Law Firm AI Visibility Starts With Trust Signals
Which trust signals make AI recommend a law firm?
Andrew Colsky and Stephan Bajaio unpack the visibility mistakes that keep great professionals invisible online, and the clarity that fixes them.
Be prepared to Be-Picked.
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Episode 35 · Listen now
Brief summary of the show
Andrew Colsky sits down with Stephan Bajaio, CEO and co-founder of VibeLogic, to unpack the visibility mistakes that keep great professionals invisible online. Stephan brings more than 10,000 hours of SEO and content strategy experience with some of the world's biggest brands.
His case: your website should work like a digital storefront, not a static brochure. Use the language your clients actually use, prove your expertise before anyone hires you, and think in lifecycle value rather than funnels.
See where your credibility stands
Take the free AQ Assessment. Twenty questions show how AI search sees you and what to fix first.
Take the free AQ AssessmentKey takeaways and FAQs
Clarity and authority beat acronyms. A website that works like a storefront, written in the words clients actually use, earns trust before anyone picks up the phone.
What you'll learn
- Why clarity and authority matter more than the acronyms (SEO, GEO, AEO)
- How to build content that works before, during and after the sale
- Why your bio page, video and blog posts matter when you are the product
- How to use one podcast, transcript or article in many places
- Why AI can scale content but cannot replace human insight
- Why the language clients use beats professional jargon
Questions from this episode
What is the biggest website mistake professionals make?
Treating the site as a brochure. A single bullet point is never enough when a client is searching for something specific.
Do SEO, GEO and AEO need separate strategies?
Stephan's view is that clarity and authority matter more than the acronyms. Clear, expert content serves all of them.
How do professionals build trust before the first call?
By proving expertise in ways that help people first: a strong bio, video, useful articles and reviews from real clients.
Full transcript
Read the full transcript
speaker-0: Welcome to another episode of Be Picked, the show where we help professional service providers learn how to build and grow their practice. I'm your host, Andrew Colsky and today we are going to be talking about private coaching with Kevin Shulman, who is president of Shulman and Associates. welcome to the show.
speaker-1: And good morning. It's a pleasure to be here.
speaker-0: We're really happy to have you here. So we talk about all sorts of things on this show related to helping people build and grow their practices. And oftentimes, ⁓ in in pretty much all professions that I'm aware of, they learn nothing about what to do to market themselves in school because they're simply learning the actual skills of the trade in school. So here ⁓ We have a lot of people who are ambitious, who are trying to grow, who are trying to get out there, but they get mixed messages of what to do or too many things to do, or they get overwhelmed and they end up doing nothing because they don't even know where to start. So tell us about yourself, your background and what that has led to you doing in terms of private coaching.
speaker-1: Well, ⁓ if we want to go all the way back, ⁓ my degrees are in psychology, industrial and organizational psychology. I taught undergraduate psych for a couple of years, way back in the olden days of the nineteen seventies, ⁓ older that's longer before most of your ⁓ listeners were born. And ⁓ but I've spent the last thirty plus years ⁓ doing what I call sales and client development training, working with individuals and small mid-sized firms, occasionally large firms, but I don't really enjoy that work as much, so I don't go after that. But working with small and mid-sized firms to help them grow and expand their client base. ⁓ You know, what I find is ⁓ and you kind of just alluded to it. ⁓ people go to law school, accounting school, engineering school to to avoid being in sales in the first place. And ⁓ and they get there and they learn a whole lot about what to do with a client once they have one, ⁓ but they don't get taught anything about how to go get a client. And you know, it it's it's really hard and they get into work and they become a first year or a second year and and they're working their butts off and no not a clue as to how to bring in clients which is the only way to make partner. Well it's the only way to do it quickly without doing a hundred hours of work a week and who wants to you know you gotta learn how to how to bill a hundred hours, not do a hundred hours.
