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Jim Hacking

Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux

And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up Jimmy?

Jim Hacking

This is our first ever episode dedicated to a particular holiday with Halloween right around the corner. We thought we would come up with the list of the 10 Scary things that we’ve seen lawyers do since we started the maximum lawyer podcast.

Tyson Mutrux

Yeah, in do and things about lawyers and all that. So it’s an i we made sure we had a rule and now that none of these can be scary. Good. All right. So they’re they’re scary bad. It was my rule. I don’t know if he agreed with it. But that was my rule. I didn’t want to come up with anything that was like scary. Good. Like, because to me, that’s just too, too hokey.

Jim Hacking

Well, this is fun, because it’s just you and me. We’re on blue jeans. You’re drinking your coffee. You’re Hey, what I meant to ask you what are your kids going to be for Halloween?

Tyson Mutrux

So Jackson is going to be Shar zard from pokey mon Hudson’s gonna be Georgie. from it. Yeah.

Jim Hacking

It’s his arm will get ripped

Tyson Mutrux

off. Yeah, why that’s let’s hope let’s hope and then Emma is going to be Jasmine from Aladdin. It’s gonna be there. We’ve you know,

Jim Hacking

when my kids were little, I was reading it. And we would go to the Bread Company in Webster Grove and we would always parked by the sewer. And I would say, Hey, you guys look down there. That’s where penny wise lives down in that sewer. And they would get freaked out

Tyson Mutrux

in our neighborhood that anytime they see a frickin sewer, they’ll go oh, it’s penny wise. And so yeah, it’s it’s a thing in the family. Sorry, do your kids still dress up?

Jim Hacking

Just Nora? Nora, Nora is going to be a cop and her best friend Emily’s gonna be a robber. So they’re going around.

Tyson Mutrux

Nice. Are you going to dress up?

Jim Hacking

I might put my Superman costume back on I did last year. I don’t know what I’ll do.

Tyson Mutrux

Nice. I can’t see what I’m going to be because Amy put out a Facebook post. And she was asking people what they thought it was going to be. And so some people wanted me to dress up as you which I thought it’d be kind of funny.

Jim Hacking

Yeah. But you said you didn’t want to scare your kids. That’s right. i Let’s get to it. So the number one, or the first thing that we see lawyers doing that, or scary or lawyers doing too many things that they themselves don’t need to be doing. Now. It’s interesting in compiling this list, these are all things that I myself have struggled with as well. So it’s not like I’m saying I’m the only person who are that I’m the perfect lawyer who doesn’t do any of these things. But

Tyson Mutrux

this one you do. This is the one you do the worst, this is your worst one. Absolutely. This is your this is you right here. Number one is you

Jim Hacking

I am getting better at it. And I certainly recognize it and other people faster than I recognize it in myself as so is often the case with most things. But putting me to the side, we have seen plenty of attorneys you and I who just have this unwillingness to let go of things that they 100% don’t need to be doing and and you know, we’ve talked about it before on the show, I know that there’s a part of it, that’s only I can do it this well. But if there’s ever something that’s going to retard growth, it’s that you’re doing way too many things that you don’t need to be doing. And you’re keeping yourself from spending time on the things that only you can do. And if you’re doing all the piddly stuff, then you’re just leaving so many opportunities on the table and you’re just setting yourself up to stay small.

Tyson Mutrux

Yeah, it’s interesting, because I think they they think are and we think not just they we all think that the opposite is true that we need to be doing more, and they’re in reality, we need to be doing less. I mean, don’t you think those don’t think that’s what the mindset is, I’ll get to do more, I gotta work more hours, I’ve got to do this. I mean, you gotta gotta do that. And the reality is, you need to start taking all that stuff off your plate, so you can be doing the things that are the only he can do.

Jim Hacking

I think part of it is that people just feel safer doing the things that they’ve always done that the risk of thinking about growth or about learning new skills, it’s safer to just go do something that I’ve done for three years, then to sort of be growth mindset and have an open mind as to learning new things and filling the space of if I’m not doing all these tedious things, and I’m going to have to think big thoughts and figure out bigger things to do. And that’s sort of intimidating.

