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Ken Hardison from PILMMA joins us today to discuss what PILMMA is and how it started.
Ken also covers the benefits of mastermind groups, how the PILMMA Super Summit works, his favorite part of the conference, how firms grow with the help of each other, and the future of PILMMA.
PILMMA Super Summit 2025 will be April 29, 2025 – May 2, 2025 in Denver, Colorado.
Visit PILMMA online here: https://www.pilmma.org/.
Get Ken’s book, The Mastermind Effect, here: https://www.amazon.com/Mastermind-Effect-Owners-SECRET-Growth/dp/0983937974.
See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/.
Transcript:
Intro:
Lindsey:
Welcome to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, where we quickly cover the hot topics in the legal marketing world. I’m your host, Lindsey Busfield. As a legal SEO agency, the law firms we work with all have a dedicated interest in growing their firms with strategic marketing initiatives. As such, we field a lot of questions regarding which marketing strategies are worth investing in and which are more hype than results. One organization we have been asked about multiple times is PILMMA. Many of the clients we work with are already PILMMA members and they consistently praise the strategic marketing and business management strategies that they receive as a result of their membership. Additionally, I had the opportunity to meet Ken Hardison, the Founder of PILMMA at their annual summit last year. And while I could talk secondhand about the great work that PILMMA does, nobody is going to be able to explain the game-changing resources PILMMA provides as well as Ken can himself. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Ken:
Oh, thank you, it’s my honor.
How Did PILMMA Start?
Lindsey:
Well, let’s start with a little bit of information just about you. Can you share a little bit about your journey from becoming a lawyer to a leader in the legal marketing and management industry?
Ken:
Yeah, so I started practicing in ’82 in a little town called Dunn, North Carolina. And I was a partner in another firm from 82 to 96. And I wanted to start marketing because I had went to court one day, I used to do PI, disability and criminal, and one of the partners did estate, real estate and the other one did domestic. And I went to court and this guy came in with crutches and I said, “What happened, Joe?” He said, “Well, I got hit by a semi.” I said, “Well, you know, I do PI.” He said, “Yeah, but I hired this guy off the TV.” And it just hit me.
Well, I went and tried the case and we won the case and I drove back to the office and I told my partner, I said, “I wan to have a meeting,” I said, “We have got to change with the times,” I said, “We need to start marketing.” And they said, “No, it’s unprofessional. We’re not going to do it.” So we had a dialogue for about six months. I left, took one associate and three staff and I went out and kind of went out, spent three days with John Morgan, this is in ’96. Back then he only had 25 lawyers.
I went Ken Nunn up in Indiana, and I shadowed him for two or three days and then I went and got involved with Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham, and I just learned everything, read everything I could about marketing and then tried it to law firms. And I went out and mortgaged everything I had to my name, half a million dollars at that time and went on TV and started Yellow Pages. And of course the Yellow Pages are dead now. But anyway, in five years we went from two lawyers, three staff to 13 lawyers, 47 staff, and the rest is history.
2010, I just got up one morning and I just wasn’t challenged, I wasn’t looking forward to going to work, and I said, “I think I’m ready to do something else.” And so I sold a law firm and I was going to retire, and I moved down to Myrtle Beach from Raleigh, I was living in Raleigh then, and I fished in golf for about six months, got bored and I started a Mastermind and then we started PILMMA and the rest, it’s kind of a hobby to start with, and two or three years it really took hold and without much marketing, believe it or not, we started growing and then I said, “Well, I can make this a real business.” So I did. And the rest is history. I mean, we’re on our 15th year, we’ve, gosh, helped hundreds if not thousands of PI lawyers, disability workers’ comp, employment, anything with contingency. I don’t think we’re as good a fit for domestic criminal lawyers, although we do have some, we really niche for the injury/contingency based law firm.
And we’ve got different levels of membership. I used to do some coaching and consulting, and we’ve got just a regular gold membership and in that we offer intake training every month for your intake people, a marketing round table, a management round table. I do a Q&A every month on Zoom, any question anybody’s got. We do a monthly magazine that we put out every month to our members, and we’ve got a vault full of videos, trainings, and teachings that I did. There’re like 30 of them. And then we’ve got archives of webinars and templates and different things. It’s just really like, we call it the resource.
