Make Money Mondays: Virtual Meeting, Real Food

Never eat lunch alone, say master networkers like Keith Ferrazi. But in today’s hectic world, getting together for lunch is easier said than done.  Still, a lawyer’s got to eat, right?

Enter an elegant solution to this common problem: eatNgage.com , a platform that lets you set up a virtual meeting, demo or webinar with colleagues or potential clients and have a meal delivered to them IRL (H/T Gerry Riskin of Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices). eatNgage uses Zoom, a widely-used virtual meeting product as the platform for its service which has the advantage of user familiarity. Other features include an invite and reminder system, ability to select a variety of meal options along with a meal budget.

Although eatNgage appears to have been set up for vendors hawking demos, there are plenty of uses for lawyers too.  Most obviously, lawyers can use the platform to serve existing clients – for example, by providing briefings to out-of-state clients, GCs or to association boards which may have members who are also in different locations.

But eatNgage can be used to prospect new clients as well, and in fact, eatNgage shared  that many customers use the service to deliver webinars + lunch for several hundred participants at a time. And while that seems expensive, as one commenter pointed out , the price is comparable, if not less, to flying presenters out to a seminar site, paying for parking and having meals delivered anyway.

eatNgage is also a godsend to lawyers (mostly moms) who work part-time or telecommute due to childcare responsibilities and as a result, miss out on networking opportunities necessary for advancement and success.  eatNgage means that a lunch date doesn’t have to take a 3-hour bite out of a work-from-home parent’s day.

At a time when folks are overwhelmed with announcements of all kinds of webinars -from how-to’s to get rich schemes – on social media and via email lists, eatNgage is a way to give your webinar an advantage over the competition. After all, who doesn’t like a free lunch?

Editor’s Note: Second Hat Tip to the new LexBlog Platform . Initially, I must confess that I didn’t really understand the concept. But the new platform makes it easy to scroll through and follow hundreds of law-related blogs in a matter of minutes which is how I came across Riskin’s post.