December 8, 2024

Thrive Insider

Exclusive stories of successful entrepreneurs

Mitch Greenaway Head of Partnerships at WMCW

  1. What’s your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I come from a finance, strategy, and business development background. I started my career in print advertising, following that was a stint in finance management and then into sales where I held the position of head of sales for a large national medico legal business which offered medico legal reports and disbursement funding. This role involved me managing relationships with personal injury law firms and doctors across Australia. During this time, I discovered through conversation with my legal clients that there is a huge gap in personal injury advertising. My previous experience enabled me to bring a large number of industry contacts along with building an intimate understanding of the personal injury market to WMCW. Although I did not come up with the idea, I have been onboard since day one and intimately involved in the company’s vision and direction. 

  1. Describe the process of launching the business.

The process of setting up the business involved: 

  • Completing a seed funding round.
  • Beta testing landing pages in some personal injury verticals.
  • Building a website with over 650 different pages of useful content. 
  • Building the systems to handle the leads – salesforce – implementation and integration with all of our advertising avenues. 
  • Setting up an outsourced HR, accounting and back of house functions. 
  • Employing a team of claims advisors – our people who work with our customers and training them how to handle and triage personal injury enquiries for our legal partners 
  • Building a management team to handle different departments, operations, finance, marketing, and sales. 
  • Sales and marketing plans (with a particular focus on digital marketing chanells.
  • Building Pitch Decks for our legal partners and investors. 
  • Financial planning – budgeting and forecasting. 
  1. Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

We are a unique business in that we target both B2B & B2C.

B2C: We have attracted and kept our customers coming back with high quality content, nurturing staff handling the enquires and the promise of removing the fear and complexity of personal injury claims. 

B2B: Legal Marketing is a highly competitive space in Australia; WMCW are offering a product that takes a lot of stress and expense away for our legal partners in securing clients. We provide a very in-depth triage process (handled by our call centre) which qualifies out cases that would usually get through traditional means, only providing qualified leads to our legal partners. Our legal partners dedicate budget to us each month and we become part of their team. 

  1. How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We achieved our first-year anniversary of business and are still in growth phase; we currently have several streams running including product pivots as we continue to understand and adapt the everchanging legal marketing landscape. We have worked with our legal partners and clients to iterate the product that suits both their needs. I would imagine we will continue to adapt to the market as it changes, looking to new regions and areas – recently we have started targeting other verticals. 

  1. Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
  • Solve problems for your customers – continue to test and launch new products inline with customers needs. 
  • Create a great culture internally and this will directly reflect in the customers experience. 
  • Success only comes with hard work – be prepared to put in the long hours to achieve what you set out to do. 
  1. What platform/tools do you use for your business

Being a tech-based marketing company, we can operate on almost an entirely remote environment using the below platforms; 

  • G suite 
  • Salesforce – which runs our lead processing (with a lot of plugins). 
  • Aircall – for our call centre operations
  • Google Adwords – for our advertising
  • Facebook Ads Manager – for our advertising
  • SemRush – to keep an eye on competitors
  • Xero – For accounting/invoicing
  1. What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I recently attended the Ad world conference (October 2021) which I found to be very interesting, there was a large focus on the impacts of the IOS 14 changes, which has led to increased advertising cost across different platforms and has hindered the ability for companies to retarget audiences. This has made it more important for us to shift a focus to providing high quality content and resources to a far wider customer base. Podcasts I have found invaluable include Masters of Scale Hosted by Reed Hoffman, How I built this with Guy Raz, The GaryVee Experience. Books include Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World by Tim Ferriss, Blitzscaling by Chris Yeh and Reid Hoffman & No Rules Rules by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings. 

https://wmcw.com.au/