Sam Donaghey
Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host Sam Donaghey. And today we’ve got a great conversation lined up. Joining me is John Burdett, founder and CEO of Fast Slow Motion. And our guest today is Todd Richheimer, CEO and co-founder of Lofty. Todd is a lawyer by trade who stepped into entrepreneurship and ended up building a technology company inside one of the most traditional industries, law.

Lofty spent years building its own software platform and recently made the decision to begin transitioning to Salesforce, a move a lot of business leaders wrestle with when facing the build versus buy question. So Todd, welcome to the show.

Todd Richheimer
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to it.

John Burdett
Todd, I’m super excited about this podcast. You and I got to meet recently. I got to fly up to come to visit you in Long Island and we just hit it off right away. And I’m just so excited for our audience and to hear your story and to hear your journey. ⁓ So tell us a little bit about your background. So we know you’re a lawyer, you practice law for a little bit and now you’re…

CEO of a very successful tech company and law firm called lofty. So tell us your journey of like how that started, what motivated you to do that, that kind of thing.

Todd Richheimer
For sure. ⁓ Thanks guys. Appreciate you having me on. And John ⁓ felt similarly when you came up to visit. I felt like I met my entrepreneurial kindred spirit. ⁓ Just talking about your journey, ours, et cetera. So yeah, so I think the relevant piece of my journey starts right out of college. I worked my tail off to get an investment banking job. To me, that was like the gold standard. That was the job I wanted. ⁓

worked super hard to get it, got there, ⁓ and never hated something so much in my entire life. ⁓ But I will say, so I did that for a couple years, and what I found was that that experience was formative. As much as I didn’t like it, right, having that sort of like nuts and bolts background in finance was really, really helpful. So I go off to law school, ⁓ practice for six and a half years in traditional litigation roles. ⁓ And I gotta tell you, for anybody that has

an interest in business. If you go to work for a law firm, you can’t help but see inefficiencies, right? I mean, they’re everywhere. It’s a very old school profession that ⁓ is really protectionist, right? Lawyers have kept non-lawyers out. And so it’s an industry that’s really stuck in its ways and just got super fascinated in the inefficiencies and opportunities ⁓ associated with it. And the sort of where the idea for Lofty came from.

John Burdett
So tell us what is Lofty and I’m fascinated by the way you formed the company and you navigated some, I would call them legal challenges or formation challenges to kind of do what you want to do. And then, I mean, you’re, non-technical and you start, you know, a software company in the legal industry and stuff like that. There’s just so many, it just, I’m fascinated by so much of that. And I think our audience will be as well. So tell us that story of like, what is Lofty? What do you guys do? And like, how did you navigate that to get it going?

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, for sure. So we are a this like sort of strange combination between a law firm and a technology company. And on the surface, what we do is, you know, we use online media to generate personal injury cases for our partner firm network around the country. But what we really are is an analytics business, right? We’re collecting analytics to make sure that the people that we jointly represent with our partner firm network ⁓ get the best representation they can.

⁓ And where the idea starts from, and this will make more sense as I explain what we do, ⁓ is it originally started with like really cool economics. So I am a…

first year out of law school, and I find out about this idea of the referral fee. So it’s an unwritten rule within the personal injury space that one attorney will pay another attorney one third of the legal fee for that referral. So here I am sitting on the defense side paying off my student loans and I hear about this idea of the referral fee and I’m doing the math and I’m like, so you’re telling me that if I refer a million dollar case to another attorney, that attorney gets paid a third, $333,000. They turn around and pay me $111,000 just for that referral.

and just ding, ding, ding, right? mean, like that sounds a hell of a lot better than billing my time at six tenths of an hour. So that led to sort of like this interest. And so I started researching, like, are there firms doing that, that they’re generating cases and they’re referring them out? As luck would have it, I met my co-founder, who’s technical. He’s a computer science and electrical engineering guy, went to MIT undergrad and post-grad. So super smart. And we just, hit it off. And the two of us got together.

every Saturday for the better part of a year at a WeWork in lower Manhattan. We both had full-time jobs, ⁓ prototyping different ideas. And this was one of three ideas we had. And two guys that knew absolutely nothing about digital marketing put up an ad in New York City on Google and the phone started ringing. And then it was just like, you you take a signal, right? You’re like, how is that possible? We’re in the most competitive city, arguably in the world. And the phone starts ringing. So

