Do you want to build a multi-million dollar marketing consultancy? Buckle up and learn from today’s guest, who spills the secrets to taking your business from zero to hero. Starting from scratch, Hugo E. Gomez, the founder of Abogados NOW, discovered the power of niche marketing by focusing on Hispanic digital marketing for law firms; he filled a critical gap and turned his passion into a thriving business. He reveals his highest ROI client acquisition channels, which made his company a go-to resource for legal marketing in the Hispanic community, attracting Spanish-speaking clients for law firms with bilingual staff. Plus, learn how to weather any economic storm with a plan that keeps your pipeline overflowing. As economic experts warn of a potential downturn, Hugo shares battle-tested strategies to recession-proof your business. Don’t miss this jam-packed episode with Hugo E. Gomez on how to thrive when the market takes a tumble.
In this episode with Hugo, you’ll learn how to:
- Find your niche in a saturated market.
- Fire yourself within your company.
- Prepare for an economic downfall.
- Leverage paid ads to keep a full pipeline.
- Avoid the #1 mistake consultants make when sending cold emails.
- Use a newsletter to win new business.
Book your complimentary growth session call.
Connect with Hugo on LinkedIn.
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Joining Michael on the show is Hugo Gomez, who’s the Founder of HispanicMarketing.com in Abogados NOW, which he started with one goal in mind to connect businesses to the fastest and largest growing cohort of Hispanics in the US. Before we dive into the episode, are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients we work with started as readers like you. A consistent theme they have shared with us is they wished they had reached out sooner about our clarity coaching program, rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants like you, we are offering a free no-pressure growth session call where on the call, we will dive deep into your goals, challenges, and situation and outline a plan that is tailor-made just for you.
We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time-consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. Don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free grow session call. Visit ConsultingSuccess.com/Grow.
Let me tell you about what you’re going to learn in this episode with Michael and Hugo. First is how to find your niche in a saturated market. How to fire yourself within your company, how to prepare for an economic downfall, how to leverage paid ads to keep a full pipeline, how to avoid the number one mistake consultants make when sending cold emails, and how to use a newsletter to win new business, plus so much more. Here to share with you his story and insights is Hugo Gomez. Enjoy.
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You’ve been in the marketing world now for quite some time. If you could share, where did the interest in marketing come from and then specifically around Hispanics or marketing to the Hispanic community? Fill us in on where that came from.
I’ve always been a digital marketing nerd since junior high school. I was blogging a lot. I was involved in social networks and video editing at an early age. I knew that I would be involved to some degree in my career having some involvement in digital media, but to what extent I didn’t know. My career accidentally started in lead generation in consumer finance when I graduated from university. That taught me that marketing was much more than branding, color schemes, and brand guidelines and it had a lot to do more with algebra inputs and outputs.
That was more interesting to me in the long term than being involved in more creative discussions. While those are interesting, I feel like metrics and funnels were more interesting for me. I pursued that. I have been involved in lead generation thereafter since 2010 in the financial space and then in legal. The reason I got into Hispanic marketing or Hispanic lead generation is namely because Hispanic lead generation companies didn’t exist. It’s still a fairly new concept, which I thought was interesting considering that 20% of the United States is Hispanic.
You’ve been in the marketing world for many years now. You mentioned you got a start in lead generation, which is also interesting. One of the companies I had back in the day was focused on lead generation. I have a deep respect and understanding for that space and for that industry. I’m interested in two parts. Why did you arrive at and decide to focus specifically on legal lawyers and law firms? That’s my number one.
The second question I’d love to tee up for you and we’ll come back to is why do you decide or do you remember the process or where you were for you to arrive at, “I should focus on the Hispanic community. It’s underserved. It’s a big opportunity? There are lots of opportunities that surround all of us all the time, yet most of us don’t necessarily take advantage or don’t move forward with something we think about we don’t take action on. Those two things start off the legal law firm side. Why that?
Legal, it was more function of where my last job was as an employee. Around 2017 I worked for a legal lead generation company and they had a particular business model that sold data very transactionally. I saw an opportunity to help attorneys with their branding with the creative aspect of their firm but also the super nerdy lead gen funnel deliverables. I saw that as an opportunity, namely because I had spoken to many attorneys during that time who’d said, “I don’t mind buying leads but I would love to brand myself to the Hispanic market.”
