How they turned a law firm into a subscription business with Chris Valdheims

Chris Valdheims: If you call five law firms, most of them will probably respond in some way that, okay, you need to spend $3,000 or $5,000 with us. For us to do anything together, I wanted there to be an option of you can spend around a hundred dollars and we can start talking. And a lot of times when I initially talk with someone, I'm like, well, let's do that. You can get a membership for a month if it's not working for you, no problem, no hard feelings, but actually it is a way that you can start to engage with this stuff and see if you like us, if we like you, if it's something that's going to be helpful for you.

Lex Roman: Have you ever thought about turning your service business into a subscription?

It can be grueling to deliver custom scope work week after week, month after month, and some of us find ourselves thinking about how we can scale our business model and move into things like subscriptions, memberships, courses, and communities. This episode is about just that.

I talked to my lawyer, Chris Valdheims, who started a subscription law firm many years ago with his business partners. I've been a member of Counsel for Creators for the entire time I've been in business.

I've been really impressed with Counsel for Creators, both as a client of theirs, on their service, their delivery, their communication, but also from the business model side where I see their duality of having a membership and also being able to add on services. If you've been thinking a subscription or membership model might be right for your business, you're going to love this episode.

Chris and I talk about where the idea for the membership came about, some of the ways that they've advertised and grown their membership and why he thinks it's important for a creative law firm to be practicing creativity themselves. I'm Lex Roman. I empower creatives to make smarter marketing bets, and you're tuned in to the Low Energy Leads Show. 

Lex: Before we get into this week's episode, I just want to give a plug to the Low Energy Leads Newsletter. If you don't already subscribe to the newsletter, I want to encourage you to find that link in the show notes and get on the list. We're going to be making some changes to the show in the next couple months, and you'll want to be notified about some of the cool events we have coming up, some of the new tools that are coming out, and you'll get that all. If you're on the low energy leads list, I am excited to talk about your creative journey, but I want to start also with the law firm that you co-founded called Counsel for Creators and where that began. Walk us back to the early days of C4C. What was that like? 

Chris: So it's kind of a roundabout path. I always tell people that my law school or law career is my second career. So before that I was a designer. I made software and at one point I just wanted to try something new. So I picked, not randomly, but with some intention to become a lawyer because I felt like there was a lot of stuff working as a creative professional. There's a lot of stuff I didn't understand. It felt like there's a lot of stuff that was happening under the surface that I'm like, I know there's some logic to this and some reason why this is all happening. I just don't know. And I felt like I was sort of at the mercy of things I didn't understand. So I went to law school and when I was in law school, one of the realizations I had is, wow, all of this stuff that I'm learning about contracts and copyright and trademark and all this other stuff would've been so helpful in my creative career. 

And then the other thing I realized, but also A, I never would've approached a lawyer. It seemed too intimidating, and B, I never would've thought I could afford it, and nobody I knew felt like they could afford it or it was accessible. So I thought to myself, okay, how can I make this stuff that I'm learning more accessible to people like me in essence or people that I know? And a lot of my initial clients were friends of mine who I worked with as a designer or software developer, so it was kind of a natural transition.

So Counsel for Creators came out of that, came that idea that I want to make this stuff accessible and obviously financially is one way, but then make it less intimidating. A lot has changed since I started. So 10 years ago there was no such thing as a lawyer, almost no such thing as a lawyer not wearing a suit and dispensing advice hourly. That was pretty much the choice. So I'm like, there's got to be a different way. And so everything that we're doing comes out of that initial impulse. 

Lex: And did the legal membership, was that always part of the vision or did that come about later on?

Chris: That came about later on. So it kind of grew out of feedback from working with people. So that happened maybe three years into Counsel for Creators. We started in 2013. 2016 is when we launched the membership. And that was what I noticed as kind of responding to problems that I was seeing, which was number one, people wanted an easy way to ask quick questions. And as I said, the kind of standard way of doing that is Bill hourly, which creates this tension. So if you or I and I are talking, you're looking at the clock as you should be like, I don't want this to go on too long because I don't want to be billed $200 instead of 100. That makes perfect sense. So I'm like, that tension wasn't really working. I felt like everything was rushed and I guess it was not aligned interests. 

