This episode of the Miami PI Chronicles podcast is brought to you by the law offices of Richard E. Basha and Associates specializing in all aspects of commercial, civil, business law and litigation. Their office is located in the Bank of America building located at 401 East Los Olis Boulevard, suite 1400 for Lauderdale, Florida, 33301. For a free consultation, please call 954-523-4882. That's 954-523-4882. For all your investigative needs, please call McKinnon Investigative Group at 954-513-7414, that's 954-513-7414 or email us at myginvestigationsetoutlook.com. Welcome to the Miami PI Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Francois McKinnon, from McKinnon Investigative Group. And I'm Oscar Santa Maria of Optimum Investigations. We created this podcast with a goal to educate, inform and entertain aspiring, beginner and seasoned professionals in the investigative field. With over 60 years of combined experience, we offer invaluable insights and lessons learned. We may not have all the answers, our knowledge can certainly benefit anyone interested in this dynamic profession. So sit back, listen and enjoy these episodes. Please don't forget to like, share and follow. Good evening, Oscar, how are you? I'm doing pretty well, Francois. How about yourself? I hear you've had a tough week at some issues. We were a little sick, I think. I think I was a little under the weather, I was on a case in a bowling alley and all of a sudden, it hit me and I was like, oh man. And so for the next five days after that, I was pretty under the weather, but I think I'm coming out of it. Yes. Well, I hope so. Time to go back to work, my friend. Certainly is. How have you been? Well, I've had a busy week. I wanted to tell our listeners that we want to thank them for listening to the show. We're getting more and more of our likes and people are listening to the show and it's very exciting. I wanted to tell you that we're getting a lot of emails. You and I have not communicated that much this week, but I wanted to let you know, I received an email from this PI. Her name is Cheryl from Tampa. She wanted to know how to get clients, new clients, and she wants to grow her business. She's like a single operator from her PI agency and she wanted to know our thoughts. How can we help her get some more visibility and some more clients? Any thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, what I would suggest a few years ago, I read a survey on a magazine called Pursuit Magazine and they had a bunch of statistics about private investigators and they said most private investigators are only in the business for 10 years before they usually hang it up. And also, most people are one man, mom and pop shops. It's very rare that you see these big national companies. I mean, they're out there, but most people are sole proprietors and they go out. They try to come up as much business as they can. So what I did when I was starting out was I used to have a company that I used to work for called RJD, a really good group of people. And that company gave me so much work for a couple of years that I used to almost pray at night that please, I hope I don't have a case for tomorrow and I would open up my office door and sure enough, I would have like back in the day, there was those facts with the thermal papers. Oh, yeah. They would send me the request and then the comprehensive reports and it was all on those thermal papers where sometimes it would send me to and it was up to the roof of my home that I had to go and cut them all where you're supposed to and remove them from the side that it was back in the primitive days. So I worked for that company for about two years solid, more work than I can handle just from them. And all of a sudden, they ended. They didn't have any more work overnight. It almost, yeah, it almost, and it was them. It was, they just lost a lot of clients and all of a sudden, you know, they, a lot of the vendors they use, they had to keep their own in-house people busy and that's where I learned my really big lesson and that was never put all your eggs in one basket. So at that point, my back was up against the wall and I started emailing and something that I found was the easiest way to get work is through other investigators. Oh, I agree. I totally agree. I've done the same thing before and just one good email to the head of the PI, any PI company, they get sometimes swamped like you were and then they need to get to farm this workout and the best thing to do is sending an email. Yeah, that's exactly what I did. I started sending emails. You know, I got maybe a 10 to 20% response. People were actually interested and I started getting a lot of little clients to, you know, to make up for the cash cow that I had earlier and that really did help. It actually something that stopped the bleeding quick. So that would be my first suggestion to the email, the emailer. Another easy way to get work or easier is through personal injury law firms. They're always looking for investigators. I would contact the paralegal and tell them that you do flat rate services for, you know, property damage photos going out to see if there's any surveillance cameras out during accident scenes, witness statements, locates, sometimes your clients move away. Litigation takes a while and sometimes people move, their numbers change. So they have to let their client know, hey, your case is coming up and they want you to try to find them also locating witnesses and things. Something else I do for personal injury attorneys is I do video IMEs, which you just go out. Independent medical executives. Yeah, independence. So you show up over there and you set up a video camera. Yeah, I just set up a tripod. Nothing