Those conversations were had where I’m from in Los Angeles County and naturally, I think a lot of attorneys who spoke to me because I am Hispanic, assumed that maybe I could help them out there. Because of those conversations, I started Abogados NOW, which is Hispanic digital marketing specifically for attorneys. That was the impetus of it. It was a natural conversation with attorneys. The market told me what to do. I was sensitive to what they were saying, and what they wanted, and going beyond transactional lead sales, I wanted to give them something a little deeper for their business.
What you’re mentioning right now is important and often not appreciated or people don’t spend enough time looking for those signs. You’re essentially saying that you put yourself in a position where you are having conversations over and over again. You start to see the data, the writing on the wall, that there’s a need and interest, and then you take action on that. Maybe that’s a lesson for everybody here because it doesn’t matter whether you’re getting started or maybe you’ve been building your consulting business for over a decade, but when you think about launching into new markets, new products, new services, the market will often give you signs or signals of where there is a need or an opportunity if you’re putting yourself out there to receive that information.
It generally comes through conversations, meeting people at events, doing research, and all that stuff. I’m glad that you shared that. I know you talked to lots of different business owners and you went through this process or at least a thought process of narrowing in finding the niche. What advice would you have for business owners that maybe right now are quite broad like they are saying, “We provide digital marketing services. We do management consulting. We do strategy and planning consulting.” What would you tell those people?
Finding Your Niche
Find the niche that you’re excited about, the one that emotionally or without calculation gets you out of bed. I hate to sound like a romantic but I don’t think that what I do is work. I think what I do is fun. The niche that I initially thought I was in was legal and our flagship company, Abogados NOW is only focused on attorneys. As we grew over the last six years, I received countless emails and texts and outreach from other non-attorneys, debt companies, credit card companies, and medical companies that came to us and asked, “Can you help us out with this Hispanic angle that you have, reaching out to Hispanic through digital media?”
It dawned on me that the niche I was in wasn’t legal. It’s Hispanic digital marketing and I think that was pretty eye-opening. I’m trying to listen to the market to see what they want. The advice that I have is to listen to what the market wants. Niche down. There’s that Alex Hormozi quote where it’s like, “If you go narrow and deep, you own something. Whereas being broad and wide doesn’t make you, all that interesting or unique.” The niching down is super important as long as it’s something that you’re interested in. I find that in the content marketing I’m doing for attorneys or medical professionals or any verticals, I get excited talking about demographics and Hispanic usage on mobile phones, and Hispanic social media trends. It’s not necessarily the trade that I’m talking about. It’s more so the market that I like talking about. That niche to me is exciting especially because it’s underrepresented.
Two things stand out for me on that. 1) Specifically about you saying, focus on what you’re interested in or what you find interesting. This is the advice that we provide consultants. If you’re going to spend time building a business and working to become an authority in that space, you’re probably going to need to do a lot of research. You’re probably going to spend time creating a lot of content, whether that is for presentations and speaking or doing a show like this or you know, publishing on LinkedIn or publishing to trade journals, like you’re going to be spending time on whatever X is.
You might as well pick something that you’re going to enjoy spending that time on rather than something that you don’t. The second thing that you mentioned, which I’m also a very big believer in and share with clients is people often look at companies that are successful and are quite broad. They haven’t niched down depending on how you want to be in Canada or the US. You say that word a little bit differently.
The mistake in viewing successful companies or established companies that are broader that have, for example, you take a consulting website LEK, Accenture or BCG, and you go, “These guys have 25 different capabilities, they’re successful, shouldn’t I do the same thing?” The problem with that is that’s not how they started. That’s where they are. When they have thousands or tens of thousands of people, they have different departments that they can essentially do that. What you’re talking about and what we’re often looking at are companies at a much smaller scale when you’re, especially when you’re starting off in wine to own a market or make a name for yourself, you can’t be all things to all people because you come off as being too general and too hard to remember. I think the point that you’re making there is great.