speaker-0: Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. No, that and and that's one of the big problems that people run into because imagine someone who's, you know, hung out their own shingle. So now they have to bring in every single dollar, but they also have to do every single piece of work. They've got to make sure that they don't miss any deadlines, they've got to make sure that they're putting in quality, you know, effort. And on top of that, now they're being told, Well, that's great, but in order to get the clients you gotta go do Do that too.
speaker-1: ⁓ absolutely. And they need two things. They need, ⁓ quite frankly, someone like you who can help them with the marketing and the social media and all of that and get people to know they exist. And then they need my and by the way, I do nothing on that stuff. I I I need people like you in my life. but then they need someone like me to help them close the business. And they need to be able to build that connection and get somebody one on one to want them to do the business, to want them to be the guy or the girl that's gonna help them get it done. And and they don't know. th there's another thing that's kind of related to that, which I find is absolutely universal. One hundred percent of my clients, one hundred percent of the people I've met over the years, probably including the two people that are on the screen right now, ⁓ fall into this category. They could be better at bringing in business by referral. Referral generation is one of the things we're all terrible at. And ⁓ You know, I had a mentor who told me a long time ago, all you need to do is go out and sell one client. Service the hell out of them, and that client will bring you two or three more. Service the hell out of them, and they'll each bring you two or three more. And if you would do that, you only have to make one sale in your entire life. Now, life doesn't really work that way. But what I always say is just imagine if you got an average of one. good quality referral from every client every year. One re one client one referral per client per year, which doesn't sound like a lot. And you were a crappy closer and only closed one out of four, which is ⁓ a lot which you should do better with referrals, one would think. And but if that was the case, your business would be growing twenty-five percent year over year forever. And I've net never met anybody whose business was growing twenty five percent year over year forever without ever doing any sales or marketing. And in theory you can do that.
speaker-0: Right. Right. Right. So yeah, and and and this gets into the fact that there's so many different ways that a person can get themselves out there. And there's pros and cons to each, but there's nothing wrong with any of them. The the answer is whichever one you choose, get started, you know. Don't don't sit back and wonder.
speaker-1: And and your point is well taken, but I don't think it's whatever one you choose. You have to choose a number of them. I always say that you should have a prospecting and I hate that word prospecting because that sounds like sales and I'm s I apologize to to people who are scared of the word of the S word, but you need to have a prospecting stool or a prospecting teepee. A stool doesn't stand very well on one or two legs. You need three, four is better. Five Might be better by six it gets wobbly again. The same thing with a TP, you need at least three sticks to build a TP. Four is better, five is better, but by six you might as well be building a house. True. And so you need three, four, or five different ways that you are quote unquote going to market that you are using to prospect to find new clients. Clearly, one of them should be referral generation. I think I just said that and I I hope I made that clear. that should definitely be one. One may be marketing, ⁓ social media, for example. one may be networking. one might be god forbid cold calling. That would be the horror that would be horrible. But you know there's there's a but there are dozens of ways to get out there. The key is to pick three, four or five that can work for you, use them all, track their effectiveness over time, and if one really isn't working for you, ditch it and go find another one.
speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Well, so, you know, look, y you do this as a profession in terms of coaching people to take them from being lost into into how to go about this and being successful. So if a new client came to you and they said, Hey, you know, Kevin, I I'm I I have my own practice or I have a small practice with a couple of guys, and you know, we've been at it for about a year, and you know, we get a couple of clients here and there, but we're really not pulling in what we need to pull in. Where would you start with that person in terms of, you know, here's kind of step one through three.
speaker-1: ⁓ that's a fair question. and quite frankly, everybody's different. We need to find out first what are they doing, what's working, what's not working. What are they doing that with maybe one little tweak we can make a big impact What's something that they've totally missed, like referral generation is the one I've been harping on, ⁓ that they've done nothing about. And you know, ⁓ people think that in today's world and I I hate to sound like the old guy, but I am the old guy. in today's world, the way to get referrals is to ask people to go give you a review on on Yelp or on Google or on whatever, on LinkedIn. And that helps and it's not I'm not implying at all that that's a bad thing, that's a good thing. But that's a whole lot different thing than than getting having them bring you specific people that they know and trust that they can bring into you.