fancy. Just a regular camera. Not even any mics. These rooms are very small. So you can't have this big equipment. It's just a regular handheld video camera. You put it on a tripod and you videotape the examination. Do you charge hourly for this or flat fee? It's so much. That's what I was going to tell you. So I would offer like a bundle of these types of things for a flat rate and a lot of you be surprised at how many of these personal injury attorneys would reach out to you. Something else they also need is personal injury case signups. So if people are too injured to go to their office, they'll have you go out, meet with them, have them sign the contracts, take whatever photos or pick up accident. The police reports or the driver stage of information, take photos of any injury, property damage to the vehicles and then turn it into your into their office. I would offer all of the types of services at a flat rate. I would probably start out by offering $200. Most of these things are very easy to do and the more you get. I mean, you can have a very busy day if you get several of these personal injury attorneys to hire you either for a located witness statement, video IME, and it can actually really give you some good filler work. I would probably also suggest that you claim a Google business page if you don't have it. Yes, that's very important to get good reviews and to claim your page and work on it. Even if you have to reach out to some of your clients and ask them to write to a review, that brings you up a little bit higher in the searches. Can you talk a little bit more about it? Yeah, even if you don't have a website, it's always good to have a business Google page because that's going to actually put you on the map. I don't know if you ever Google private investigator, say Fort Lauderdale, there's the top section which is the page section, the advertisers and then below that is what the map section is. Those are your Google business pages. You want to be on there because even if you don't have a website, people can call you, people can leave reviews for you and you'll eventually show up when whatever city you're conducting business or the surrounding cities. So I would definitely get that. I would also suggest a lot of people that are starting up probably can't afford a website. You should always have a web presence. I think these days there's ways of building a website just to create a presence that's fairly inexpensive, that you do yourself. You can get some images from the web and just create your own website. I suggest to use a professional because a website is very, very important. It's something that I remember you and I working on our own website years ago and it's a great tool to present your agency and your services to your future clients. I think that's very important. No, for sure. I mean, starting out, you may not need one because, like I said, most of the work you're going to be getting is probably going to be through other private investigative agencies and through some small personal injury attorneys. But if you want to start expanding, I would definitely get a good quality website that's really going to help you. When you're not actually marketing, it's going to be marketing while you're sleeping and you want to attract people. Eventually, it'll get up there. I mean, I would obviously suggest that people put a little bit of money into it through something called SEO, which stands for search engine optimization just so that you can move up in the rankings. Ideally, you want to be in the top three. They call that the three pack. So when they go to a certain city, initially, they'll see three top investigative agencies. So you go to Fort Lauderdale, you'll see a company, B company, and C company. And that's where you really want to be because that's going to be the focus of the attention. Then you can actually hit view more and a whole list of other investigative agencies will pop up. But your goal is, and not right away, but your goal is to eventually be on that top three, at least in some cities. You want to get the right keywords. So you're right. I would try to get a professional save up for that. It's money very well spent. I knew an investigative who went from making about $50,000 a year, just a few years ago, really putting money into his website. He's making now easily over $400,000 a year. And it can be done. And it can be done really quick. But in order to make money, you have to spend a little bit. So what Oscar, what about Google ads? Does your company utilize Google ads? Because it can be quite good to attract a lot of visibility. Google ads is the way to go. You're going to get definitely a return on your investment. I personally haven't really done any Google ads. Most of the work I get through our for our through insurance companies and the cruise lines, as I mentioned before, not insurance companies. I'm sorry, law firms who are the direct council for insurance companies. And also my niches with the maritime insurers, people who get injured on boats, mostly cruise ships. I have spent in the last couple of years money on my website and in getting myself exposure. And that has definitely paid dividends. So I'm happy with where things are. I really don't need to go the route of Google ads. But that's definitely a way to go. If you really want to make money quick, that would invest the money. You're going to get a lot of people that are looking for infidelity cases, child custody cases, not so much attorneys and insurance companies. They're really not looking on the internet to find clients. They're usually looking word of mouth. But for those infidelity and child custody cases, I'm telling you, it's a goldmine. As I