So I'm like, let's try something different. So I think at first what I did is I did half hour blocks that people could schedule, but then I noticed there was a lot of repeat customers. So I'm like, well, let's make it into a membership. And a friend of mine, I had talked with him about this and he kind of knew stuff about that topic. So I basically built out what I think at the time was the first legal membership for creative. So other people who had done similar things or had tried it and it didn't work, but I'm like, let's make this actually go.

That was 2016. And what I like about it is it lets people just contact us. So if you need to talk for five minutes or half an hour or whatever, instead of going on the internet and trying to find answers and spending all this time, you can just call us in. One of the origin stories I always talk about is I had a client who told me that she had spent the weekend trying to figure out this legal question by the time it got around to Monday where she could ask me, I'm like, you don't have to do that. This was a five minute phone call. 

You could have been making something or just hanging out or something like that. But I think because you have that, you had that kind of wall between lawyers, people, just natural and understandable reaction is, I don't want to talk to a lawyer unless I absolutely have to, which ultimately makes things more expensive. So that's the problem we were trying to solve. 

Lex: Yeah, and I've been a member of your legal membership for at least three years now, I think. And it is a real game changer in that way because before you would spend so much time researching things and trying to figure out, do we even need to talk to a lawyer? And now it's like you guys email me and you're like, you should talk to us. We haven't talked to you in a while.

Chris: It's a flip. It's a real flip in mindset to be proactive about legal issues in your business, and also understand a big part of it is helping people learn this stuff because it's also about our clients understanding it. So it's not, I think with the old model of hourly billing, the more that you could get someone dependent on you to come back to you every time they have a question that means more money.

But with this model, it's more like, if I can, you come to me as much as you want, but if I can teach you in the intervening like, Hey, here's how trademark works, or watch out for this. When you're signing a contract that's more helpful to you and it's not based on you having this sort of dependent relationship, really we're trying to make it so that anyone who's part of our membership is learning and gets better at this stuff and sees how it fits into the business overall. 

Lex: This is an interesting trend that we've been seeing in service provider land over the last few years, which is not done for you but done with you or empowering your clients to learn alongside you so that they're not dependent on you. With web designers, for example, for years it was like, oh, you need me to do everything on your website, but now it's like web designers would prefer to walk away and empower you to do that. So can you tell us what's involved in the legal membership and how are people using that in their business? 

Chris: What's involved in terms of features, which I'll talk about briefly because ultimately we know it's about benefits, but the features are ultimately you can schedule a call with a lawyer as often as you need to.

You can send in documents to have us look it over. So if someone sends you a contract and you're like, I don't really know what this is or what this is asking me or what this all says, you send it in and we'll send you back notes. We'll review it and help you understand what's in there.

So that's kind of the feature, but the benefit is really just to have a second opinion on this stuff, on any kind of legal stuff. It's really to make it accessible, making people feel like just if you have a question, just schedule a call with us and on Tuesday we'll talk and we'll figure it all out together. 

And it's even kind of gone beyond that. It's even a lot of my calls now, yes, there's legal stuff, but some of the best ones lately have been, we get really into business stuff. We get really into, I had a conversation with someone about their long-term relationship and how it was involved in their business.

That's not something I was trained in law school for, but because we have that time together and it's not like on the clock that was important to that person. So I wanted to make sure that I really heard it and understood and passed on anything I might've learned from my other clients or my own experience or anything like that. So yeah, what we're really trying to do is just create a place for people to engage with this stuff and not worry about cost as much as they would have to before, 

Lex: Which enables you to also be leading edge with stuff like AI. You held that discussion a couple months ago about AI and the impact on your business as a creative and also hiring contractors or being a contractor, which is really important to be aware of those things. Those things are rapidly changing, but you're not necessarily going to call a lawyer and pay hourly to understand that, right? But you will come to a discussion that they host. 

Chris: Yeah, and that's the other thing we try to do. We haven't done any lately, but we're bringing that back where it's group discussions because I think also it helps people to hear from other people, not just us, but then also if you're hearing from someone else who has a similar business to you, you can kind of get a sense of what are other people thinking about this or how are other people dealing with this same issue?