That just led to more, right? And as we peeled back the layers, what we realized was like, you had this thing with really cool economics ⁓ in an industry that shut itself off from the rest of the world. So there’s not much data and it’s very tech backward. ⁓ And there was just a ton of opportunity. And so to complete the story, what we did was we built a full funnel advertising solution where we capture everything from the initial inquiry.

all the way through what these cases monetize for. Now on the surface to people not familiar with personal injury, they might say, well, that’s not too special, right? I mean, you’re just, you’re attributing your marketing spend. Yeah, but the issue is different from every other industry. When that inquiry comes in, it’s not gonna monetize for one, two, three, four, maybe five years down the road, right? So tying that out.

took both a tech stack that allowed you to capture it, as well as the patience, right? And then, you know, the ability to finance it, et cetera. So that’s sort of the magic.

John Burdett
Yeah, there’s, I’ve got so many questions around that and people I think are missing some of the, I think some of the courage it took for you to start a company like this, because you’ve got major cashflow issues to get it going. ⁓ and you’re, you, you’re like, see an opportunity and you know, you can do it better, but you’re not going to see the payoff. Cause you were telling me, what is it like? It takes like five to six years on average. Is that right? Something around that to settle? Two. Okay.

Todd Richheimer
Yes.

average is two, on average,

18 months to two, but our revenue curve is five years, right? And so like, and if you’re investing, if you’re growing, right, you’re investing more capital into the spend. So it really takes a long time to get that flywheel going.

John Burdett
Okay, yeah.

That’s right. Which is nice on the side you’re on now, cause it creates a barrier to entry for your competition. ⁓ but getting started, I mean, that just takes a lot of courage and a lot of faith that, we’re doing it. One thing I also love about what you guys have done from really day one is using data to make decisions.

Todd Richheimer
Yes.

John Burdett
So you’ve kind of mathematized all of this. You know, this type of case usually pays this amount, usually takes this amount to settle. You know what questions to ask upfront to determine which law firm to send it to. You’re using data to make decisions, which makes it a math equation, which allows you to project out your revenues and plan out the business, which is just super cool.

Todd Richheimer
Absolutely. Yeah,

no, completely. I appreciate it. It’s super interesting to me. Our industry is filled with like quote unquote marketing agencies, right? And all these guys will show up your door. You gotta remember because we are also structured as a law firm, ⁓ I get all of the same solicitations that law firms get around the country. And these folks come to your door and they promise you the world, ⁓ which is super interesting, because they’ll tell you, we’re gonna charge you this for an inquiry or we’re gonna charge you this for a relevant inquiry.

or this for, you know, this type of inquiry, but they have no idea what those inquiries are worth, you know, two, three, four years down the road. So you’re selling me something and guaranteeing me a return that you have no independent proof of yourself. Right. And it feeds into where we are today. I mean, I think a lot of our vision was related to two things. One tech would evolve as we’ve seen with the AI progress, right. But then to

is that you have this industry that’s been closed off to the world and that ultimately non-lawyers would be able to own law firms and we would position ourselves as the perfect conduit for which outsiders can responsibly get into this space in a manner that’s always good for the client.

John Burdett
Say that again because I don’t think most people realize that non-lawyers can’t own law firms in the United States.

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, no, totally. It’s really a crazy thing when you take a step back, right? So non-lawyers cannot own law firms in the United States. Now, there are some exceptions to that recently, which was part of our vision. ⁓ I think it was three years ago, two or three years ago, Arizona changed their rules to allow non-lawyers to own law firms, right? That’s one state. Washington, D.C. allows it, but it’s a much more narrow rule.

