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The Managing Partners Podcast

Alexandra Geczi

Episode # 186
Interview on 04.28.2022
Hosted By: Erik J. Olson
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About Alexandra Geczi

Representing: Alexandra Geczi PLLC

Alexandra Geczi is the Managing Partner at Alexandra Geczi PLLC in Dallas, Texas.

The challenges Alexandra experienced as a child growing up in a high-conflict home and as a target of bullies in school inspired her to create a law firm that empowers women through their divorce journeys so they can choose their own path in life. She frees women who want to live a better life by helping them let go of a marriage that isn’t serving them anymore. Women who are empowered can inspire and create change that will improve everyone’s lives.

Learn from her expertise and what trends are helping grow her firm on this episode of The Managing Partners Podcast!

Episode transcript

Erik J. Olson:

Hey there, everybody. I am Erik J. Olson, your host for this episode of the Managing Partners Podcast. On this podcast, we interview America’s top managing partners to find out how they’re running their firms, how they’re growing their firms, and how they are keeping their case pipeline full. Today I have with me, Alexandra Geczi. Hey, Alexandra.

Alexandra Geczi:

Hi.

Erik J. Olson:

Thanks for joining us.

Alexandra Geczi:

Nice to see you.

Erik J. Olson:

Where are you dialing in from?

Alexandra Geczi:

Dallas, Texas. The Big D.

Erik J. Olson:

All right. Cool. Let me tell the audience a little bit about you. Attorney, mother, and women’s advocate. Alexandra Geczi founded the firm, Alexandra Geczi Family Law, one of the only family law firms in the country dedicated exclusively to women. Her firm helps women let go of bad marriages so they can live a life they love. Welcome to the show.

Alexandra Geczi:

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Erik J. Olson:

Of course. Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself and the firm.

Alexandra Geczi:

Well, you did a good job there. I started the firm 2008. I started off as a solo. I did a little bit of estate planning and family law, then it just evolved over time. I ended up building up a firm with several attorneys, and we did general family law, dropped the estate planning. Did that for a little while, and now we’re evolving again post-pandemic. I would say, five years ago or so, I really started focusing on women and helping them through the divorce process. Prior to that, I had actually represented a lot of men, a lot of CEOs, executives, professionals.

Alexandra Geczi:

Just had a series of cases that made me shift my focus, and I love representing women now, and helping them through the divorce process. I really enjoy the mechanics of divorce, and supporting these women through this process. The firm itself has just evolved as far as the structure, as well. Now, we’re in a virtual mode. Whereas, instead of having in-house a lot of people, now we have a lot more contractors and freelancers working with us. It’s just been very interesting how its evolved over the last few years, but that’s where we’re at now.

Erik J. Olson:

I was surprised to read in your bio that you are one of a few family law firms that focus exclusively on women. I was surprised because there’s a firm locally, The Firm for Men, and I’m in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that focuses on men. So I just naturally assumed that it was balanced. That’s surprising that there’s only you. I assume there’s still others, but not many that focus on women.

Alexandra Geczi:

Yes. Yeah, I was actually surprised too. In doing some of our marketing, a lot of these publishing companies that all of us lawyers are very well aware-they give us rewards and stuff, and they have a category for father’s rights, but they don’t actually have a category for mother’s rights or women’s rights. For the last couple of years, every time we have those annual calls where they try to sell you something, I keep pushing, “Where’s the mother’s rights category? Where’s the women’s rights category?” They’re like, “Oh, blah, blah,” excuses, excuses. But, I don’t know why that is. So, it’s just-

Erik J. Olson:

It’s surprising to me. Now, what do you mean, they call and try to sell you something? I thought there wasn’t a sales pro. I’m just kidding. Well, cool. Certainly, when I speak to other family lawyers, referrals come into play a lot. But you and I were chatting beforehand, and it sounds like you have a lot of other lead sources besides just referrals. Can you go into a little bit of detail about some of the marketing that you’re doing right now?

Alexandra Geczi:

Oh, I’d love to. The marketing is my favorite part of running a business. You’ve got all the different parts of the business, there’s other parts that are great, some are less. But the marketing, for me, I just love it. I’ve experimented a lot over the years. Our marketing now focuses a lot on various internet techniques. I used to be a hundred percent referral, and I did great doing that. But, I found that it was a very taxing on my time. If I was going to scale, I needed to figure out alternative ways to help support, I still enjoy networking and referral-based marketing, but I needed other options.

