32 - Joshua Hutchinson | Mighty Process Server

Full Transcript
0:01Intro:You're listening to Process Server Daily, the show where hustle meets strategy in the high stakes world of process serving. From elite pros to the new servers taking massive action, these are the voices of a rising industry. Hosted by the founder of 1, 2, 3, legal support, Mighty Mike Reed. This is your backstage path to building a profitable process serving empire. Lets get into it. Welcome back to another episode of Process Server Daily. This is episode number 32, and I'm really excited to have a very special guest, Mr. Joshua Hutchinson. He's a process server and happens to be the president of Hutch Serves LLC located out of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and he's the secretary of the Tennessee association over there. Welcome to the show.

0:59Joshua Hutchinson:Hey, thanks for having me. How are you?

1:01Mighty Mike:Of course. Yeah. Hey, listen, you know, you, I love seeing all your posts inside the community and, and, or engagement inside the community and what you're doing there with Hutch Serves. It's really cool to see a real professional and excited to kind of dig into your business and what you're doing and what even got you started here. So again, welcome.

1:20Joshua Hutchinson:Glad to be here.

1:22Mighty Mike:So tell us, tell us what, what did, how is Hutch Serves born, like what, what made you decide to become a process server?

1:30Joshua Hutchinson:Oh, man, that is, that is a long story.

1:36Mighty Mike:Two minutes. You got two minutes.

1:38Joshua Hutchinson:Okay. I'm a senior in high school. We decided to have a foreign exchange student stay at our house. His guardian over here in the States is a family law lawyer. He is an Asian, just like think of like you must get straight A's, kind of Asian parent. Like he's that but like personified in a family law lawyer. You know, very business oriented mind and, but really nice guy though. And this is back in California in the Bay Area. And he said, hey, do you want to drive up to Sacramento? I'll pay 150 bucks to just to file this thing. And I guess some things have to be filed in the capitol.

2:24Mighty Mike:Yeah.

2:24Joshua Hutchinson:You know, and after doing it for him a few times, I was like, hey, what is this? You know, and he told me a little bit about it and you know, a few years go by, I'm, I'm with my girlfriend and now wife and all my disability money dried up because I have Crohn's disease. I've had over like 20 surgeries. And she said, you need to find a job that works for you despite your health because we don't know if your health's ever going to be, you know, like 100 or anything. So I was like, well, serving Papers. Like, I just go to people's houses. I can find a bathroom. I need to stop at the side of the road. It's. It's not a job where I'm gonna be fired or put on leave or, you know, it's. It's self employed. And I just called a couple local companies and that was it and just started. And as far as Hutch Serves, the name goes, In 2020, when California passed the AB5 bill, which I'm sure a lot of people know about in this industry, I was like, well, I have to create a company because I work for, like five local companies and I can't be an employee of all of them. So I was like, well, my last name is Hutchinson. And like, in high school, I went by Hutch. Same thing with my dad. I was like, hutch Serves has a nice ring to it. Let's do it. You know, didn't. Didn't really think too, too long and hard about it.

3:51Mighty Mike:So what got you? So you were in California doing that, and what brought you out to Tennessee

3:58Joshua Hutchinson:two days before the lockdown started? We put our house in the market. So we had already planned to move and everything. It's just more of expenses and everything. We were looking at places to move out of California because we saw the writing on the wall of just how things were getting expensive. And my family, my parents also wanted to move about 2019 or late 20, 2018. And we're like, why don't you guys wait maybe like another year and we'll be ready to move and let's pick a place together, so.

4:32Mighty Mike:Oh, that's so cool. So your service. So you have a very interesting perspective. You can look at California, which is where I started serving, where you have, like, the judicial council forms and it's all dialed in a certain way. And every, every document type has a different proof type that you can literally look up, you know, summons, proof of service of. Summons, proof of service of small claims court, you know, proof of service of family law.

4:57Joshua Hutchinson:Right.

4:57Mighty Mike:Like, you can start rattling them off, you know, SC104, you know, all this. Take all of that and your experience with that and going to Tennessee. How has that transition been process serving wise?