It’s built brick by brick. It’s respectful to your client base as well because if you’re working with them, let’s say you work in pharmaceuticals, and that’s your niche. You want your pharmaceutical clients to know that you’re obsessed with their industry. You’re not distracted by fast food, eComm, or beauty brands. Having all these different verticals, I mean for me particularly, I can’t be distracted. I’m easily distracted and working with multiple verticals at once would do a disservice to the client. Whereas niching down, I see that as a benefit because everything that you learn from one client can be shared amongst all other clients in that season of niching down. Whether that season is a few months, the next few years, or the next decade, it serves your client better and it makes you look better. Ultimately, I think it makes you look more authoritative in the space.
I want to take the comment that some people are going to have who are joining us right now going, “I can provide expertise. I have experience in many different industries.” My response to that generally is, and you’re thinking on this, typically focusing on the industry is the best way to es establish specialization and to work to dominate it and own a market. The other though is if we use your example of somebody who’s fast food, in legal or pharmaceutical, the other way is to figure out who’s specifically inside of those companies can you make the ideal client where you’re working with them? For example, maybe you work with CMOs or Chief Marketing Officers at pharmaceutical companies, fast food, or whatever, but they tend to be the same size. Maybe it’s Fortune 500 CMOs and you build your brand around being the person that serves CMOs as opposed to being, “How do you think about that?”
Be sensitive to what the market says they want. Share on X
That conversation with the CMO is different than the director of marketing, the general manager, or even the CEO. That, in and of itself, is a niche. It doesn’t have to be industry-specific, but I think ultimately if that’s your end buyer, you want to appeal to the end buyer. It’s more CMO to CMO. I could see a huge value in being the CMO consultant.
We’ll start a new business on that. Let’s fast forward then to the present day. Your company is a multimillion-dollar marketing consultancy. You employ I believe over sixteen people. What’s the actual number in terms of number of full-time and part-time contractors?
Let’s call it 51. 15 are full-time payroll and another 17 more or less are part-time and then the rest are contractors that come in and out of our ecosystem depending on how much work there is.
Our research was based on the full-time because that’s definitely more than that. What I’m wondering about is if can you walk us through the chapters of how you’ve got to 51. Go back to the first couple of years in business, what did it look like to you, and who else? If you could create some chapters around who you hired and when you hired them, roughly grouping them together, what would that look like in terms of the hires that you made?
I initially ran it as a consultancy. I was selling myself based on my prior jobs. I’m reaching out to those clients saying, “I have my own shop now. Let’s chat. That worked out well because I didn’t have to work too hard to establish credibility. I referenced my LinkedIn page and their history with those vendors.” That was just myself. I had this conversation that I lost money on my first client because I made all the mistakes you could make in that first client.
Give us an example. What were those mistakes?
Subcontracting a web developer whose fees I paid all upfront and then that person disappeared. It’s like classic stuff. It was a $7,000 contract and I was in the whole $14,000 to get it up and running. It’s a classic story. It never happened again, fortunately. I learned a lot very quickly, but I learned very quickly that I needed help. I got that 3rd or 4th client as a consultancy selling myself. It was around the 3 or 4-month mark that I brought one person to help me in and then we did a lot of subcontracting trying to fire myself from a lot of roles at a very micro level. It was year two when we started aggressively hiring because I started doing a lot more cold email outreach and that was effective for getting new clients beyond folks who already knew me or folks where I worked.
Who are you reaching out to when you say outreach, you’re sending emails, who are you sending those emails to?
The two attorneys. It’s what I knew the most
Are these Hispanic attorneys or all types of people of all backgrounds?
Overwhelmingly, our customers are not Hispanic. What they do know is that there’s value in marketing to the Hispanic market. They don’t know the language. They don’t have any marketing expertise to reach out to them. Our value proposition was always, “We know you don’t speak any Spanish but you live in West Covina, and West Covina has 900,000 Hispanics. Let’s get you connected to a portion of them.”
That was an interesting value proposition to them because typically they’re being inundated by SEO companies telling them about rankings, but here we are telling them about a completely underrepresented market from which they interact every day and they generally don’t connect through their marketing. That was our cold email outreach efforts and that’s when we started hiring more aggressively for people to manage, our social media department, copies, copy department, and web design.
Were you hiring people because you were starting to get many conversations and responses back from those that you were reaching out to through cold outreach and you’re essentially staffing up to deliver on the new pipeline of clients?
Yeah, which could be controversial. Some agency owners think we’re crazy but we always overstaff for what we forecast as new work in the next months.