explained, a friend of mine went from about 50 to $400,000 a year. Very, very quickly with it, a span of just a few years really took off. It's amazing. Yeah, it really did. So, you know, food for thought. Any other suggestions you can think up to ramp up the business for our listener, Cheryl. By the way, Cheryl reached out to us on an email. She sent us an email at my M P I chronicles@gmail.com. And we received like 17 or 18 of them. So we're going to be answering these questions and try to help people out to get their business. Well, the only thing that I would suggest to add to that is when you do get a new client, really try to achieve the optimal results, even if you have to go out and maybe add a little bit more extra of your time just to really impress them. I read a quote once that said, "The man who does more than he is paid for will soon be paid for more than he does." And I really do believe that's true. Give your clients what they want a little bit more. And if you don't get it the first time around, and if you have the time, just go and give it that extra effort. And that really does pay dividends. I truly agree with you have done it myself. And even being in an area where I had not gotten any results doing a surveillance, and I was doing another case in another area that broke off for the day. And then I just drove back and then I was able to get something, so I reached out to my client at the insurance company and say, "By the way, I was in the neighborhood and I was able to get this fantastic video of the claimant that I don't know if the case was still ongoing." But usually I do it within the same period of time, if I'm in the same era. I mean, you want to give them as much results as you can. And sometimes there are no results to get, but some other times it's just the timing is not there, or the budget has ran out. So whenever you have some of your free time and you're in the area anyways, I suggest go back out there and impress your client. They're going to be very impressive. They'll want to give you more work if they see that you've taken your own time and your own initiative to try to help them establish where their case stands. And that's all done by doing it on your own time. It's only time that you could be doing something else, but if you're in the area, it's very simple. It's a no-brainer for me. I just go ahead and do it and get results. Yeah. And especially, you know, like I said, when it comes to those new clients that you really want to, you know, what they say is that about the first impressions, you can't, you know, you only have one opportunity to make a first impression. So, you know, make that impression. Make it a good impression. Okay. We're going to take a break and next, we'll coming back with our special guest, Glenn Toppig. Talk to you soon. Welcome back to the show. Our special guest today is Glenn Toppig. Hey, Glenn, how are you? And welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Sure. Today, we're going to talk to Glenn a little bit about the assassination attempt on President Trump, July 13, 2024, the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Glenn, you've worked as an executive protection. You've done specialists. You're also working for the SWAT team for Broward County Sheriff's Office, I believe? Yes. Yes. Okay. Can you tell us a little bit about what your thoughts are on the assassination attempt, as well as a little bit about what the SWAT, the training you had with the SWAT and how it's related, as well as you have some good stories about working or superstars of ours back then. It's not Taylor Swift, kids. No, it's not Taylor. But you do have great stories. So, just tell me a little bit what you think about this assassination attempt. Well, first of all, I was watching, I happened to be watching it on TV. And I saw it when he got hit and like my heart fell out of my chest, like, oh, no, somebody just shot him in the head. And that's why he went down. And I really felt like this overwhelming dread took over me, like, oh, shit, what just happened? But then we'll be agents who swooped in, like, I think it was like two seconds, they were on top of the guy, all right? But then what led into later on, when they were getting them off the stage, kind of reminded me back when I was doing that kind of job, that you had to be at least the height of your client. You couldn't be shorter than them, because you want to cover them, right? Sure. And of course, of course. And not let the guy expose himself as much as he wanted to raise his hand and, you know, and I made it, I'm okay. It shouldn't have happened that way. They should have, you know, stayed on top of them the whole way down the steps, get them in the car, and get them out of there. But that didn't happen. Why didn't it happen? To me, it looked like a bunch of keystone cops. Now, I'm talking about the guys that jumped on them on the stage. Those guys were excellent. That's a female. The females and the female service is a female agent, but she looked very comical. I thought it was like a comedy skit. Oh, you're talking about the other one looking to realsure a guy. Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, put it out. Little white pointed at, you know, it was like, I'm yelling at the TV, because I used to do tactics with the, you know, with the service office. And I'm thinking, like, why are they letting this guy be exposed? Why are they taking the time, getting them off the stage? All right, after after shots have been fired and hit him in his ear on top. Yeah, so that and then let him stand up and be higher by standing on the floorboard of the car. I'm just shooting me here. I hear him. I'm big, but life, I mean, now you can shoot me. Got a good target. They get in the car and get them to hell out of there, right? It was worse. That was a soccer rock from start to finish. That's a role number one. When you're you have a protectee and specifically the former president of the United States, the goal is always to grab your protectee and throw them in the car and cover them and get the heck out of there. I remember when Reagan got shot, they did exactly that. They got to go through then. Sure. And seeing the service agent took around as well. Right. And sure. But that was a lot. It seems to me anyways that it was properly done. The Reagan's assassination attempt and the cover up right was and and to cover him. And some people, two people were shot at one paralyzed in the process of doing to accomplish the task when the task was accomplished properly, even though he was shot. And I think former president, I could have easily lost his life because of a lack of communication. Huge lack of communication between the police, the FBI, and the Secret Service not wanting to take out the assailant right off the bat. This is the rule number one. You wait with your counter sniper. You're gonna be looking for any showing high to get an advantage point to this stage. And I was feeling on the building next door that we're watching the roof. They had to to say this is what one a on the north side and the south side. And the fatal shot was taken from the south side further away from big. I don't know what happened to the first two. Perhaps either have a shot. Maybe the several players shot. We're exactly I think this is and there was a noise. There were trees involved exactly. So the sniper was a little bit to their left. But I think the cell team was positioned directly. And when they saw that they're not responding, they took the shot. But anyways, it was a horrible thing. Trudgities when you see somebody go after a president or former president or anybody for that matter that loses their life in front that we're not in the it's sort of military operation. It's a speech and we have the freedom of speech in this country. What I think is that they get these guys that are right out of college and they go and they get through the process and get to the training to the Secret Service Academy. And then once they're out of the academy, they get very little other training once they're out of the academy. So they need to hire somebody like people have like right out of the Delta Force or SEAL Team Six that have combat experience dealing with this on it. They did this for years. So I think it's a matter of training that one of the sheriff's office, the sheriff is very big on training. Every couple of weeks you're on the gun range. Then you were doing traffic stops and you were doing something else. But then a month later, you were doing it again, right? Because that's just what the way you do it. If you keep training, then most of memory kicks in and you have to look around and see where do I go? Where did my gun go? It was really a comedy of errors. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Training is everything. It becomes your memory, immediate reaction, right? You know what to do with your weapon and you don't have to take cover for your client. So you worked for some big entertainers before and you told me a couple of things that some things happen before. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? Tell me the years and everything and how things were Baghdad. Because you know, I unfortunately and probably the same age of zero hours. So we've been there before. We've done our jobs, but I want to hear from you, your background a little bit. I think you were in the military. Yes. Tell us a little bit about your training, your background and what brought you to do executive protection. Right. Well, I was just starting with the military police, the six year station in Germany. During my time there, I got into a little bit of bodyguard work with some dignitaries from the military showed up. We had to escort them around. I didn't really have any bodyguard training, per se, but we were all cops. We knew why we had to watch people and watch their surroundings. When I got out, I did about six years, came back and I worked in this rock and roll club where the head of security had a contract with the venues to do all the close contact security with the entertainers when they came into town. So we got that. What down was this end? Who was in the club was in the city of Hollendale called the warring ballroom. Okay. So that was a famous rock and roll club back in the late 70s and early 80s. We're a lot of them from the stars. That's where I got to know Johnny Depp, because he was a band member with the house band like that. Got you. Oh my god. That's a long time ago. Yeah. Right. Like he didn't want it on two. Yeah. That's the story he told me. Go ahead. So when we got word that had a certain band was coming into town, we would do that to pick them up at the hotel or at the airport and take them to the venue, do a sound checks, take them back to the hotels, stay with them. If it was just a one night show, when they're done, we'd take them back, put them on a bus, get them out of here. But there were a couple of times where it was kind of hectic because one time, one of the female artists, we got word on the radio that was a guy with a gun in the auditorium. And the auditorium is like 15,000 people. So we had to run on the stage, grab her, duck, put her down, and then like, you know, get out, crawl down, out, get back out of the line of sight about a fire. And it turned out nobody ever found a gun. So it was just a little bit of excitement. Then we get it back on stage and we do the show and then it's over and