$3.1M to $5.7M — and a Law Firm That Finally Runs Like a Business
How West & Dunn unified their marketing, operations, and growth strategy to nearly double revenue in two years
About West & Dunn
West & Dunn is a full-service Wisconsin law firm founded in 2016, headquartered in Waunakee (just north of Madison) with additional offices in Baraboo, Manitowoc, and Lodi. The firm serves individuals and businesses across Wisconsin in criminal defense, estate planning, business law, civil litigation, and municipal law and supports veterans nationwide in pursuing VA disability benefits. With four equity partners and a team that has grown to nearly 50 staff members, West & Dunn has built a reputation for transparent, high-quality legal counsel across a remarkably diverse range of practice areas.
The Challenge
Scaling a Complex Firm Without Losing Control
By late 2023, West & Dunn built something real — a multi-partner firm with four distinct practice areas, a growing team, and a meaningful footprint across Wisconsin. The problem wasn’t ambition or capability. It was infrastructure.
Running four practice areas under one roof — each with different billing models, different client types, and different growth trajectories — meant the firm’s financial reporting had become a blended, hard-to-read picture. Strong performance in one area could quietly offset stagnation in another, making it difficult to know where to invest, what to fix, or which partners and practice areas to hold accountable for growth.
On the marketing side, the firm had made genuine efforts. They had worked with outside agencies and were spending on digital advertising — but they lacked the internal systems to evaluate what was actually working. Reporting from their marketing vendors was heavy on ‘vanity metrics,’ such as impressions and clicks, and light on what the firm actually cared about: qualified leads, booked consultations, signed clients, and revenue. Without a way to connect marketing activity to business outcomes, spending decisions were largely intuitive rather than data-based.
The intake process had similar blind spots. The firm was investing in lead generation without a clear picture of what happened once a lead came in — how quickly calls were answered, how many were missed, how leads moved through the funnel from first contact to signed engagement.
What West & Dunn needed wasn’t a single fix. They needed a partner who could see the whole picture.
“We knew we needed to grow, and we were doing a lot of things — but we didn’t have a clear way to evaluate whether any of it was working together. Marketing, operations, intake — they all felt separate.”
Why SMB Team
West & Dunn found SMB Team in late 2023. What distinguished SMB from other options wasn’t any single service — it was the integration of business coaching and marketing under one roof.
For a firm managing four practice areas, four equity partners, and a rapidly growing team, that combination was essential. Coaching without marketing leaves a firm with strategy but no execution engine. Marketing without coaching means spending money without the operational foundation to convert it. West & Dunn needed both, coordinated around a shared set of goals.
“The coaching piece was really attractive because attorneys don’t learn how to run a law firm in law school. And having marketing and coaching together — that’s what helped us understand all the layers involved and what we needed to do on our end to make the most of it.”
The Approach
Build the Foundation, Then Scale
SMB Team’s engagement started with a diagnostic phase — understanding the firm’s financial structure, identifying where growth was concentrated and where it was lagging, and mapping the full client journey from lead to signed case.
One of the first and most important findings: West & Dunn was missing a significant percentage of incoming calls. The firm had call tracking installed, but the data hadn’t been systematically reviewed. When SMB Team surfaced the numbers, the missed call rate was around 30% — meaning more than one in four potential clients who reached out never got a response.
The strategic decision that followed was deliberate: before increasing investment in lead generation, fix the intake infrastructure. Sending more leads into a leaky funnel would compound the problem, not solve it.
With that foundation stabilized, the engagement expanded across coaching, SEO, PPC, and social media — all oriented around a unified revenue goal and shared success metrics.
“Our team made it clear — this was the priority. Not more marketing spend, not more ads. Fix this first. And they were right.”
SMB Team Solutions
FreedomOS Fractional Business Officer
Structure, Accountability, and a Plan for Growth
The coaching engagement focused on giving West & Dunn the operational framework a firm of their complexity needed to scale deliberately.
Separate P&Ls by practice area.
All four practice areas had been tracked under one reporting system. SMB Team helped the firm build out independent financial reporting for each — criminal defense, VA disability, estate planning/transactional, and civil litigation — so partners could see clearly which areas were growing, which were flat, and where to invest or intervene. Each practice area was given a minimum 20% growth target with real accountability behind it.
KPIs and quarterly priorities.
The firm implemented a formal goal-setting framework with measurable KPIs across the organization — replacing reactive decision-making with intentional planning. For the first time, hiring decisions were evaluated against financial models rather than feel.