When you think about that, as you said, some people might think that that’s crazy. What’s your mindset? What’s the model or the analysis that you run to feel comfortable in doing that?
The Human Capital Business
It’s a human capital business. You don’t want to stress out your team. If there’s a little inefficiency, let’s call it production margin, but it’s not at the expense of their wellbeing, the team’s wellbeing and they feel like they’re not super overwhelmed, I think that’s a win. It helps with retention. Some months they’re not as busy because some months are better than others in sales, but I think that net is a good thing.
Do you factor in the margin? I would imagine some people are going to look at that and go, “If we bring on these 2 or 3 new people, I don’t yet know we’re going to have enough work for them, or if we do, it may not be full-time but I’m making this commitment to them, it’s also going to impact our margin. How do you process that?
It’s high confidence in our ability to get more clients. We know that every quarter we’re going to have more business than the prior quarter. We prepare for that regardless of how ever much of a massive margin win it is or potentially even net loss that’s happened before but our confidence level’s high in quarter over quarter new client signups.
Have you had a quarter where you didn’t achieve that level of next growth and you were in a bit of a tighter situation financially or unexpectedly?
It happened first quarter of last year. We had an amazing January and then February, and then the Silicon Valley Bank news hit in March. The whole pipeline vanished. People got scared, fast, and rational or irrational, it was like everyone pumped the brakes for what appeared to be a good 6 or 10 weeks more or less. We didn’t see the funnel metrics revive until a lot of these fears around Silicon Valley and The First Republic. It was such a small episode but it was the first time I’d experienced it where the confidence level, even at these professional B2B levels was totally wiped out and it wasn’t speculation. We asked around. We wanted to know like, “What took you so long to get back to us?” It was confidence. The news freaked them out.
There is value in marketing to the Hispanic market. Let’s get connected to a portion of them. Share on X
How did you handle that? Take me back to that time. Were you stressed? Were you not sleeping? How is it impacting you and your team? Share that, first of all.
With the team, I didn’t share. Generally speaking, I see our company in two buckets. There’s sales, B2B and there’s production. Admittedly I didn’t tell anything to production because they have experienced ups and downs and sometimes it’s huge spikes and sometimes it’s meaningful valleys business. They were indifferent to it, but our B2B sales team had serious discussions. Is this something existential? Did something happen with email? Is our offer not interesting anymore? Are there new competitors? Are there complaints about us?
Essentially, you were doing the same things you were doing before. It’s just you weren’t seeing the response, you weren’t seeing the level of metrics or conversations.
Show-up rates and sales tanked for easily two months plus. It was super stressful because you come off this high that you’re kicking ass for a while and then all of a sudden you’re not. You’re wondering, “How did the world change quickly?” It was overwhelmingly clear to us that the economic outlook, and the confidence of business owners tanked with the fears of Silicon Valley and the First Republic. We’re a California-based organization. That news was felt out here, especially amongst admittedly higher-income individuals, they’re connected to folks in Silicon Valley and huge depositors. There was a lot of chatter and texts going all around, people asking, “Should we move our dollars? Should we get out of this bank?” We talked to such high-net-worth individuals that the alarms were raised for quite a bit of time.
What did you do? How did you handle that? I know you said you had lots of conversations, you’re talking to people, you’re thinking through it, but like ultimately, take me back to that time when you know, did you consider having to let people go? Did you cut your budgets back? What do you do to get through that period?
I just waited, to be frank. There wasn’t much to do because of speculation that I had and the feedback that I got from potential buyers was clear that this was a very emotional moment in the market, especially in California, but I didn’t want to move anything. Our new revenue from new signups was at a low, but I had confidence that these are things that happen in cycles. These things always happen. It may even happen in the next few days with whatever’s happening with the CPI. We’re prepared for it now, but I think I would’ve done something a little differently in terms of hedging for those valleys.
In what way can you be more specific when you say hedging for those valleys and preparing? What do you mean specifically?
If let’s say our email campaigns aren’t performing as well and our conversion rate is lower than normal, then I would address for our buyers, the offer, pricing, and something pretty irresistible to get them in.
When you say address, do you mean you would test something a little bit different like test a different offer to test a different angle? Essentially, do something that maybe you haven’t done before to try and see if that creates a better result.