And then we put on one big event a year, we used to put on two, but I decided to pop it down to one and that’s going to be April 29th through May 2nd in Denver. And we usually will have about 40 speakers, probably over half of them are lawyers, successful lawyers that I’ve taught them to shared some of their secrets. A lot of them are my Mastermind members, we also have a Mastermind program and we’ve got about over 100 law firms across the nation and Canada that are in the Masterminds. I got seven groups, try to keep it small, each group, and it’s a market exclusive so people can share what’s working and not working.
And yeah, I just got through with one yesterday. And we go to pretty nice places. We’re doing Charleston, I think in July we’re going to Montreal if they’ll let us in. I don’t know about all these tariffs. And then we’re going to Hawaii. Next year, we’ll go to Quay West and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. So we got really nice places, stay at really nice hotels and it’s almost like a little groupie, everybody’s sharing and trying to help each other like a little mini board of advisors.
What is a Mastermind Group?
Lindsey:
Yeah, talk to me a little bit more in depth about what a Mastermind experience is like.
Ken:
Yeah, I wrote a book on it called The Mastermind Effect. So basically what you’re trying to do, it was developed many, many years ago, Napoleon Hill’s is known for it, Think and Grow Rich, but it’s where you get like-minded people together to help each other and trying to help them grow their business. And the deal is most of them are entrepreneurial and most of their families or their partners or their people that they’re working with don’t understand them because they’re thinking big, they’re thinking outside the box. And I’m one of those people. And so I’ve been in Masterminds for over 30 years, I still am in another Mastermind, has nothing to do with lawyers.
So we get together and meet and pretty much, I’ve been doing it for 15 years now. So what we do is, one, we make them fill out sheets so that they know their numbers, like what is the percentage of your gross is spent on staff? What percentage is spent on associates? What percentage is spent on marketing? What’s your net? What is your average fee per case type? What is your conversion rate for cases wanted? And what we try to get lawyers to do is to really think about running the law firm. It is a profession, but you got to run it like a business because it’s very competitive in PI, I tell you, the most competitive field, in my opinion, out there as far as for law firms. And each one gets about 45 minutes to an hour to share what’s been working in marketing and management, what’s not been working in marketing and management since the last meeting, and what challenges they’re having.
And then if there’s something they’ve thought about doing, some kind of marketing or some kind of new compensation package for their staff or lawyers, they’ll ask, “You know, I’m thinking about doing this. Have you ever seen this or have any of y’all doing this?” And so you get all this feedback and I facilitate all of them. I’m kind of like the orchestra leader. I try to not make it the Ken Hardison show, I try to get people that are very quiet to talk and I get people that like to talk too much to stay quiet a little bit more. But I’m trying to get everybody to engage, you know what I’m saying? Because it makes a better Mastermind because people come from different experiences from different part of the countries and quickest way to learn something is from somebody else’s mistake or somebody else’s victory, right?
Lindsey:
Absolutely.
Ken:
So it is shortcuts. I tell most of the really smart lawyers that join Mastermind, I say, “You’ll get there either way,” I said, “You’ll just get there a lot faster with a Mastermind because it’s going to shortcut all of it.” Because when I was doing it, I didn’t have anybody, I didn’t have a lawyer Mastermind. I was in a business Mastermind with different types of business, but not the same. And I wasted a lot of money, maybe I didn’t waste it because I learned what didn’t work, but I was always trying new things, testing new marketing strategies and about half of them worked and about half of them didn’t.
Lindsey:
Well, and as you mentioned before, like with the Yellow Pages, things that used to work now don’t and so you really need to be on top of emerging trends. So it’s helpful to have a group of people who are trying the different things in a different time with different budgets and different locations to really get a feel for what is working here and now and how well for this type of firm.
Ken:
And I get a lot of new companies that come out with new deals that come to me and say, “I want you to Masterminds to beta test this,” and of course they want my endorsement and that’s good, but I won’t endorse anything unless I believe in it.
Lindsey:
Absolutely.
