The Achieve Podcast - Will Dukes (FecundFig)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. We're joined today by Will Dukes, who is the founder of Feck and Fig. Will, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.

It's a pleasure to be here, Jesse.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit, give us a quick backstory on your business. What do you do and how did it all get started?

So, uh, I don't know about a quick story, but it, uh, because it's taken a lot of interesting turns, but Beck and Fig now is a client acquisition— we refer to as client cultivation agency— and we primarily focus on small and growing law firms. And I run this agency with my wife, and so we really try to focus on aligning the sales, marketing, and branding processes inside a law firm so that those attorneys can cultivate the clients that they crave. And that has evolved through a lot of, a lot of, a lot of different twists and turns. Previous to this, it was still kind of the same company, but it was under an old franchise that I was a part of, and we focused primarily on sales training and development, and that's what originally gave the, uh, kind of planted the seed, if you will, for Beck and Figg. And I had started doing a lot of intake training and process mapping for law firms, and then they would come to me and ask, you know, I'm not sure if my leads suck or does my intake suck, but something's not working. And so we would go in, and often enough it was the intake. There was definitely opportunity there. And then over time it was like, okay, we got the intake kind of shored up here, improved up to a better level. Now we can turn to lead quality in and of itself. And that's what kind of got us into marketing and ultimately into the branding. So now we have solutions for the full client cultivation cycle that we help those law firms to build into place and to train their team on and to help manage for them as well.

When did you start your business?

So the original iteration, you know, if you actually like look at my business filing, is, uh, I think it says 2009. But, uh, in reality, being a full-time gung-ho was, uh, right at the start of 2011.

Okay, so you've been at this for a while.

Yeah.

Talk to me a little bit about how your business has changed as it's grown and what does it look like today.

Yeah, so when we, uh, when we got started Uh, it was just me, and I was basically just kind of the consultant on the ground, part of this franchise, doing a lot of networking, maybe going to the BNI groups, the Chamber of Commerce, uh, those type of things, and just working one-on-one with clients. And it was much broader in terms of the business. And actually, the franchise I was with before had kind of made a pivot to business coaching. And so why that That wasn't the original thing I came in for. I kind of grew into that. That's what I kind of became known for down in the Miami community. And so that was realistically the bulk of the business. And then I eventually had my first employee, kind of my assistant, help me do different things. And then coming up this summer, be 4, 4 years that I was able to poach my wife away from her corporate medical sales job, and that's when the, the agency started to grow. We took one of our part-time video editors and brought them on full-time. Now we have a full-stack developer that handles kind of the martech and deployment for the company, and then an assistant to her that kind of does some of the front end design development work and an assistant for our, um, for our creative director, who's our main video editor and graphic designer. And then our EA that my wife and I share. So full team is 6 full-time employees now, and then a couple of part-time helpers here and there.

Well, congratulations on the growth. I know entrepreneurship isn't for the faint of heart, and I'm sure you've had some ups and downs throughout that journey. Let's talk a little bit about sales, marketing, and outreach for your own business. Where, where are you seeing the most traction? What's working for you?

So I'm still a, a networker at heart, and so the vast majority of our clients, uh, just come through business development. And so I, we, we joke with them sometimes that, you know, a lot of the things that we're helping them to do, uh, we're, we're not actually doing for ourselves. But part of that is because we're a high-touch agency right now, and so it's not like this scalable system in a box and we're kind of giving everybody the same formula. There's certainly, um, opportunities for that, and a lot of people have, have done very well. But coming from kind of that coaching background and seeing all the pieces that it actually took to make one of these campaigns work and for people to actually get success has been something that has been very important to us. And so, you know, we're, we're there and it's still kind of a— even though we're doing more of the agency work and done-for-you type of stuff, there's still a big component of the coaching and consulting that goes along with that. And so, hey, our, our clients— I have, I have a client that's been with us for over 10 years, um, and we have others. On average, actually, we're flying out to, uh, to Vegas in just a couple days, um, to go do a business workshop, and we had to run all of our numbers. And so our average client retention rate right now is like 38 months. That, uh, people stick with us. And so we've got a wide range, and so we don't, at the, at the current moment, don't have a lot of capacity for, you know, super high lead volumes and tons of sales meetings.