If we're having a discussion about clients paying on time, that's something I think a lot of people can relate to and there's a lot of different solutions. And that's the other thing with legal, there's not just one answer. I mean, there's sort of a framework around things, but I always tell my clients, if what I'm telling you doesn't work for you or just you're like, I'm not feeling it or it's not the way that I prefer to do business, that's fine, but then now is an informed decision and it can be informed by me, but also by other people you might actually resonate more with what someone else is saying than what I'm saying. And so we're just trying to create the space for that kind of thing to happen. 

Lex: Another thing that I think is so interesting about C four C is the way that you've advertised the membership. So how do you get people into that legal membership? What are some of the ways that you've gotten the word out about that over the last, what, seven years? 

Chris: We've in the past have run a lot of paid ads, which works reasonably well. We've got a lot of people come from Yelp because we were on Yelp a long time ago, so I guess we just come up a lot. So a lot of people come that way. I write a lot on LinkedIn on different social platforms. We have active TikTok, active Instagram, so social media has been interesting. And what we're really trying to do also for a lot of people who come to us is again, the experience of a lawyer is often if you call five law firms, most of them will probably respond in some way that, okay, you need to spend $3,000 or $5,000 with us. For us to do anything together, I wanted there to be an option of you can spend around a hundred dollars and we can start talking. 

And a lot of times when I initially talk with someone, I'm like, well, let's do that. You can be on the membership for a month if it's not working for you, no problem, no hard feelings, but actually it is a way that you can start to engage with this stuff and see if you like us, if we like you, if it's something that's going to be helpful for you.

So in terms of marketing and sales, it's almost like the latter situation where you have a more accessible thing and people can try it, people can try it and see if that works. Because for a lot of people, if it's their first time engaging with a lawyer, they're not really sure what the experience is going to be like. 

Lex: Going back to what you said about how you built this membership, tell me more about Yelp and ads. That is actually not a thing that we have heard a lot on this show in terms of where people are getting their business. So how did Yelp contribute a lot and what kind of ads were you running? 

Chris: It was so random. It was one of those things early on, this was in 2014 or something, and I don't know, I think one of our lawyer friends said, oh, do you guys advertise on Yelp? And I'm like, I didn't know that was a thing you could do. So I went and did it and just, we've been on there for so long, we do a bunch of reviews and people find us that way. And so it was never a conscious thing. And I think just honestly, it's pretty much on autopilot at this point. There's not much customization you can do. It's really just what keywords you want your profile to show up under. So I think there's a lot of organic traffic, but then there's also a lot of paid traffic. And then so for that paid traffic, really we kind of lead them to a place where they can learn more about what we do. 

And then one of the options when you look at that landing page is you need to talk to an attorney, or is this all overwhelming or you need just like, I need to know what the first step is, just join the membership and we'll kind work from there. That's always the default answer. Some people come in and they're like, build it. I want to form an LLC, I'm ready to do that. Okay, cool, we got you. But for a lot of people, they're like, wow, I have no idea what to do. So we're like, try the membership, see if that works for you. 

Lex: When it comes to building the membership side of the business and specifically the different offers that you put together around trademarks, around formation of an LLC, different things like that, what are some of the lessons that you've learned over these last 10 years? 

Chris: Number one is for us to be proactive with people. So one of the things that I assumed in the beginning, which was an incorrect assumption, is people would come to me when they need something. For instance, someone would wake up one day and be like, you know what? I need a trademark.

Let me go do that. Let me call them and do that. Some people do that. There's enough people who do that. We'll get people who will call us and yeah, I need a trademark. I'm ready to go. They've done the research, they know what it is. But a lot of times I'll have a conversation with someone in the membership and they'll be like, oh, I'm starting a brand of candles or something. I'm like, have we talked about trademark yet? No. Okay, let's talk about that. I'm going to explain to you what it is. 

