not selling a scarce product, I have a commodity and this commodity, it’s you can’t really ship How do you get the price and everything like that? How do you charge what you want? You’re not scarce thing? Yeah. So then you got to learn how to sell and get people to come to you and value your thing differently. And so all those lessons I learned from a kid have informed everything moving forward, where I have to look at it like what is the life I want? How do I get here, this is a business going to law school was a business decision. It wasn’t I was in love with the law. I’m not gonna I love the law now and what it can do it because like the greatest slide magic show ever, but like, the the decision to go to law schools I looked at it was like, yo, if I get this law degree, I can do so much more, it opens up and gives me so many other options in life, because people treat you like you smarter ****, just because you got a law degree, which is crazy, because I know a lot bunch of lawyers who don’t know much of anything. But you get that perception of intelligence, that perception of problem solving. And that was valuable to me at the time. 

Chris Davis  12:29  

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes perfect sense that you can see the parallel of you strategically approach your life. That same strategy you use in business. And I think it’s it’s really what sets you apart. It By the way, everybody Wow, while you’re listening, if you’re on your phone or in front of your computer, I want you to go to Stanley’s website, it’s tateesq Esquire take tateesq.com, and you’ll be able to see exactly what why is website appeal to me specifically in his space, it is to start to give you some context and and give some credence to what he’s saying in his approach to growing his business. So there’s, there’s this, this fearlessness that you have with technology. And and I want to highlight it, Stanley, and this is for everybody listening who was the traditional CEO that would rather hire somebody to do the technology, you get overwhelmed quickly. I want you to talk from the perspective of what is it in you or just maybe a natural affinity for technology, that didn’t make it, it didn’t serve as a hurdle. For you, it was something that you were just like, Okay, I’m going to do this, all of your attorney, friends, all of all of your associates, they’re doing it one way referrals, go get complimentary services, go get the leftovers. And and so you not only had to break from that norm, but you’re also in a very difficult space in technology, where there’s even more liars in fakers. And there’s a lot to navigate. So what was that in you? That was just like, I’m not scared of this? I’m gonna figure this out. 

Stanley Tate  14:21  

Oh, you know, the big thing is, is what you highlight is that there’s so many bs people trying to pitch us services about what they can do for you from a web design SEO standpoint, right the numbers they can produce for you and I was always like, yo, if you got such killer results, then you don’t need to be out here cold calling people to try to get business right. And if you were getting someone number one results and all this other great work, then they would not stop paying you because it would be an investment for them. They’re like no, this is what I need to do. So something doesn’t ring true here like so you’re looking at us base and I’m watching all my people get

Stanley Tate  15:00  

Caught up in his referral websites, where they’re paying for leads on a monthly basis like this is stupid because you don’t control any of it. And then, so I looked at it from that standpoint, I was like, Look, either I’m gonna go down this path over here, which is I know it’s a treadmill of mediocrity. Or I can sit here and suck it up and try to learn how to do this stuff myself, and failing, iterate, and make it happen. And that’s where like, law school was helpful, because law school,

Stanley Tate  15:29  

look, you had, I didn’t know what I was doing. But you learn how to teach yourself. And you gain that confidence that if I can teach myself, these courses of law, I can teach myself anything. Because the cats who are doing this for the most part that are doing your SEO, your web design, they’re not brilliant, they just know more than you, right. But that’s because I put effort doing it. So if I can take that effort, and I realized too early on, when I was starting my business, the one resource I had was time,

Stanley Tate  16:00  

I got more time, because I ain’t busy with clients. So I got to start getting clients. Until then my resource is time. So I would be at late watching YouTube videos, on blogs, trying to learn how to do stuff at a time I was on like a WordPress website. So I’m learning how to do PHP and to design things the way I want. And I wanted to do it because I knew if I invested in something that looked good, and was easy, people would stay and it will keep coming. I don’t know why I believe that I just did, right. And I just kept iterating from iterating iterating. From there. 

