Erika Steinberg | Building Smart Sustainable Marketing for Midsize Law Firms

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. Welcome back for another episode. Small and mid-sized law firms compete in a crowded market, but they don't always have the marketing resources of Biglaw. Without a clear strategy and consistent execution, even the most talented lawyers can struggle to grow their practices.

In this episode, we're going to explore how mid-sized firms can build smart, sustainable marketing functions. You're going to hear how to create a roadmap for growth, bridge gaps in leadership, and keep momentum strong so your firm's marketing isn't just busy, busy, busy. It's actually effective.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I am so excited to welcome my guest today, Erika Steinberg, who is the founder of CMO2Go. She believes that expert marketing is not just for the largest law firms. I think we can all agree on that.

Erika launched CMO2Go more than six years ago, and she now works with midsize law firms around the U.S., helping them create roadmaps for success with marketing planning, executing on those plans, and keeping their momentum going by bridging any marketing gap in their teams. Before launching the company, Erika held senior marketing leadership roles at Sidley Austin, Kaye Scholer, and Arent Fox. With more than 30 years in legal marketing and business development, she likes to say that she speaks fluent lawyer—we're going to learn more about that—understands how law firms operate and knows how to work effectively inside of them.

Erika, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Erika Steinberg: Thank you so much. How can it be 30 years?

Elise Holtzman: I know. Well, I have a child turning 30 this fall, and I just don't know how that happened. It's very strange. But yeah, we sound old, don't we?

Erika Steinberg: No, no, we sound very young.

Elise Holtzman: Yes, we sound so young.

Erika Steinberg: Not at all.

Elise Holtzman: So I'm thrilled to have you here. You and I were just talking about how we're nerds about marketing and business development. We could talk about this stuff all day. So let's dive in.

You like to say that you speak fluent lawyer, that you and your company CMO2Go, speak fluent lawyer. What do you mean by that? Why does it matter?

Erika Steinberg: So first of all, I love that, we speak fluent lawyer. To me, it means that we understand law firms. We understand how they work. We understand the level of service that lawyers and, particularly, partners expect. We understand the partnership model, how firms are structured, both administratively and the structure by practice, industry sector, account-based marketing client teams. We know how to work effectively within this matrix structure with lawyers and with business professionals.

This fluency, it's important. It matters because it makes our ramp-up time with our new clients minimal. When one of the marketing leaders from CMO2Go steps into a role at one of our clients, we immediately become part of the firm. The mindset from the get-go is we, not you. It's we can do this. How can we surmount this challenge?

Also, very importantly, we know we never say no at a law firm. You never say no when you're in marketing and business development. You say "yes-and," because you know and we know how to take the kernel of an idea and turn it into a fantastic idea or project, and make it work for the whole firm and for the individual lawyers. So that's why this fluency is so important to me.

Elise Holtzman: I agree with you. That's something that I run into as well. I think that there is still a lot of skepticism in law firms about the role of legal marketing and business development professionals. I think that there's a fear of having someone from the outside come in and speak corporate speak to them in a language that doesn't align with how law firms operate and the kinds of professionalism and services that law firms need to provide to their clients.

So I think that when one can speak the language of a law firm and make it clear, "I know you. We know you. We understand how you work. We understand what your opportunities are, what your challenges are, what your ethical requirements are, what you were educated on, and what you weren't educated on," I think all of those sorts of things are really important so that they can do the job that they want to do. We don't want them to have a six-month ramp-up to be able to be effective with the tools that you're providing for them.

Erika Steinberg: Absolutely, because your clients need the answer right now. They need information right away. They need knowledge. They need reassurance. Part of what legal marketing and business development professionals do now is provide that to the lawyers. And sometimes directly to the clients. So we understand that our clients are the lawyers, especially when you're in-house or if you're a consultant, our clients are you. But we're also, by extension, taking care of your clients.

Elise Holtzman: Right. So I want to dive into some basics about marketing for small to midsize law firms and then follow up specifically with some of the work you do, which I think is interesting in terms of stepping into a gap when a law firm suddenly doesn't have a marketing professional that they need. Because many times, as you know better than anyone, they'll have one marketing person and then all of a sudden the person's gone or is on leave or something like that. So we'll talk a little bit about that.