Tyson Mutrux

Yeah, I’d agree with that. I agree with that. Alright, so let’s go to number two. And I was, I was a little hesitant to post this one, honestly. But I was actually shocked by how little solo and small firms make. I don’t know about you, but they make far less than I thought, I really thought that the majority of solo and small firms were doing really well. And I don’t think that that’s true. I think that and I don’t know why that is and and with us over the last few months talking to lawyers and talking about their pain points, and it’s becoming more and more evident that that’s true. And so, I don’t know, I was a little disappointed by that. What are your thoughts on on that part of it?

Jim Hacking

Well, I don’t even think it’s so much as a as being disappointed, I think it’s actually scary. I mean, I think that a lot of people are struggling financially. You know, whenever I talk to Maddie and Martin, who’s out on the road talking, talking with lawyers all across the country, that there are real people struggling, and certainly people came up to me at the conference and talk to me about how just on a financial level, they’re struggling. So I view that as one of our motivating purposes you and I is to help people make more money so that they can, you know, live a good life and be happy and healthy and take care of themselves. Because, you know, I’ve certainly been in those situations where I’m doing the shaking of the couch cushions looking for a change that I can make payroll back in the old days, we certainly had that problem where I was, you know, looking for money to make payroll. And that’s, that’s a very stressful, scary thing. So you know, all the things that we do all the talking that we do about marketing, and improving systems, all of that is designed to try to help people make more money so that they can get away from the scary aspect of practicing law and get into bigger and better things.

Tyson Mutrux

And I do, and I don’t want to terrify too much people too much. But I do think that there’s there are small things that people can do that will help them increase the revenues, so they can make more money. So I don’t think it’s, it’s one of the things where we see these low numbers, but in most cases, if not all cases, they’re fixable. I mean, it’s something that can be fixed with a with a couple of tweaks, and then over time, you’re going to start making making good money. And so I think that there is hope out there. So people need to know, there is hope out there, you can, you can do well, just making those small tweaks.

Jim Hacking

Alright, so the next one is the next scary factor on our list, which comes from a conversation. Several conversations that I’ve had with Kent, about making videos is that the number of lawyers who have approached us or approached me or approached Kent about wanting to do YouTube videos, is a very high number. But the number ones who actually follow through on doing it is a whole different ballgame. And I think that’s, that’s this isn’t just limited to YouTube is that a lot of us spend a lot of time saying I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. But when it comes down to it, we don’t really do the things that we know we need to do to grow our firm and to spread our message and that that consistency is really lacking in the follow through is really lacking. I think within our group, we have a lot of people who are get excited about new things. And they put to the side sort of the bread and butter, the regular things that they should just do on a on a consistent basis. That would really put them over the top.

Tyson Mutrux

I don’t even realize like once you start doing videos, it’s it’s easy. I mean, it’s it is really easy. Once you when you agree. Like once you’ve got the system for it built up. It’s super easy to do. You go in front of a camera, you shoot a video, no matter where you are, and it gets edited and put and put out there. It’s that initial fear of actually shooting the first couple of videos. That’s the hardest part. But once you realize it’s no one gives a damn what you look like in your video. No one gives a damn really what you say as long as you get you have a good message. They don’t care how you say it, right? You can stumble over your words 30 times during the video. But if you’ve got a message, and they’re learning something, they don’t care, I think once you get past that it’s it’s easy to do. I mean, what am I being fair there?

Jim Hacking

You have to make it easy. You have to set yourself up for success. You can’t make it too hard. But a phone and a little tripod or a selfie stick is all that you need. And you’re absolutely right when you talk about how lawyers obsess about their image and how things work. I got an email the other day that I posted in the Facebook group by a guy who said he really liked the one the ones where I was growing out my beard because it made me look like a regular person. And I think that’s just such an important message is that your true voice your true hearts and come through if you do video consistently and nobody gives a crap about what you look like if you’re if you’re given good information.

Tyson Mutrux

And Little does he know that you’re actually a robot, so it’s funny what he said because you are a robot and you How did you get that? How’d you get that beard to come in? Was it was it something that they had implanted or how that work?