Chris Davis  16:35  

Yeah, I love the work, man there, there is nothing, nobody and nothing can replace it. You know, it doesn’t matter who you work with, what companies you hire, what experts come on, they’re still going to be just that regular grip that’s involved with it. And tell me tell me tell me this, I was looking up some of the history behind like your your website and how it’s

Chris Davis  17:03  

transitioned over the years. Tell me some of the frustrations you faced. And this is for all of my web developers, and web designers that that are listening. Tell me some of the frustrations you faced when you were leaning on these companies to design a website for you. And going through that process.

Stanley Tate  17:24  

So to be fair, I couldn’t even afford companies start off right? Like the individual. And the problem with the individual is that what you don’t realize when you start is that you’re actually hiring, when you hire someone to build a website for you, a lot of times we’re hiring someone to do multiple jobs. And they they’re a cheesecake factory, they can’t be great at everything. So usually, they’re going to trend, they’re either going to be really good at one part, which is they’ll be great at like the design aspect, but suck at coding. So now you got the super bloated site, because they just use some type of like basic builder Site Builder at the time, that sucked, it was bloated with code more, they’re really great at code, but your design is trash. And so you’re not realizing that you’re hiring for four different jobs really is what you need to be doing. And so at that stage, I was hiring individuals who I wanted them to be everything. And then they’re charging such a low rate, that they’re trying to just speed through it and just give you a template a website. And but then also inside of it, they dropped the ball on so many things because they’re overwhelmed because they too want to run a successful business. But they haven’t figured out how to make the type of money, they want to make a charge. And so I wouldn’t be coming to them. If I could afford $5,000. They’re charging like $2,000 for a website. And you think that’s a lot of money at your stage. And it is if you don’t really have a business setup yet that’s generating money. Yeah, but the $2,000 you’re basically setting on fire because you don’t get anything that really has any value to you. So you’re better off just using a studio press theme to start. That’s kind of like what I had to lean into. Because I realized the people that I was working with, their bandwidth was limited, but they were trying to squeeze as much into it. Balls get dropped. You’re not getting before sight performance you want. You’re having to go back to them and say, Hey, can you update this? I’m getting all these Google errors and stuff like that. And it takes them two, three weeks to get back to you. And then it just fall off. They just disappear an extra three months later, like oh, my bad. I have some personal going off. Yeah. Dude my business. don’t give a **** about your personal stuff.

Stanley Tate  19:35  

So those are my frustrations. But then as my business grew and this is the thing when I tell people like they don’t have to be perfect. There’s like Apple got all these all these versions, right? Like the iPhone has all these versions. So we start here we iterate we iterate, we iterate, and over the process as I was having a frustrations I had to learn. I told myself I’m going to learn to do this myself.

Stanley Tate  20:00  

So I don’t have to rely on this person over here. Mm hmm. That stat you said so much. But that responsibility that you took ownership for your business and your success is key. Because a lot of times I see people that just want to throw it up, hey, Bill, my website and like you said in that statement, you’re saying, I need you to be a designer, I need you to be a developer. Oh, and by the way, can you be a marketer too,

Chris Davis  20:27  

all in one, and they can’t, in a novice or a less integris individual will promise Hey, yes, we can do it. All right. But if you if you as a CEO, are not watching them, doing your checks and balances, and it never stops, it never stops. Everybody that I hire, I don’t I don’t learn what I’m not trying to be as good at as them at what they’re doing, because that’s why I hired them. But I need to know enough to properly manage them. Right? So I could say, hey, well, wait a minute, why is that there? Hey, why did you put that there again, and that is the piece that’s missing. And you’ll see that the marketplace is flooded with people who complain about the results that they get, because they don’t take on the responsibility to truly manage the process. And in some cases, jump in and do it yourself. So you, I was surprised when I reached out to you. So all before I go there. So let me just say, I went to the to your website, and it was so engaging in so easy to get the information that I need. So I’m a bad test. Because you know, I know what to look for an XYZ. So I showed it to my sister. I showed it to my wife, they all had the same response. So I said I knew it. I knew, you know, if it’s simple for them, then it then it passes it passes the mark. So tell tell me a little bit let our listeners know. How is the Lead gen flow working? Well, for you to me from the outside, it appears that your website as structured as constructed with is generating you have a lot of quality leads, because your messaging is on point. Is that what you’re seeing on the back end as well? 