But let's start with some of the foundational principles. In our conversations, you have occasionally compared marketing without a plan to building a house without architectural plans. You get there and you just start slapping up some wood beams and put some cement blocks in some place. What are some of the common misconceptions that you hear from law firm leaders about creating a marketing plan? Then we'll talk about how they can do it the right way.

Erika Steinberg: Yeah, yeah. I would say one of the greatest misconceptions or the greatest misconception that I hear about creating marketing plans is that it takes a long time. People picture this in their mind that a plan means spending days in a conference room. You're exhausted. The plan has to be 50 pages long. It's going to go in a binder and then you have to keep referencing it. That's simply not true.

Our planning process, I call it a blueprint because of the architectural plan, it's just a few hours. It's collaborative. It's energizing. The plan itself can be distilled to one side of one piece of paper that has all of the information that you need. You can keep it right in front of you all the time. When you don't have a plan, I mean, can you market without a plan? Yes. But when you don't, it makes it harder to focus. It makes it harder to measure results. It's harder to stick to a budget, and money doesn't grow on trees.

You're more likely to engage in those random acts of marketing, which can be fun. You know, you're chasing shiny objects, but what larger purpose do they serve? What goal are you trying to accomplish? So when you have a blueprint, your marketing plan, that blueprint articulates your goals and the way the firm is going to accomplish them.

Elise Holtzman: Let's talk about some common mistakes that you see. So a firm puts together a marketing plan. What are some of the mistakes you see when they're trying to either design the marketing plan or execute on the marketing plan?

Erika Steinberg: So some of the mistakes are doing it in creating silos and not bringing in all of the people who maybe should be brought in. Sometimes a plan, I mean, and that happens at all levels. I've heard about plans for a lateral that are done without the lateral participating. You hear about planning. So you want to make sure that you have the right people in the room. So that's one mistake that I hear about.

Another one is really biting off more than you can chew. When I work with a firm, we hold them, I hold them to three, four, maybe five marketing goals. That's it. When you start to do more than that. By the way, I did that even also when I was at Sidley, which was a huge firm. We would still hold to three, four, maybe five on the outside. Because when you try to do more than that, then you lose focus and you lose steam. Then you end up just spinning your wheels and not making the progress that you want to make.

So be realistic about what you can do. This goes really double or triple when you're talking about midsize and smaller firms, because you have a smaller team than you do at a global firm. So those are two of the big ones.

Elise Holtzman: What about once they have the plan and they start executing on it or they're supposed to start executing on it? What are some of the missteps that you sometimes see law firms doing?

Erika Steinberg: When that happens, that is usually because nobody is accountable. So when you have a plan and you have a marketing project, there's got to be somebody who's accountable. There has to be some sort, and again, this would be part of the plan, the tactics in your plan, you don't just create goals, you create SMART goals. So it's specific. It's measurable. It's attainable.

Trying to remember what's the R. It's relevant and it's time-bound. That time bound is really important because if you just say, "Oh, I'm going to do this" without saying, "Oh, well, I'm going to do this and here are the milestones I'm going to hit. Here's when we're going to hit those milestones," then again, it just becomes way too easy for that project to float off and then nobody's taking care of it.

Elise Holtzman: Well, particularly when you don't have a big team. I mean, you may have this huge marketing team, I mean, an Am Law 100 law firm might have 100 people on their marketing team. But if you're a small to mid-sized firm and you say, "Oh, we're going to do this thing," that's a great idea. But to your point, it's not a goal.

Erika Steinberg: Yeah. It's a goal. It's not a SMART goal. It doesn't have parameters drawn around it. Do you have a starting point? Do you have an ending point? Another mistake, speaking of that, is not defining success. What do you want to be true at the end of the project? What do you want to hold in your hands, or what do you want to be able to say is true when it's finished? Then once you have that, you can actually measure your progress and determine how successful you've been.

Elise Holtzman: Given the idea that lawyers are busy practicing law and running law firms and that the sorts of firms we're talking about don't have big teams, how do you help your clients maintain their momentum so that those initiatives don't fizzle out over time? So we talked about the idea of having a time-bound goal. You know, this thing has to get done by November 15, 2025, or whatever it may be, and the idea of having somebody who's accountable for it. But there are still things that can fall by the wayside because people get busy and they get asked to do many different projects. So what are some of the things that you try to do to help your clients stay on course?