speaker-0: Uh-huh. So, you know, and this comes down to sort of the personal touch, which is actually really important. If you are running a a ⁓ practice, ⁓ whatever it is that you're doing, but if you're running a practice by yourself or small, you're probably looking to draw from your local community, which means that people know each other in the local community. So what you know, y you you've you've talked about the referrals and I'll tell us now some more details. What how do How I make that happen?
speaker-1: So it's interesting. You talked about local community. the first thing I did when I started my business in nineteen ninety two, I think. ⁓ I don't know how that happens, but it does. I joined my local chamber. Now, I'm not particularly a fan of chambers of commerce. mostly because if you're a young attorney Your local chamber probably has fifty people that look just like you. If you're a young engineer, they've got another twenty-five people that look just like you that are trying to do what you're trying to do. And so it's a little bit hard to stand out. But I tell two stories about my my time in my local chamber when I first joined. Story number one is my first day there, I met somebody. Who wasn't even a member of the chamber and didn't become a client. But he referred me to somebody who did become a client. And that guy referred me to two other people, and one of them became a main source of business, a center of influence, as we like to call them. And that person referred me to seven or eight different pieces of business. And I tracked that. And that person that I met on day one, I got north of a million dollars worth of business from, directly or indirectly. And that was my first day at the chamber, did that for me. Now, the other thing I did, which was kind of interesting, was and this was being I did this if I can use a legal term with malice aforethought.
speaker-0: Wow. Okay.
speaker-1: what I knew was that ⁓ if you want to do ⁓ be noticed at the chamber you've got to become part of the leadership. And so I developed my little my little dirty plan and the first thing I did was I joined the membership committee. When I got on the membership committee, here's the one piece of information I knew. The biggest problem chambers have is not getting new members, it's getting members to stay. Right. Every new business that opens, the chamber goes and says, Hi, we're your local chamber for two hundred bucks, we'll help you get business and to help you grow your business. And everybody says two hundred bucks, of course, here here it is. And everybody joins. But then they don't show up to the meetings and they don't know how to run do anything in the meetings and nothing happens. So a year later when the chamber comes back and says we want another two hundred bucks for s for year number two, they all say, Sorry, we're done. Mm-hmm. So it's getting them to stay is the problem. So I got on the membership committee and I raised my hand and I volunteered and I said, listen, I know that our problem is membership retention. I am willing, if you'll give me the list, to call every single member. And that at the time that chamber had about 700 members. I'll make 700 phone calls. Don't ask me to do it in in a week or in a month, but I'll do it. And I will give them a survey of what would they like to get out of the chamber and what are they not getting and all that. And I'll come back with the results and hopefully it'll help us with member retention. And everybody said, Wow, you would really do that? I said, My pleasure. So the nice thing was when I called, it wasn't a cold call, I was calling from the chamber. I said, Hi, I'm calling from the local chamber. And I got ownership on the phone ninety five percent of the time. Nice which I couldn't do if I was calling representing my new company from for for members. Right. So I called up, I said, Hi I'm a member of the chamber. ⁓ we're curious as to what you what you're getting out of the chamber, what you're not getting, what you'd like to see. And I had that little five minute conversation that I said I'd have and I did record all the data. But then I said but then came my ulterior motive. I said, Listen, Mr. Business Owner or Mr. Mr. Senior Partner, most people join the chamber for networking. And clearly I'm not I don't work for the chamber, I'm a member myself. As long as we're on the phone, let's do the networking thing. Tell me a little bit about your practice, I'll tell you a little a bit about mine, and let's see if we can help each other.
speaker-0: Great.
speaker-1: And that's how I started my business. Seven hundred calls to seven hundred business owners and in the first year my business took off. That was that that was my secret plan.
speaker-0: ⁓ it makes a lot of sense, you know. That that's great.
