You’re listening to SmartTalk with Victor and Mark; SmartTalk is hosted by Victor Medina estate planning, elder law and private client attorney in New Jersey and Mark Merenda CEO of Smart Marketing a marketing and coaching firm for law firms, Attorneys and financial professionals.

SmartTalk is a podcast for solo practitioners and small firm attorney’s looking to improve their practice.

You’re listening to SmartTalk Episode 20 the languages of the workplace and the value of putting in the effort

Victor: Welcome back to another edition of SmartTalk with Victor and Mark I’m Victor Medina I’m joined by Mark Merenda, how you doing Mark?

Mark: I’m doing great Victor, how you doing buddy?

Victor: I’m doing fine, we have no special guests this week its just you and me

Mark: no special guests and no special topics, we’re winging it

Victor: it’s been a little break since we put one out we’ve got a lot to talk about it would just be unfair to any guest we might bring on

Mark: that’s right, we never let them talk anyways

Victor: all right, new year, 2012, we are ready to launch, we’re ready to go

Mark: we’re ready we’re rolling

Victor: give us our first topic

Mark: you want to talk about that book that we both read recently or are reading about The Five Languages of Workplace Appreciation? I thought calling the author and seeing if he wanted to come in as a guest, but realized we weren’t going to let him talk anyways so we might as well talk about the book

Victor: for purposes of our audience here, they can pretend that he’s on

Mark: that’s right

Victor: it’s the same experience

Mark: it will work better anyway

Victor: explain a little bit about the book; give us some background

Mark: okay, these two authors came out with a book five or six years ago and it was pretty interesting and it got a lot of attention; it was called Five love Languages or the Five Languages of Love

Victor: The Five Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace

Mark: wait a minute, first it was

Victor: I’m sorry

Mark: first they came out with the Five Love Languages

Victor: I’m sorry, I’m correcting you and I’m wrong!

Mark: I really wish you wouldn’t talk on this podcast; if it could just be me for the whole thirty minutes or whatever its going to be, it would be so much better

Victor: all right, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’ll be quiet now; the Five Love Languages

Mark: all right, so the Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman and Paul White and what they said I thought was really, really interesting which is; they said that people have a preferred way that they wish to be shown that they are loved. They were words, gifts, acts of service, touch and one other which I will find here on the Internet or if I can remember what the heck it was; it was interesting to me in the sense that in relationships you see sort of comic misunderstandings between husbands and wives all the time, amongst the people you know, friends, maybe its on a TV show or something like that where you see somebody, lets say it’s the wife who says to her husband ‘ you never tell me that you love me’ and the husband says ‘ya but look I did the dishes last night, wasn’t that showing you that I love you?’ kind of thing. The point is that if you’re not speaking in the language, the preferred language of the person that you’re talking to, your message, your demonstration isn’t going to be very effective; the opposite of what I just said would be somebody who says ‘honey I love you’ and the response is ‘ya you say that but then you don’t do anything; you don’t do the dishes, you don’t show me through these acts of service that you love me.’ and so if you’re talking to these people in a language that’s not theirs, its not going to be very effective. Words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. The one I left out before was quality time.

Victor: understandable

Mark: I don’t have time, I don’t have time, sorry I don’t have time! So then they took this book and mov[...]

You’re listening to SmartTalk with Victor and Mark; SmartTalk is hosted by Victor Medina estate planning, elder law and private client attorney in New Jersey and Mark Merenda CEO of Smart Marketing a marketing and coaching firm for law firms, Attorneys and financial professionals.

SmartTalk is a podcast for solo practitioners and small firm attorney’s looking to improve their practice.

You’re listening to SmartTalk Episode 19 Steve Jobs and his Legacy

Victor: Welcome back to another edition with Victor and Mark, well Mark, its just you and I this time, I don’t know what to say, no special guests

Mark: well its good cause I don’t like letting them talk anyway

Victor: and there’s a pretty frequent complaint from those folks that say we don’t let them talk

Mark: Good, good, at least its clear when people come on the show that its our show and we’re going to talk a lot and you can occasionally fill in if we ask you a direct question

Victor: I feel a little bad for the people that are not trying to sell anything they don’t have a book or anything they’re just here because we asked them to show up because we ask them to and then we railroad them

Mark: hey, it’s a fight for oxygen here; you earn your airtime by being funny or witty or entertaining or interesting in some way; we’re not going to pause and invite you to do that, you just have to do it.

Victor: I agree

Mark: it’s a brutal thing its survival quest; the law of the jungle

Victor: all right, so we agreed on a theme for this show, what’s our theme?

Mark: our theme is Steve Jobs RIP; both of us are of course passionate fans of all things Apple; I think we both had sort of the same reaction, I think it was me that told you the news.

Victor: yes

Mark: via text message and I had this reaction that really of surprised me; I was very conscious of how much I admired Steve Jobs, and I was very conscious of how I admired the products, I love using the products and all of that; but I felt this emotional reaction when I heard the news I felt the tears spring into my eyes; it is clear that I am not alone, at the Apple website, at apple.com/stevejobs they have a rolling tribute, what people emailed in and they have over a million so far.