You want to get folks into your ecosystem. I think testing an offer for people who already have contracts with you and are reviewing contracts with you, I think that’s something that I would do differently. With the acquisition of leads, a shortcut that I found that works quite well is running paid ads for a lead magnet. Just running more ad dollars. The hedges probably reduce your margin in the acquisition, which is fine, but at least you’ll still be able to hedge for an overall loss of customers if there’s this emotional turmoil in the market.
I want to talk more about the marketing you’re doing. What else you’ve been doing to grow the business and the pipeline? Before we do that, I’m guessing others are wondering, you talked about Joe or Sally, the law firm that wants to attract more Hispanic clients and they don’t speak Spanish. Walk me through that. Let’s say you’re attracting Spanish-speaking potential clients to these law firms, yet there’s nobody in the law firm who necessarily speaks Spanish. How do they handle those leads? How do they serve that client? What does that look like?
We only work with law firms that have some bilingual staff. The chances are much higher that they have bilingual staff if we only reach out to attorneys in particular metropolitan areas of which there’s like 2025. We’re not marketing ourselves as for instance, attorneys in Iowa don’t know us, but attorneys in Texas and California certainly do.
You’d have ads running or whatever the marketing plan is. It’s driving people to pages or content that is in Spanish and then when that Spanish-speaking client/customer opts in or gets in touch, there’s someone that can also speak Spanish from that firm to help them and and work with them.
It’s the minimum requirement to work with us. We’ve had attorneys who say, “I have no bilingual staff but I want more clients.” It’s impossible, you can’t have both.
What do you mean? We got AI. You should push a button.
If only.
You talked about the cold outreach sending of emails, which I find interesting because there are two caps when it comes to that. For those that feel cold email, it’s impersonal like it doesn’t work, it’s a volume-based game. You have others that work amazingly well when you know how to do it well. What I’ve always found is that one of the key factors is how powerful or how compelling is your offer. If you have something that speaks to like the pain point that somebody has or to a desire, then you can get a response. If you’re general, connect with them, good luck, and probably, you won’t see much benefit from that. What would you add to that or what do you see differently in terms of somebody who might be thinking cold outreach and picking up the phone or doing something to a group of people that you don’t have a relationship with yet is very challenging? How would you counsel them on that?
Cold Email
I’m not a big fan of cold emails with a hard sexy offer. That works well for probably the worst client I find because if the reader or the end user sees an offer as intrinsically valuable, meaning that transaction as opposed to the relationship, it’s going to yield a great client. The way I see cold email is it is 1 of 40 different outreach channels that we have. Although there are clear winners in our funnel of channels that yield a number of appointments or leads or even sales, I’m not partial to any one of them. I’m partial to the collective because if we cold email someone, it’s very likely that they have already seen our social video ads, our blogging content, may even be a member of our newsletter, may have seen some paid ads, may have seen us on a podcast or have seen us at events. I think it’s what I tell our sales B2B team all the time, more is more. It’s not less is more.
You’re saying like an omnipresent approach where you want to surround the ideal client in as many different ways as possible. What about when somebody’s getting started? Let’s say you bring on a new client that you’re working with, I’m guessing that they don’t necessarily have the budget to say like, “Let’s do all 40 things right away.” What have you found is the right series of steps or channels to work in and in what specific order?
On the fulfillment or the B2B side?
The magnets are big when you can accelerate them with paid ads. Share on X
Let’s say, a consultant or consulting firm wants to start being more proactive with generating leads and and opportunities. They’ve maybe got their business to where it is right now based on referrals and doing good work, but they want to be more proactive. What would you suggest for somebody like that to look into?
Certainly, mix of cold email and video content like personal branded social content on all the channels and then the newsletter. Those are the three things that I would say yield the highest quality person that will respond because a newsletter, reader will read, especially if you don’t want to write something too short, but nor do you want something too long because most people don’t have time for it, but you want someone to read.
I find that people who read newsletters are the highest-converting appointments. I think it’s because they care about the details. They want to listen. They want to learn. It’s a different cohort of a buyer than someone who’s just coming from a paid ad. I think paid ads should be at the very bottom of the list. I generally think that, especially on a consulting side, you want high-quality clients in the beginning that are decent margins that you can build relationships with.
