Heroes in Business - Charlie Davis Founder Davis Miles McGuire Gardner

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

Charlie Davis co-founder Davis Miles McGuire Gardner is interviewed by David Cogan of Eliances Heroes show amfm, iHeart radio. Davis tells Cogan how he realized the true value of what he does for a living, and shares the knowledge of beginning with what you know and building on it for having passion in career. Davis also helped his wife launch scrapbooking dot com, a successful scrapbook website.

welcome back to alliances heroes where heroes in business align to be part of our super community and find out more about alliances visit www.alliances.com now back to our super host David Kogan founder of alliances thank you again that's right this is David Kogan with E-Liances. And we just had the king of nerds, right? The CEO of Nerdery.com. Now, I got to tell you, to build a law firm is no easy task. To build one that employs 135 employees is even more difficult. And achieving the ranking of a top 10 law firm in the state of Arizona is a gigantic

accomplishment. That's what our next hero has done and he is the co-founder of law firm Davis Miles McGuire Gardner firm. Building a law firm really is no different than starting a company. At what point did you say you wanted to expand and hire more lawyers? And with that is Charlie Davis, the founder. It came about because of opportunity. Opportunity presented itself. My partner at the time, Greg Miles, and I looked at it and we said, I looked at it and we said, yeah, we can do this. And set on a path. We ended up hiring 14 lawyers and 20 staff people in a matter of 30 days. And we did it. But that's amazing. How did you know at the point, okay, I need to go ahead and we're going to expand this and we're going to start with number one, number two? I mean, where?

Well, it began with me actually thinking I was going to be a solo practitioner for the rest of my life. I built a company called law.com, sold it to a New York investment firm. And when that was done, my wife and I built a company called scrapbook.com. And after we got that launched, I was just going to be a solo practitioner, but, um, people contacted us. They, uh, I never did completely leave my law practice, and I'd kept a number of core, very successful entrepreneurs as clients. And we were contacted by what was then called Prepaid Legal, which now is known as LegalShield. And they asked if we would become the provider firm in Arizona.

They were not happy with the previous provider firms. We looked at it and we said, well, this gives us a chance to help lots of people who can't afford the corporate rate for lawyer services. And even though a lot of the practice areas covered areas that Greg and I had never practiced in, we said we think we can do this, but if we're going to do it, we're going to do it the right way. So we collaborated with prepaid legal and said, this is what we would need to begin this the right and the correct way. And that was the beginning. And then that developed into more and more opportunity. And as we saw the opportunities,

And then that developed into more and more opportunity. And as we saw the opportunities, not only with the LegalShield side of the practice, but with our traditional side was growing, we brought on some amazing people, both in the LegalShield arena and in our traditional practice. And they helped us build this and take it one step at a time. And you don't do something like this by yourself. You do it by surrounding yourself with people that have talents that you don't have, have capacities that you don't have, and have foresight and ingenuity that you don't have. In fact, let's talk about some of the areas of specialty that your company practices.

And at a point when a person engages with you, I mean, with so many lawyers that you have, is there any area that you refer out that you go, you know what, we do a lot, but we just don't do this? Is there an area you don't cover? Maritime law. Maritime law. All right. There are other areas too, but we do cover a broad range. We're one of the few full-service law firms of our size, maybe in the country, but particularly in the Valley. There's a lot of fantastic lawyers and great firms in the Phoenix metropolitan area. And so we said, well, we have great lawyers. Let's see if we can expand our base. And so in our traditional practice, not our legal shield practice, and I'll get to that in a second, but in our traditional

practice, we cover consumer areas, bankruptcy, domestic relations, landlord-tenant, personal injury. And then we also handle high-end corporate mergers and acquisitions, tax work, high-end litigation. We are great commercial litigators. And we said, you know, if we get the right people, we can perform a service that we need to a multiplicity of clients. And our corporate clients also have family issues where they need consumer-type representation, and consumers, some of them turn into fantastic business people. Excellent. And you could reach Charlie Davis by going to davismiles.com. That's D-A-V-I-S-M-I-L-E-S.com.