5:10Joshua Hutchinson:About a month ago, we had to domesticate a subpoena in Marshall county, which is three or four counties below Nashville. 85% of Tennessee is rural, just in terms of, you know, not many people living in the county, and they probably have who knows how many cities with only a few hundred people in it. And I told my server, hey, you Know, go domesticate this, blah, blah, blah. And the clerk of the court, like, the. The county clerk said, oh, no, this has to go to Secretary of State. I'm like, doesn't. It's going to an individual, not a company. Now, the defendant was a company, so it was listed as a company, but the person being served, you know, was that. So there was just a lot of back and forth. And obviously, you know, they don't have a form on their website. So I had to go to Knox county, which is Knoxville, website strip their form, go to, you know, Adobe, whatever, or just put it into Google Docs and had to redo it, had to call them, be like, look, you just need to stamp, file, receive this, because that's the only way that this is going to work. And there's Prob. Probably there's 95 counties in the state. I'd say probably like more than 80 of them. Don't even know what a domesticated subpoena is. Yeah.

6:33Mighty Mike:Are you doing that as a service now? Is that something you do regularly?

6:37Joshua Hutchinson:I just charge a little extra just for the domestication itself, the filing fee, and for the serve to go there.

6:43Mighty Mike:It's.

6:44Joshua Hutchinson:I mean, we. I don't really offer it per se in terms of market it, but, like, you know, if someone asks, you know, we just take care of it.

6:51Mighty Mike:Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. For those of you guys who don't know, like, domesticating a subpoena, generally when you're asking somebody to come and testify in court or to a deposition, that's when you use a subpoena. And if they're out of the state, that court has no jurisdiction over them for subpoenas, which is interesting because a summons does. Like, a summons, you may not be in trouble in your local state, but if you lose a case, there's still a judgment against you. If you're the person being served, the difference is the summons. I'm the one being sued, let's say, in this case, on the defendant, I'm being sued, whereas the subpoena is like, I'm just a bystander that you want to testify on a case that has nothing to do with me other than me. Maybe I saw a license plate or something. So that's so cool. So tell. Tell me a little bit about your business there. Like, I really want to highlight and understand. Hutch serves there in Tennessee. You said there's only a few people in every city, every little town in Tennessee. It's very rural. So I have a bunch of things come from that with safety and how you serve. But first of all, like, what sets you apart from other companies there in Tennessee?

8:03Joshua Hutchinson:Well, I offer flat rates, but I have three different tiers of flat rates because there are obviously the metro count, the metro counties, which is Nashville, Chattanooga, Knox and Memphis. So those are just, you know, a flat rate for, for those, those are my lowest tier. And then there's, I just have called like other Tennessee counties and then I have remote counties and you know, those are also flat rate, but they're tiers. So the reason why that is though is because, I mean even like every process serving company around here has that because some states, you, you know, it's like, hey, 75, 85 for the entire state, flat rate. And you know, that works for them. But here in Tennessee, we have valleys, we have rivers, we have lakes, we have mountains, we have forests. Like everything you can imaginable we have. And one county versus the other is, is very different. Like for instance, we had this winter, we had ice, you know, we had ice storms. And there's this one county, I think it's Clay, it's northeastern, not like the super northeastern, but it's on the Kentucky border. And they went on Christmas break and they didn't get back to school until February because the roads were that bad. The school buses couldn't get out there because we had a, we, they had on break and then we had a snowstorm probably near the end of the break and then we had another snowstorm near the end of January. So it was like 45 days straight that the kids in those county didn't have to go to school. And that's really the difference. It, it's a lot of terrain difference. It's, it's, it's based on county and it, it also depends on server too, because there are some servers, they're like, they just want to do their county or they just want to go to maybe one county over now. Some, they'll, they'll go two, three counties over, they'll go two hours away. And it really depends if that server is just their own company and it's just them or if they, you know, work with a few people. So.

10:28Mighty Mike:Wow. So you're, you got the different rates and you got the different experience with all the different areas. How are you staying? I mean, what's your certification license in Tennessee? How does that work? Nothing.

10:44Joshua Hutchinson:18 and breathing. You can be a child molester and oh, no documents, no joke.

10:51Mighty Mike:So what do you, is Tennessee doing? So because you're the secretary, right? So you Have a little bit of.

10:55Joshua Hutchinson:So that is something that we brought up in the meeting. We're like, let's get a training program together. Let's, let's, you know, let's come up with some stuff that we can bring either to some legislation or to the AOC to be like, hey, let's get this stuff recognized. And let's maybe, you know, because we don't want over regulation like California or like Georgia or like North Carolina, where I know North Carolina, the documents have to go to a sheriff first. Now there are some companies that can bypass that, but they have to have really good standing with the court for that first. But we don't want that. So we're hoping to try to go in unique route in terms of getting taps plugged in with the AOC or with the legislator in terms of we can maybe set and be a give take two way street and we're going to try to go that route. You know, it's probably going to take probably at minimum two years. But you know, we have to put all the training modules, the curriculum, you know, the safety and all that stuff together before we can do anything. But that's something that we've been looking at. And I mean our this year's meeting, we didn't have speakers. It was just, all right, let's see how we can change the landscape. And it was just a lot of discussion.

