[Dave Lorenzo]
Welcome to the Inside BS show. I am Dave Lorenzo, and today we're talking about what you need to do to prepare for your future and what you need to do to prepare for the future of your business. My guest today is Leslie Marenko, and she's a fantastic estate planning attorney here in South Florida.

She's also the owner of her firm, and she's built her firm up over the last 10 years. She's going to share with us things you should be doing as a business owner, not only to plan for the future of your family and protect your assets, but also she's going to share with us things you should be doing to protect your business, and she's going to share her journey as a business owner herself. Please join me in welcoming Leslie to the show.

Hi Leslie, thanks for being here today.

[Leslie Marenco]
Thank you so much, Dave. I think this is going to be a fun conversation.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Well, I am absolutely thrilled to have it with you because I've watched you for the last decade build your practice, and congratulations, you are doing, from what I can see, you appear to be doing fantastic.

[Leslie Marenco]
I'm just on the outside, right?

[Dave Lorenzo]
You appear to be doing fantastic, but I want to start with what you teach, because I subscribe to your stuff, what you teach all of us to do to make sure that we're protected. I come to you as a dad. I'm a dad of two kids, and I love my wife, I love my kids, I have life insurance, but that's not enough.

What should I do to make sure my family is set in case of anything?

[Leslie Marenco]
Sure. When a client first comes in and reaches out, that first meeting, and we have a certain defined four-meeting process, because this can get a little bit overwhelming quickly, and it depends. You just said you're a dad, you have two kids, and certainly for parents, especially if they're...

How old are your kids, Dave?

[Dave Lorenzo]
My kids are in high school, so they're 14 and 17.

[Leslie Marenco]
Got it. That's a little bit different, believe it or not, than a child that is under 10, right? Your 14-year-old or your 17, I mean, your 14-year-old probably has a better car and a better iPhone than I have right now, right?

I mean, this generation is just a whole different thing from when we grew up. But that is a different conversation, because let's say in an emergency situation, you're in a car accident, and you're going to the hospital, you're out for the count, right? And your kid's in the back, and people that actually sit in the back seat have a way better chance of surviving almost catastrophic car accidents than people in the front seat.

We don't want your kid having an issue with Department of Children and Families, with the social worker. We don't want to deal with the government any more than we have to. But your 14-year-old is going to get on their iPhone, right, and call an Uber.

I mean, forget that. I used to say, call your best friend. No, no, they're just going to call Uber, and they're going to Uber wherever they want.

They're not going to let some hospital worker take them anywhere. That is very different than if you have a five-year-old, right, or if you have a much smaller child. So kids' protection planning, in and of itself, depends on the family dynamics.

Who do you have nearby? Is Abuelita down the street, or are you the only one in Miami, as is a lot of our international clients here in South Florida, right? And then there's added complexities to that.

That's why that first meeting is so important to assess. What type of family are we talking about, and what is the nature of the assets that we're going to need to transfer over at incapacity or death? Business owners, particularly, have their own series of things to think about.

And there's multiple layers to this. So if we're just doing foundational planning and putting something in place so that somebody has legal authority, if something happens to the business owner, to transfer it and to manage it, that's one thing. And that's kind of where business owners, that's their floor.

That's their foundational planning. And they should really look for attorneys that are used to doing that type of planning. Certainly not anyone that just does door law.

I joke about door law a lot. If you do bankruptcies one day and you do divorces the next, that's not the estate planning attorney for you guys, truly. Estate planning is a very nuanced area of law, I would actually say.

It's kind of the umbrella and has a lot of intersection with real estate issues and corporate issues and asset protection issues and tax issues. And you don't want somebody that's kind of a generalist in that area. Add to that the complexity that you own an operating business and you really should seek out a law firm that, A, is only an estate planning law firm and, B, one that's used to dealing with business owners.

But it's an ongoing conversation depending on what level of consulting are we doing. It's a very different conversation with a 40-year-old roofer that has a $30 million business, as is a good friend of mine that I am in a vistage group with. He needs some basic stuff in place, for sure.

He has some minor kids. But he's still growing and he's absolutely still building that business. We just want to make sure that the basics are covered.

It's a really different conversation with the 75-year-old client that really starts looking at, what do I do now? How am I going to exit? There's always an exit, whether you plan for it or not, whether you die at your desk, as we say in the legal field, which some of my colleagues absolutely do that, or you actually want, whether it's a family business and you're passing it down to your kids, whether you're selling to a third party, whether you're becoming capacitated and the whole thing goes to shit.

And so it's a really different conversation depending on who we're speaking to, what are their goals, what does their family look like, and what are the nature of the assets, for sure.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Yeah. And you bring up a great point. Even among estate planning attorneys, there are estate planning attorneys who focus on elder care, which involves really complex healthcare issues and governmental issues and that sort of thing.

And then there are estate planning attorneys who focus on sandwich generation, so people who are taking care of kids and taking care of parents. And then there's you, who you know how to handle business owners, you know how to handle older people as well. So you really want to, when you're talking to an estate planning attorney, you want to talk to them about who the bulk of their clients are and who they're used to dealing with.

So you mentioned something that I want to make sure we talk about, and that is somebody's in an accident and they have to go to the hospital. If there's someone who needs medical care and they can't speak for themselves, you need to have documents in place that allow other people to make decisions for them. What is that called and what should people be asking their estate planning attorney to help them prepare?

[Leslie Marenco]
Sure. On the healthcare side, there's this misnomer. Other states have something called a healthcare power of attorney.

People will call my office and they will actually say that to our client services team. And in Florida, we don't have a healthcare power of attorney. We have several different documents that kind of encompass that whole thing that maybe in another state, a healthcare power of attorney will encompass.

And so here in Florida, we have a designation of healthcare surrogate, which is the most important document. It's who is it that's going to be making these medical decisions for you when you cannot. And I don't mean like you broke your leg.

No, no. I mean like you can't talk to the doctor, to the nurse, to anybody. And God forbid you're in a Terry Schiavo situation.

We are quite famous here in Florida for that whole debacle where a lot of these documents were revised and edited after that whole thing. I mean, we even had President Bush commenting on something that had nothing to do with the federal government. So that was always interesting.

But here in Florida, we're known for many things throughout the country. I think both you and I are from New York, correct Dave?

[Dave Lorenzo]
That's right. A hundred percent.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yes. I was born in Port Chester. So yeah.

I mean, coming down here for my first job, we already had a certain, you know, Oh, like image of Florida. And I feel like it really lives up to that. It really kind of lives up to that sometimes.

So there are three documents for healthcare purposes and it's your designation of surrogate, your HIPAA release, which is absolutely a federal form, but it's, can this person now see your medical records? I mean, are you allowing someone to see that, which is very protected under privacy laws. And then we have a living will, which is also the most ridiculous name for this document because the living will is really has nothing to do with your last will and testament.