But it really is lawyers have protected their industry and not allowed outsiders to come in. And people will argue over why that is. know, one side of the aisle will argue that like it’s the sanctity of the law and only lawyers can be the guardians of this sacred profession. I may be more cynical. I think it’s protectionism. We want to protect what’s ours and not let outsiders in. But the practical implication of that is that we haven’t had

as much tech development as you’ve had in other industries, right? So if you look at personal injury, if you look at small law in general, I think people have a habit of looking at the coasts and thinking that like law firms are like giant, you know, white shoe law firms. In reality, the overwhelming majority of lawyers are practicing at one to two attorney firms around the country. And so you have this landscape that’s hyper fragmented, right? So tons and tons of firms. ⁓

Those firms have no incentive to share data or technology with each other, right? Those firms can’t raise outside capital. This is the big thing in how lofty navigated. They can’t raise outside capital because non-lawyers can’t own law firms. So you can’t go to a venture firm or private equity firm and say, invest in my business because they can’t own a piece. And so what’s happening is there hasn’t been tech development.

And then on the other side of it, and this was part of our vision from the beginning, was that we have a huge access to justice problem in this country. 85 % of people that need legal services can’t afford them. They can’t afford them because the incremental cost of legal services is too high. And you think about what causes the cost of services to come down, it’s technology of which we have no. so…

⁓ Our belief is that Arizona is the first domino to fall, and you’re going to start seeing widespread non-lawyer ownership of law firms.

John Burdett
It’s so awesome to me that you guys had this vision and you acted very intentionally upon it, making wise data-driven decisions. ⁓ It’s just, I don’t think, I just, can’t commend you enough for that because I mean, I see a lot of entrepreneurs just kind of willy-nilly trying to figure things out.

Yeah, you were taking risks, but you were taking very calculated risks and you had a vision with intentionality and it’s just, just so, so cool to see that. And then you’re on the other side of it now. So you, look like a genius, but I’m sure a lot of people early on were like, you’re crazy. Hey, you know, what are you doing? Kind of thing.

Todd Richheimer
Thanks.

Oh, totally. mean, the looks I got when I quit my

big law job, right? You know, to do this was like, and you know, truthfully in hindsight, I think about this a lot. So we are, we launched in 2013, right? And I do think about the ignorance with which I got started. And there really is an ignorance is bliss component to it, right? Because knowing what I know now would be very hard to have started.

John Burdett
Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
Right? mean, like, look, we’ve the way where we’ve gotten to and it’s been balancing the risks is because I couldn’t raise equity dollars. I had to raise all this money via debt. Right. And for those entrepreneurs out there that have have raised money, you know, trying to raise debt as an early stage business is very hard. ⁓ And so, yeah, it’s been a challenge, but it’s been it’s been a lot of fun. And I appreciate that.

John Burdett
So let’s talk about one of the major decisions you made ⁓ early on is, hey, you’re going to build your own software to manage all of this. And there’s a lot to manage. There’s a lot of decisions. Like I said, you’ve been using data science from day one. And ⁓ so walk me into like,

You’d never, I’d assume you’d never built software before. Your partner is a software expert. Walk me into that decision of like, okay, we’re going to build our own tech here and start scaling that out. And then obviously we got some follow-up questions about some of your pivots that you’re making now.

Todd Richheimer
Absolutely. So, ⁓ gonna walk you through that, but I wanna put one caveat on it. It’s like for those folks listening to this that are young entrepreneurs, like trying to get into it, it drives me nuts when people tell the story in hindsight, as if they were like clairvoyant, right? As if like every step along the way I had mapped out and I knew that I was making the right decision. There was a lot of this that we like fell into, like now fell into it with a degree of…

John Burdett
you

Todd Richheimer
curiosity, right? And picking out signal from noise and leaning into the things that worked and away from the things that didn’t. ⁓ And so, you I think we did a good job of that. But, know, day one, I just think we kept solving the problem at hand, right? And so the first year, right, I was answering every phone call. It’s actually really cool. just, ⁓ in my office at home, I just found my original notebook with the original intakes.

⁓ And for the first year and a half, I was a walking, talking 24 seven call center. And it was cool. And you know, by doing that, I learned the business, right? I learned what these people were looking for. Because I wasn’t a personal injury attorney before doing this. I was doing commercial litigation. so like, yeah, learning ⁓ what those folks liked. And then so.

we started solving the problems we had. We wanted to move from me answering the phones to having an intake specialist. What software were we going to use? And I think originally Mike, my co-founder, right, had the ability to prop up a piece of software that somebody could use and that grew, right? And one thing led to another. And I think the advantage of building as we went was it really makes you think about the problem you’re solving a whole lot harder.

than just taking something off the shelf. ⁓ Which now has put us in a position to make very reasoned decisions about using a Salesforce or whatever tool we’re using.