A little bit more of a boutique-type agency.

Exactly.

Focused on, on law firms, it sounds like.

Yeah.

Uh, well, there's a lot of talk right now around AI automation. It's changing fast, moving constantly from under our feet. Where have you found ways to use AI in your business?

Yeah, so we're— I, uh, some of the, the content I do put out is around, around this and things going on. And because I grew up on a farm and relate our whole process back to that, uh, it became clear to me that AI is like a big tractor. And my great-grandfather, who was born at the turn of the last century, you know, he grew up driving a mule through the field with a plow. And by the time he passed away in the '80s, he'd seen this massive transformation where at the time when he was born, about 80% of the population actually worked on farms to feed the other 20%. By the time he died, that had shrunk to only 5%. And the key change that had happened there was the invention of the small personalized farm tractor. And the tractor I grew up with, you know, a single man could plow a field in 40— or could plow a 40-acre field in a day. Whereas my grandfather with a mule could only plow 1 acre a day. So like a 40x boost in productivity, and that was with a small tractor. And so I look at AI being very similar to that, right? Like, it's not this big scary thing that a lot of people think it is. It is ultimately just a force multiplier, and it's ultimately just this big leverage tool. So, uh, it— I, I won't say I was the earliest adopters, and because we do a lot of, of copywriting and stuff, you know, those early early iterations were not really that great. But in terms of systemizing our processes, the workflows that we've built that we're using AI prompts and now getting into building out the agents that can go in and execute on that, we've already seen a huge boost in productivity from our team in being able to automate a lot of those processes. And there are definitely some things right now that there's no way that I would be able to do for our clients if I wasn't using AI to support that, because it would just take— it's not that a human couldn't do it, but it would just take far too long. And so everything from scripting and copywriting to analyzing data, we— one of the first agents I put out to our clients to help them really, really capture their brand voice and story, I made an interview bot. Where as a, as an agent where I could put them in a group on Telegram and now the bot interviews them and so they drop all that information and then synthesizes the whole thing into their brand profile into content that comes out of what they say. And so that's just one small example.

Well, as you tried to scale, what are some of the constraints that keep showing up? What, where do you keep bumping into things as you try to grow?

So that's actually what we're flying to Vegas and are talking with Alex Ormosi-Sin with on Monday. The, the biggest thing that we're facing right now is ultimately coming down and streamlining our offer. And so the transition from being a consultant where, yeah, I can pretty much help you with all these different things has been this constant evolution of, you know, when I was just like a business coach in the chamber, I could certainly read a P&L and know how to do those things, but I'm not, I'm not a financial consultant, you know, I'm not an operational consultant. And so it really got narrowed down to, no, I'm just helping you with communication, sales, marketing. That's my, my lane. And then it was narrowing down the, the niche. We're not— you know, for— it was very broad at first. All right, now we're just doing service businesses. Now we're just doing professional services. Now we're just focused on small law firms. And it's even getting niched inside that and the types of law firms that we work with. Um, but there is still the issue as we're growing the team of being able to unpack all the stuff that I've been doing for the last 15 years and before, um, into those SOPs, into the systems and processes to actually, you know, nail down one clear offer that has one clear scope, a clear set of deliverables, and this is the solution that we are providing for you, versus, hey, we can be with you forever and continue to help you put out all the fires and things that are going on and incrementally move the needle up. And that was just the I think I've always known, but, and, you know, finally got fed up with it enough to say, all right, you know, I, I've got to do this now if I'm going to be able to step away from this business and not just be owning this consultancy job.

When you look at the next stage of growth, what are you most excited about?

Getting more of my weekends back. The, uh, I am, I This is the first year in a long time that I'm actually not even planting my own garden, and that kind of bugs me a little bit. Some of my hobbies and things have definitely fallen by the wayside, and even the frequency that I would go to the gym and other things, because we've, for the last 6 months to a year, just like been nose to the grindstone, like systemizing, documenting, trimming things out. And so getting to that stage where more and more I'm happy with what our clients are receiving and the results that they're getting, and I'm not a part of it. And that's happening some already, right? Like, there's things, you know, my wife brings to the meetings, I'm like, That's great. You know, I never, I never touched that. I barely even knew that was going on. And to see things be delivered. And so I'm looking forward to knowing those things are getting done and we're generating the results our clients deserve.