speaker-1: Yeah. I have relayed that story to untold hundreds of people in the last thirty plus years, forty years, and maybe thousands of people, I'm guessing maybe one or two have gone out and d and replicated it. It takes time and effort and you gotta be willing to put in the work.
speaker-0: 'Cause it takes effort. Right, right. And and that's you know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit then about Yes, it takes effort to get out there and to network and to meet people and to get the referrals and all, because if if you don't know them, they're not going to refer anybody to you. But then it's so enticing to say, ⁓ I can just, you know, write a check and purchase Google Ads. That'll build my business.
speaker-1: Absolutely. R write the check is the easy way. Everybody that starts a business has the ability to write at least some small checks. And writing ads for Google ads writing checks for Google ads and writing checks for, you know, pay for click and all that fun stuff. Spending time spending I less I know people that spend north of an hour a day on LinkedIn. Mm-hmm. And they don't have a practice. Wow. LinkedIn is a wonderful tool, it really is. Business to business on social media, it's the only to me it's the only one to be on. But if you're spending north of an hour on it and not and not having that generate a lot of business, something's wrong. Something's wrong. Either you're not doing it well or you're spending way too much time on it.
speaker-0: Right. Well, I mean, you know, the the difference that I talk about a lot is if you are putting money towards purchasing advertising, to me it's very much the same as dropping a quarter into a slot machine. And the reason that I say that is because you're putting money into something, so your money's gone. You don't know whether you're gonna get any return at all. As soon as you stop putting money in, you stop getting any potential return at all. And so it's gambling. You're gambling and you're hoping that one of those quarters might bring you a client that might be the type of client you need, that might be willing to pay for your services, that might want to hire you.
speaker-1: Th that might pay for all those ads you did.
speaker-0: Right, right. And it's it's not you know, to build a practice is more of building a reputation, building credibility, building your network as you say. That requires, you know, a different set of skills than just writing a check to Google for for ads. but you build something, you get the right type of clients. you get quality clients that are focused y that are that are for your type of work. those are the ones that are gonna be referring you to other people down the road. So it's an entirely different animal, but you know, you can't do nothing and expect to get results.
speaker-1: ⁓ absolutely. But by the way, you just reminded me of a point. You said you get the right kind of clients to help you build your business and then you get referrals. Mm-hmm. Sometimes and it's happened to all of us, I including you and me, in our lifetime, we get a crappy client. Who's a major PIA, uses up all your time, doesn't give you enough money in return for all that time, and just all all the reasons what what make people a crappy client, it's not necessarily how much money they bring in. And then you mistakenly think that I'll make up for that by getting more referrals from them. And here's the and here's a universal truth. Crappy clients will always bring you to other crappy clients.
speaker-0: That's exactly why I was laughing.
speaker-1: Clients that abuse your time and then don't pay your bills and you have to chase them will bring you to other crappy clients that abuse your time and don't pay their bills. Every time.
speaker-0: Yep. Yep. And that's
speaker-1: And a and if and if you have your A number one best client and you're afraid to ask ⁓ for referrals 'cause you think it'll hurt the relationship, I have been doing business growth training for almost forty years and I have never had one person tell me zero percent of the time has it ever happened that I I asked a client for a referral and he told me he'd never do business with me again. Now, some people say no I don't give referrals, some people say I don't have any referrals for you, some people say I don't like doing that. ⁓ I once had a client who wouldn't give me referrals 'cause he didn't want to share me.
speaker-0: Yeah. Interesting.
speaker-1: It was very interesting. I had a client ⁓ when I met him, ⁓ it was not o in the professions, well it kind of in he was in financial services. And he was like number, I don't know, twenty in his office out of twenty five people. And we worked together and he became number two or three ⁓ within six months and and it was really ⁓ a really n a nice client, all good. And I expected him to be ⁓ the easiest person to ask for referrals because he had twenty-five other people in his office to to give me referrals from. And he said, Hell no, you're my secret weapon. I'm not giving you anybody in my office. He said, I'll refer you to people outside my business, but I'll never refer you to someone in my office.
speaker-0: Right, right. Well, he's got a point.