It is a healthcare document that says, if I'm in a vegetative state, if I have an end stage condition or a terminal condition, and two doctors sign on the line, which is dotted to say in their expert expertise and their experience, they do not believe I am going to miraculously wake up. Then you can say, remove me, remove all these tubes, remove me from the ventilator, remove me and let me die. That is not the same thing as kill me.

This is not the state for that, but it is a remove me from all of these things that are keeping me alive and allow me to die naturally. Hey, if we remove you from these things and you, uh, you know, wake up, you start breathing, you start, they're going to leave you as is. So that's also something people tend to ask a lot of questions about.

Interestingly.

[Dave Lorenzo]
And there's, and there are several scenarios that you ask your clients about. There are, there are more than a dozen different types of contingencies that people have to discuss with you. And here's the thing, Leslie, and I'm going to say it because people are going to say, think it's in your self interest.

You want to have this conversation with Leslie now rather than have the doctor try and figure out what to do if there is no documentation. I personally had that experience when unfortunately my grandfather was in a state where he couldn't make a decision for himself and my mother and her sister, my aunt disagreed on what to do and his wishes were not known. And it was a, it was a, it added an enormous amount of stress to an already terrible situation.

You do not want your loved ones to be in that spot. So it's better for you to have an uncomfortable conversation with Leslie than it is for you to put your loved ones in a spot where they got to make a decision about you and whether or not you should remain on life support. I, you know, I, this is, this is something that people don't, I mean, honestly, you know, because you deal with this every day, nobody wants to think about this.

The way to think about it is you don't want them in that position. So you be uncomfortable, suck it up and do what you got to do.

[Leslie Marenco]
And you know, there's, there's a part of all of this, Dave, I think there's a, everything in my world is, is absolutely a cost benefit and planning, whether we're dealing with these types of things, asset protection, tax, whatever. There's many ways to skin a cat, I would say. But the other thing I always tell clients is there's a huge psychological component to these documents that goes way beyond legal and, and a much more practical things too.

Like, you know, when you sign a living will, it's almost like you're saying, this is what I want to happen no matter what you guys say, right? Even if you designate this, this person and under the other document, but now it's like psychologically, I made the decision myself. You guys don't have to feel bad about pulling the plug.

And that's not a legal determination here. We're talking about, you know, a very practical determination and how these documents actually work in the real world. Because the reality is if you're in that bed and you're in a vegetative state and everybody's on board, right?

Your spouse, your parents, your sister, everybody knows what's going to happen and everybody's in agreement with what you would have wanted. And the doctors are also saying, yeah, in our experience, this person is not coming back. Then you don't have a huge problem.

The problem comes when somebody isn't sure when somebody is not in agreement, when somebody is going to create risk for that medical facility because they're like, we're not unplugging shit. Like we're not getting sued tomorrow because you guys couldn't come to an agreement. And this was kind of the Terry Shivo problem that even though court number one says unplugger, parents appealed.

And then court number two says, oh shit, we didn't have enough factual evidence, remanded. And then it goes back and forth for 14 years while spouse and parents are fighting with each other. And gazillions of dollars, of course, were spent in these litigations, right?

So it's terrible. It absolutely makes an awful situation even more awful for no reason, for no good reason.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So that's the healthcare aspect of this. There's two other aspects of what you do that are really important for folks to understand. You mentioned tax, but I want to talk about asset protection first.

And the reason that, and this is how I get into a conversation about connecting people with estate planning attorneys. Because when I talk to folks, they've built an asset like a business, and then maybe they have a home, maybe they have investment property as well. We have certain protections here in the state of Florida to protect our home, but other people in other states may not have those.

So let's talk about asset protection. Let's talk about high risk professions. I consider entrepreneurship to be high risk.

Obviously doctors are high risk. Professional service providers are high risk. What is asset protection and who needs it?

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah. And asset protection is one of those things that there's so many different things that we can do. It really is a cost benefit analysis.

I joke, asset protection is this huge kind of umbrella. And at its core, it's how do we restructure the things that you own with or without giving other people or other entities interests in them so that it makes it very difficult and sometimes impossible for a creditor to come after that asset. It starts with an analysis of all the things that you have, sometimes because we're in South Florida and people have very creative ways of owning things.

I call it, in another podcast, I once called it Cuban estate planning, and I got a little bit of hate for it, but I will say it again. This is Cuban estate, or whatever, pick a nationality. I happen to be Cuban, so I can talk all the shit I want.

But putting your kids' names all over your shit, then it's not actually theirs, and then they get a divorce and their spouse is coming after. This is silly, guys, especially at a certain level of wealth. So asset protection is really a way of structuring assets that is going to make it really difficult for whatever creditor, whether it's an outside creditor or an inside creditor, whether it's the outlaw in law, we call it.

And we look at that. Where does the risk come from? If you're talking about an entrepreneur or a doctor, these are already high-risk professions, and we're looking at it from those angles.

And you also mentioned something which I love, because it's only Florida and Texas that has this kind of insane homestead laws for your principal place of where you reside, what's your abode. And let's not confuse that with, oh, I tell the county this is my homestead to get a tax break on my house. The analysis and the way that the case law breaks down when we're talking about homestead is actually Florida constitutional homestead.

And whether you designated it your homestead or not is actually only one of the many factors that we would look like. It's substantial reform, truly. And we have an amazing homestead protection here in Florida, only limited by how big is this piece of property.

In Texas, it's unlimited, because there's huge ranches and all of this thing, and that's kind of why that law developed that way. Here in a regular, let's call it the city, you have half an acre, and then it kind of gets more complicated from there. But it's really an amazing, the case law breaks down better and better.

And what's incredible about that is when you look at every other type of asset protection strategy that's not the homestead, the case law gets tougher and tougher. So what you see is you've got to really dot the i's and cross the t's, and you can't kind of bullshit and wink, wink. Of course, that's not my asset anymore, and somebody else manages it, and I don't have access to it and all of this.

That doesn't play well. And they will dig into that, and that has become harder and harder, actually, more nuanced. But the case law for your homestead has gotten better.

You could actually defraud people and use that money to buy yourself a house. And hey, if it wasn't specifically the person you defrauded that's coming after you that purchased that money, your homestead is still protected. And when that case came down in the Florida Supreme Court, we were all very, very surprised.

But hey, it's a great benefit of being here.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So is there a dollar limit? Because I remember O.J. Simpson moving to Florida, buying property. So you buy a million dollar property, you pay a million dollars in cash, that million dollars is protected.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yes. Yes, it is. There is no dollar limit.

And O.J. really, before he went and did more stupid shit, right, one of the smart things that he did at that time really was move to Florida, because he had these types of income that were protected under other Florida statutes, not the Florida Constitution. But his pension with the NFL, I mean, there were certain things, there were other annuities, but they were qualified plans, like they were all retirement type annuities. And they were done way before any of the creditor situations happened.