Stanley Tate  22:12  

Yeah, definitely. So it This wasnt overnight process, learn what questions you need to ask how you need to present things because like, are too far too often what we do is we just throw a form out there, right, and some people’s forms are ridiculously long. And it’s like I’m not filling this out. So you’re gonna have huge drop off, you look at analytics, and you can see the drop off from start to completion. And so I had a nest where it’s helpful over the time learning, SEO, learning all these other things, I can look at these reports and understand what was going on. So I looked at analytics, and I saw like, okay, these forms are too long. Then you also see if you do too short, you get a bunch of BS leads, and now your time is wasted. Because if you’re automating things, there’s a certain vulnerability that goes into it because your calendar is out there for everyone on the schedule. And you can get filled up with trashy leads right away. And so then you learn, okay, I can’t really rely on this form tool that WordPress has, or this other thing has, I have to move more into like conditional logic, right? And anymore, you consider the design of the form. And so from that standpoint, I have been able to create this thing where it, there is a filtering systematic curves. On the front end, I’m able to use conditional logic as well, to say, actually, this person isn’t a great lead for me, you get this separate access to me. And maybe it’s limited, like I take all my non qualified leads on one day at one batch. So I bust all those bs leads at one time, because there’s still some value there. But you’re really like scraping for gold. At that point, we were paying my intern at that point. And you’re hoping you get a little bit of something. And I’m gonna take that investment because it pays off, but I don’t want them spread throughout the week. I want them batched on one day, because mentally it takes way less out of me knowing that this is my one day of unqualified leads. Yeah. Can we open up the counter for all these other leads who are more qualified based on what it is I said, but that’s a work in progress because we have to understand like, what language you want to point out what are the key terms because there’s not a great way to do it you have to kind of set up and zap here and do these other things to kind of recognize the these key indicators on the back end. So that has been a process but the whole system of building a website that is that generates quality leads in my sleep.

Stanley Tate  24:45  

Dude, I have it good right now. But it’s been like a combination of a bunch of tools and work getting to this point. Yeah, and I love it. And so again, everybody, Stanley and I gently

Chris Davis  25:00  

Literally just met, I was a cold outreach from me to him because I was impressed with everything that he was doing. And just listen to the words that he’s saying filtering systems, conditional logic, batch processing, differentiating the good leads from the poor leads. If you are a service based business, it’s different when I say, you guys may hear, oh, he’s the automation guy, he knows how to do all of that stuff. Listen to Stanley

Chris Davis  25:29  

is your traditional service provider who says, no, wait a minute, I’m gonna do my due diligence to figure out how to do this the right way. One of the things that you you mentioned, I’m a huge fan of,

Chris Davis  25:45  

of pre qualifying, you know, I just don’t think name and email is enough, ever, ever. If I’m going to get on the phone with anybody, I’m going to get some additional information. And a lot of times, as you mentioned, sometimes the length of the form can be a qualifier in itself. And then if you couple that with some really good questions, man, you’re in a good position to every time an appointment is on your calendar, you can ensure a very high close rate. But one of the things that you’ve mentioned it and I just want to highlight this for our listeners, did you hear Stanley say, he doesn’t throw away the quote unquote, bad leads, I think that is so key. Because too often our people just focused on great, great, great and, and don’t have a system in place, it’s not, it’d be different if you were mixing them in every day. And that’s probably how it started out. Right, and you’re getting frustrated, like, I just wasted 20 minutes on the call, is there some way to filter them out. But the fact that you set aside a day to just kind of comb through and make sure there’s no last gold in there? You know, I think it’s something that our listeners really need to pay attention to. And I’m thinking more so of process when when you’re speaking, not technology for some of you who get easily overwhelmed. But there’s a process down, he said, hey, look, I want to filter the good leads, deal with them first set aside some time to sort through the bad ones. And how it’s working, is ongoing. everyday. anytime he could be sleep, he could be on vacation, he could be anywhere. And those appointments can can appear on a schedule. So I want to jump to what I was what I was going to mention. So everybody at this point knows why I was attracted to the website, why reached out to you while you’re on the podcast, and you’re proving to be beyond what I envisioned this podcast would be so thank you for that Stanley.