Erika Steinberg: One of the unofficial bullet points in any legal marketer's job description is professional nudge. You get to be very good at it. You learn how to work through people. You learn how to, and I feel like this is something that experience teaches. You learn how to bring people along, and you also learn to assign as little as possible when you're working with law firm to the lawyers.

You get their input and their time when it's absolutely necessary, because really they should be spending most of their time with their clients and also getting with their clients and with their prospects. But we try to minimize their time so we can keep things moving. Everybody's busy, but when you outsource your marketing function, I have some clients that outsource it to us completely. Sometimes we're bridging a gap. Sometimes we are augmenting their team.

So whatever role we're playing, this is our full-time job. For the lawyers, I get it. Marketing is always going to be a side gig at best. But for us, it's our full-time job. We're able to move things forward, sometimes by sheer force of will. Also, one of the things that's really critical is getting buy-in from the beginning. Creating a marketing plan and having marketing initiatives and making progress on your goals is not necessarily something that can be done according to the wishes of just one person; you've got to have buy-in from others.

You also need to have that buy-in from the top. If the managing partner or the leaders at the firm are not supporters of marketing, it's not going to work. I've actually been in that position where a different partner brought us on and was really trying to move things along, but some of the others at the firm just didn't have time for it. We collectively banged our head against the wall for a while.

Elise Holtzman: You mentioned bridging the gap. I know you have something called a bridge the gap service, or bridge a gap service. What does that mean? It sounds like interim marketing services, but I'm curious what that looks like and why a service like that is needed.

Erika Steinberg: Yeah. So Bridge the Gap was something that I needed when I was in-house. When I was director of marketing operations at Sidley, we had two crazy whirlwind rounds of maternity leaves. In one year, it was, I think, 14 babies, and then a couple of years later, 16 marketing babies. I was constantly calling the recruiters that I knew to ask, do they have any experienced people like legal marketers, business developers, who were looking for work just for a few months.

But at that point in time, we didn't have a workforce like that in the U.S. In the U.K., they had it, but not in the U.S. So the same thing would happen also when somebody would leave. The market was so competitive that in some cases, we knew that it would be months before we got someone in and really up to speed. During that time, the pressure and the burden of keeping up with the work at hand would fall to others on the team.

So this now benefits all firms, and we do Bridge the Gap for all firms, but it really is great for midsize firms because, as we already mentioned, typically you're going to have a smaller team. People wear multiple hats at midsize firms. If you're at a midsize firm, you have four or maybe even five people on your team, and one of them leaves or is going to be out for a number of months, that's 20%, 25% of your workforce. Depending on who's out, it could be even a larger percentage of the work.

So it becomes harder for everyone else to absorb that work and keep up with the level of service that the lawyers really expect and need when it comes to business development and marketing. It's something that we started to offer right from the beginning. We can come in again. It's legal marketing provided by veteran legal marketers. So we know how to step in and immediately be effective.

It's also something that we've been offering for and have been working with firms. Sometimes nobody's going on leave, nobody's out, but it's just a small team. The CMO has had an eye on a project saying, "I wish that we could get to this,"—a huge website rewrite or launching a website or looking at launching a new practice or an industry area—and they just haven't had time to get to it because it's them and maybe one or two other people, and they want to bring somebody in who can do that. So we bridge the gap in many different ways.

Elise Holtzman: I think it's very important for small and mid-sized law firms to understand the options like this. Several years ago, I was working with a law firm and they didn't want to hear anything. I was working with them on business development initiatives with individual lawyers, and I kept saying to them, "You need a marketing function. You've got these lawyers now who are trying very hard to develop business, but there's no marketing function supporting them."

The firm kept saying, "You don't understand. We can't hire someone full-time. We don't have that kind of budget available to hire someone full-time. We don't want to bring someone on full-time." I kept saying, "But there's this option out there." So I think that I love the idea of having this fractional CMO, which is what your company CMO2Go does. Then even further, this idea of the Bridge the Gap program, where you don't have to feel that you cannot carry forward marketing initiatives that you have simply because someone on your team, perhaps the only person on your team, either is out of the office for a while or simply can't handle it because he or she is only one person, or you only have two people.