John Burdett
Yeah, think calling out what I don’t want.

people to miss this, but I’m a big believer too, that the founders need to be the first to do anything. You don’t like recruit it. You need to figure it out. You need to get your hands dirty because you’re not going to recognize the problems. You’re not going to recognize the opportunities and you need to be the first ones to start putting those processes in place so that you can onboard good team members to start scaling that out. Now I can speak to you on this because I’ve met your team. Then you start bringing on rock stars that do

Todd Richheimer
Mm-hmm.

John Burdett
way better than you ever could, which is one of the biggest blessings of being an owner and CEO. And because your team is amazing, you know, I got to meet them and stuff like that. And they’ve taken it to the next level. for those entrepreneurs out there, they’re wanting to get started. You need to be the first one to do these things because you’re not going to be able to solve the problems. You’re not going to be able to make wise decisions if you’re just looking at it from a backseat perspective.

Todd Richheimer
Totally agree. Building the team has been, I think, one of the greatest joys, both one of the greatest struggles and one of the greatest joys of this. our team right now is incredible, right? ⁓ But one of the hard parts about building a business, and I’m sure you had this experience, like, one, taking your hands off the wheel.

John Burdett
Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
Right? Like giving up like ownership of certain things, but then two, and it’s a whole nother skill set is managing folks that have a skill set and an understanding that you don’t have. Right. And, trying to insert yourself in places that you can be additive and not like just coming up with like nonsense. Right. ⁓ and so, yeah, that’s been, that’s been super.

Cool. I, know, it’s something I appreciate about you, John, the way that you talked about your business was like an appreciation for the people. Um, I, know, I sort of laugh. I always hear people talk about like our business is going to solve X problem and everything we do is going to be aimed at, you know, the consumer and don’t get me wrong. That’s all very important.

But I do think there’s a lack of like, what about the people that are building with you? Right? What if the beauty of your business was, you know, allowing the folks that are on this journey with you to fulfill their dreams, right? To live the life that they want to live. I don’t know. I think that’s a beautiful part about business that gets lost a little bit.

John Burdett
Yeah. And it’s so fulfilling. mean, you don’t want a celebration dinner of one when you’re done with this thing, right? You want it to be massive and you want everybody enjoying that journey along the way and celebrating those wins. Cause it’s, it’s lonely at the top, as you know, but it’s even lonelier if you don’t bring along good people and let them enjoy the journey and get out of the way. Um, and, and, stuff like that. And so it’s cool to see that you’ve done that. So let’s talk about that from the software perspective, because you have a really, really talented team.

Todd Richheimer
Yes.

after.

John Burdett
and you’ve recently made the decision that, I’m going to start moving a lot of my, my tech stack over to Salesforce and my processes and stuff like that. And, you made all these decisions before you met us. And, ⁓ there’s a lot of courage behind that. I’m sure there’s a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of hard decisions and stuff like that. Walk us through that journey about like, how did you even come to that and have you navigated that thus far?

Todd Richheimer
and

Definitely the sleepless nights. ⁓ There’s a lot of those in the last 12 years. ⁓ But ⁓ yeah, so, and I think this is a good lesson for other businesses. ⁓ So we built this piece of software, right? We built this full funnel solution that solved all of our needs. And over the last call it two years, we started running into hurdles, right? And those hurdles were associated with a system that we needed to scale.

But it was built on a framework and in a language that’s sort of like out of vogue. So it was built on Ruby on Rails. And so finding engineers to build in Ruby became more difficult. And so we had a decision to make. And what we came to was we pretty much had to rebuild the system to be able to handle this next layer of scale. ⁓ And…

what we came to, we were facing the decision of do we rebuild the system, the entirety of it, or do we build what we have to and buy what we can? And I came to the conclusion that that is a much better way to go. Let’s build what we have to buy what we can. And the piece that we’re moving to Salesforce, right, is really the intake component of our operation, right? It’s what the intake specialists are doing.

as they pick up the phone, they process these claims and pass it along to our partner firm network. And so it came down to really two big things, I think, drove my decision. One was ⁓ we are never going to be able to keep up with the Salesforce when it comes to ⁓ innovating in AI, right? And so being able to leverage that ecosystem, ⁓ I think, was a huge pro in that column.