And so they were absolutely protected here in Florida. We do have a lot of very interesting exemptions here. It does depend, however, if it's a state creditor or a federal creditor.

I tell our clients sometimes, you know, a bankruptcy trustee, the IRS, and your spouse, your future potentially ex-spouse, are your worst creditors. And we call them super creditors, and the reason for that is they have levying mechanisms through the court that other creditors can only dream of for very particular reasons. And you see that in the case law.

So absolutely, O.J. got some great advice from a lawyer somewhere, and he bought himself a beautiful piece of property on some golf course, and he was sitting pretty.

[Dave Lorenzo]
And he should have stayed that way, but, you know, rest in peace, O.J. And so if you, so you buy the house, you pay cash for the house, so the homestead is protected, but then you can take a home equity line of credit and use that money, and nobody can take that money away from you. So I mean, that's what a lot of people do, and it's, you know, I hear people call it a scam. It's not a scam.

It's not a scam. It's 100% legal. It's totally legal.

You buy a $5 million piece of property, pay cash, property's protected, get a home equity line of credit for $1 million, and live off of that home equity line of credit, and nobody can touch it.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah. We even have a case now that says, let's say, you know, you buy a piece of property, and then you sell it, but you put that money, and you actually earmark it in some way. So this is a factual determination, but let's say you tell your whole family that you're just, you know, waiting to find the right property to buy.

That money can't be taken, believe it or not, and that's a more recent case because that was kind of just liquid money sitting in a bank account that now your creditor, you know, was trying to garnish, trying to like freeze that asset, try to freeze the account, saying, they owe me money. They no longer have a fucking homestead. What is this?

How can I not take that? And actually, no, you can't. There was evidence, evidence, and I know to civilians, I call civilians, newsletter or whatever, you know, non-attorneys.

To civilians, that's an insane concept. Like what do you mean, evidence? Like you got your neighbor to testify to some bullshit, and yes, I'm not kidding when I say there was enough evidence that that money was really earmarked, and they were just looking for the perfect family home.

So no, you can't take the $15 million from that bank account, even though it was no longer like actually a piece of a house. It was no longer a piece of property.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So the third aspect of what you do, we talked about the health care aspect of it. We talked about the asset protection aspect. You help people save money legally on paying their taxes.

So talk about the tax planning element to what you do.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah. And so when a client first comes into the firm, we're always starting with foundational planning, right? And then they're kind of immediately flagged for what other things should we talk to this client about in this many meeting process, because we need to get certain determinations of what do you want to happen and all of that.

But at the end of the, let's say phase one, there's, oh my God, are you anywhere near a level of exemption? So I'd like to tell clients in the simplest way possible, the IRS gives all of us a coupon and it says at the moment when you pass away, and I'm simplifying this greatly, if your assets everywhere in the world, so think about when you're alive, you got to declare income, right? The IRS is not asking you what's the value of your house.

They're asking you what, how much money have you made? What can we tax you on? Well, when you pass away, the IRS is not asking that anymore.

The IRS now wants to know what is the value of all of the assets that you Dave, including the Rembrandt, including the sofa that might be $5 at a garage sale of, that's all it's going to be worth. It's actually cost more money to get rid of it than the actual value. But there is a schedule for your home furnishings and they want to know what is the value of every asset that you have everywhere in the world if you're a US person.

So if you're a US domiciliary, you know, there's even a schedule for that apartment you have in Rio de Janeiro, right? Whatever you own, if that number is above a threshold, which changes all the time, every time we have a new president, they start talking all of this nonsense about the estate tax, the death tax, the this, the that. It's a very political, you know, hot commodity to talk nonsense about.

So whatever that threshold is, if you are above it, it's a massive tax. So your coupon will cover the first, whatever it is at that time. I'm not Ms. Cleo. I'm definitely dating myself now. I don't know what that number is.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Ms. Cleo! Oh my God, Ms. Cleo! I, you know, I've heard, we've done Walter Mercado here on the show, but we, Ms. Cleo, I remember Ms. Cleo. Okay, go ahead.

[Leslie Marenco]
So I don't know when you're going to die and I don't know what that magic number is going to be when you die. So those are the two things, the unknowns we're dealing with here. But if you're already over a certain level of wealth, and especially if your business is already over a certain level, and then it's going to spin off cash and you're going to start investing in other things.

And that's just the natural, you know, life of the business owner. Then we're going to need to do some estate tax planning to shelter that 40% because 40% is a huge amount of money. I don't care if we're only talking about sheltering the other million dollars.

That's $400,000 guys, right? So a little bit of planning really goes a long way if you are a business owner that has above a certain amount of money. Right now, I would say if you're above $30 million, you absolutely need to speak to an attorney and that's even a more nuanced area of estate planning.

My biggest referral sources, if you could believe it or not, Dave, are other estate planning lawyers. They refer me all types of stuff that they don't want to do, that they know they're just not up to date on, and they prefer, and God bless them, I mean, we all wish we could have their life of just kind of bread and butter planning, and they don't want to complicate themselves in any way. And so they toss it my way.

And it's kind of become where we sit in the market of we will do this kind of complicated stuff nobody else wants to do.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So let's talk a little bit about how you got into this in the first place. How did you get your start and what did you do when you started? You weren't doing complicated estate plans for multi-millionaires when you first started.

So talk about how you started and how you got to where you are.

[Leslie Marenco]
So I feel like I fell into this area of law totally haphazardly, and every summer we have a bunch of law firms. We hire six of them every summer. And one of the things I always tell them is don't do what I did.

It worked out really well for me because I think this area of law absolutely suits me. The analysis you have to do in estate planning or tax is very linear. And I used to be a civil engineer for six years before I became a lawyer.

And so, I mean, I just got my first job out of law. I graduated in 2010, took the February bar, and I knew I passed the bar. And then I was like, wait a minute, am I really going to leave my engineering job for this?

And I guess let's go try it out. You do dumb shit when you're young, Dave. You know, you don't think things through.

You don't think these decisions are going to be like life-changing when they absolutely are. And I had told the head of HR of this firm when they gave me the offer from the beginning that I needed more than three months' notice to leave. And that was because as an engineer, I was doing certain projects that I couldn't just let them do.

By the time I started there, I swear to God, Dave, I don't think they knew who I was. Like when I showed up on day one, the head of HR was like, who are you again? Oh, shit.

Where are we putting this girl? And I think initially, three months prior, they probably were thinking construction defect, like they had a few of those cases in the other department. By the time I started, that case was over.

And they threw me in a department with a bunch of attorney CPAs that were all doing this kind of area of law in another way. This was a litigation firm, and they had a separate department that went after us, that chased us inside of massive, massive fraud cases, because that money doesn't just sit When you defraud people, Dave, if you and I were sophisticated fraudsters, we would know better than to steal people's money and leave it in our bank account here at Chase, right? In Coral Gables.