And then you decide when you want to do it. Now, the value of it, kind of how much it costs, you decide when to do it, when you want to do it, is that a priority for you? And I'll explain the value with this and that ultimately people will do those things, but it kind doesn't put them in a position where they feel like they have to do it right now, if that makes any kind of sense. And so it's really educating people on here's what you might need has been a big part of it. So a lot of when I'm working with a new client, it's just like I'll ask them, do you have a trademark? Do you have an LC? Do you have all this other stuff set up? Because they might not even know about that. So that's been one thing. Another thing is keep it simple. 

So I think as the business has grown, we do less and less, but what we do, we do it a lot better. So when I first started practicing law, I would do almost anything. I did everything from, I helped people with wills. I went to court a few times to help someone with a credit card debt, you know what I mean?

Whatever came in because I needed the money and I didn't really understand the idea of, I guess niching down and building a really nice process around. We basically have four or five things that we have a really tight process. There's other things we'll help with, but in terms of 80, 90% of what we do, it's all within these kind of four or five areas. 

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Lex: What about with the membership in terms of was it easy to get people on board since it is kind of unusual to participate in a legal membership? Was it easy to get people on board? Let's say they came to you for an LLC or trademark and you're like, oh, and by the way, we have this legal membership. Did you find that adoption was really easy at first?

Chris: Maybe a little bit difficult, but really the conversation we'd end up having is, let's say that you came to me for an LLC. You're one of those people who's like, I need an LLC, I need a lawyer's help to get it done. But then you're like, you know what? I actually have other questions. I liked working with you all. I feel like I was heard. I felt like this was a good experience, and I do have other questions. I'm thinking of hiring my cousin or a friend of mine wants to invest or whatever.

Things that don't quite fit into the scope of the project we're working on. That's the point where I'm like, well, the membership might be a good way for us to just continue the conversation. So it becomes a natural flow from we did a specific project to now we can have this ongoing relationship. And I think that's the ideal. So that's one way that it happens. Or the reverse I was talking about earlier. Someone finds us and is like, wow, there's a lot of stuff I have no idea what to do. Okay, join the membership and we'll help you figure it out. 

Lex: Your process is super dialed in. Your website is very clear what you're providing. You were mentioning the different focus areas, that's all on the website with the pricing and everything. And then when you're in your membership, you have automated check-ins and there's a process for everything. And so how did all those things come about? 

Chris: I mean, I think when my early days of the firm, I read a lot of books on business and the message that kept coming up over and over again is turn things into a process as much as you can. And so that's where it came down to reducing what we're doing. Because yes, I could probably make a process for 20 different things, but ultimately it was like, well, what do most people want? They want a trademark, they want an LLC, they want a good services contract, they want to protect their copyright. Those are the kind of things that most people want. So we essentially made a process around those. And then it also helps us, and I think this is good for any service provider, really set boundaries and expectations really well because all the process is an iterative thing that we developed from hearing back from people. 

So if you're doing a trademark with us, we're really aggressive about sending emails saying, a thing just happened, a thing just happened, the next thing will happen in three months. And maybe you got those emails where it's just tells you everything that's going to happen. Because what we wanted to get away from is people being out there uncertain, what am I going to hear next or what's going on? Because trademark for instance, is a long process. It takes a year even that it's like, okay, let's put together emails for every event that happens and make sure they go out and it makes our life easier.

And I think people just want certainty because with something like legal stuff, people don't really know what's happening and that's okay. So it's our job just to be like, we've been through this. We can show you what's happening. We can make sure that you feel like it makes sense, otherwise it's difficult. And one of the big complaints a lot of people have had about lawyers classically is not, there's bad communication. So lawyers don't say what's going on or you'll email them and they won't respond. And so it's really just to make that stuff easy for us. We use a lot of template emails. So even if someone's like, Hey, I'd like to talk soon, boom template, cool. Here's my link schedule with me on my calendar. 

Lex: What do you use to store all those templates and send them? 

Chris: So right now we're using Mixmax, we're moving software, and then we have other pieces of software that we use for things that are more automated or generated by some trigger. We use Autopilot. So that's when someone joins our membership. And then you talk about those reminder emails, a lot of those are actually automated. There's some, we do have a kind of system for going through and individually taking people we haven't heard from, but a lot of them are, if I haven't seen a call on the calendar, send a message saying, Hey, I haven't seen a call on the calendar from you for a while. Let's talk. 