Reason number two was I don’t want to be an intake software company, right? So while that function is core to our business, it’s not our business, right? And so why not leverage software that already exists? And so was really those two things that drove it. Our team did a hell of a job vetting the different solutions, vetting folks like FSM ⁓ and…

⁓ to your guys’ credit, really the relationship has been outstanding and it’s made with any big decision you worry, right? Is like, how’s it gonna go? And it’s really been going fantastically. And so thank you for that.

John Burdett
Well, thank you for the kind words. I don’t want to, you can’t underscore the, how big of a decision this is. You have a very successful business now. And when you’re making these kinds of decisions, mean, you’re, you’re not, I mean, we’re talking to people, you’re dealing with the livelihood of your people. You know, you’re dealing with the livelihood of your clients. You’re dealing with, you know, you’ve built something successful. But we see it often, you highlighted some of the points that we often see. I’ve been building software for 25 years now.

And back in the day, when I started, that was your only option. You didn’t have flexible platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot that existed in the ecosystem. So you had to kind of build it from scratch. So every company had to become a software company. And as you mentioned, you know that you’re, you’re not really a software company. You know, you’re, you’re solving other businesses with you’re solving other problems for clients using software, but

becoming a software company is very different than the type of business that you are. So it comes down to an identity question. It’s like, what type of business are you really? What is your core competencies? What are your competitive advantages? And if that software piece isn’t that, you want to then build it on something that’s flexible.

that you can always say yes to always have wise decisions to make from, but you’re not supporting it. You’re not worried about the security of the system. You’re not worried about keeping it up in the middle of, know, all these kinds. You’re not worried about like, can I find people to work on it? You’ve got an ecosystem of millions of people that now support that. And so

A lot of people miss that early on. They’re like, it’s going to be simple. just, know somebody that knows somebody, you know, they know somebody in India. We’re just going to go build this software out here. And the next thing you know, you’re supporting a software application that you have no idea how it works or how to support it.

Todd Richheimer
John, if I’d never hear the term tech debt again, I will be a happy man. That is, and people don’t realize it, right? Supporting that software is difficult and it’s time consuming and it’s distracting if it’s not your core business.

John Burdett
Yeah. Yeah.

That’s right. That’s right. We, for one of my previous businesses, we were a software company and we were spending millions of dollars a year building out and supporting our own software. And I looked at it from that perspective as well as do I want to take, you know, these really talented people who are working on.

Things that make us viable in the marketplace, meaning, you we’re our software is how we make money. That’s who we are and move them internally to build our own internal systems. And I made the same decision as you as like, no, I’m going to build my internal processes on Salesforce. And then that way I can easily configure it. I don’t have to maintain it. I can find other people to support it and stuff like that.

And it turned out to be one of the wisest decisions I made for that business because we then ran our entire operations on Salesforce. And we focused all of our attention on building those features and supporting the tech debt that we had for our customers to make our software better than everybody else’s.

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I’ve been thinking about this a And I think Salesforce fits into this bucket. It’s so interesting to me today as we’re living in this AI craze, right? And everybody is throwing AI at the end of everything they do. And having these companies pop up with like these crazy valuations that really are features and not businesses.

John Burdett
Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
And

what’s interesting is they’re built off of these LLMs, right? They’re effectively built off of a Salesforce, right? ⁓ Understanding Salesforce isn’t an LLM, right? But they’re built off of these LLMs. I don’t know, it’s just so interesting to me that like, and you’re watching Silicon Valley and the venture community.

invest in it very similar to how they invested in SaaS, right? It’s like, hey, we’re going to invest in this feature that’s going to sell to a business and, you know, they’re going to get, you know, annual revenue and this and that. But what’s so interesting to me, and I think people are missing the boat on this and this may be a big contrarian, but like,

It feels to me that the beauty of Salesforce and these LLMs is you can innovate from within these businesses and not necessarily need the all of these other subscriptions. And so I don’t know, to me, Salesforce is a building block as these LLMs are. And I think there’s real opportunity for more innovation to take place within the businesses and not necessarily, you know, the vendor community.