Alexandra Geczi:

So the last few years, we’ve actually been experimenting with a lot of different things, and it’s not just the traditional social media and advertising. There’s a whole array of different marketing approaches that are out there. One of the things we’ve been experimenting with this last year was funnels. There’s a couple of companies out there, and we subscribed to one of them. You basically set up landing pages that are not on your website, they’re separate landing pages that basically walk people through an action that you want them to take. So it’s a great opportunity for us to put videos, or to put guides, or checklists.

Alexandra Geczi:

Then we can track the campaigns that lead into those funnels, rather than just having a general search term on Google that then lands on your website and you can’t really track it very well. So we don’t know if a campaign is effective, or not. We’ve also done a lot of workshops and webinars, especially the last couple of years. Those have become a much more popular. We actually started doing it just before COVID, and found that those were starting to pick up then too. Now, as we go post-pandemic, we’re going to start doing more of a hybrid, not just internet.

Alexandra Geczi:

We’re going to have more in-person workshops. I don’t know if you count in-person workshops as a referral, but the way we market the workshops is much more internet-based. So, those people will come in. You’ll also have the ones that don’t want to come in, so they’ll do the webinars. And stuff like that. That’s been a good source too. You don’t get as much volume, but you do get better quality that way. Then content on our website is big. SEO, for me personally, for our firm, and I think for a lot of lawyers, content is very important. Our ideal clients like to research things. What key words are they researching? Making sure that we’re speaking on those topics, so that they’re out there finding our articles as their research, and coming to our website.

Erik J. Olson:

When someone finally does raise their hand and they want to talk to you, have you found that they’ve done a decent amount of research on different options for themselves, different lawyers, they know about you?

Alexandra Geczi:

That’s sort of 50/50. I think our ideal clients, they have done research, and they know that I’m going to be the one that’s a good fit for them. I think that’s a part of what we’re putting out there, so that they get to know me and the firm a little bit better, so that they know it’s a good personality fit. Because, I know I’m not a good personality fit for everybody. But, for our ideal clients, it’s great. There’s actually a difference, I think the women do that, they are much more thorough in their research. But the men, I find, they don’t do a whole lot of research. We’ll still get calls from a lot of men, and they don’t even know that we represent women. So we’re like, “Have you visited the website? Are you familiar with-” “No, I just found you guys on Yelp, or on Google. Four stars, five stars, whatever, you guys are good for me.” I’m like, “Well, do a little more research.”

Erik J. Olson:

Yeah, “Let me tell you something.” Oh, that’s funny. Yeah, I’m sure a lot of men are a little shocked, huh?

Alexandra Geczi:

They’re actually pretty cool about it. Every once in a while you get someone who gets a little ticked off at it, they say you’re sexist, or whatever. Like, “I’m going to sue you.” But, for the most part, I think they think it’s pretty cool.

Erik J. Olson:

I don’t know if I’d say a danger of niching, but when you niche, it’s almost like you’re excluding everyone besides that ideal prospect. So you want your ideal prospect to find you and say, “Oh, this firm is for me.” But what that means is, everybody else feels excluded. That’s the product of niching. It’s going to happen, and it’s okay. Did you find that as challenging in the beginning when you first started to go into this niche?

Alexandra Geczi:

It takes courage to be disliked. So yes, I was scared at first. It sounded like a crazy idea. It was counterintuitive. But that saying, “There’s riches in the niches,” and I would have to say that mantra to myself over and over again. It was so funny, a few years ago, I made the commitment. We still had a good chunk of men that we were representing. I was like, “The systems we’re building, they just don’t fit that type of case. So I need to just commit to this sort of case, just divorces, just women, particular types of women. To make that work, I have to commit.” So I made that decision, I pronounced it to the entire firm. I was like, “We are no longer are accepting X, Y, Z cases.” That week, we had three multimillionaire men call the firm and be like, “I want you to represent me.” I had to say no to all of them. It was a real test. So, [crosstalk 00:09:51].

Erik J. Olson:

Yeah, we’ve done the same thing here. We focus just on law firms. We’ll get the Contact Us form submitted. It’s very similar to you, some of these businesses don’t really do a ton of research. We have to say no. But, you say no, because you really want to say yes to these other opportunities. It’s a better fit for you. Certainly once you’ve trained your firm about the folks that you want to work with, they get so much better, so much more efficient. At some point you realize, I don’t even want to take these multimillion dollar opportunities because that’s not us anymore. At some point, you do actually change as a firm. Did you find that too?