Victor: I’ve got to say, I’ve known you for a little while and I’ve seen you deal with some of the worst news; the Red Sox collapse

Mark: (cough, cough, choke)

Victor: things like that and I shared that news with you, I’ve been like-minded, I haven’t seen you tear up nearly as much in those instances as you are professing to have done that Wednesday night.

Mark: No, it was terrible, terrible news; I think that every now and then there’s somebody your not even conscious of how much you identify with this person and when it happens, you fell like somebody you know, somebody close to you is hurt or is no more. I think a lot of people from my generation maybe felt that way when they heard the news about John Lennon; on my latest blog post I quote Carrie Fisher who grew up in Hollywood and so on; she said she felt that way when she heard that Carey Grant had died. When looking at the news stories on Steve jobs a thought that I had been reflecting on really for days now is what other businessman in the world could die and have this emotional of reaction; a billion people?

Victor: For that matter, how many people know CEO’s of other companies?

Mark: Right

Victor: Charisma or not, its just not something that generally happens you associate one person an elite person

Mark: Right, you and I each own a company, they’re very small companies compared to Steve Jobs we’re a mosquito buzzing around the elephant in that sense; but the issues of owning and growing a business remain, to me, the same. And he did it so brilliantly, for so long that that it’s inspiring to me as a business owner, everything he did was inspiring.

Victor: Okay, so we’ve got a couple of touchstones that we can hit upon certainly what happened to him personally, in and out of the busin[...]

You’re listening to SmartTalk with Victor and Mark; SmartTalk is hosted by Victor Medina estate planning, elder law and private client attorney in New Jersey and Mark Merenda CEO of Smart Marketing a marketing and coaching firm for law firms, Attorneys and financial professionals.

SmartTalk is a podcast for solo practitioners and small firm attorney’s looking to improve their practice.

This is SmartTalk episode 15 the boys moved to video

Victor: All right, welcome back to Smart Talk with Victor and Mark; hey look at us we’re on video now

Mark: we’re doing something different today

Victor: yeah unless your listening on audio but now you know there’s a video version

Mark: that’s right

Victor: you can go and look at it; we’re going to put it on YouTube. All right, so what do we have on tap for this week Mark?

Mark: We’re going to do something a little different we’re going to talk maybe a little more on practice management then marketing. I think it definitely impacts marketing it’s certainly going to impact the long-term development of your business.

Victor: Great, introduce our first topic.

Mark: okay, well lets talk first of all about what it is that you like to do and how that impacts the growth of a firm and how that should determine some things for you.

Victor: okay

Mark: you talk about a quadrant, I guess you use a quadrant, and I tend to use a symbolism of a bullseye; a target bullseye and say in the center of that bullseye is your unique ability it the thing that your gifted to do, its the thing that you love doing, it’s the thing that’s easy for you to do and difficult for other people.

Victor: Sure

Mark: and then in the next ring out from that bullseye is the stuff that you’re very, very good at; your probably better then most people at; and the next ring out would be stuff you are maybe more then adequate at; then the next ring out would be stuff you can do if you have to; your probably not that great at it but you can get away with it; and then the next ring out would be stuff that your not very good at; and the next ring out would be stuff that you stink at.

Victor: it’s like a reverse Dante’s Inferno

Mark: Well yes

Victor: The circles of Hell

Mark: each one of these things that your good at or that you stink at or so on, has a corresponding quotient of do you take pleasure in doing it?

Victor: Okay

Mark: with the likelihood that there’s a pretty exact correlation between your not liking to do stuff you stink at.

Victor: Right

Mark: right; I mean to do things your good at. So what that does is give you a road map in the growth of your firm and the hiring of your firm about which tasks and which duties you need to outsource or hire to place yourself in. To turn this from something less abstract into a personal story, I can tell you how it started with me; I was a solo marketing consultant and I had one client at the time,

Victor: a true solo? it was just you?

Mark: just me that’s it. I had one client and I was renting an office within his office suite

Victor: and he paid you to do that?

Mark: This guy was kind of a mentor to me, he’s a very smart guy, and as a matter of fact, he’s upstairs in this building that I’m in now, and I learned a heck of a lot from him, and he kept saying to me ‘Mark, you have to hire an assistant you have to hire an assistant’ and I would to him, ‘I can hire an assistant I made seventy five thousand dollars last year, a good assistant will cost me like thirty five forty thousand dollars, that half of my gross, there just no way.

Victor: Right

Mark: I can’t do it. And he said ‘ I guarantee it that you will make more than the thirty five forty thousand that this assistant is going to cost you by what that assistant frees you to do.’ And that was a moment of revelation to me. Cause he was saying to me was ‘ Mark you can make more money doing the stuff your good at and paying somebody to do the stuff your not good at or don’t like doing than you can save by doing it yourself.

Vi[...]