Lex: And I'm curious, so you have a team, there's three of you that are lawyers, right? At C4C, there's three, and then you have other folks that work in the business. So do you keep some kind of consolidated CRM with all of your clients in it or how do you keep notes across? Because when folks talk to different people on the team, how do you keep that all straight? 

Chris: So we do have a CRM, which emails get logged there, notes of any calls get logged there. So if someone's on the team and okay, what did Chris say to this person two weeks ago? Or When did we last talk to this person? It will put, there's a note of, we had a call November 17th and here's what we talked about.

So all of it's in there and and it makes it easy for anybody to see what's going on or even if I want to know, okay, want to check in, make sure that everybody's getting responded to, it's easy. I can just look in there and be like, okay, cool. It looks like it's happening. And it's actually funny, I was talking with Chung earlier today, Chung's my partner. We were talking about how when we started the business, we had to be expert emailers. We had to be on email responding to everybody. 

That's not our job anymore. We have two brilliant assistants who just, anything that comes up, they just handle it. And so we were just talking about it's actually a bad thing if him or I are going into emails and responding, we're micromanaging and we're getting in the way.

So it's kind of an interesting evolution as a business owner when you get to that point of I am not going to respond to this email and actually I shouldn't. There's someone else whose job it is to do that, and they're actually going to do it better than me. I do what I do well, but maybe you've had emails with Cindy or Sophia. Both of them are much better at it, detail oriented in ways that I'm not, but that's what they're doing. And so for me it was an evolution of like, okay, I'm no longer, but I made a system. 

So I basically took what I learned from my experience and be like, okay, this is what works. This is what doesn't, so go ahead and do it. And then now it's even cooler is they go ahead and change it. They're like, this is the way you are doing it, but actually we have a better way and we're going to do it that way. Now. I'm like, okay. And what we really try to talk about a lot is what's the intent? So as long as it's meeting that intent, go for it. The intent might be make sure that people feel heard or make sure that no one's kind of left in the dark. So whatever it takes to do that, I don't really care. We're always learning and I think it's just as long as we're always trying to get better. Okay. 

Lex: Speaking of getting better, you've been on a creative journey recently. You started a podcast this year? 

Chris: Yeah, it was in May of this year.

Lex: So we started our podcasts around the same time. And you've also started a new newsletter for HyperMemoir. You've been on a new creative journey. Can you tell us a little bit about what got you into that? 

Chris: Yeah, so I'd wanted to do a podcast for a long time. I have a whole other side project that I had been doing for a long time, which involved, and I think I was telling you before we got on, it involved my grandfather who was an artist and me discovering him as an adult.

I wrote a book about it, it's not out yet. But then I'm like, there was so much material that I found and so much side stories and other stuff, and I'm like, I want to find a way to share that with the world. The book isn't ready to come out yet, but there's a lot of pieces that I wanted to share with people. So I started the podcast with that intention. It actually kind of went in a completely different direction, whereas I was more talking just about creativity and the internal game of creativity, what I'd been going through, everything from perfectionism to imposter syndrome, to how do you deal with dark topics or whatever, just talking about creativity. 

So that's what the podcast has been about, but it's really kind of moving it back now actually to telling that story, telling the story. And so for me, one of the things my, I want to say ethos, I'm not sure if that's the right word, but ideas is that as a lawyer for creatives, it's really important to be a creative yourself. And so I established that as a creative outlet that I could consistently put something out. I really like podcasting. I like coming on podcasts.

I like talking and recording and seeing how that goes. That was a real nice creative outlet and just doing it for without any kind of money involved. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but for me it was just nice to have something where unlike with business where I always have to think about, well, I have to make sure that we're getting paid in a certain way. 