Ken:
Whether they pay me or don’t pay me. Took a long time, but I got a pretty good reputation for being a straight shooter and so I like to keep that reputation because it takes just a second to lose it and years to make it. But yeah, I’m not going to say it’s for everybody, if you think you know more than everybody else in the room, then you’re probably not a good person to be in there if your ego is so big, you got to kind of put your ego at the door and say, “Listen, I’m ready to learn something new. I know I don’t know it all.” And listen, I know a lot, but I don’t know it all, they teach me stuff every time. Yeah, I mean, because there’s always new people trying new things. And yeah, like yesterday we had this new thing and one of my Masterminds said, “Well, this has paid for the whole trip,” and he said, “This is a golden nugget.” So that made me feel good because I want to give value.
But yeah, I mean, I think it’s got a couple of other things, it’s a good place because, like I said, people don’t understand what you’re going through. It’s lonely at the top. And then the other thing is, it’s almost like a little peer pressure. If you show up at the next meeting and you haven’t done anything or tried anything, you kind of look like eh, you know? So you got a little, it’s that peer pressure too. They do, I got probably 80% of them, they put together a whole big PowerPoints and everything. I mean, you don’t have to, but a lot of them like to do that. And then they share what swag they’re using and some of their drip campaigns and different things that they’ve tried it say, “Hey, I really think I’ve hit something here. You guys need to try this.”
Lindsey:
Well, everybody benefits when you bring your A game and whether it is, doing it for the benevolence of others so that they can learn from your experience or even just going through the process of really thinking through what you’re doing and seeing how successful it has been for your own business, it forces you to reflect and then take action and either, double down on the investment here or try something else. But bringing your A game to these Mastermind meetings is going to benefit everybody.
Ken:
Yeah. And we’ve got some great success stories of, we’ve got lawyers that were at 300,000 annual and they’re doing 16 million now, I got lawyers that were doing 5 million when they joined, they’re doing 30 million now. I mean, but listen, it was them that did it, it wasn’t me, but I think having access to the Mastermind got them there a lot quicker. At least they tell me it did anyway, so I want to believe that.
Lindsey:
I know that I personally work better when I have a creative partnership or a creative pair to bounce ideas off of and we get to strategies and concepts that are so much better than either of us could have ended up with on our own. And there’s something real about that. And have the camaraderie of people who are in a similar position that others won’t necessarily understand, even your spouse might not even understand if you’re coming home and jibber jabbering about this and they’re like, “Go find somebody else to go talk to about this.” So I think it’s a great group both for, you know, interpersonal networking, but also for that business advancement.
Ken:
Yeah, and one thing I want to say too, and then I’ll shut up, but they can bring like their marketing director or their office manager or CEO, whatever it is, to it too. And it helps them. Like I had one said, “Can they just sit at the back?” I said, “Hey, bring them,” I said, “As long as they sign,” you have to sign a non-disclosure, NDA, because we want everybody to be open and free and not worried about somebody sharing their stuff with their competitors.
Lindsey:
Of course.
Ken:
And we’ve done good. And I have to create a Chinese wall for me because I got like seven groups, I might have five groups with lawyers from Atlanta, and I can’t talk about in one group what some other groups do, I have to put on the blinders, which I’m good at. My grandmother told me I was the only grandchild she had that she could tell anything to and tell me not to tell anybody, and I wouldn’t. So I’ve always been good with holding secrets.
Lindsey:
That’s a gift to be able to have that kind of memory.
Ken:
Yeah, and I think that’s good because I know I’ve seen some Masterminds where they fell apart because the facilitator couldn’t keep his lips sealed.
What is the PILMMA Super Summit?
Lindsey:
Yep, I would imagine that would be a huge liability. And again, it goes back to what you’re talking about with reputation, is you need to have reputation not only for good strategies and good concepts here, but you need to have a good reputation for being trustworthy and fostering an environment of trust. And that’s a really special thing to have been able to do on a very large scale with high stakes. So my hats off to you for creating that. So talk to me about the annual PILMMA Summit. I know I’m excited to be out there out in Denver in April, but for anybody who hasn’t been, what can attendees expect and what can they expect to walk away with?
Ken:
Yeah, so we’re kind of different, I think I call our differentiator is that we’re not a lot of fluff, I don’t get big name football players or stars. What I try to do is get really good content that’s actionable that you could take home, not a bunch of theory. So we’ve got people who told me talking about how to actually get LSAs to where they work because a lot of lawyers have problems with them, what to do to get you to get on the maps, you know that, how to get referrals from your past clients, how to get streaming, TV, radio, how to hire, how to fire, what KPIs are important to keep up with, what numbers should you really be looking at?