speaker-1: It was very interesting, but ⁓ that was the only one I ever had like that.
speaker-0: Right. Well and you know, I I wanna expand on that for a second because I think this is an important thing. When when you talk about referrals, I think some people might be thinking to themselves, so I'm gonna ask my client to go out there and be a salesman for me and drum up business and whatever. And that's not what I what I believe you're saying. What I believe you're saying is what I find to be true for me, which is I may work with someone and I think they did a good job for me and I appreciate the work they did. And I'm not going to go out there thinking, who can I call to refer to this person? I'm just going to be living my life. But when I live my life, I hang out with people that are have interests in common with mine. So they may be the type of person that may need that same professional. And lo and behold, I'll be talking to someone and they'll tell me a story about something. I'll say, you know what? I know someone who can help with that because I've worked with that person. And there comes the referral. Not because I was out there stomping the pavement trying to find people for this person, just because we were having a conversation and I realized they had a sp a problem similar to mine.
speaker-1: ⁓ hundred percent correct. ⁓ I'm not asking anybody to go out and be my sales guy, although occasionally I do. I have a few few people that I've worked with for a long time, and every year I sit ⁓ down and I'll and I'll say, Listen, ⁓ you have an assignment this year. This year your job is to bring me three clients. And can you do that? Now I'm always willing to do it for them if they ask. Most of the time they don't ask back. But ⁓ I have a few people that I do that with and and that's fine. but there are a lot of pieces about it. There's an interesting thing, something that I call Emerson's Law. I think we know which Emerson I'm talking about, right? Not the electronic sky and and and not the greatest keyboardist of my era, which tells people how old I am. and ⁓ But Ralph Waldo and somewhere in the in the library is a book called Emerson's Essays and in there is his essay on compensation and it is the most tedious read in the world. I encourage you to not go read it. It it's terrible. But I can boil it down to six words that if you buy into it can change your life. And the six words are if you want more, give more. If you want more, give more. And what I got out of that is that people who give more referrals get more referrals. People at the chamber that give the most referrals get the most referred. If you join a networking group, the people that give the most get the most every time. And by the way you should join a networking group for it, that's true for everybody. Hard to find a good one, but do it. And so here's my story. About twenty five years ago, I wanted to get my work week down to four days a week. ⁓ my main motivation was I wanted more time to do my volunteer work, which I was finding I didn't have enough time for, and you don't need all that background. And I put a program together for myself to work ha on how to reduce my time my business time by twenty percent, yet 'cause I didn't want to work more hours. That was out of the question. And 'cause I'm anything but I'm not a workaholic. And But I wanted to continue to grow my practice and grow my own personal production at the rate it had been growing and do it with twenty percent less time. And I thought about how to do that. And the main way that I decided to do that, I made a commitment, and I mean commitment, to give at least one good quality referral every day. And I gotta tell you, that's hard to do, it's easy to say, and really hard to do. Sometimes I will admit it got down to recommending a restaurant. But ⁓ really hard to do. But I'm and when I give a referral, it's a really good quality referral. It's not just, hey, I know a guy. And if you do it right and you give good quality referrals, and the way I say it is it took Emerson a few months to figure out that I was serious and really committed and but once I did that, I literally don't remember the last time I went more than a few days without my phone ringing and someone on the other end saying, Hey Kevin, someone told me that you're a guy I need to talk to or something like that happening. Or hey Kevin, I've got someone you need to talk to.
speaker-0: Well it's it's you know the the way that I kind of describe that concept to people sometimes is this. Let's say you have someone who says, you know, I I I never get invited to any parties and I never get, you know, any attention and I don't know, you know, I got all these events but but then nobody ever follows up with me and you know, how do I how do I get invited to more events? How do I get invited to more parties? And I always respond to that with a question to them, which is How many parties have you thrown that you've invited them to? And it's always deer in the headlights.
speaker-1: Every time.