“We used to hire when we felt overwhelmed. Now we know what revenue a new attorney should be expected to generate, what we’d pay them, and whether the math makes sense before we make the call.”
Intake overhaul.
The coaching team worked directly with West & Dunn to redesign how incoming calls were handled. They implemented overflow call coverage to eliminate the after-hours gap, standardized intake scripts, trained staff on tone and process, and introduced the SMB Success Chain Tracker — a funnel tracking tool that made every stage of the lead-to-client journey visible and measurable.
The missed call rate dropped from over 30% to under 10% and continues to decline as more emphasis is being placed on after-hours support.
Leadership alignment.
With four equity partners, strategic decisions — from growth targets to compensation structure to long-term firm direction — required genuine alignment. The coaching engagement included significant time on leadership dynamics: building shared frameworks for major decisions, resolving disagreements constructively, and helping the partners move in one direction rather than four.
The firm grew from approximately 10 employees to nearly 50 over the course of the engagement, with the confidence to hire deliberately and the infrastructure to support the growth.
LeadsOS Search Engine Optimization
From Invisible to Authoritative
When SMB Team’s SEO team came on board, the website had structural issues that were limiting organic visibility — thin content on key practice area pages, technical errors that confused search engine crawlers, and an internal linking architecture that funneled authority away from high-value pages.
The team took a quality-over-quantity approach:
- Practice area pages were significantly expanded with SEO-optimized content covering the full depth of each service — including structured “Answer Capsules” designed to surface in Google’s AI-generated search results.
- Internal linking was rebuilt to direct authority from informational blog content toward the firm’s highest-intent practice area pages.
- Local SEO was strengthened across all four office locations, with Google Business Profiles updated from generic categories to precise practice-specific terms and citation signals reinforced with 30 BrightLocal citations per location.
- Technical cleanup removed thin pages, corrected duplicate H1 tags, added legal service schema, and eliminated indexing issues that had been dragging down overall site quality.
Results from November 2024 to February 2026
LeadsOS PPC & LSA
Targeted Spend, Measurable Returns
The paid advertising strategy was built around the firm’s actual goals — specific practice areas, specific geographies, and a clear line between ad spend and signed cases. An ROI analysis drove budget allocation decisions, and a multi-step landing page was developed to pre-qualify leads before they reached the intake team.
Results:
“The biggest thing we got from the PPC work — beyond just running campaigns — was the tracking. Now we can see exactly where we’re losing people in the funnel and what to do about it. Before, we’d get reports full of impressions and have no idea if we were actually getting clients.”
LeadsOS Social Media
Building Brand and Generating Criminal Defense Leads
A targeted social media retargeting campaign launched in September 2024, focused on criminal defense — the firm’s fastest-growing practice area. The campaign was designed to re-engage high-intent prospects who had already shown interest in legal services.
Results September 2024-February 2026:
Outcomes At-a-Glance
| Metric | Before SMB Team | With SMB Team |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Revenue | $3.1M (2023) | $5.7M (2025) |
| Missed Call Rate | 30%+ | Under 10% and dropping |
| Team Size | ~10 employees | ~50 employees |
| Organic Search Position | 48.7 | 12.2 |
| Monthly Organic Clicks | 907 | 2,149 (+136%) |
| VA Monthly PPC Leads | 58 | 104 |
| VA PPC Return on Ad Spend | ? | 233% |
| Estate Planning Return on Ad Spend | ? | 148% |
| LSA Return on Ad Spend | ? | 186% |
The Takeaway
West & Dunn came to SMB Team as a firm that had done a lot right — they’d built a substantial practice, attracted strong partners, and earned a fantastic reputation across multiple areas of law. What they needed was the infrastructure to match their ambition: financial clarity at the practice area level, marketing that could be evaluated and optimized, an intake process that captured every opportunity they’d already earned, and a coaching relationship that could hold four partners accountable to one shared plan.
For West & Dunn, the gap between a strong law firm and a growing business turned out to be smaller than they thought — it just required the right partner to close it.
“If someone asked me what SMB does for us, I’d talk about the coaching first. Attorneys don’t learn how to run a law firm in law school — they just don’t. Having a business coach gives you the data to track, the systems to track it, and someone outside the firm who makes sure you actually do the things you say you’re going to do. Combined with the marketing, it all connects in a way it never did before.”