that's the lead. That's the end of that. Great. But she resumed the show, right? Yeah, she resumed the show. Yeah, because there was no threat. Somebody said, there was a gun. Nobody really saw a gun. All right. Then we're with Ben Halen and myself, my party with David Lee Roth, the lead singer for two nights, actually one night, two days. That's great. And he was a wild one. He was. Well, tell us about it. Tell us about it. That's what we want to hear, the dirt that they don't carry anymore. These guys, you know, back down, it was sex drugs and rock and roll. Oh, sure. Late '70s, early '80s, right? A lot of cocaine being spread around. Groupies were coming out of the woodwork, all over the place. Well, when these guys, none of these guys left with a full stomach, okay? Oh, no. There was a lot of DNA mouthwash going around. PJ show, PJ show. Right. It's interesting. I mean, sometimes these guys would, they want to go in the crowd and we go, no, no, no. You can't do that. We're not set up for that. We didn't plan on that. We had a meeting. I think it was either Journey or AC/DC where the lead guitar player decides he wants to jump off the stage and run through the crowd into the back into the auditorium and play his remote control guitar. So we were ready for it. Oh, said he jumps off stage. I got, "Holy shit, what's he doing?" Quick. Get some guys over here quick. So we just hop and get held in like an huddle like that. And he was playing his guitar and he ran through the whole sport auditorium and then back up to the stage and one of his roadies up to back up on stage, all right? So after it was over, we got with his manager and we go, "What the fuck was some probose down all about? We didn't plan on that." You know, if you did, we would have been ready for it, but we had to scramble people and they would try to grab at them, try to grab his guitar, grab on them. We only carried big flashlights back then. Yeah, no weapons. Why can't people get away? It was crazy. Sure. It was fun, but it was crazy. Yeah. It was a different time that people don't understand these days. You know, they go to concerts. People are serving wine glasses. It's extremely well put together, you know? No, no, no. It was like that. A lot of pot smoke in the air and a lot of fights. Oh, yeah. And that's part of your job. You have to make sure that your client is safe and secured and these things, everything goes bad when you have a mix of drugs, sex and rock and roll and silence and drinking. I had that in the rock and roll club I worked in. We had thrown out a couple of girls and the boyfriends weren't happy and they came back later. I did a drive-by shooting, killing one of the vouchers that was outside, shot my windows out of my car when I was sitting in it and that was it. Where was this? It was a holiday, the "you're horrible" room, yeah. That's what one of my books is based on. Yeah, tell me a little bit about your books. You were a well-published author. I believe you have 13 novels that are out there. Can you tell us a little bit what you wrote about and for what? Well, my first one was I called it from the "agora bowl" room. I couldn't use the name of the club so I came with myself and his scriptwriter came up with a name called the "ert-h-u-r-t" of the name of the club. So it entails the shooting, how it went down, how they guys got caught and the aftermath after all the trials and then the prison time that they got. So it was a weird thing. One of the guys, they both got 25 years in prison for the first degree murder. The one guy got raped in prison and contracted AIDS so the family pleaded with the governor to pardon him so he can go home and die, which he gets. And then a short time later, the other guy escapes in a laundry truck and is on the run for over 10 years before the U.S. marshals finally find him and bring him back to jail. No. Life sucks when you don't play by the rules. Yeah. And then the book covers all the crazies back in the rock world club. The fights, the overdosing, the romance, the, oh, that stuff. So it's a little fiction and a little reality. Right. If even if even Google this, the issue, you'll see it online. You'll see the story. And first of all, tell me a little bit more about your other books and then tell me where people can find. Okay. One reason when I brought up was about the time I was a hostage negotiator on SWAT, the book called "The Callout," where it tells all the stories I was involved with over the years with these dealing with guys that were hostage takers or suicide attempts or suicide by cop issues. And then another one had to deal with the decaying of America had to deal with how the country is going down on a down slide over the last four or five years and that what it's going to look like in the future. And I shifted over to a children's book to get away from all the crazy books about a talking alligator. Cool. Yeah. The good part about being an author is you get to be very creative and what he can judge you. Oh, right. You write what you want. And if it's a children's book, even better. Yeah. So Glenn, where can people find your novels? They're on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Kindle. Okay, great. You know what? Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you at the last minute and you'll be welcome to come back anytime you want. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Have a good day. You too. Thank you for listening to the MyMePI Chronicles podcast. For all of your investigative needs in Florida, please contact making an investigative group at 954-5137-414. That's 954-5137-414 or visit us at www.miginvestigations.com. Thanks again for listening and please remember to share, follow, and like.