So I think this is really important, although it strikes me that there could be some challenges to navigate there as well. So, Erika, when you step into a law firm, you or one of your team members steps in as an interim marketing leader, what are some of the challenges that you see? How do you navigate those quickly so that you can really help the firm succeed in its marketing initiatives?

Erika Steinberg: A lot of people assume that the challenges are with the people. I have found that each time we've stepped into a marketing leadership role, the partners are happy to work with us. Partners recognize when they have a talented legal marketer or business developer in front of them, and they are eager to work with us.

So far, we haven't had any personality issues. I mean, that could get in the way, but we haven't experienced that in six plus years. The challenge sometimes is, and this isn't even a challenge, now, over the past several years, data privacy is so important. So we always have to assure the HR team and the data privacy team that it's safe to work with us. That's probably the greatest challenge is just getting in and getting access to the systems that we need access to.

When it comes to working with the lawyers though, sometimes every law firm is a flat structure for the most part. There are politics. If there are internal politics that we're not aware of, we want to know about those. We'll find out. Nobody on my team is shy. So if I see that it seems, "Oh, maybe do these two people not like to work together? Is this something that I need to be aware of?" I'll go to somebody right off the bat and say, "Tell me what's going on here and how have you navigated it?"

Any challenges or things that we recognize from all of our years in-house also. We know how to recognize them quickly and how to come up with a resolution quickly.

Elise Holtzman: What about the learning curve? This is a different firm. It's got a different culture. It has a different marketing plan than the one that you were in last week. How do you quickly come up to speed? What are some of the things that the law firm needs to be sharing with you so that you can do your best job?

Erika Steinberg: Yeah, we always ask about current projects. What are the priorities at the firm? If somebody is on leave or has left, what were they in the middle of? So we want to know what's most important to the firm right off the bat so we can dive in. What's coming up immediately?

The fact of the matter is that doing a pitch or preparing a group of lawyers to go to a pitch meeting or for a proposal, it's not so different firm to firm. If you've been in-house in a law firm and then you've already prepared a variety of teams and whether they're industry teams or practice areas and you've put together pitches and proposals for antitrust, for litigation, for corporate, for M&A, what have you. So you know how to do all of those things already. It's not as different as you think.

So you might have a different plan, but there are only so many elements of a plan that firms draw upon. So there's always going to be some sort of BD function, some sort of communication, some sort of marketing, some sort of digital. We know how to do all of those. We've been in the trenches doing all of those for sometimes for some of us, 30 years.

Elise Holtzman: I think it's good for lawyers to hear that because I do think that there can be a reluctance. "Well, what do you mean we're going to bring somebody in temporarily to do this?" It may feel different than, let's say, bringing in a paralegal or a contract lawyer to work on a particular matter for a short period of time because you have a lot of documents to go through or something like that.

This may feel more integral to what the firm's doing and having to understand all these different things. So what I'm hearing is, yes, you work on learning that as much as you can about the firm, but that it is a lot easier than many lawyers might think for you to come in and help them for an interim period of time.

I like that idea because it makes it clear to lawyers that there are resources out there for them and that they don't have to throw their marketing on the burner or struggle or feel like, "Well, we're small, so we can't do that."

Erika Steinberg: Yeah. Yeah. Also, a lot of information about law firms is already in the public sphere. So before we even go into a firm, we can look at the website. We can look at LinkedIn. There are a lot of webinars out there. There's a lot of information. So we can already get a feel for what is this firm about? What's important to them? What is their tone? What's their brand voice?

That way, we know what to expect. Is this more formal? Is it more unconventional? We have an idea of what to expect and what the firm's comfort level is. We're not going to go into a firm being all loosey-goosey when we see on the website that everybody is addressed as Mr. or Ms., and everybody's in a suit and tie in their photos. You know, there are clues to the type of firm.

Elise Holtzman: Understanding that every firm is going to be a little bit different or a lot different, right? What their goals are, what their practice areas are, what their culture is, what the lawyer's personalities are. What are some of the things that these days you are seeing small to midsize law firms do in terms of marketing that can be really successful for them?

Erika Steinberg: You know what? They are doing smaller and midsize, well, particularly midsize firms. Midsize firms are doing everything that the larger firms are doing. They're just doing it with smaller teams, and they're making do with different resources. They're learning different resources. So they are still doing, there's a baseline of things.