No, no, no. We move that money. We entangle that money.

We make it very difficult to get that money. They also have good lawyers, these fraudsters. And so inside of these firms, there's also departments that try to go wean these assets, try to go after them now, try to see how we can freeze certain things so that when we get this judgment years down the line, because litigation takes forever, that these things haven't all gone to like the girlfriend in Barcelona, you know, like that's really hard to fall back.

And so I end up in this area of law, just because that's the way life is, right? But I think most attorneys and most young attorneys need to heed my advice here, and be very, very conscientious and very intentional about the type of law that they want to go into, because you may not be as lucky as I am. I truly believe this was like the absolute best area for someone that thinks the problems the way I do.

And I would just say that's like a mathematical type of that's just the way we solve problems. And something like insurance litigation would have driven me fucking crazy. You know, I'd be like, what is this shit show?

Like there are no rules here. You know, what am I what am I actually doing? So that's, that's, that's my two second of how I ended up here.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So you started it's really interesting. You started doing complex stuff. And then when you, when you went out on your own and somebody just needed a simple four document package, you were like, really, that's it.

I can do that.

[Leslie Marenco]
And honestly, I don't, I think because of that, nobody really refers us the simple stuff, like whether it was, and a certain shift happened after the pandemic, which is super interesting because I feel like the first five years, the financial advisors, the CPAs, the other financial based, you know, professionals were absolutely my best referral source. We have the same type of client. We're not in, you know, competition with each other.

It's certainly a conversation we're all having because even when somebody engages us, I'm on the phone with their CPA and making sure their CPA knows what's going on, or I'm talking to their insurance provider, whatever it is. So we're all on the same page. And that shifted a little bit after, after COVID and to attorneys, attorneys became my biggest referral source.

But regardless, it's a very comprehensive way of planning. And I almost never get referred like the little old lady that's 80 years old and just needs to transfer her property to her one child. Like that's just not what I get referred.

And this is mostly a referral business on the planning side. My firm is now quite divided actually into two separate departments. Administration is on one side of the office and that's all of the probate and the litigation that stems from the probate.

And then planning is a whole nother group of people and the whole other side of the office. And they're really two very different things. I joke, you really want to deal with us on the planning side.

I promise you, you can't escape whether you deal with us on the planning or your family deals with whatever in the probate and the administration, you can't escape this type of law.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So explain, explain about probate and what happens here in Florida with probate.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah. So when someone dies, the way I try to explain it in my seminars and stuff, so people understand conceptually, because one of the interesting things, Dave, is like in civil law countries in Latin America, like there is no probate process. There's what we call la legitima.

There are laws in place period that say when you die, Dave, your shit's going to your wife and your kids. And that's the end of this story. Like we don't need anybody to decide anything.

You don't have any freedom to decide otherwise. Now, there's strategies of offshore, whatever, that those types of people use to get around their law. Here in the US, although the survivors have certain rights that they can enforce, you could disinherit whoever the fuck you want.

You know, when your kid, what is your oldest kid's name?

[Dave Lorenzo]
Nicholas. Nick.

[Leslie Marenco]
Oh, Nicholas, darling. If you don't know how to act, Nicholas, and you never come to see your dad when you're 30 years old and you marry the most awful person in the world and you become estranged, Dave, you can disinherit Nicholas. Right?

You can go, you know what? My money is better spent with my other child, with charity. You could do whatever you want.

With that freedom comes the responsibility to do your own estate planning. Now, if you don't do your own estate planning, or the biggest myth, all you have is a will, a lot of people think, I have this will, so I'm going to avoid this court process. And that is absolutely not true.

You're going to need more sophisticated strategies than that. But if you do your estate planning, you could avoid that entire thing. When I'm trying to explain probate to people, I tell them, when you go to sell your property, right?

It's your signature. There's a pen and your signature is what sells the property. When you are dead, there is no signature.

A judge, at the end of this process, is going to be entering court orders that take the place of your signature. And that is the most basic way I know to describe what happens here. So you pass away anything that is yours, now you're not there to dispose of it, to do what you need to do to transfer it to the people that you love.

And so we start this process. We have to appoint someone that hopefully is the best one to do this job, and then go through this whole thing. Do you owe people money?

What are the assets? Are their taxes owed? And on a good day here in Miami-Dade County, after about 18 months, your stuff will eventually transfer to the people that hopefully that you wanted.

Because if you didn't even do a will, then it's just going by the Florida law. And people really want to avoid this probate process because A, it's time consuming, B, it's expensive, quite expensive, and C, it's totally public. And certain Latin American cultures really hate the fact that anybody can go on the docket and see what is going on here with all of these assets.

We have in our newsletter, as you know, Dave, a dead celebrity newsletter. Many, many years ago, 10 years ago when I started the newsletter, it was really sophisticated text stuff that nobody wanted to fucking read. And I was like, this is a waste of time.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Everybody wants the dead celebrity stuff. Everybody wants it, yes.

[Leslie Marenco]
I believe it was Anna Nicole Smith that was my Eureka moment, my aha, and that was the gift that kept on giving. The second I put her in the newsletter, I got a lot of feedback, and I had a lot of people writing me. And I was like, oh, I see.

People need entertainment, not tax stuff. And in that newsletter, I am usually very easily able to find Michael Jackson's will, the other ones, whatever. I don't know how these celebrities don't have better advisors.

I guess they may have maybe too many advisors, I'm not sure. But it's really interesting that you do not want people to know what you have. You do not want everyone to know that there are these bank accounts and these assets and this is who's in charge, and God forbid, that your 19-year-old kid is about to inherit a bunch of stuff.

If you don't think people here, particularly in Miami-Dade County, I might be a little jaded, are not really into seeing who they could take advantage of, you are sadly mistaken, because there is fraud all the time that we deal with. So it's actually kind of one of the biggest asset protection strategies is always step one. How do we create anonymity around what you have?

So a will is not going to do it. A will is the worst thing. You're going to end up in this probate process, and the whole world, forever, will be able to see what transferred to who.

[Dave Lorenzo]
So I'll tell you that I was in business, I want to say, 16 or 17 years. I had been in the corporate world, and then I went out on my own, started my own consulting company, and I was working with a Miami-Dade-based entertainment lawyer. And we were talking about what he was going to do with a particular Miami-based celebrity.

And he said, this person's buying a house in Cocoa Plum, and he's like, we're going to get all this set up, and he's going to buy it in a trust. And I said, well, what difference does it make? He's like, you don't understand.

He said, if we put the house in this guy's name, number one, everybody's going to know where he lives, and they're going to show up there. Number two, if we put the house in this guy's name, and something happens to him, it's going to be a pain in the neck, because he's got like 15 baby mamas. So everybody's going to fight over whose house it is.