Jim Hacking

I’m not like you Little Lord Fauntleroy taken three months to grow a little bit of cheek stubble. I grew up here in about three weeks.

Tyson Mutrux

Sure, whatever. I almost did. Alright, so the next one is in these these this one ties in with a lot of what we’re talking about. Number four is lack of systems and I we beat people over the head with this, but it is crucial i i think lack of systems may be number one. And we didn’t put these in any particular order, but this may be the most important thing. I think just to put a very simple without systems there is no growth. There will be no growth without systems. Okay, you may get to a couple of people in your firm and do well. But without those systems, you’re, you’re you’re not going to grow at all, and actually documenting everything from from start to finish and everything you do. So you could hand this off to someone else, and they can do the exact same thing you do. That’s crucial. And it’s so important. So from like, we’re filming the videos, I mean, with systems, you get things done with the videos, with with systems, you get your videos done with our systems, you don’t because it’s sporadic. And systems includes, you know, putting things on your calendar to do them regularly, all that building and all these systems to make sure you do things, right. We have systems for the podcast, right? I mean, that’s how we get the podcasts that every single week that we you and I shoot on there on our calendar every week, they get edited by cat and put out I mean, it’s there’s a system, there’s a there’s an assembly line to it. And so that we need to look at the look at our firms the exact same way. You’re right,

Jim Hacking

you’ll recall, we had our friend David freeze on the show. And when we talked about, we talked with David about systems, you know, I talked and I recounted the exchange I had with Dave, back in the day when he said, You know, Jim, when you start to grow, you’re really gonna need systems, because that’s when you’re going to feel the strain of the system. When you when you have growth, you’re gonna feel your system strength, because everybody has systems. Well, however you whatever process you have, it might not be written down systems, and it might not be autumn automized, or automated, or optimized or automated systems, but everyone has systems. So what you’re talking about is documenting your systems and making them consistent across the board. One of the things, we were talking about how we have three paralegals in the office, and we figured out that each of the paralegals does their job a little bit differently. And we’re like, that’s strange, you know, they’ve sort of built out, they’ve done things better. And so now we’re trying to make that consistent across the whole firm. So systems are important. It’s so funny that you came back to that, because that’s what you always come back to. And, and that’s your consistent message. And I appreciate that. And, you know, it’s always that thing of spending more time to get your systems, right, so that you can speed up later on, we’ve systematized our lawsuits, and we’ve gotten it down to a much faster process than it used to be. And that the two great things about systems are speed and accuracy that if you if your system is really built out correctly, you shouldn’t be making mistakes.

Tyson Mutrux

And you can track things. I mean, it’s with systems, you can track things. So while you were doing that, I was actually pulling up our settlement dashboard. I, I had a pretty good idea, you know, few years ago, what my, what my average settlement amount was, what my average fee amount was, but it wasn’t really accurate. Now we track that stuff really, really well. And I can tell you to the scent, what our average fee is on every single case, how long our cases take. And what we can do with that information is we can because it’s in systems is we can actually improve what we’re doing. And we’ve we’ve increased Jimmy, this is insanity, we have increased our average fee, by I’m looking at the number now and this is in the last 20 months by about 85% which is mind blowing. And insane. And so we’re able to because we’re able to track all this stuff. And so we’re only able to try next we have the systems built out and so it’s super, it’s super crucial. You got to do it if you want to if you want any growth and even if you don’t want growth, let’s say you’re you’re someone that just wants to have you and a paralegal and that’s it, that’s fine. But you can better you can do better for your clients if you have all the stuff systemized and so you can track everything. Because if you do PII, you get higher settlements. If you do wills and estates you can do but better wills estates. I don’t actually know how all that works. But you can definitely with systems improve your life and your clients lives.

Jim Hacking

I wouldn’t want you to in my will in a state that

Tyson Mutrux

no one nobody does. Nobody wants me to do their will No, not at all.

Jim Hacking

Alright, so this next one of mine, the scary thing that lawyers do. Number five, comes from the Clio 2019. Legal Trends Report. Have you looked at this at all? Because we should probably do a whole episode on this.