Or, of course, you can go to alliances.com because you're listening to Alliance's Heroes. Be a hero. Go to where entrepreneurs align. Be part of the community. That's E-L-I-A-N-C-E-S.com. Now, you briefly spoke about too, scrapbook.com. In fact, this site garners 20 million views a month. Yes.

Unbelievable. How did you build it along with your wife to make it so successful? I mean, you've built a huge law firm. You built another company that you had sold. How do you create and build something like this? I think, you know, Tom mentioned it in your previous segment, you're willfully ignorant. You don't know that you can't do something. So you just go ahead and you say, well, here's what we need to do. Here's step one to get to step two to step two to get to step three. And Scrapbook.com was really the product of my wife.

It was her idea. She has been a lifetime scrapbooker, and she was on call to show her wares at a number of places. She says, I would just like a site where I could put my stuff up so people could see what I do because I go teach and I have to lug all this stuff around. And that was actually the beginning of the creation of law.com because we went and talked to my nephew who was in the early stages of the internet, garnering a bunch of domain names. So we got those domain names and then we started dreaming. We took two days, went up to the mountains and we said, what would we want scrapbook.com to look like at the end of the day? And we put it on little post-it notes and we put it on a wall, a piece of butcher paper. And we

said, this is what we would like it to look like. This is what, and I'd had experience with building websites with law.com. So we said, this is how this thing could come together. After doing that for one day, we woke up the next morning, we said, we are insane. What are we even thinking about? We don't know what we're doing. This takes all kinds of skills that we don't have. So we said, well, let's begin with what we do know. And so we started it with one segment and my wife's genius for teaching and we started teaching people about scrapbooking what makes good scrapbooks what makes poor scrapbooks why designs some designs work why some designs won't we had some technology people who helped us put that very basic thing together and we started getting tons of traffic and then my sons came to work for us

first one son came and then another one who had been working at Goldman Sachs came and joined the firm and they really put the thing on steroids we we took it as far as we could and they've done an absolutely fantastic job my third son is a technology guy he came in and helped get he's a he's a professional. So all the video stuff that he did the foundation for was another thing that allowed that to launch. And again, you can go to the website. So easy to remember, scrapbook.com. All right. Now, I got to tell you, too, is that one of the members that actually serves on our Alliance's advisory council is David Blackledge. We call him AAA because he's an attorney with your firm. He's Advocacy. What is the one or two keys you hope that your children, grandchildren, can learn from your wealth of experience having started and built so many things?

Don't stifle your dreams. And when discouragement comes, know that that's just part of the process. That's not the end. Excellent. Excellent. Now, you've also been listed in the Registry of Preeminent Lawyers for over 25 years. You have a 10 rating. That's the highest possible rating on the avvo.com site. As you've progressed through your career, did any part of your journey actually really had an impact and change you? Yes. Yeah, I've been practicing for about 15 years. And, and the law, the practice of law seemed mundane. It seemed to be just handle a series of problems, and then you go to the next problem. And it, I was at a place where I said, Well, do I want to do this the rest of my life, and then I had an epiphany. And I saw that what we do as lawyers is so important to moving the society forward. And every day then became a project for

how can I help people solve problems in their lives that they can't solve by themselves. And it changed my whole focus. I love what I do. I see that without the law, everything in this room is governed by the law. The seats you're in, the microphones we're using, the airwaves we've done, everything is governed by the laws. It's the pathway over which society can move forward. And without it, it's chaos. And I love what I do. Excellent, Charlie. You protect others by guiding them through difficult, sometimes overwhelming experience in their lives. You also bring much joy to your family, business, and more. 11 grandchildren is a huge accomplishment.

You can reach him again by going to davismiles.com. And when we return, we're going to have the CEO of a $1.5 billion company. That's right, Children's Place, David Kogan with E-Liances.