In fact, now people are going to know who this is. And he said, and the third reason is, just flat out, for protection purposes, we want to make sure that this house is insulated from anything that could possibly happen. Even if someday it isn't his homestead, we want it to be completely and totally protected.

And I was like, man, I hadn't thought about all of this crap that could happen. And he turns to me, and he says, even if you only have two or three assets, no asset here in Florida should ever be in your name. Other than your house, no asset should ever be in your name.

[Leslie Marenco]
It's so true. It is so true. You want to stay out of the public, the more money, the more problems, right?

And that is also very true.

[Dave Lorenzo]
And down the road, having seen, having worked with other people, and having been on the sidelines watching people be sued, I've seen people completely drop their lawsuits, because when they do an asset search, they think this person has all these assets. There's no assets in the person's name, and the asset search is taking so much effort that they don't want to spend another $15,000, $20,000 to find the assets, thinking that they may not be able to even get a judgment down the road. So they just let the lawsuit go.

They're like, it's not worth it. I can't. And this is the thing that I love about, I love to explain this to people about asset protection.

And you correct me if I'm wrong, Leslie. Asset protection is not necessarily about getting the assets so that they're unreachable. It's about making the assets incredibly inconvenient to find, incredibly inconvenient to reach.

The more layers people have to go through, the quicker they're going to give up. Because human nature is that people just give up on stuff. They just don't want to fight it anymore.

Correct or incorrect?

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah, that is absolutely correct. And there's, litigation, litigation is one of those things that, A, is very strategic, but B, has a huge psychological toll on both sides, right? The person being sued and the person that is suing.

And attorneys don't work for free. I mean, I know some clowns that kind of work for free sometimes, but that do way too much free work for people. But for the most part, people do not work for free.

And you're going to have to continue paying your attorneys to go after these assets. And sometimes you even have to switch attorneys, because the attorney that's doing the principal litigation could absolutely be the best attorney that's going to take this to trial. That's going to, whatever type of case this is, right?

It's a commercial litigation case, and that's the perfect attorney for that. The second there's a judgment, that attorney may very well be like, I'm not a judgment collection attorney. I don't know how to go to this other jurisdiction, whatever jurisdiction it is.

I'm not sure how we even do that. I'm not sure even how we get around, let's say the charging order in Florida for multi-member LLCs. That's not my jam.

Now you've got to call my friend Pablo over here and hire him, and he's going to do all of that, right? It's even one of those moments in time, I think, as somebody that would have gone through this whole thing where you finally think you've won, and you have this judgment, and now your attorney is telling you, go hire this guy, and almost start all over. Psychologically, you feel like you're starting all over.

And that is what we learned in the firm that I worked at. Before I do what I do now, which is shelter assets, and I'm on the planning side. Before we dealt with that type of client that was going after assets, suing somebody that had defrauded them, or really did a really bad job on a business deal, or whatever it was, in massive, massive cases.

And there is this huge practical and psychological component to all of that, because you're going to give up. I mean, you're paying your attorneys a lot of money to do this, and at some point, you just want this to be over. You want to settle.

And so at a minimum, when you do asset protection, you are putting yourself in the best position to negotiate a really great settlement, because people are going to become emotionally exhausted, and maybe even start going broke trying to come after you.

[Dave Lorenzo]
All right. I want to shift gears and take a few minutes and talk about your journey as a law firm owner. So you're at this firm, and you're doing this work, and you're happy.

It's going really well. What inspires you to open your own firm?

[Leslie Marenco]
Oh my God. It was just... So like I said, I'd been an engineer for almost six years before I...

And I left my engineering firm on a Friday, and I started working as an attorney the next Monday. It was just like there was no break there. And then all of a sudden, there were rumors that we were getting bought out.

I was in a mid-sized firm, and they had three partners with very different kind of practice areas and different kind of books of business. And the market had also turned, right? So I mean, I'd become an attorney.

I graduated December of nine. The fucking world has ended, it seems, like it's kind of crazy. And so there's all of this talk that we're going to get rolled up.

We're going to get rolled up into a much larger firm. And it was that moment in time that I'm like, until then, you're just like working, working, working, working. And we had massive cases, and we had a great team.

We were there till like two in the morning all the time, working together. So I'm a workaholic by nature. I happen to be a little bit, you know, like, that's just my tendency.

So that wasn't the issue. But when this starts to happen, it's like that break where you go, what the fuck am I doing? You know, like, wait, wait, wait a minute.

Like, I used to have a really well-paid job. Law is a great, you know, we're well-paid in law too, but I had a really well-paid job as an engineer. And you have a really good life as an engineer.

Engineers are like, I don't know, the kings and queens of like work-life balance. In the five and a half years, Dave, I never saw a moment of overtime. That does not exist.

Culturally, that does not exist in development work. And so I was kind of like, you know, this is all great. I love being a lawyer, and I love the cases that we have, and I love the people that I work with and all of that.

But like, does this really make sense? So it was one of those moments, and we were about to go to big law if this whole thing happened. So it was that moment where I'm like, I think I'm going back to engineering.

I actually said to my then boyfriend, who is also an engineer, and I credit him with me starting this firm all the time because he, in a very naive fashion, I was also being very naive, but he kind of turns to me and he's like, don't all of you lawyers like start your own firm? Like, why don't you do that? Like, right.

Like, fuck it. Why not? Like, it was one of these like silly, like it's so stupid.

When I think back to this, Dave, I'm like, man, was I just like, this is the most Pollyanna shit I have ever heard. Because I kind of turned to him and I was like, well, you're right. I mean, why not?

[Dave Lorenzo]
Why not?

[Leslie Marenco]
I'm not from Miami. I'm telling you, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. I'm not from Miami.

I didn't go to this like Lord's private school or whatever blend Columbus, whatever dynamic they have down here, which is extremely interesting. So I didn't know what the fuck I was thinking or where the fuck I thought I was going to get a client from. But I go ahead and I start this firm.

And I quickly realized we are all going to start, like, I thank God I do not have offspring. Thank God I don't even have a goldfish because that goldfish might starve. You know, like I was literally like calling my, my parents to be like, I may have to move in or something.

Like I've ruined my life. What the fuck was I thinking? I need to go beg for my job back, you know?

And I'm a very stubborn person. That's the other thing I should have realized. I just, and I truly say starting a business and I guess particularly maybe a law firm or whatever, any service based business, this is a very humbling activity to me.

This is a very humbling experience because I don't think I'd ever started anything that I felt bad, like that I thought I was bad at. Like school was always easy for me growing up. My dad ensured that I knew a lot of math because Americans don't know math, so you're going to know math.

You know, literally that was the logic. I ended up in engineering school. That was fine.

Law school was fine. Like I never felt all that challenged maybe. And all of a sudden I start a business, a law firm, and I go, holy fuck, I don't know shit.

And I'm really bad at all of this. Like I don't know marketing. That's when you start realizing there's all these parts.