You have the newsletter which comes from cold outreach and you can get more newsletter subs from cold outreach plus your social media video presence. Those three are super low-cost. We’re talking less than $250 a month to do it by yourself and it’s high impact and it stands out. It makes you look unique. It goes back to what I said earlier, you have to be interested in it because if you’re not interested in the things you’re talking about, people can tell.
They can totally tell that you’re reading from a script. I like being myself talking about the Hispanic market to lawyers. I talk about their issues to doctors. I talk about their issues with other verticals. I try to understand what their pain points are and contextualize them in the Hispanic market. Those three channels afford you the opportunity to expand on that expertise and if you have a voice, if you have something interesting to say, people will want to hear it. I’m a fan of being yourself on those three channels.
On the newsletter side, I mean one thing we’ve worked with a lot of clients in our clarity coaching program around as it relates to newsletters is making sure they have a very compelling lead maggot or call whatever you want, but a reason why somebody would join your newsletter list. I may back up for a moment as some people might be clear on what I’m referring to, you go to some people’s websites and it says, “Sign up for our newsletter or get notified.” There’s no real reason why somebody should give you their name and email address. We’re talking about a checklist or a video, a training, something that they are interested in getting and therefore they’ll give you their name and email address. Anything else that you would add to that from your experience of ways that people can build and attract more ideal clients onto their email list?
Attracting More Ideal Clients
I think the magnets are big when you can accelerate them with paid ads. That methodology I find is a little too sophisticated for most people. They don’t have the patience for it, but I think it’s the highest-quality way to get a newsletter sign-up. Let’s say you work in entertainment. Let’s say, you’re a publicist for agents. You represent people who represent their clients. You could run a $1,500 paid ad campaign over two weeks and you put an ad on Facebook, it could be a video ad or an image and that says, “The Hollywood agent PR insider.” It’s an exclusive membership, an exclusive weekly newsletter, or an exclusive daily newsletter about the things that are affecting Hollywood, West LA, Beverly Hills, and Santa Monica.
You’re showing that you know the areas, you know where Hollywood stands, you know where the business moves, and then you could even say get invited to exclusive events or our next mixer by signing up. That is technically a lead magnet. That invitation might cost you another $1,000 to host a dinner party at a bar or something, but ultimately you’re going to get a high-value target ICP client signing up. You might have 50 people in your newsletter, but those are 50 people who are your ICP. I’m not a big fan of newsletters at scale. I like newsletters that are super concentrated with your ideal buyer. They have low unsubscription rates. They love what you have to what you have to offer, but you have to give something up. That’s the thing.
I’ve seen good lead magnets in webinars and tickets to live events. I saw one agency give up its keyword list, which I thought was interesting. Another agency I saw gives a list of ZIP codes that have the best eComm buyers, not to give something of value to the extent that you have to ask yourself, “Would I pay for this? Would I pay to go to that Hollywood event? Would I pay for that keyword list? Would I pay for that list of ZIP codes of eComm buyers?” If your answer is yes and it’s probably valuable to someone else as well, you have to offer something of value.
Another question I have for you is you built the team up now, between full-time and part-time contractors, 50 people or so. What do you spend your time on right now? I know you’ve shifted. You’ve been able to extract yourself from many things, so where do you put your time?
We built Abodagos NOW to the point where it could, to an extent, predictably bring on new attorneys and our fulfillment team can predictably manage them. It’s a privileged place to be now we’re expanding. We’re expanding to DoctoresNow, which is for medical professionals offering the same Hispanic digital marketing solutions. We’re focusing on dentists and learning what works and what doesn’t. We’re also getting into the financial sector and into larger brand Hispanic video marketing solutions. I’m in the process of building four companies. Three of which are very new and it’s going against all conventions of everything that everyone’s told me, but I think we’re on the right path. My gut is telling me this is the right thing to do. Right now I’m building a base.
Are you using the revenue and pro or profit from the first company to essentially feed and support the other companies?
We have to. It’s measured its slow growth because as opposed to trying to sign a bunch of clients we want to sign, but we want to learn about the client before we make such an aggressive outreach effort as we did on the attorney side.
With the benefit of hindsight, would you have started or do you think you could have started this diversification earlier or do you think it was the right move to wait as long as you did get the business to where it’s at before starting these additional divisions or businesses?