If anything, I guess what I see is some of my midsize firm clients, and what I hear from marketing leaders at other midsize firms, is that some of them are in building mode. Some of them have a much more mature marketing function. So the first thing that they really want to be focused on is that building mode, making sure that they have the foundational tools that they need.

They're also, one of the ways that they're successful, is they're aware of how the firm is already getting business. They're aware of what's successful. Then they're putting, since you have fewer marketing eggs, they're putting them into those baskets.

So a marketing leader—if you're a mid-sized firm and there is no content creation, you're not writing alerts. I mean, that's probably not a great example because everybody should be doing that. But if they're not relying on that to get business, then they might not have a CRM. I've met mid-sized firms still, you know, a hundred lawyers, and they still don't have a CRM because they're putting everything out on LinkedIn. They're putting everything out on social media, on their website. They're just not emailing it to people or the individual lawyers are.

In some cases, they find that's not hurting them. There are a lot of content strategists I know who would disagree, and it's a missed opportunity, which I agree with, but it's not hurting them. They may, on the other hand, find that they get a ton of interest by putting on webinars and educational events and having clients into the office and doing events like that. So they want to put more of the focus and time and budget on those kinds of activities.

Elise Holtzman: Well, what you're talking about is knowing, as you said, where your business is coming from. So what I find, and I'm sure you see it even more than I do, is that law firms aren't tracking that information. Look, some of it's hard, right? Some of it's hard to track. We know that marketing and business development, when it comes to tracking results, is not a perfect science. There's no question about that.

But there are law firms where they're not even keeping track of where their leads come from. So, for example, something as simple as someone calling the firm and saying, "Hey, I think I might like to hire Erika because I need help with my trust and estates plan," and having the intake, the person on the phone or the attorney herself not saying, "Oh, I'm so happy that you called. I would love to discuss this with you. How did you find out about us?"

So taking that to a higher level, what's working and what isn't working. To your point, if you have limited resources, let's not chase bright, shiny objects, because I think that happens too. It's like, oh, AI. And I'm not saying people shouldn't be using AI, and you need to know about AI. It's actually becoming an ethical requirement that you understand how all of these things work.

But is the LinkedIn posting working for you, or is it better for you to have a CRM where you're sending everybody in your database information that's helpful to them? So I'm hearing that first, right? One of the foundational principles is do you have the tools? So do you have the website that you want? Is it saying the right things? Do you have the CRM? Then where the heck is your business coming from and what should you be focusing your efforts on?

Erika Steinberg: Yeah. Not only what marketing activities are driving your business or what marketing activities are having an effect on your business, but literally where is the business coming from? Is your firm one where you bring in the corporate practice, the transactional practices, the one that brings in the clients and then feeds? So which practices are feeding other practices? Where are the clients coming in? Where do they go?

Then determining, okay, if this funnel, if this pathway is one where this is the way clients typically come in, and then this practice or this huge group feeds other practices, how do we maximize here? How do we keep that funnel open?

Elise Holtzman: It's funny because as you're talking, I'm thinking about something you said at the very beginning of our time together, which was having the right people in the room. What's striking me in this conversation is if you don't have the financial people in the room, the accounting people in the room, your CFO or whoever it may be, who knows what's going on with the business and who sees the trends, then you are going to get excited about some marketing initiative that may not have anything to do with the reality of how your firm operates and where their business comes from.

So I love this because it takes us full circle to this idea about having a plan. Taking the time—I think people do get excited, and we both know this. People get excited about marketing initiatives. It's like, "Ooh, we're going to go do this stuff on LinkedIn or we're going to change our website or we're going to get a new CRM," and all that sort of thing.

Erika Steinberg: And nobody's ever excited about CRM.

Elise Holtzman: No, that's fair. I do hear a lot of complaints about that, actually. That's funny. But going back to your original point, maybe making the plan is not quite as exciting, yet that's where, in many places, the magic really is.

Erika Steinberg: Yes. Yes. A lot of times also, you get, especially when you have the right people in the room, people learn a lot and the energy feeds off each other. So then they find ways to collaborate. If you have leaders from different parts of the firm who are all in the room, then they figure out ways like I've seen it happen time and time again.