I don't know marketing. And then when you kind of start to figure out some business development or some marketing, you go shit. I'm not very good at sales, right?

Like sales, the dirty word that lawyers don't like. You know, how do I do that? And how do I put together fee plans and like sell it in a way that makes sense to a client so they're not like, what the fuck am I buying from you?

And then, oh my gosh, now we get some clients and now we hire some staff. And man, that's still not my forte, I'll tell you right now. That's why I have a great COO.

Because people and the process and operations has always been something I have struggled with on the people side. So you start to hire people that you hope are better than you, right? And realize all of those failures when they absolutely suck and you have to fire somebody for the first time and you're like, oh, this is awful, you know?

So those first, I would truly say five years was the greatest ego shattering experience of my life. And you learn a lot and you either kind of break through certain barriers to where you have better problems, better problems, because the problems don't go away, but they just become better with more money. And I guess you could just throw more money at it.

Or I guess you give up, right? And I was too stubborn. Maybe at some point I think back and go, you know, three years in, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking.

I should have given up. Thank God I kind of didn't because we definitely did start at some point and it was 2019 that we really started to scale and things started to make a lot more sense and certain pieces were in place so that it just started to work. Before then, I was on like a hamster wheel and it was fucking awful.

And if I wouldn't have been the workaholic that I am, I should have given up.

[Dave Lorenzo]
What was the thing? And so there's, you know, whenever I talk to anybody who starts as a solo and then they have a firm where there's other lawyers that work there or there's, there's a team. What was the one decision or the two or three decisions that you made that kind of changed everything?

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah, I think one of the things, and I know, you know, in my space, even in other types of other areas of law, I feel like all of us in the midsize level, small to midsize, solo, whatever, we kind of know each other, a lot of us. And one of the things I see the people that just start off, I think they're really scared to hire anybody. They're really scared to spend the money and do that.

That's certainly not something, I mean, again, I don't have two offspring, Dave. So I guess the only person that was going to starve here was me if I didn't get this thing off the ground. So I truly appreciate other people have different circumstances, but I think that delay in hiring to replace yourself, um, either initially as like, you're not going to pick up the phone, you're not going to like tab, tab documents and print, you know, massive trust documents and binders in our world, like all of that kind of administrative bullshit.

You need to hire somebody immediately to start doing it. You need to start leveraging your time with money. And that needs to start happening as soon as you're comfortable with it.

I think the problem is most people aren't, they're like, I'm barely getting enough money out of this business as it is out of this law firm. So how am I going to hire somebody? And then the big mental hangup I see like these young lawyers when they're first starting off do when they're going to hire their first associate, right?

Especially now, um, you know, a first year is going to cost you 120 or whatever it is, thousand bucks. And they don't know shit. You know, hopefully you've got one that maybe has some, some, I don't know, law clerk experience somewhere, but they don't really know jack of anything.

And you're going to have to train them. You're going to have to spend time doing that and it's going to cost you money and how fast can you get them to be, uh, at least break even, let's say profitables coming next, but break even. And that's really until you do that, you're a slave, like you're going to be a slave.

You'll never scale past anything if you don't replace yourself as the service provider, as someone that's going to be able. And you know, there's a, I have a C, I have a fractional CFO and you know, Jose, he's a very grumpy, very, as all CFOs are.

[Dave Lorenzo]
I was just going to say, if you don't have a grumpy CFO, you don't have the right CFO.

[Leslie Marenco]
You don't got the right one, you know, like, and he loves, I mean, he loves to, I am on the phone with him every Friday from like seven 30 in the morning to like around 10. And he's always just like, we gotta be more bottom line oriented and you're a two top line. And I am very top line oriented.

I think I am less risk averse than some other people. And that's what allowed me to start hiring and to start getting certain people in place. However, even I should have done it way sooner.

One of the things I feel like was a mistake that I did was trying to hire like that first year. I would not recommend that. I actually recommend your first hire needs to be somebody much more knowledgeable, maybe not as much as you are, right?

Maybe you can't hire to that extent. But do not go hire a first year lawyer. Do not hire someone that you need to train from scratch to be a paralegal.

Spend the money, actually like look for an A player, A players really truly, you know what it is? These consultants always tell you like A players are like three B players. It's so fucking true.

It is so true. And if it's, and I wish I love to, I love to throw money at problems. I wish it was as easy as saying like, I'm just going to pay more than the market because sometimes you pay more than the market and you get some clown that you got to fire anyway, you know, like that truly is just a C player that kind of is good, tiene labia as we say, you know, they talk a good game.

But when you truly do kind of drill down into your market, your marketing strategies for hiring and you start, you know, psychometric in them and putting them through multiple layers and you actually find an A player, you realize how true that statement is. But scaling this, man, it takes a moment. It took me five years, five years of the hustle market sell and the grind to be able to really get certain pieces in place to really start snowballing.

[Dave Lorenzo]
What is your, what is your day like now? Are you, do you still, are you still on files or you're not on files anymore yourself?

[Leslie Marenco]
Oh, I am not on files. Like I went in production in the production team. So all of the lawyers, I'm part of our weekly strategy meetings that we have where we discuss all the files, especially on the advanced asset protection side, especially on the estate tax side, especially on the planning, the advanced planning side.

I'm not involved on the probate or the litigation department very, very often until there's some real hang up that that happens in there. But no, I do not manage, I always say it's almost a disservice to a client if I would be managing your file day to day because there's just, there's just no way you're not going to get the level of service that I want every client to have. You're not going to get the amount of communication you're going to need, especially on the advanced planning side.

It's an ongoing, you know, we're going to do a state tax planning for somebody. It's about 10 months of work, believe it or not. It's, it's like we propose these things.

What are you comfortable with? We implement that strategy. We talked to CPA about that tax return and then we almost start over with another asset.

So it's a constant advisory and the more we learn about the family, the more interesting this usually gets, um, the more involved it gets. So I say something that we think is going to take six months usually ends up taking nine or 10 and it would be awful if I'm your primary, you know, tax lawyer on the file. I wouldn't be able to see you for two weeks or whatever it is and you'll be very annoyed and I'll be, you know, very stressed out and that just doesn't work.

But I have great lawyers. Um, I do not, we do not really hire first year associates even at my level. I mean we're, we're 30 people in total and even now my CFO would kill me if I tried to hire like a first year estate planning attorney.

He's like that, that, that would be, you know, this is your charitable act then, you know, that's in his mind. This is something that we would do maybe to foster talent, but not something that actually I would put in front of a client like, so yeah. And I have, I actually, Dave, one of the things that I have, I have your book.

This actually was a fantastic, I mean back then I feel like, I don't remember what year this book came out, but I was still 17 I think, yeah, 17 or 18 right. Cause I was absolutely still in like the, I do fucking everything and I can't figure out how to like build. I think this also really, because when I first started that my newsletter now has about 36,000 people on it.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Wow. That's awesome. Leslie, that's amazing.