John Burdett
That’s right.

That’s right. Yeah. You want to be focused on, ⁓ innovating your business and not worrying about, okay, what apps do we need to do all these kinds of things? And I think a lot of times, you know, the, the tech stack gets out of control for,

Todd Richheimer
Okay.

John Burdett
mid-market and lower companies and even larger companies. your buy, yeah. And then to your point is like, I would say most businesses right now, they’ve got Claude subscriptions and chat, you know, GPT subscriptions and perplexities subscriptions. And they’re like all over the place instead of really thinking about, okay, what are our business processes? Where’s all our data? How are we going to leverage these AI tools to make wise decisions? And you want to make that as simple and consolidate as possible so that you can

then just focusing on solving the problems you’re trying to solve and not worrying about having all this kind of tech stack bloat that we already have in our small businesses, but we have it even more with AI ⁓ out there. ⁓ So that’s a real problem. And we think about it the same exact way. We think good process, having data.

Organize, have your house in order is going to propel us to use AI so much better than any other business because we have our house in order. And then that, that AI model is going to make really wise decisions, not hallucinate, not do things awkwardly because we’re very structured and we know what we’re doing.

Todd Richheimer
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, entirely agree. Entirely.

John Burdett
So

let’s talk about the people aspect of it, because you and I very passionate about that. And ⁓ I’m sure some of your team members weren’t too happy about, we’re going to move to Salesforce for some of these core things. And what does that mean for me? And all that kind of stuff. Talk to me about how you navigated that with your team.

Todd Richheimer
It was, that was tough. That was an unexpectedly tough piece. underestimated how ⁓ vested people were in the system that we built and supported, you know, and then moving away from it, you know, that you’d get resistance. And rightfully so, right? But like, I think that the debate around it was, ⁓ was really good. You know, I, there’s a Jeff Bezos quote that I love. That’s like the whole disagree and commit type mentality. ⁓

And I really want to foster that environment, but that’s not to underplay how hard it is, right? When people have strong opinions. ⁓ And so, yeah, I think that’s hard, but I think that like when you have people that care and they’re making an argument from a place of like, really care that we get this right, you end up making some good decisions.

John Burdett
Yeah, I mean, you’re blessed you’ve recruited good people. so that helps those. Yeah, they may not agree initially, but they get on board and then they’re behind at 110 % and stuff like that, which makes that a blessing as you look at it in the rear view mirror.

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, look, and I think I’d be remiss not to note, because I said, you know, our team is awesome. And they are. ⁓ You know, one of the things that we’ve made a very conscious effort at this year with our engineering team was to up our talent pool. Right. And, you know, we went into this year saying that, like, you know, our team was a little bit too junior. Right. We need to and we stumbled a little bit last year in them being junior.

and we really raised the bar and things have gone really nicely.

John Burdett
That’s awesome. let’s a couple more questions here as we kind of land the plane.

For CEOs out there, they’re listening. What are some of the warning signs you would say of like, okay, it’s time to look at making a tech stack change or some of these big, you you can even take the platform change out of it. mean, this is a major decision where you’ve got a very successful business, but you’ve realized it won’t scale to the next level. And so instead of ignoring that, you had the courage to like, okay, let’s do this. What kind of warning signs did you see that people can kind of look out for as they’re, they’re navigating and growing and scaling?

in their business.

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, I think ⁓ you start hearing know a lot, right? When you ask, you know, can I add this feature? Can we do this? And the answer is no, or it’s going to take too long, or we’re going to have to kick something else off the priority list, right? So development gets harder, right? So I think that’s one of those things. ⁓ The other thing that like is always on my mind, and I’m sure there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that this feeling and you know, is like,

I don’t want to F this up, right? Like, like don’t F this up, right? Keep on, you know, like you’ve done really well till now. And so I’m constantly trying to like get ahead of things. And so one of the questions that I constantly ask our team is, you know, we’re doing X number of cases this year. If we get to Y.