This is, oh, you're doing this. So, well, I can build on that and maybe we can do this together. Then you have a real holistic marketing plan. You have a way forward that really involves everybody and something that's going to make a difference for the firm.

Elise Holtzman: Well, and I think that's also not necessarily natural for most lawyers, because for those of us who have been around the block a couple of times, we grew up in a time where we were siloed. You went to your office, you did your work, your clients are your clients. Some people are still operating that way.

"Well, these are my clients. I don't want to worry about cross-selling or collaboration because I'm not going to get all the credit for it." So I think that the things that you and I are talking about do require a more collaborative a rising tide lifts all ships kind of approach.

Erika Steinberg: Yes, yes, absolutely. In my time working in law firms, I have worked with partners who have been able to put aside what's good for their own practice and really focus on what's good for the firm. Not everybody can do that.

So any legal marketer who has worked with an entire firm or has worked with a designated marketing partner or partners has worked with people who come from both sides. Some people are really all about their practice. But where the magic happens is when you get people who can focus on what is good for the firm as a whole.

Elise Holtzman: It's not just you saying this, Erika. We know that there's research out there that demonstrates this. I mean, Dr. Heidi Gardner, who I've interviewed on the podcast and mentioned before, has done research for about 15 years out of Harvard on actually how professional services firms, largely law firms, succeed.

One of them is by breaking down those silos and working across practice groups. I imagine that when a law firm does that, it makes your job so much easier.

Erika Steinberg: Yes, yes. Also it's one of the benefits of working with midsize firms is that it's usually easier to do that. Not all the time. I don't want to give that impression. But usually it's a smaller group of people.

In some cases, the firms are on the first generation of firm founders or maybe the second generation of firm founders or not too far beyond that. So there is a sense of we're all in this together. So the midsize firm for me has been my niche for the most part.

That's been one of the reasons because you don't have to get a sign-off from three different departments and 12 different lawyers.

Elise Holtzman: I love highlighting that idea, because sometimes I think lawyers at midsize firms think to themselves, "Well, we're not Biglaw and we don't have these kinds of resources." Yet there are serious benefits to being in a smaller or midsize firm, where the decision-making process and the ability to just get everybody in a room and talk about it as opposed to having 25 offices in 20 countries, that decision-making is in one office and taken out of everybody's hands, and all that. So I think that for midsize firms to focus on their strengths when it comes to designing and implementing marketing plans is a good thing for them to recognize.

As we wrap up our time here together, Erika, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge where experts sometimes forget that what is obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

When it comes to small to mid-sized law firms implementing an effective marketing plan that actually works and can be sustained for the long haul, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but you think is really important for people to hear?

Erika Steinberg: That's such a good question. So I think that when people set about marketing planning, they want to dive right into all the things they're going to do. "This is everything that we want to accomplish. I want to do this and this and this," and they've got a laundry list.

Really, at that point, you need to take a few steps back because at that point, you have tactics. But what is your strategy? What is your guiding light? So take a beat, take a breath, make sure you have a firm mission statement.

Is it true? Does it need to be adjusted? Talk about your marketing objectives. So those are your longer-term priorities, goals, things that you want to attain over time. Not, "We're going to do our website," that's a tactic. But something else is we want to reach out to this client base, people in this industry, and really develop this industry because we're seeing the need from our clients.

So take the time to articulate those higher guiding lights. Then, once you're coming up with your tactics, the list of all of the fun and exciting things that you want to do, you can evaluate them against your mission, against your marketing objectives. If anything is really outlying from that, why? Have a conversation about why. It doesn't take that long.

Elise Holtzman: I love it. You can't do everything. So what are we actually trying to accomplish here before we start diving in? Then, which of this laundry list of things can we really do, and do we really want to d,o and focus on a few of those?

Erika Steinberg: And pick the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on the firm. So if you know that every time you have events that you bring in one or two clients or you convert a couple of people, focus on events because that is actually impacting your bottom line. Marketing is not just for marketing's sake. It is to impact the bottom line. It's to help grow the business.

Elise Holtzman: Well, on that note, we will finish up because that's absolutely something to always keep in mind. So Erika, thank you so much for being here today. Always a pleasure to talk to you.

Thanks to our listeners as well for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.