I don’t think I could have started it sooner because I thought my niche was legal with that twist of Hispanic marketing, but it was only a couple of years ago, more or less that I realized that the niche is Hispanic marketing. I need to evangelize this beyond attorneys because as I mentioned, 20% of the US is Hispanic. Every business could virtually benefit from speaking directly to this market. I was focused on attorneys in the beginning and I’m glad I was because it made us hyper-focused. It got us to where we’re at now, but now I need to delegate that passion for understanding these verticals. I’m more focused on building out these other verticals, these other companies, and no regrets. It’s the right time. I don’t think we could have afforded it either a couple of years ago.
Do you think that there’s still significant growth in the legal market? I’m wondering if somebody might be reading thinking, “Why not put all of your energy and effort into making what’s already working better, bigger and blowing that up as opposed to diversifying and taking profit away from something that’s already working into something that is not necessarily yet working, like you’re doing R&D to a degree and planning for it to work out. What was your thought process around making that decision to not just focus on what’s already working and make it bigger and then diversify instead?”
I’ve gone out of the way and it’s helped our company grow. That was my logic that this could continue growing without my intimate involvement in every single scaling exercise. That’s why it feels like such a huge privilege right now to be able to do all these other things. The majority of folks that I hear from when I tell them this are saying, “Go all,” in Abodagos. There’s merit to that, but I’m also excited to build other stuff. I’m going to continue honoring what we’re doing Abogados.
We haven’t even scratched the surface of the addressable market there. As I’ve moved out of the way we’ve been able to continue to scale. I want to have that level of impact. I’ve seen attorneys build their businesses from $100,000 to $10 million a year with their services and I’m like, “That’s great. Why can’t we do that with everyone else where we’re doing our fellow entrepreneurs a disservice by not telling this to everyone else,” but there’s like something holistic, like mission-driven there. but also there’s a huge business opportunity. It’s the right time and I’m still excited. I want to continue doing that.
It sounds like a key component that has allowed for this level of sustained and consistent ongoing growth even with you not as involved or involved at all anymore on the legal side is good people, and I’m sure there are systems and processes. If somebody said, “I’m looking to scale and grow my business. I’m wondering how to think about who to hire and what should I be looking for?” I know it’s a big question, there’s a lot of different components, but what principles have you lived by or follow when it comes to hiring, firing, and billing teams? Does anything stand out that you make sure that you and the team are always aware of?
Hiring, Firing, And Building Teams
I still consider myself super green as a business owner when we scaled and hired a lot of people, especially in the last few years, our management team is a very tight-knit group, and I’m so proud of that group. When we got together and looked back, we said, “We made a lot of mistakes hiring the wrong people.” We asked ourselves like, “Why?” There’s a shorthand between us because we got lucky. I believe that there’s a degree of luck when you hire the right people at the same time, but as we scale, you can’t rely on luck. What we said was how do we figure out how to hire someone?” What we did was we interviewed one another and figured out all the qualities that we liked.
There’s a degree of luck when you hire the right people simultaneously. But as we scale, you can’t rely on luck. Share on X
We found out that very few of the qualities that we wrote down were about the trade. Now the trade is second. The thing that we look for first is a lot of character-based signals. We had to do what I thought was a cheesy exercise initially like a mission and value statement exercise. I thought that was like corporate jargon. I could not be more of an ambassador of this system than ever. We got all this data from one another’s interviews from one another other, and we distilled it down to the things that we value the most in one another and what we want to look for in new hires.
Now when we interview the experience is already accounted for in a CV. What we dive into is if they’re aligned to our values like, “Are you aligned to growth? Are you aligned with autonomy? Are you aligned with transparency? Are you aligned to being performance-driven? Are you aligned to being yourself? This means not trying to put on a mask when you come to work.” That value statement exercise has done us so much good because now we’ve identified who we are and now we can more easily identify an interview for who it is that we want beyond skills and trade.
That’s a great point and I’m glad that you shared it. I want to thank you so much for coming on the the Consulting Success podcast here and sharing some of your journey. I’m excited to follow along and see as you build out these other businesses. Where is the best place for people who want to learn more about you and about your company? Where should we send them to?
BilingualMarketing.com is our parent company that owns these entities. You can find an email there. It’s [email protected]. That’s a direct line to me if you ever want to chat about any of our companies or any of our Hispanic marketing strategies.
Thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks.
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