Tell me what's going

on.

Your Honor, back in 2010, Labor Day weekend, Mr. Shanks hired myself and three other people, John Trackle, bass player, Louis Brown, the drummer, and Mikey Spike Devlin, the guitar player.

And we played at the picnic to raise money for children.

According to you, he didn't pay those guys for a long time.

Yes, Your Honor.

What happened at the end of the show, the four of us were standing around waiting for him to pay us.

And he said he didn't have any money and he wasn't going to pay us.

What do you do at your firm to make sure that what you guys are representing in the marketing that you put out there is a- actually experienced in the people that reach out and say, "Hey, I've got this terrible accident, injury situation," and you want them to have an experience that will not only benefit them but also make sure that referrals come in after?

Yeah, so I'm tile ...

You know, my, I report to our COO, so I am, I am very in the weeds of what operationally we're doing with client experience, you know, what on the back end of how we're investing in technology and people and processes.

So, you know, clients are getting updates.

Clients are getting empathetic communication.

Clients are being able to connect with an attorney whenever they need and getting a call back within a couple of hours.

So I am really in the weeds of seeing that huge focus of our brands that, you know, I take it with marketing to be able to kind of translate that into our messaging.

Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yeah.

I used to play the saxophone and the, I'm s- percussion, I guess.

I wasn't that good at the drum set, but I was more of like, you know, like xylophone, timpani, bass, bass drum, all that stuff.

Um, yeah.

So our events are like, um, historically our, our, one of our marquee events has been MegaFest and, and we've done this, uh, I wanna say this will be our fourth year coming up.

Um, and that was just my idea to try to find a way to remix beer fest culture, right? So like, uh, you know, we, we, it, you know, we're from Chicago, you know the block parties and like you grow up seeing like the Bud Billiken Parade and like all these neighborhoods or Hyde Park Beer Fests, um, what kind of inspired me, um, 'cause that fest was going on in my grandma's neighborhood.

What's something from NASA that unexpectedly made you, like a better brewery owner?

Right.

Variable costs on salaries is what's holding back owners from getting a much better acquisition cost.

So the ones that are trying to sell right now want it because it changes that line item from variable to fixed, and then you get a much higher payment for your team.

Okay.

That's the simplest way to explain it right now.

So that's what they're they're screaming about.

The reality is the big market teams and the small market teams are having a problem.

I'll never, ever, ever figure it out.

[chuckles] It's still radical.

Yeah.

Looking back, some people think, "Wow, that was pretty fricking-- You jumped off the cliff." Um, but let's get back to your point, and what I think is really critical is that [chuckles] we didn't walk away from branding.

[chuckles] We just walked away from doing it with bus boards, billboards, and legacy media, and we put it all into building a digital brand.

Now, the other question you asked me was, did data play a role in the decision? Uh, and if anybody's curious about what that decision was, um, by the end of twenty eighteen, beginning of twenty nineteen, um, I, I had been already moving a significant portion of our marketing budget into digital, and I started really around twenty eleven.

And twenty twelve, I brought on a guy that had Google, Google experience, um, and he was doing a pretty good job.

By twenty fourteen, uh, we were able to measure it really well, like crystal.

Yeah.

What was it that made you take it from this home brew fun project to a full-fledged business?

Well, you know, that's, that's a great question.

And, and, and the journey wasn't, uh, so quick, right? So I started off home brewing just because I had a financial role in my early career, and I was looking kind of for, like, for a creative outlet and a way to kind of like express myself.

I was a science fair nerd growing up.

I was in, like, all the science fairs since I was, like, in seventh grade.

And, uh, so at the time, I think maybe beer went from, like, $6.99 a six-pack to, like, $8.99, and I was like, "You know what? I can make my own," which I thought was gonna be cheaper.

It definitely was not cheaper.

Yeah, so other than just being, getting the bragging rights of being the winner of the competition, what you win is a collaboration with Samuel Adams Brewery, correct? Tell me, how is this gonna work?