Alexandra Geczi:

Very much so. What you’re saying is correct about the efficiencies that we’ve built in. I don’t even have to instruct my team half the time, because they know exactly how the process works, they know exactly what forms have to happen, so my time has been freed up. Just the marketing systems themselves, I know exactly who I’m speaking with, so the experimentation is a lot less now. I don’t have to spend as much money trying to shotgun approach it. I know exactly where I’m going, where my target is shopping. I can go in there, say the words that they need to hear to pull them in. The amount of money and time it has freed up has been wonderful.

Erik J. Olson:

That’s great. I love it. Out of all of the marketing that you’re doing right now, what is something that is working especially well these days?

Alexandra Geczi:

Whew. We’ve been tracking our marketing for a while, for the last couple of years. I have a lead tracker that my team gives me every couple of weeks. Our internet marketing, actually now about 70% of our cases come from the internet. Obviously, it was a hundred percent at one point for referrals, and now it’s shifted the other way. For me as a business owner, I’d like it to be more 50/50. So now I’m trying to figure out, “Okay, how are we going to swing back a little bit more to the referrals, so I can get that balance?” Because, I hate to put all my eggs in one basket. But as far as the internet, clearly that’s been doing really well. Hold on. My light just turned off.

Erik J. Olson:

You need The Clapper.

Alexandra Geczi:

There you go. As far as the internet marketing, I can tell you that content has been really key. Getting good blog writers to create content on our blog. The social media linking back to the articles, and just letting people know that we’ve got this content out there. Offering the webinars, and seminars, and different things on the topics that we know our ideal client is looking for, that has been really key to that.

Erik J. Olson:

I like it now. Conversely, what is something that used to work for you, but just hasn’t worked very well recently?

Alexandra Geczi:

Networking.

Erik J. Olson:

Yeah. Good answer.

Alexandra Geczi:

I’m actually an introvert. I enjoy people’s company, but I recharged by going into myself, and being quiet, and being away from people. So for me, networking was always very efficient. There was that book, Endless Referrals. I can’t remember. There’s a couple of networking books. But that one, I always thought was really good because it talks about how you network with purpose, and you go in, you find that center of influence, that person who everybody knows. There’s a whole strategy to it. I actually teach a CLE on it. But, how you find that person, you go in, you find the other people, you make the introductions, you get the business cards and you put them into your contact, your management, your CRM, your database of all the names. Then you have nurture points after that. That’s really the point of networking.

Alexandra Geczi:

So I think we did really good job of that. But it was exhausting for me, because driving in traffic to go downtown, the stress, “Oh my gosh, am I going to be late? Am I going to meet the right people?” Maybe I come back with three or four names of people that really good. I can talk to 20 people, be exhausted, get maybe three good names out of it, so that part I don’t really miss so much. Now with the pandemic, networking had to change. So, we did a lot of online events, but then I think people got that Zoom burnout. That’s where I think the referrals have dropped off. I think that’s been part of it. I really haven’t been as diligent about that. But for 2022, I’m actually revamping our plan on some new ideas I’ve got about how to still be efficient with referral marketing and networking, that still doesn’t exhaust me as much too.

Erik J. Olson:

You’re right. It’s very time consuming. It’s efficient, and it’s high trust, high touch. But, that means high time as well. What are your plans for the next couple of years?

Alexandra Geczi:

Well, I love the direction that the firm is going now with virtual. Pre-pandemic, I was putting out the five year goal, hoping that people would eventually catch on. In my mind, that was a silver lining of the pandemic, was that it got people there faster. We are now pivoting a little bit. I think working from home has been really great, productive for my team. The offerings, we’ve systematized a lot more, so I want to offer a lot more litigation flat fee, which I think is also possibility when you niche. You can actually do litigation on a flat fee, which then will equalize the income revenue [inaudible 00:15:59] comes in each month, because then I can figure out how much revenue comes in and not have to be dependent on when payments come in. So, that’s the direction we’re heading the next couple years.

Erik J. Olson:

I like it. Yep. That’s great. Well, cool. If someone would like to reach out and ask you a question, or maybe they have a case for you, what’s a good way to get in touch with you.

Alexandra Geczi:

We’ve got a great contact page on familylawdfw.com. That’s our website. You just shoot us an email through the contact page.

Erik J. Olson:

Great URL by the way. That’s really nice.

Alexandra Geczi:

Thank you. Thank you.

Erik J. Olson:

All right, everybody. If you would like to check out other episodes like this, you can see our entire back log at thisisarray.com/podcast. Every episode is tagged by practice area and by state, so you can find exactly what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for digital marketing for your law firm, please consider my firm, which is Array Digital. We specialize in digital marketing for law firms, which means websites, SEO, online advertising, and social media. Thanks. Appreciate it.

Alexandra Geczi:

Thank you.

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