So let's look back at the last 15 years or so you've been doing this. What are some of the wins and maybe the mistakes? What lessons stand out to you as you've grown your company?

Man, I don't even have to look 15 years back for some of the lessons. But in terms of the wins, I mean, just one, one that I mentioned earlier, you know, we've got clients that have been with us for over a decade now, and I've been consulting with in some, some form or fashion. And, you know, her firm in particular, when I started working with her you know, she had like 1 or 2 paralegals, 1 associate, and a receptionist. And now, you know, it's like, I think it's like a 40-person team, and she's got like 10 attorneys. And, um, being— knowing that, you know, the things that we put into place and set up and that are continuing to work has helped enable that growth, that's a huge And there's plenty of other stories like that. I, before we niche down into, um, uh, just law firms, I had started working with a, uh, a young man who was a, uh, a tutor, just like literally driving around town tutoring kids in math and science and whatever. And I've helped them build a 7-figure business strictly around SAT math tutoring, like not even the full SAT, just, just math. And just to watch that kind of growth has been, been huge. And so there's a lot of different wins and validations of the processes and things that I've created along the way. I'd say that's very gratifying. But the lessons, you know, just earlier in a sales call, you know, I'm constantly reminded like, don't change the process, right? Like, don't, don't try to flip things around too close to the sales call, because I was on a sales call that didn't lose, but, uh, I, you know, got delayed because we changed the, the process around, and then we end up spending too much time kind of in the weeds on the call rather than really talking about the future and painting that picture of where we need to get to. Um, and one other, one other example, um, you know, kind of moving things forward, trying to, to, you know, get excited about hitting that next number. And, you know, we're gonna, you know, pass the sales goal this month, uh, with this sale. Knowing that we have a, a process, like, with somebody comes to us and said they have problems with intake, and we're very clear, like, we're going to do an audit of your entire system first and understand where all the gaps are, uh, before we try to get into, uh, actually just looking at the, the script and objection handling and all those things, because everything flows in together. And I, I let this lady sell me on the fact that, no, no, I've already done my audit, I know what the problems are, you know, I really just need help in this training. And, um, so we basically created a custom package for her to do, and it ended up being a disaster, really. And, you know, she got into the middle of it and all of a sudden had all these other questions. I'm like, this is what's supposed to happen in our audit. And it was just a very painful but valuable reminder for me to stick to my guns in my process.

Last question for you: what advice would you give to other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey to you?

So I'm actually giving this, this presentation, um, in just a couple of weeks for specifically for attorneys who are just kind of starting out on their their journey. And so my, my number one thing, and from the lessons that I've learned, is that you get very clear on the value that you're providing first. Focus in on the, the offer and continue to, to narrow that down, because when you can identify very clearly who you're trying to serve and what you are doing to, to serve them. And that's not bloated in too many things. It just makes everything else much easier because it's hard enough just picking one avatar and one service that you're trying to promote, to then create the delivery for that particular service, to create the, the branding and the messaging that is going to attract that avatar, to create the lead magnets or the initial seed offers, whatever you want to call it, to actually attract them and get them into the door, and to be able to deliver on the value that you're promising in such a way that they're excited to tell other people about you, which I think is ultimately the, the key measure of the success and the value that you're providing is, are other people going to recommend their friends to, to do the same thing? And so The more narrow your focus at the beginning, or the sooner you can get to that narrow focus, the sooner you can build all the systems and get good at that. And then you can grow and kind of expand off of that and build later. And if I had one thing to do over again, you know, knowing what I know now, it would be doing that from the very beginning.

Well, well, thank you so much for your time today. Really enjoyed your story and insights, getting real. You know, the journey's not always what you expect it to be, and, you know, showing the growth and the results you're having for your clients as well. Congratulations on growing your business. For those listening, if you want to learn more about what Will and his team are doing at Feckinfig, you can visit feckinfig.com, and we'll have that link as well in the podcast page. But go ahead and learn more if you're in the legal space. Sounds like Will's a great person to know here and, and would love to jump in and help. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it, And again, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.