You know, what’s the why where the system starts having an issue, right? How far can we go today? You know, and trying to be a year or two ahead of that. Now, the byproduct of that is, and admittedly today, we’re sitting on more infrastructure than we currently need, right? Like I do think part of growth, and it’s the uncomfortable part of growth, is getting ahead of it, right? You can’t, you can’t just grow and instantaneously have the infrastructure.

John Burdett
Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
Right?

And so it’s like trying to keep those things in sync is hard. And so where this all came about was like, okay, we’re here. We want to get to here. What do we need when we do get there?

John Burdett
Yeah, I tell our team all the time is you got to be comfortable being uncomfortable because growth requires you to be uncomfortable. But that’s a good thing because it cures complacency. You can’t be complacent and growing at the same time. But what you want to do is be intentional and focused about where you’re going. You don’t want to be all over the place. And I love how you’ve kind of, you you set the vision. This is what we’re going to do. You’ve gotten your team on board and it’s not going to be a smooth ride. I mean, it’s going to be challenging. There’s going to be bumps in the road. There’s going to be things like that, but

Todd Richheimer
Yeah.

John Burdett
You’re playing offense, not playing defense. You’re, you’re, setting the vision for your company. And as you mentioned before, it’s like, I mean, people underestimate the pressure that CEOs have.

⁓ of they’ve built a now a successful business and they don’t want to mess it up. I mean, they don’t, I mean, they’ve got mouths to feed. They, they’ve got their reputation, their ego, you know, as much as we don’t want to talk about that, we’ve got all these things on the line now. And a lot of people kind of freeze up and don’t do anything, but always encourage, I mean, you gotta, like, if I’m going to be disrupted, I’m going to disrupt myself. Like I don’t want to be disrupted by anybody else. And I love that’s what you’re doing with lofty.

Todd Richheimer
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. I will say, yeah, I wouldn’t trade this journey for the world, but it is definitely does not come without the stress. And especially, mean, like, look, in legal right now, we have two forces, just enormous forces that are colliding in AI and regulatory change. And the waters are really turned up. And the thing that’s on my mind is like,

you know, there are headwinds and there are tailwinds, right? Now, I think the opportunity here is way, way greater than the challenge, but that’s not to discount the challenge because it’s significant. And I think if you don’t give it its due credit is where you really end up in a lot of trouble.

John Burdett
That’s right.

That’s right.

Sam Donaghey
Todd,

you mentioned earlier as well about hiring more senior talent as well. What are some of the biggest challenges that you find in your work for hiring?

Todd Richheimer
Good question. And actually this has been a win for us. ⁓ Engineering talent, know, it’s interesting with AI, you hear about engineering talent, you know, maybe ⁓ there being more talent available, but like that has not been my experience up till now, right? Is like engineering talent was really sought after.

and competing with the salaries that they were willing to pay, you know, in California and New York City ⁓ was pretty insane, right? You know, for junior level talent. So I think competing for that talent was really difficult, especially with like a unique business. It’s so interesting to me, ⁓ like, I don’t know, in my opinion, and this is probably like a self-serving comment, but like,

lofty epitomizes entrepreneurship, right? Like it’s part legal, part data, part technology, part ad tech, part fintech, right? Like it has all these different components of like capitalizing on opportunity, but that’s a tougher sell when you’re going to an engineer who’s leaving Google and you know, they’re coming off with this like, you know, they pay for their lunches and their dinners and it’s like, it’s really crazy things. So I think that’s hard to compete with.

Sam Donaghey
Right, right.

Todd Richheimer
But I will say one of the things that has an interesting byproduct, and I know you guys are largely remote, interesting byproduct of COVID is it really, the world, remote work was never on my mind. Like I draw my energy from people. I like being around people. Never crossed my mind pre-COVID. the post-COVID world, taking geography out of the mix,

has really opened up possibilities in finding just killer talent. So, huge benefit.

John Burdett
So looking more broadly, how do you see technology reshaping the legal industry in the next decade or so?