Chris Davis  27:35  

I reached out, I reached out to Stanley and we’re talking and I want to respect this time. I’ve got a 15 minutes live. I’m just telling, Hey, I got student loans. But I don’t have a show. I just want to full disclosure. I just want to say great job on the website, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I and before we got on the phone, I said hey Stanley, who

Chris Davis  27:51  

is your designer available? Who did that? And Stanley’s response.

Chris Davis  27:57  

Stanley’s response was, I did it. And I was I was I was taken aback mainly because of the industry more so than him hims himself is that when you go to an attorney’s website, you could tell us a template? Most most you could there’s two things you could tell Steli it’s a template or it’s some proprietary lawyer software that they have to use. That’s giving them some some visibility online. So tell me about because he because you’ve mentioned UX and, and user flow, you understand the journey and you understand how to optimize a journey online. That’s just some that’s just an expertise that you have. But tell the tell the tell the audience, your approach, what it was like, determining how to build your website and what what you use to do it.

Stanley Tate  28:50  

So as I mentioned earlier, I started off in WordPress, and I know enough to get stuff done there. But then it gets to a point where you’re like, Okay, I need to hire someone to really achieve the look I want. So I started with this company in England, and I found it and they were dope. And but then I was okay, I need to work on a UX here because there’s some things here, like I think we can improve. So then I met this dude, Ryan Stewart who was in the SEO space.

Stanley Tate  29:18  

I looked at his website, I was like, oh, his do some good things here. And let me reach out to who his UX person is. And so I remember like I sat down and I hired this UX person to go through an overhaul some things in WordPress. And while he was doing that, and his WordPress so WordPress designer takes like six to eight weeks sometimes just to get a landing page back, which sucked during that time, I came across the web flow. And I was like,

Stanley Tate  29:47  

my mind was blown, because here’s this tool that I was like, Yo, this is actually I think, going to be the future of how this works because you can iterate right there you can get something from design.

Stanley Tate  30:00  

So production an online in an instant. And I was like, okay, maybe I can use this tool. So while this designer was working on as UX upgrades to my WordPress, I started sketching out what my future website would look like. And then I started using figma. Because I could play around, it’s just pretty simple tool to use, like Photoshop, basically. And I started sketching it out. And I was like, Okay, what are the things that I want? What, how do I want to look, and then I ended up designing the whole thing. And I started building it in web flow. And I was like, Oh, this looks really good. But I don’t want to actually like even a web flow is a really great tool, there’s still a learning curve there to do certain things. So then I ended up reaching out to the company to do the build, but I had did all the design work already. And the one thing that is design that got kind of troubling, this is kind of where you initially reached out to me about is how you found me, I think, was you, you saw me on video ask which is a tool.

Stanley Tate  30:57  

And the reason why it came about is I kept looking at the hero image as I was building the design, I was like, this hero sucks is either gonna be a static photo of me, or it’s gonna be a generic photo of somebody, or it’s gonna be like this video loop in the background that does nothing. And I was like, how could there’s got to be a way to do something better. And I remember saying product, video hunt, of video, ask on Product Hunt. And at that time, it was just like a way to get testimonials. That was the way they were using the tool or to do client interaction. And I was like, wait, I think we should be able to use this tool to do like a choose your own story. Kind of like a Hardy Boys mystery. Yeah. And I was like that actually be really dope to put into hero if we can just embed that there. Because ultimately, you want to ask me questions. You don’t want to have to go searching and going into the search bar you what you’re here for, because I have narrowly defined my services. I know what you’re here for. And because I have that background work, I know what questions you’re going to ask. And so now I can lead you on your own journey through asking the questions you want, using this tool video as so like, once I had that tool, I was like, Oh, great, we got this, this is going to be the new hero here. And it’s like, that was it. And I realized then like this series of like lessons I learned over time. And then as no code tools were building up, I was like, I could do a lot of this myself, because I know what good design would look like. Because you follow your heart has some negative space has some big excellent I worked with so people could actually read, write simply and then have like a balanced color scheme. And I was just building upon the lessons that already learned over time from working alongside designers, developers, I’ve learned from them. And I was like, Okay, here’s what I need to have. Um, I love it, man. And, and I’ll highlight this, I worked at Lee pages, where we gave templates, landing page templates. And it was amazing how many people could take a functional design, like you mentioned, negative space, bold tags, easy, easy to read, and just totally destroyed. So I’ve learned that some in terms of design, some people just have it, and some people don’t. And I think with what I’m hearing from you too, is you’re really in tune with your strengths, you know, with the things that you can do really well. And then you’re not afraid to say okay, well, look, I’ve taken it this far. This is where my strength ends, let me bring somebody on to take it to the finish line. You know, it’s kind of like,