12:16Mighty Mike:Yeah, you know, some of the biggest conferences out there, you know, these association conferences, it's just a fun, you know, social, it feels like a fun social networking type of event and it is very engaging and fun. But some of the best times I've had are going to those conferences. But I'll tell you, if it wasn't for state associations then there wouldn't be process serving in certain states. Like California is very litigious and they have collection big, big collection firms that are constantly trying to submit mailing bills that, that would essentially kill the process serving industry. So I know NAPS is looking out for every state. They're trying to anyway to look out for every state and will go to bat for people like in Tennessee for example. But they want local states to get chartered with them so that you can have boots on the ground and people to be experts in that state and in those laws and to be able to teach it. So it's cool that you're doing it. And you're a young guy too. You're like ready to go build your business at the time. Same, same time you're you know, giving to Your association of your time, which is all they can ask for, really. And it's so cool. Yeah. Hey, quick break from the episode to tell you about something that's changing the game for process servers across the country. It's called Mighty Process Servers. And yeah, you can join absolutely free inside. You'll get full access to every clip, every download, and the educational tools that we use to help process servers build profitable companies. We meet every Tuesday at 1pm Eastern for our live Mighty Mastermind call. Come join the conversation. You can connect with other professionals, post on the discussion board, direct message members, and become part of one of the most engaged communities for process servers. Don't wait. Go to mighty processserver.com and join today. Those who get verified, get listed and start bidding on jobs same day. Now let's get back to the show. So I really want people to know out there that like, there's a difference between 18 and breathing person and someone like yourself that actually treats this like a business. So how are you, how are you taking things to the next level? It's just like the next two years. What are you looking forward for? Hutch serves.

14:49Joshua Hutchinson:Oh, man. Hopefully get an office somewhere and get out of my home office so I can be more productive and have an address that I can, you know, use for many different levels. Hopefully hire someone because right now, like, it, it has just been me. Like I don't know how I've been doing it.

15:09Mighty Mike:Yeah.

15:11Joshua Hutchinson:But I've somehow been doing it, but it's just been me. So hopefully to hire someone. Yeah, hopefully get an office. I would say I'm also looking to expand into other states and my business. I have a unique business model when it comes to out of state work. I'm mostly just trying to find other companies who do cover their entire state for a flat rate. And I'll tell my clients, hey, I can cover like these other states. They're going to be more expensive than, you know, my Tennessee rates. But, you know, if you don't have the time, you know, to go out and find someone and build a relationship, know that I have you covered. You know, I did, I did that leg work, you know, so well, attorneys generally like it.

15:58Mighty Mike:In my experience, they prefer that if they already trust you and you're already doing a great job for them, they trust you to reach out and find other professionals like yourself, you know, because you know, when somebody's telling you no answer and they don't give you any details, you know, they never attempted it. Right. Like you, you kind of pick up on those little signs with process servers where you can kind of call them to the carpet and stuff. But you, you, you know, it's cool that we have a professional like you in our community on the directory. Mighty process server.com. if you guys are listening to this and you, you're like, hey, I, you know, I like what he's got going on there in Tennessee. I'd encourage you to reach out to, to him at Hutch Serves. How can everybody reach out to you? What, what info do you want to share?

16:47Joshua Hutchinson:Yeah, it's just hutchservice.org super simple, super easy. Email is hutch serves1419gmail.com. That one, four one nine is my California. My was my California number ID, you know, and I'm probably gonna get a new email at some point, but, you know, I'm just leaving it there for now. And, yeah, do that. I mean, hutchservs.org is probably the best way. You know, you'll find my everything there. I'd say. Another unique business model that I'm starting to do in practice is when I talk to my local servers or just other companies in general or, you know, companies out of state, I tell them, like, hey, like, I have these, like, right Now I have 15 states covered. I don't get a lot of work for those states, but that's fine. I still got them covered. I tell them, hey, tell your clients you have these states covered. Like, these are my rates. So now you know that, you know, you know what you need to charge to make some money. Just tell them, like, hey, you got this cover now, you know? You know, and it's, it's actually been working slowly. I think I just have to keep at it, and it'll start to grow, and I'm starting to help my, my servers in general that don't have their own company. I'm telling them, hey, like, I know I'm never going to reach your local law firms. Like, I don't have the time to reach, you know, your local law firms. You know, they're going to want you because you're the person that goes in there that drops off the affidavit personally. You know, they know you because it's a small town. You know, I mean, like, all of them are small towns. So I tell them, like, hey, just create a company. Like, create a dba, llc, whatever you want to do. And, you know, just tell them you have the entire state covered and I

18:38Mighty Mike:got you network with others. Yeah, yeah.