If you have a team, they need to get paid. All that kind of stuff happens to just have something where it's like, I'm going to do what I want to do and I'm really not accountable to anyone else other than my own creative impulses. So that's what I've been doing. And so it's a continuing thing. I try to do it every week. Almost every week I put out a new episode and I even like that cadence of, okay, if I'm committing to do it every week, that means that there's certain things I need to do and there's a certain kind of consistency that can sometimes feel nice if you do it in the right way. I feel like 

Lex: Another thing that we've talked a lot about on this show is the idea of your public persona and how that goes alongside your business or assists in marketing your business. And so I'm curious how you're approaching amplifying the work that you're doing with Hyper Memoir and the book and things like that alongside your business. How do you think about those two things when it comes to, for example, social media or email marketing? 

Chris: When I started, the two ideas felt really distant. So when I started even thinking about this and maybe a year ago or whenever I started thinking about I want to do a podcast or I want to tell this story more publicly, I was really like, well, how do I reconcile the two things? And that was actually really, I had to do internal shifts because my thinking was, and again, this is just kind of learned thinking from the way the industry was.

Well, on one hand, if you're a lawyer, how does that fit? How does that persona fit with being a writer or telling these kind of personal stories? And as I would mix the two a little bit more, I realized people really liked that. I realized that whatever division I thought of wasn't, I've talked with my clients about hyper memoir. They're listened to the podcast and they're like, oh, that was really cool, the stuff you're talking about with perfectionism, because my clients are creatives, so what I'm going through and talking about, a lot of them can relate. 

I have one client who is pretty prolific podcaster, and he'll give me tips. He'll like, Hey, you should try this or do that, or whatever. I'm like, okay, cool. But that's during our membership calls. That's what I'm calling to give him legal advice, and he's like, Hey, actually I have a tip for you. I love it. So it's really interesting to see that, and that wasn't the intent that people actually relate better. They're like, okay, cool. You're in the game too. I can actually trust you more. And that wasn't the intent. That was just kind of what ended up happening.

Lex:  It can be tricky though to balance as you're trying to figure out, okay, so let's say you have a new podcast episode out, or you want more folks on doing reviews or doing subscribing to the newsletter and things like that with other things that you might promoting. How do you manage those different streams? On a very tactical level when it comes to like, okay, today I'm on LinkedIn, am I promoting hyper memoir? Am I promoting C4C? Am I promoting something else? 

Chris: Yeah, that's tough. That's what I'm actually grappling with right now. So if I do have an issue to solve, it's really that to what extent do I do each one? I mean, I'd love to be in a world where they just sort of support one another very organically, and there actually is situation like that where, and I haven't done this yet, I don't know why, but where really Counsel for Creators can be, in essence a sponsor of hyper memoir because it already kind of is. That's what enables me to actually have the time to do that.

So then they kind of connect and the topics are kind of the same. There's similarities, and it's even trying to figure out where do you as a person, you're the niche in a way, and you unite those two things. So just by virtue of you existing, those two things are united. It's hard to express it sometimes. And so for me, I wake up some morning and I'm like, I want to talk about this other mornings wake up, I want to talk about this, but I'm trying to figure out a way to do it without giving the audience whiplash. You know what I mean? If people even care, I could go super deep on trademarks one day and then the next day talk about discovering stuff from World War ii. So how do I kind of do that without it being like, what is this guy doing? 

But I think what I do is I just try to get the reps in. I think that's where the consistency helps is to learn, okay, this is working, this isn't working. It's interesting. And I think ultimately then it also kind of comes down to segmentation. What I like is I like an Instagram that you can have multiple accounts, for instance. So people who are interested in hyper memoir, they can just go to that account if they're interested in legal stuff, they go to the Counsel for Creator's account. That way there isn't so much whiplash.

And so I think multiple accounts, LinkedIn is different because that's typically you as a person. So again, I try to find what's the principle that unites it, and I think it's really about the kind of mantra that I have is about making things real. So whether that's internal, how do you take something that's inside you and bring it out creatively? And then once you've done that, then now how do you turn it into something that is going to sustain you or turn into a business or turn into a movie or whatever. That's where the legal stuff kind of comes. So there's a bridge between the two.

Lex: Chris, if you could give one tip to our listener about connecting with their best clients or their best audience, what would it be? 

