A Wheelbarrow Full of Cash: Building a Brand That Outlasts You

Hey subscriber,

On this week’s episode, I sat down with Mike DiPasquale, founder of DM Injury Law, a personal injury firm based in Kansas City with offices across Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska. Mike grew up in the television business; his father spent a career buying and selling TV stations, and that background shaped everything about how he thinks about brand, consistency, and the long game of building a market-dominant law firm.

He’s been at this for over a decade. In Kansas City, he can’t go anywhere without someone recognizing him. In his newer markets, he’s still burning cash and playing the patience game. He was refreshingly honest about both.

Mike started with a hard last name to spell and an agency telling him to use their standard tagline template. He rejected it. On the fly, he and his wife came up with Mike’s Got This. He said it felt uncomfortable at first. His friends made fun of him. He went with it anyway.

Years later, the stickiest search term his firm gets is still his first name. Not the firm name. Just Mike. The tagline did exactly what it was built to do: it fused his name to the injury moment so completely that people don't search for a firm, they search for a guy. DM Injury Law is the professional container for the work, but the brand memory device that lives in people's heads in Kansas City is a three-word call and response: Injured? Mike's got this.

That's the part worth noting: he didn't want a slogan that could belong to anyone. He wanted something no one else could take into another market and use. That specificity is what makes it work. A tagline built around your name, your personality, and your actual market is one your competitors can’t conquer. 

Mike did a backpack giveaway in Oklahoma City recently. A thousand-plus backpacks, cars lined up, a real success. But about ten percent of the people who came through recognized him. In Kansas City, it would have been nearly everyone.

That gap has nothing to do with creative. It just takes time. His honest assessment: it took seven or eight years of consistent advertising in Kansas City before the brand became truly sticky. Before people stopped him everywhere. Before his kids started catching flak at school. Before strangers had stories about him.

His father taught him the lesson through a furniture store in Wichita. One store advertised consistently, had a brand, had a dog named Ruggles that everyone remembered. The other store was on and off, start and stop, no real identity. The consistent one survived. The other one had a going-out-of-business sign. Mike said his dad pointed at that sign from the car when Mike was twelve years old. He never forgot it.

Entering a new market the way DM Injury Law does it today is not a break-even proposition for years. Mike’s description: take a wheelbarrow full of cash into your front yard and burn it for several years. At some point the wheelbarrow is empty, but at least you’re not losing anymore. Then slowly, you start making a little.

He went into St. Louis the same month Morgan and Morgan did. He called himself an idiot for it and laughed, but he stayed. He went into markets with legacy brands that have been there for thirty years and went straight at them anyway. He is still self-financing that growth, no outside debt, which means he is the bank and the risk is entirely his.

His advice for firms in less competitive markets: double down before the big players arrive. Build something so entrenched that when private equity-backed operations start looking at your market after they’ve checked off their top-tier cities, they find a dominant longtime player already there. That is a real competitive moat.

Mike has tested non-branded digital in several markets and tracks the results closely. His finding: the cost per acquisition on non-branded search looks acceptable on the surface. When you look at gross profit, it does not hold up.

Non-branded cases come with less client loyalty, lower average case values, and higher closed-with-no-fee rates. The firm is doing the same work for less money and with clients who have less connection to the brand. It can make sense as part of a strategy, but not if you’re only looking at CPA. You have to look at what you actually net on those cases after everything is accounted for.

His broader point: too many firms stop at cost per acquisition and never get to gross profit. A firm can sign a lot of cases and still not understand whether any of them were worth taking. The firms that figure out how to efficiently handle volume, including smaller cases, and deliver a great client experience in a shorter time frame, those are the ones that make the advertising game work long-term. The ones that can’t handle volume well are not going to win in a world where media costs keep rising.

Mike spent years working inside a private equity-backed broadcasting company before he opened his law firm. His father spent a career buying underperforming TV stations, making them better, and selling them to long-term holders. He watched a fragmented industry consolidate into a handful of large players over thirty years. He thinks the same thing is happening in PI law right now, just slower.

His take on private equity in legal is more nuanced than most. Because PI attorneys work on contingency, the only way a firm makes more money is by getting clients better outcomes. Outside capital coming into the space, whether through MSOs or other structures, is not inherently bad for clients. It will force firms to operate more like businesses. The ones that already do will have an advantage. The ones that don’t will have a problem.

He is actively looking to acquire firms. His model for growth in established markets: find a legacy brand with a founder who wants to step back, keep the brand, modernize the operation, and grow from there. Spending years building from scratch in a market where someone else has already done that work strikes him as the harder and more expensive path.

Mike never set out to build what DM Injury Law has become. He said that directly. He likes building things. He started marketing because he needed to be different and didn’t have the money to outspend anyone. He found a tagline his wife helped him invent on the spot, stayed consistent with it for over a decade, and let the compounding do its work.

The catastrophic cases that matter most do not come from advertising. They come from personal connections, built through volume, through reputation, through the network of sixty-five lawyers and three hundred employees who all know people. The advertising builds the base that makes that network possible.

The furniture store with Ruggles is still open. The other one is not.

Talk soon, 

Al 

P.S. The full conversation with Mike is live now. He goes deeper on how he analyzes new markets before entering, why he thinks the UK legal consolidation model is a preview of what’s coming here, and the story of the sports anchor in Miami who shares his name. Worth the listen.

Have a legal marketing question? Want to be a guest on the podcast? We’d love to hear from you. Reach out at www.pmpmg.com/podcast or connect with Al directly on LinkedIn.