And probably we’ll have some panels, like a social media panel, “This is what’s working now, this is what’s not working.” We’ve got a guy that’s really busted YouTube wide open from Texas that’s going to share the secrets of how he’s just like quadrupled his practice in less than three years by using YouTube. So we’ve got, like I said, over 40 speakers. I think the big deal is it’s not a lot of fluff, but we don’t even give CLE credits. I mean, people come there to learn how to grow their practices and we’ll have anywhere from, I think we’ve got 64 vendors signed up right now, we’ve got 72, so we’ve got, what, eight spaces left, and we’ll probably sell out, we usually do. So we’ll have vendors can sit there and talk to people about SEO, about offshore staffing, about LSAs, all about TV, radio, everything.
Ken’s Favorite Part of the PILMMA Conference:
Lindsey:
Yeah, one of my favorite parts of going to the conference is walking around the booths and seeing what new businesses are starting to emerge, especially with AI coming in and you know, being a major game changer there, seeing how that is working, whether it’s with depositions or with marketing or, and there are a lot of really interesting tools that are available out there. So that’s definitely one of my favorite parts of it. What is your favorite part of the PILMMA conference experience?
Ken:
Listening to the lawyers, because we got Justin Lovely who has embraced AI and he started speaking of it, he gets asked to speak all over the country now. I mean, he was speaking yesterday at another conference, but he’s one of my Masterminds. And the Masterminds loved him because he’s just like in his early forties and he just embraced it and he’s using it all kinds of ways. And then my marketing director here, she’s really got AI, we’re using a lot for all our marketing, like social media and different things, and a lot of the tools, and she’s going to be sharing what her favorite AI tools are, and Justin’s going to be sharing his, so it’s people that are actually using it, not people that are selling it, you know what I’m saying?
Lindsey:
Right, exactly.
Ken:
And I think that’s what lawyers want to hear.
PILMMA’s Future:
Lindsey:
Yeah, they want to hear the success stories from people who have actually used it and have gotten more clients, because that’s, at the end of the day, what it’s all about, it’s all about growing their firms. But with PILMMA as an entity itself, looking at growth and business development, where do you see PILMMA going in the next five to 10 years?
Ken:
That’s a good question. I mean, I think we’re going to go where it takes us. I mean, the deal is I’d like to build up the Masterminds, I would love to… We’ve got some things in the bull room we’re talking about. I don’t know that I want to reveal them right now, because when I started this, I had no competitors, now everybody and his brother is either got a Mastermind or doing the solid work. And I’m good with that, but I have to be a little bit more careful than I used to be about I’ve had people come work for me and then go work for somebody else and tell them what I was getting ready to do. So I had to be careful about it.
But I mean, I’m fine with people copying what I do. I mean, that’s when I practiced law, they did it. It drives my wife crazy, I said, “It’s the biggest form of flattery,” I said, “Don’t worry about it,” I said, “We’ll be on to something else next year.” That’s the way it works, you got to pivot and keep going. We were the first people to put on an AI conference, we did it August of ’23 when it was just in its infancy. We always try to be ahead of, we’re coming out with a new book, Hiring Blueprint, on how to hire people. But that’s two big deals right now is hiring lawyers and hiring the staff and keeping them and how to use AI. I think that’s the two hot topics right now, and we got a lot of content about that.
Lindsey:
Well, and, I mean, especially with AI, it’s still very much at its infancy and it’ll be in the hands of the users to pave the way on how to best use it and how it develops and adapts to the market needs. So I’m sure that you have some big things in the works, definitely don’t want to jump into revealing any secrets, but knowing everything that you’ve talked about so far, you would get bored if it just kind of stayed put. So I’m looking forward to seeing where you’re taking it next. So tell me, if somebody is interested in learning more about PILMMA or connecting with you about the Masterminds, how can they get in touch?
Ken:
Just info@PILMMA.org. Just info, just whatever you want. Somebody will get back to you the same day.
Lindsey:
Well, thank you so much, Ken. I really appreciate you coming on today and sharing all this information. And I highly encourage any lawyers who are listening today to check out PILMMA and come to the conference, come to any of the events, and you’re really going to walk away with some valuable information. Thank you so much for coming today.
Ken:
Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