18:40Joshua Hutchinson:I, I tell them like, hey, you know, you're in Memphis or you're in, you know, for instance, one of these counties, it's called Decatur. You know, it's bu. Funk. Nowhere Boonies, you know, but there's probably a law firm somewhere, and, you know, that lawyer needs someone served, you know, somewhere else, just, just like anywhere else. And I tell them, create a company, you know, create a rate sheet, or I'll even help you with that. You know, so we both make money and, you know, we can charge the same rates locally for each other. You know, we can upcharge a little bit for, you know, know, stuff out of, out of our areas. And let's just work together. I mean, I, I, I'm finding that that, that helps a lot. I'm just starting to do that, so.

19:26Mighty Mike:Well, it's good. Whenever you help other people and you, you know, you give and you, you keep doing what you're doing as a professional, but you try to give back. That's what I'm, that's why I created Mighty Process Server in the first place, was to create a community and a place for free for people who are new. That I call them the free people, you know, because when you're new, you don't, you don't know what you can trust. And so once you get in there and you learn, oh, this is, this is the business. This is how I do it. I do my market research. I do the, be the backup script. I comment and network with people like, you know, all over the country. And if you come to the Mastermind meetings, you find out really fast that there's a lot of people who are very engaged who are also very willing to help you. And I appreciate you coming on the show. And guys, reach out, okay? Reach out. He gave you all the information you need, and, man, I just appreciate you coming on the show.

20:17Joshua Hutchinson:Yeah. And if I can plug you and your website community for a little bit, I mean, I know I just, I don't have a lot of time to, like, look at a lot of your stuff, but I remember when you were maybe about a year ago, when you were first starting to build this thing, you know, you talked about, be the backup, go into the local law firm and show your face, drop a rate sheet. You know, maybe you don't swing by every week, but swing by once a month, you know, and one of my good law firm clients, like, I gained just from doing that, like, exactly. And they just gave me a job in Cincinnati, Ohio, you know, which they could have mailed, like, certified mail, 10 bucks, but you Know they gave it to me. So it does work and you know the community is great. And I truly think that this form of community for process service, either state association, either online through you know, various like discord or this or whatever it is, is probably the future of servers sticking together to fight against the big box companies.

21:24Mighty Mike:Yeah, yeah. I don't talk about that a whole lot but because I know that when people first start I don't want them to think that they're evil. Like you know these guys have contracts,

21:32Joshua Hutchinson:they have not evil, they just don't want to pay your worth.

21:36Mighty Mike:Yeah, exactly. Or, or do you have much worth when start. That might be another way to look at it too.

21:42Joshua Hutchinson:And you know what? I, I started with ABC when I moved out here first and with Provest because they had all the work. I found out very quickly it is cutthroat out here and it, people will steal your clients like it, they'll, they'll undercut you, they'll, they'll do anything. It's just how it is out here. And I remember in California, that's not how it was. Like I, I lived in the East Bay and East Bay companies knew the West Bay companies, vice versa, South Bay knew the North Bay companies and literally like hey, my server's out in the West Bay. Like can we just give it to you? You know, like that would literally happen all the time. I remember hearing people on the phone while I was in the office signing affidavits or whatever. Like people were making that calls.

22:30Mighty Mike:So yeah, it's professional courtesy. Yeah, that, that, yeah. But when you get off in the sticks, you know, you just never know. Like I'm, I'm in New Mexico here and it's like there's nobody in the, the people who are, you know, not as professional but you know, it's good, it's good. It gives an opportunity for you, if you can be professional, to dominate that local market. And I pre, I appreciate all the tips, appreciate the feedback and just keep, keep bringing it man. Don't give up and you'll get your office soon. And I'm looking forward to seeing how Hutch serves dominates Tennessee. Keep it up, man.

23:05Joshua Hutchinson:Thanks Mighty Mike. Have a good one.

23:07Mighty Mike:All right brother. Take care. Live Mighty.

23:10Outro:That's a wrap on another episode of Process Server Daily where the legal support industry levels up. Want to grow your process serving business with the best marketing tools, the most engaged community and the highest ranking directory online? Visit mighty processserver.com claim your listing. Join our free community. Surround yourself with Process servers who get it and build something real. From the field to the courtroom. This is Process Server Daily. Until next time. Stay safe out there and live mighty.

32 - Joshua Hutchinson | Mighty Process Server

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