Todd Richheimer
I think we’re watching the practice of law change right before our eyes. I I think it is overplayed what AI is going do to the industry tomorrow, but I think looking out into the distance, it’s very significant. My opinion of it is like law is very process driven.

and process is exactly what AI is good at. ⁓ And so I think that it’s going to upend the way that we ⁓ practice law. I think for those that are paying attention, the opportunity is enormous. And I think the opportunity is to make your firm more efficient and be able to provide better services to those that need legal help. ⁓

But I do think that people are overplaying what AI can do today. ⁓ I think there are massive pieces of infrastructure missing that would allow AI to replace people in their entirety. I think it’s additive right now not replacing anybody, ⁓ except for very simple functions. ⁓ But yeah, I think the opportunity is really, really tremendous.

John Burdett
One follow-up question of that, know, so much of what you do is leverage technology to get referrals coming in, right? You know, finding them in different places. Now that, you know, SEO has kind of been turned upside down. How are you using, you know, AEO or getting into the, you know, the AI side to find leads and generate referrals. You guys kind of have to be kind of at the tip of the spear of some of that stuff. Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
That’s the opportunity, right? mean, like

it really does feel like history is repeating itself. Right. And it’s so funny at 45 to say like, I’m old enough to remember, right. It’s crazy. You know, you remember when Google came about, right. And people were cramming their landing pages with like relevant keywords to like, game the algorithms. The same thing’s happening.

John Burdett
Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
Right? And like, how do you gain the LLMs to look at you as the best alternative? Now, one of the things that I think benefits Lofty is I think those that are substantive are going to win. I think personal injury over the years has been filled with gimmicks and hot air and jingles and like, you know, things aimed at capturing attention. I think the winners tomorrow are going to pay attention to substance because I think that’s what these LLMs reward.

⁓ I also think what’s interesting is you have the organic side of things, like how does SEO get replaced? But the next thing that people are talking about is like these large language models are crazy expensive to run. They’re one day going to need a business model. And at the moment, that business model could very well be some reincarnation of pay-per-click advertising.

Right? And so it’s, you know, it’ll be interesting to see how they monetize these things. And, you know, I think paying attention to both the organic side and the paid side is a, potentially huge opportunity.

John Burdett
Yeah. there, there’s so much of how it’s, you know, AI is going to be pervasive. It’s fairly pervasive right now, but it’s going to be as pervasive as the iPhone or any other technology that people use. And no matter your income level or whatever, they’re going to be going to AI to like, Hey, I was just, I slipped and fell at this Walmart yesterday. What should I do? They’re going be asking AI that versus

you know, whatever mechanism they use to find you today. And it’s like, ⁓ it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out, not only for your business, but any business. Yeah.

Todd Richheimer
all businesses. That’s exactly

right. And you see people out there selling solutions and I encourage somebody listening to this to prove me wrong, give me a shout out, right? But like all these folks are selling services. We know how to get you to appear at the top of the LLMs. You don’t, right? You’re guessing, right? Like nobody’s figured that out yet. And these things are changing so rapidly that like, yeah, I mean, I think we have…

Decent signals how to do that, but it’s not a very mature space by any stretch of the imagination.

Sam Donaghey
Well, this has been such an interesting conversation to listen to. Todd, before we close, we always ask our guests to leave us with a quote or a piece of advice that’s been meaningful to them. So what comes to mind for you?

Todd Richheimer
Sure, ⁓ yeah, recently came across a quote that I love. I love quotes. But recently came across one that I think is perfect for this day and age ⁓ where we are all hyper distracted, wanting to be all things to all people. It’s a Charlie Munger quote ⁓ and I think it goes something like, ⁓ find a simple idea and take it seriously.

⁓ And so as somebody who like I just get interested in a lot of different things It’s a reminder to focus right and you know, I think the beauty is in the simplicity. So That’s what I’ll give you

Sam Donaghey
Awesome.

John Burdett
So good.

Sam Donaghey
Todd, thanks so much for being with us today.

Todd Richheimer
Thank you guys, really enjoyed this.

Sam Donaghey
well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion podcast. Todd, thank you so much again for sharing your story. Your journey really shows how leaders can navigate the build versus buy dilemma in practical real world terms. For our listeners who want to learn more about Todd and Lofty, you can check out Lofty.com. We’re going to share a link to that in the show notes. And as always, you can catch past episodes at fastslowmotion.com slash podcast, or you can subscribe on your favorite podcast platform.

And if you’ve got a question or a topic that you’d like us to cover, you can drop us a note at fastslowmotion.com slash podcastfeedback.