[Leslie Marenco]
And it has about a 35 to 41% open rate. That's amazing. I really feel like this is just kind of, so like 12,000, 13,000 people are reading your stuff all the time and it actually blows my mind.

Right. But when you first start doing these things, you know, you, you really, you feel like you want to give up on them really quickly. Like, Hey, I've been doing this for six months and nobody's writing me and I'm not getting any clients from it and whatever it is.

So you know, these types of books that help you think about business development and relationship development in a different way. And I would joke until I win the lotto, I'm not sure what else I would do other than run this law firm and invest in other things and whatever. But certainly this is my primary business.

So it's, it's the long haul, right? So you have to develop these relationships, especially in South Florida. This is a very relationship based community.

I feel everybody knows everybody. It's kind of weird.

[Dave Lorenzo]
And so it's, you know, it's funny you say that. So Leslie was holding up. If you're listening and you're not watching, she held up the 62nd sale, which is a book I wrote in 2017.

And I, you know, I'll tell you that when, so when I, when I started exit success lab, Nicola Gellarmino, my partner is a former litigator. She grew up in a family business and we basically had to start from scratch a year and a half ago when we started this business. So we're, we're doing direct mail.

And I said to her literally like we, we have nobody. So I'm sitting here hand addressing these envelopes and I'm, I'm telling her, you know, I can do about 20 or 30 an hour. I'll get through the hundred this week and I'll send them out.

And I'm doing this month after month. And she's like, why are you still like we're three months in, why are you still doing that? Nobody's calling from the direct mail.

I'm like, that's not how direct mail works. The way this works is we do this every month and in about eight months, two or three people will start to call. And sure enough, like six months in people call and they schedule appointments and the first client signs up as a result of it.

And she says to me, I just like, if you hadn't had experience in doing this, she said, there's no way. She's like, there's no way we would have ever done this for six months. She's like, you know, 20 letters a day, 30 letters a day, putting them in the mail, sending them out five days a week, some weeks, seven days a week with nothing happening.

And I said, I know I, it's just, it, that is the way it is. And then with email newsletters, we're going to send it out. It's going to go out every week.

And by the way, and we, we do okay too. We get about a 40% open rate, but 60% of the people are not even going to open. People are going to unsubscribe all the time.

People we know are going to unsubscribe all the time. Some people are going to call us up and yell at us for sending newsletters to them, but you know what? The two or three clients that we get, we're going to remember them.

And we're not going to remember the knucklehead who unsubscribed or the person who called us and told us we were spammers because they signed up because they wanted the free report. And then they didn't realize they were going to be on the email list, even though it says it. Right.

I mean, all of these things, the, if you go through it, when you first do it, you just have to have the blind faith, you know, the direct mail you're sending all of these letters out and you're like, nobody's reading this shit. And then all of a sudden the client's sitting in front of you and they show up in your office and they have like five letters with them. And they're like, I've been reading your stuff for like the last year and a half.

And I finally have the money to work with you. And then you're like, oh my God, people actually are reading this stuff. That's that's the thing that keeps you coming back.

When you hear somebody, when somebody brings in all the letters and they're like, I didn't have the money to hire you. Now I have the money. You're like, oh my God, I can't believe, like I work with, you probably, you know, Steve Klitzner, the IRS controversy attorney.

So he's, he's in Aventura. I, he, we, I've had him doing for 17 years. I've had him doing a monthly print newsletter and a weekly email newsletter.

And to this day, people show up in his office with like a box with all of the letters in it and they're like, and he's like, oh, you brought me your returns so that I can see how much, no, he's not like, no. And they dump the box, the dump, dump the box out. It's all his newsletters.

And they're like, they've been reading his newsletters for years. They've had tax problems for years. And today's the day they're going to get them resolved.

It's right. It's amazing. It is.

So if you're listening to this and you're sitting at home right now with your cat licking the lead, the envelopes for your, for your mailings, keep doing the mailings. It'll work eventually. I promise you.

[Leslie Marenco]
And I think that is a really good point. Like everything takes longer than you think, right? One of the things, everything takes longer than you think it's going to take to work.

And, and it's one of those things that you absolutely have to come to terms with in the business sense. Like, I mean, whether that newsletter or whether a webinar or those direct mail or whatever it is, it, everything just builds on itself too.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Oh my gosh. Webinars, right? The first time you do a webinar, nothing happens.

You know why? It's not because the webinar didn't work. It's because you're not good at webinars yet.

You got to do five or six and then you're good at webinars, right?

[Leslie Marenco]
Not only that. I actually had a, this is actually recent. So last year we started, we thought, okay, let's do a, let's jump on this webinar bandwagon, which I feel like we're a little late to this game, but like, why not?

And we actually start doing a webinar for business owners. Great. We do this for maybe, and I, and I had said again, cause you never really learned the lesson Dave.

I'm a very impatient person. So I was like, let's do this for six, seven months and we're going to rock and roll. Right?

And I was like, this is going to be the best webinar because I'm a very animated person and I do other estate planning attorneys webinars and this shit is a snooze fest. So I got stories for days, you know, and this webinar, you can talk about how I was sued by a copyright troll for a stupid picture of a fucking cat and I'm still mad about it to this day and I like go through this, right? So we do these webinars and like we got 80 people to sign up for the webinar and maybe like 20 to 25 people show up to the webinar, which was already surprising cause I feel like I signed up.

[Dave Lorenzo]
That's great. You got 25 out of 80 is awesome. Yeah.

[Leslie Marenco]
But then nobody like called us, right? Like, and I was like, what the fuck is happening here? I, you know, I'm just like, we're trying to like, cause what do you do?

You start improving piece one, piece two, the followup emails. Okay. What's the offer, right?

We're going through all this, this freaking marketing strategy. Great. Let's all do this.

And in month seven, cause I didn't learn the lesson we've just been talking about that. I should know better. Um, I go fuck these webinars, you know, like I am over this shit.

Like I'm, we're spending all this money on stupid Facebook ads and whatever. And I had said, I had even said it, uh, to my, my, my marketing director here, Jerry has been on me forever. And I was like, Jerry, the reason this shit is not converting is because like every time I sign up for a webinar and Facebook, you know, tags me as somebody that wants this, I get advertised eight other webinars that exactly the same.

And then I give up on the whole thing. I'm like overwhelmed. And then I don't know which one to watch.

And then I don't fucking watch any of them. And then lo and behold, it's out of mind, right? I think that's what's happening.

That's why people are not moving forward. They got six other webinars to watch and why not watch more free webinars, right? Well, lo and behold, as soon as we stopped doing this, maybe three weeks into this, after the last one happened, I get a call from a financial advisor in Aventura actually going, Hey, I have these three clients.