Stanley Tate  33:36  

that’s exactly how I look at it. But But what I’m actually doing is saying,

Stanley Tate  33:42  

you know, I picked up camera I picked up, I wanted to take better photos from my blog and stuff like that, right. And so I was like, I’m gonna learn how to take photos. And because my disposable income started to increase, so I could buy a good camera and I could buy a good lens, right. And I can get this depth of field. And people think that’s pretty just because you got depth of field. And by taking these photos, and people now want to start to hire me for to do their photos. And I thought about it. And I was like, I am just better than you. And so you want to pay me that’s great, but I’m not as good as the person you actually need to hire to do this thing. So I’ll get you 90% there. But that last 10% that last 10% makes all the world of difference. It takes you from just average, to Whoa, what is this? And so when I look at like how I do things, how I build things, I can get myself 90% of the way there but then I have to decide, is this something I want to spend then to get that last 10% and when it comes to something like coding for websites like that, I believe you should do it because here’s what people don’t think about what their website what your website if you are someone who depends on organic traffic or you

Stanley Tate  35:00  

filtering everyone through your website, your website is an employee, and you have to spend on your employee every single year. So I set aside a budget for it right? Like because this is my employee, this is my secretary, this is my marketing channel. This is this is everything to me. So why would I spend 10 1520 $40,000 a year maintaining my employee? Because that is what it is. And so then it’s just like, how do we break up this budget? Where do we go to say, okay, who pushes me over the top, and I get the full value because there’s diminishing returns on a bell curve, you get to a point where you just spend money just to spend money, but there is something to be said about No, you should spend up to here because that makes perfect sense of where you’re at. Yeah, yeah, man, man, man.

Chris Davis  35:51  

Thank you.

Chris Davis  35:52  

Well said You’re welcome, bro. And you you you walk the walk, man and you shoot you walk walk better than you talk it. So it’s like, as good as it sounds. Everybody just know that the the process and the results speak for themselves as well. So Stanley, I can’t thank you enough man for for accepting the cold invite coming on. I know, I am 100% sure, the listeners of this one are blown away. Because if you are an example of somebody that is not afraid to do the work, do that 90%. But when you said that 10% 10% makes all the difference. People may not be able to understand what 10% is missing, but you feel it. And when it’s there, you feel it. So thank you for highlighting that. I know I mentioned it, but I want to give you the opportunity just in case there’s somewhere else. People who are listening, if they want to get ahold of you in any capacity. I know your profession is is helping with student loan relief. And I think just the the state of the of society that we’re in, there’s probably a lot of listeners that have gone to college or have kids that may be in in that situation. Or if they want to just follow you and just stay connected with you. Where should they go?

Stanley Tate  37:08  

Just you can come to our website, tateesq.com there, you’re subscribed to a newsletter when you contact me or anything like that we have all that set up. There’s also a need to add the link to the newsletter, because that’s something I’ve decided to do this year because I had it took me a while to convince myself that I need to have a newsletter as a lawyer, but there’s a way to write it because no one wants a newsletter from a lawyer, right? So you got to figure out a way to connect with people in a relatable way. And I finally got that part now. So like we’ve been rolling that out here, but tateesq.com is a website if you need to do now, feel free to sign up for a free 10 minute phone call. If you just want to like reach out to me find me on LinkedIn, Stanley tait, student loan lawyer, I’m right there. Or you can catch me on my YouTube channel, as well as number one student loan lawyer. So that’s what I got for you. Great, great. Well, listen, everybody, all of the all of the links will be in the show notes. As usual. Make sure you share this episode, everybody. Thank you again, Stanley, for coming on, man. I really appreciate it. Are you welcome, boss, man, I appreciate you having me. All right.