speaker-0: Yeah. It's it's it's it's just like you're saying. You've gotta reach out, you've gotta do your part. The more you give, the more you get. If you just wanna get
speaker-1: w it was an investment but I did the what we called the semi annual Shulman and Associates networking event. I held it a big catering place. I always goal was to put a hundred people in the room. ⁓ were my rules. I invited clients, ⁓ ⁓ prospective clients that I've been talking to. ⁓ And the rule was, admission is free, but you must bring a guest. Those were the rules. So my goal was to have a hundred people total. And we usually ended up with between ninety five and a hundred and ten. So that range. ⁓ and yes, it cost me a few thousand dollars for the night. and the way I did it given what I do for a living, is I started by doing a quick twenty minute ⁓ training program on something that was about business development. And often I did it I did it about networking skills because they were about to go network and most of them don't aren't very good at it. So I I gave gave them twenty minutes on networking skills and then it was okay, go do it and there was ⁓ and and there was ⁓ a lot of really good food, ⁓ some good drink and blah blah blah. But the key was I was meeting fifty new people to ⁓ to get introduced to me and my business.
speaker-0: Right? Right?
speaker-1: And I look and I did it first class. I did not do cheap booze. I did not do cheap food. It was not inexpensive. but i it was great. ⁓ actually the funny thing was, ⁓ started by doing ⁓ called it the first semi annual Shulman and Associates networking ⁓ ⁓ second one I called the third semi annual. ⁓
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: And by year three I was calling it the twenty-fifth semi and no one ever noticed that, but it sounded like a big ongoing thing.
speaker-0: Right. Right. Hey, look. It works. ⁓ gosh.
speaker-1: But it was but it was very effective and and it worked.
speaker-0: Yeah, yeah. And and and that's the thing is that you know, and I know it's hard for a lot of people when they think about you mean I gotta go out and I gotta put myself out there and meet strangers and and talk to them. And the answer is well, that's certainly part of it. You know, you you're not gonna get business if nobody knows who you are or knows that you exist.
speaker-1: No question. That's that that's the deal. ⁓ you gotta get yourself out there, people have to know you. ⁓ you know, and th the other thing is there are so many people ⁓ who they think they don't have the personality to do it. Mm-hmm. And quite frankly, it's all interpersonal skills, but it doesn't take much, just a little bit of training can get you comfortable in a networking situation and learning how to ask those four or five questions that get things going.
speaker-0: Right. Right. And this is all
speaker-1: can't just be, hey, what do you do?
speaker-0: Right. Well I was gonna say this this is all stuff that they learn from a private coach. They can help them with all these skills. So so with that, because we have reached our time limit for the show today, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you after this episode, how excuse me, how would they find you?
speaker-1: Okay, so the two ways. ⁓ easiest way is by phone. Happy to take phone calls from near anybody. ⁓ That number is 732-874-3762. Again, 732-874-3762. Or certainly they can email me. It's Kevin at We expect success.com. So there's two E's that we expect. Every time I don't say that last part, somebody gets it wrong.
speaker-0: Right.
speaker-1: and happy to ⁓ help anybody any way I can.
speaker-0: Fantastic. Thank you for that. ⁓ I also want to remind the audience that if you are lost and you're not sure exactly what you're doing wrong or where to start or how to go about it, you can also go to my website, which is www.bepicked be hyphen, p-i-c-k-ed-d dot com. And we have a free assessment on there. You can go through and it will help. kind of grade you as to where are your weaknesses and where are your strengths so you'll know where you can get started. You can also check out credibilitygenerator.com. That's where we have spent a lot of time and effort building out a tool to help you build your credibility online so that it's working while you're working. ⁓ And check out my upcoming book, Left of Trust. Guess what? Leftoftrust.com will bring you right to it. And you can take a look at that. So with that, we appreciate you all listening to another episode of Be Picked. Kevin, I want to thank you for being here, and we will see all of you next week on our next episode of Be Picked.
Left of Trust
Andrew's book on why excellent professionals get overlooked, and how to get chosen before the first conversation. Attorneys can read the first chapter free.
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