And I've been searching for an estate planning attorney for them, for their business owners and this and this. And I've already seen like five webinars and at least yours, yours wasn't terrible. You know, like literally he did not give me a compliment.

You know, he's just like, at least yours was an absolute shit. And I could actually listen to you. And I was like, Oh my God, our first client.

I was like, start the webinars again. Let's go start the webinars again. Look, this is crazy, right?

And I'm like, God damn it. I should know better than this. Even I, you know, got fatigued and I was all negative Nancy about this.

[Dave Lorenzo]
It all takes longer than it's like doing an in-person event. Right. So I, I do, I speak to rooms of 500,000 people.

I advertise, I do my own events. And I remember it was like the third or fourth event that I had done, which was just me. Three people show up.

And at the time I was working with my wife and I said to my wife, I'm like, we should just cancel. She's like, you can't cancel. One of these people drove from Naples to Miami.

You got to do it. And it's like a half day thing. So I'm like, fine.

So and they're and they're all sitting like in the middle or in the back. I'm like, come to the front, come to the front row. So so I got the three people in the same row and I do the full thing and I give it my entire, my best effort and the whole thing.

And I'm self-conscious because there's all these empty seats. There's nobody in the room. And the the the meeting ends and they all thank me.

And one woman asks a couple of questions and she said, you know, I think I might want to work with you. I'm going to I'm going to call you next week to sign up. And I'm like, all right, she's just being nice or whatever.

So I go home. It's like a Thursday or Friday. I go home.

Sure enough, on the Monday she calls me. She turns out she became and this was like 2008. She became like a $70,000 client.

And, you know, normally I would have had to sign up like seven people to have us to have $70,000. I didn't have seven people in the room. I didn't have half of that.

I had three people in the room and I was like, you know, it wouldn't be so bad if I could just meet with three people and get $70,000. So I am never going to take for granted that nobody if people don't like you always like the you know, what we teach kids in Little League is you run out every ground ball because you never know somebody could drop it. You run everything out like in business development, in marketing, in sales.

You do you run everything out. You do everything to the max because you just never know. Like the letter that you're writing today, the stamp you're putting on that letter, that could be worth $100,000.

It could be worth $200,000. You just don't know. So you got and that's the attitude you have to have with the attitude that my clients always have the attitude that we always have is I'm doing all this and nothing's going to happen.

No, the attitude is this is a box of letters. There's 20 letters in here. Each of these could be worth $100,000.

So I need to do this today because I just don't know what could happen if you don't do that. You're not you're not in the game. You're just like you're not in the if you don't do the webinars, Leslie, you're not in the game.

Doing the webinars puts you in the game.

[Leslie Marenco]
That is absolutely right, man. And even I, knowing that, knowing that, I promise you, like I gave up seven months in. I was so pissed.

I was like, he's fucking everything.

[Dave Lorenzo]
And this is the bottom line. Right. And this is and this is where we're going to end.

We're going to give your contact information so people know where to get you. The bottom line is when it comes to this stuff, business development, everything works. You just haven't figured out how to make it work yet.

That's the bottom. And this is the thing that frustrates people like you and me who are experienced. Right.

You're doing the webinars and, you know, some other schmo who's not half as good at the webinars as you is getting clients from it. But you don't know. It's like you're baking a cake and you're missing the one ingredient.

Right. The cake looks good. It tastes like shit, but it looks good.

What's the ingredient that I'm missing? I just got to keep doing it until I get it right. That's all there is to it.

I got to keep doing it until I get it right. Don't give up. Just keep doing it.

[Leslie Marenco]
Don't give up. That's right. And what did they say in marketing?

Like you, you don't actually know what thing is because you double down and triple down on the one thing, you know, works. Right. But you actually never know what's the thing that's going to like start to snowball and start to work.

You've got to do it all.

[Dave Lorenzo]
You're not looking for one way to get a hundred clients. You're looking for a hundred ways to get one client. Right.

If you have a hundred ways to get one client, then you can take two or three of those and get 10 clients from them and then take two or three more and get 10 clients from them. And then you're always going to be fine. When I this is how freaking old I am.

I used to work with people sending out faxes to get people to call us. So that's how old I am. OK, when they took away faxes, that was before before email like sending faxes to people, it was a huge thing.

People used to get so pissed. Like the fax machine would ring and it would be an ad and people would come to your office and scream at you. You're costing me money, toner and paper and sending me these junk faxes.

Like people used to get pissed for getting the fax and then they they passed a law that you couldn't do that anymore. And then fax machines went away and people were like, oh, my God, what am I going to do? I can't send faxes to people.

How am I going to get business? Right. And then email came out and people are going crazy with email.

Can spam law. I can't send emails anymore. The emails, the emails aren't getting through.

What are we going to do? Oh, no. The do not call list.

Oh, my God. What are we going to do? Like everything is it's like there will, I promise, text now, text messages.

Now, now you can't send anybody text anymore.

[Leslie Marenco]
It's crazy. It's true. It's an ever evolving, you know, your business development strategy, your marketing strategies, all of it is ever evolving.

And you can't you can't rest on your laurel.

[Dave Lorenzo]
No, you can't.

[Leslie Marenco]
All right.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Leslie, people want to get a hold of you. How can what's the best way for them to reach out for help from your firm?

[Leslie Marenco]
Well, they could call us. They could send me an email. It's my last name.

Marenko at Trust Council. We'll just link all of the I'll put it in the show notes for sure.

[Dave Lorenzo]
Yeah.

[Leslie Marenco]
Yeah. That's email is probably the best way to get a hold of me, because if you try calling the office, you're going to go to the client services team. They're going to try to find me.

I'm always in a meeting or doing something like this. Right. So email is really the best way.

My team will flag it and then I'll actually see your email.

[Dave Lorenzo]
All right. So we're going to put Leslie's contact information down in the show notes so that you can reach out to her. We're going to put the website there, too.

Let's say they want to get on the newsletter list and they want to see the newsletter. Is it at the top of your website? Where can they opt into the newsletter?

[Leslie Marenco]
Yes, it's actually I think at the bottom of the website.

[Dave Lorenzo]
The bottom of the website. OK.

[Leslie Marenco]
And there's a lot of free resources that we have on the website, whether it's something more in depth like a white paper or if you just want a certain report on something. There's a lot of stuff on the website. So a lot of information.

[Dave Lorenzo]
All right. We're putting all of that in the show notes. Leslie, thank you so much.

It was great to have you with us today. This was so much fun. I really enjoyed it.

Thanks for spending some time with us.

[Leslie Marenco]
No, thank you, Dave. It's always a good time.

[Dave Lorenzo]
All right. It was great having Leslie Marenko with us. Her contact information is down in the show notes.

Be sure and go to her website and opt in to get all the resources there. That'll do it for this edition of the Inside B.I. Show. I'm Dave Lorenzo.

We'll be back here again tomorrow with another show for you. Until then, here's hoping you make a great living and live a great life.