Chris: There's obviously creating a persona of who it is you can help, but then I think it's also, I mean, the more I've gone in business, it's more about who can I make a good emotional connection with? So it's not even about the services, but it's like who do I feel like I want to work with and who is going to get the most out of it? Because at the end of the day, legal services might be the same across the board, but we want to make sure that we have sort of an understanding.

Because what I've really learned, it's about when I get on the phone with someone, I want to like the person I'm talking to. And in the early days, that wasn't always the case. I would have a lot of people, I'm like, oh, this person is argumentative. They're mean. They don't understand anything, and I think it's really about also being able to hold those boundaries and say, Hey, actually we might not be a good fit for you, and there might be someone who's perfect for you, but it's not us. 

So I think it's really about finding out who is it that I really want to work with and who I can benefit the most. The only way you can create a good experience, which is ultimately what it's about, what we really look at at the end of everything is what are people saying in reviews? I always say, this is the currency of our law firm is what do people say in reviews? What do they say in internal feedback forms? I think you've probably got a ton of those where every time we talk to someone, we send them a feedback form, say, Hey, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? Because that's what tells us if we're on the right track, if we're working with the right people. 

Lex: What else is coming up for you? What should folks look out for from you? 

Chris: I would say this. I mean, one of the cool things I've been sort of alluding to is I think the way lawyers are, there's a lot, are now is very different from how it was in the past, and even what we're trying to do is expand the definition of what a lawyer is. So it's not just fill out paperwork and give me advice on things, but really being a good business confidant, like I said, I've talked with people about, Hey, I'm doing this business and I have this long-term relationship, so I don't know where I'm going to be living kind of situation or, so how do I need to think about that? Or just, I've had conversations with clients about who are deathly afraid of putting something out, and we've had conversations about, well, here's maybe how you can break through that or how my other clients have done it. 

So really expanding the definition what a lawyer is. The thing that will get a lot is, well, I don't need a lawyer right now. I'm not getting sued, and I'm like, that doesn't fly, but that's my job to convey that message in a way that people are, okay, cool. I get what you're saying. It's a different world and it's a lot of, whether it's us or someone else, there are a lot of lawyers out there who I think are working really hard to be different, really bring in whatever community they're part of or whatever really is important to them. So I really encourage people to look around, find 3, 4, 5 lawyers, follow them. They're on social media. They're all over the place, and so it's no longer the old days of a grid of men in suits telling you what to do. It's like there's all kinds of people out there, and that's one of the coolest things that's happened in the last 10 years since I've started.

Lex: Chris, thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your journey with us. 

Chris: Yeah, love the conversation. Thanks for having me. The 

Lex: Counsel for Creator's legal membership is what inspired me to create Growthtrackers. I had never really seen a membership style business the way that Counsel for Creators works.

I thought it was so cool how they had taken things that were previously a la carte, things that you would pay by the hour and turned them into a membership. It was just such a great mix of value where as a client, you're getting way more value than you would get from a pay by the hour law firm and from the business side, it makes sense because you build a loyalty with your subscription base for when they need additional services.

They're of course going to come to you, as I have many times. Chris also has his own podcast and newsletter. It's called HyperMemoir. I'm going to link it in the show notes. You should definitely check that out if you're also developing your creative voice and if you want to follow his creative journey. 

He's got some pretty cool projects he's cooking up, so you'll want to get on his newsletter and keep up with this work.

On that note, I want to encourage you to get on the Low Energy Leads Newsletter. If you're not already on there. I'm sharing different stuff there than I share here. We're about to make some changes to the podcast. As I mentioned before, going to be doing more live streams. I'm planning to share more templates and off the shelf grab and go tools that you can use, so you'll want to get on that list if you're interested in that kind of stuff.

I'm constantly keeping in my mind how I can make it easier for you to build a client base, and that newsletter is the center of where I share that stuff. If you like this episode, you're going to want to stay tuned next week where I'm going to talk about some of the lessons that I've learned building my own membership business.  Growthtrackers is my membership, which launched about a year and a half ago, and I'm going to share some of the things that I did really well early on, some of the things that I've learned and recovered from along the way, and some of the things I wish I had done differently. 

Stay tuned right here for that episode. Until next time, keep that energy low until the value's going to be high.