Chris Davis  38:12  

Thank you for listening to this episode, did you not get tremendous value out of what Stanley was saying? Or displaying or teaching teaching probably is more accurate, on how he built his business. I cannot stress enough, I cannot stress enough. You cannot put the responsibility of your success and business growth in anybody else’s hand but your own. Even if I were to work with you in a client capacity, there is still going to be work required on your end that I cannot do for you, my students, people who enrolled in my programs, there’s still work to be done. It does not matter who you are, where you are in business, you need to understand when you say I want to be an entrepreneur, you not only signed up to wear all those hats at the time. And though you may take the hats off as time goes on, you’re always responsible for every area of your business and the people that you put in place to operate those areas, including technology. Okay, so I think Stanley was a great example of that. I had you CEOs in mind, as well as you serve as providers, because you need to understand the plight. For those of you who are just promising too much. You’re doing too much. You’re true. You think that giving away more is going to somehow qualify you to make more and that’s not the case. We are in the day and age now where people need specific results, specific outcomes. We don’t care. It’s successful people don’t care about more. They just care about more things working. Okay. So keep that in

Chris Davis  40:00  

Your mind as a CEO and as you service provider as you go in and continue to transact in the marketplace, and also, who needed to hear this, I believe, you know, everybody needs to hear this. But for the most part, who is that friend that associate that family member, that business that you just came across, that’s traditionally service base, they have somebody who isn’t, is operating it that may know a little bit about the internet. But you know, they may be spending too much for a on agencies and outside help share this with them. This is how they’re going to save some money and get a higher quality of service. All right. And if you found today’s episode, valuable, make sure you share for my first time listeners, this is where you subscribe, make sure you go to either Google podcasts, Apple podcasts, YouTube, wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe and leave your five star rating and review. episodes like this are released weekly, on Thursday. And you don’t want to miss out here at automation bridge. We’re dedicated to training digital marketing professionals to become automation service providers. If you didn’t know there is a difference between digital marketing and marketing automation. and small businesses. They’re in need of people who understand how to extract in and optimize marketing strategies with and match them with the best technology to deploy automated systems in their business for rapid growth. That’s what an automation service provider does. We specialize in process optimization, technology and systems building. It’s different, it’s a different, more detailed practice than digital marketing as a whole. So if when you hear that if you’re a digital marketer, and you want to scale your marketing efforts, if you’re an aspiring professional that wants to provide the service of automation, just from the jump, what I want to do is I’d invite you to go to automationbridge.com/ASP, and take the next steps to talk to myself or someone on my team to ensure you be a good fit for our automation service provider program. Where we have a structured framework process and program to take you through and equip you with all of the foundational elements that you need to have a profitable career as well as ongoing coaching and training to ensure that you’re you’re you’re getting the tutelage accountability and guidance that you need to reach success quickly. Okay, that’s automationbridge.com/ASP. Also, we’re accepting guest for the podcast. So if you know of a business owner like Stanley, who his tradition is in a traditional space, but is using automation in a really effective way, let them know about this podcast and let them know to become a guest I should say on the podcast. If you’re a SaaS, founder of marketing or sales software, we’d love for you to come on and talk about your journey as a founder as well as your software. Okay, then lastly, if you’re a marketing automation consultants and you’re getting results, you you’ve got to streamline have approved a streamlined process proven framework, just you figure some things out. I like to share or invite I should say, all three of those audience collectively to become a guest at automationbridge.com/guest. Listen, I need you all to understand that the time is now I need you to act urgently on both sides. There’s business owners that need help and they need to get their management together. So they need to get their learning in place so they can better manage people who they bring on. And they need people who understand how to build these systems in their business the right way. That is now the time is here. The need has never been greater than what it is and it’s not going anywhere to our benefit. So again, make sure you go to automationbridge.com/ASP to become part of the solution. All of the show notes and podcasts are accessible at automationbridge.com/podcast. You can subscribe there and listen to all other episodes at your leisure. So until next time, I see you online, automate responsible