Tyson Mutrux

So someone had posted it. It may have been you. I don’t know, someone posted the stats on the Facebook group. And I looked at them. I didn’t read through that big report, because usually they put out a big report. Right?

Jim Hacking

That’s right, they put out a big report. And that’s what I want to talk about is the part of the report that deals with lawyers responding to call so Clio knows that lawyers complain all the time about not having enough leads. And so they wanted to put that to the test. Because, you know, 85% of the lawyers that they surveyed said that they could use more cases and of course, that’s what we hear about all the time. My buddy Dean Jackson calls it more matters when you need him. You need a more matter machine and As they went ahead, they took it upon themselves to email 1000 law firms. And of those 1000 law firms, they also called 500 people, 500 firms. So basically, they did some market research to see how law firms were doing at responding to calls. And what they what they found was that 60% of law firms never responded to the emails. 60% never responded to the emails, only 20% of the firms provided clear next steps. And here’s the kicker of all 57% of law firms never called the person back.

Tyson Mutrux

So were they were they pretending to be a lead? Is that what it was they were

Jim Hacking

pretending to be a lead? That’s right. They filled out like an online form, or they emailed the firm or the end, they call it, they emailed all the firms, and they called half the firms to get the stats on what happened. And, and I think anecdotally, this is true. I mean, until I got lead docket until I really focused and drill down on, you know, making sure that every lead is treated as a very valuable thing until proven otherwise, until I recognized and honored the energy that it took for someone to call or email us. And until I poured resources into accurately and adequately following up with those leads, until you put that value into it, you’re not going to get the return. On the back end, we have somebody now who spends 30 hours a week responding to leads, that’s all she does. And you’ve really got and then we’ve experienced, humbled. It’s not even it’s not even a humble brag. It needed to happen. Because that was one of those things from number one that I was doing too many things that I don’t need to be doing, I don’t need to be doing that, that bridge from from raising their hand until they actually come in for a consult her marching orders are get people who call for leads scheduled for a consult. That’s it and they want to do a consultation, she’s calling them to convince them, it’s just the logistics of doing it. So I think lawyers need to do do a much better job. According to the Clio report. And anecdotally, based on conversations we have of just following up on the leads that they have, we spend all this money to optimize our SEO to make ads Facebook ads to to, you know, go out in network, you spend all this time and money. But then when the lead comes in, you drop the ball, it’s like preparing for a case for eight months, and then taking the two weeks off before trial, and putting your feet up on the desk and not doing anything.

Tyson Mutrux

No, that’s a good analogy. I like that. And then. So I’ve done something similar to what you’ve done now where like, I don’t usually talk to the person until we they’ve gone through all of our criteria and answered all of our questions. And we know it’s a case. And it’s easy. I mean, we all that’s done well, before I even get involved. And I’m sure some people who are a little probably a little apprehensive about that. Anything you can say to make people feel better about that part of the process? Because some people might think, well, you know, I’ve got to I’ve got to talk to every single person because that someone at the front end might might miss something. Any thoughts on that?

Jim Hacking

Yeah, my thought on that is you have to give that up, you have to be willing to trade the one or two missed leads, for better overall responsiveness. So I mean, one, you don’t want to let good leads fall through the cracks. So I understand that as a fear. But you’re not if you want to really, really grow. I mean, you know, no one named Brian or cave is answering the phone or Brian cave, you know, I mean, big, big firms aren’t big, because the owners have that small mindset, you’ve got to let that go. And then what you got to do is you have to figure out what tools are out there that can replicate or even do it better than I do it when I’m the one building all the calls or fielding all the emails. That’s just a failure of systems. And that’s those are lies that you say to tell yourself to keep doing things the way you want to do it.

Tyson Mutrux

So that’s a great segue into my next one. So let’s, we’re going to kind of stay on that same topic, but I’m gonna I’m gonna segue into number six, which is not using automation. I’m just gonna be blunt. There is no excuse right now for not using automation. There’s none with with Zapier out there, which is a super easy tool to use. They make it stupid, simple for you to use. They walk you through step by step there’s online guides on how to use things. With something as simple as Zapier. To follow up on leads you can you can build out your entire process on Zapier. I have not got a part of it on Zapier, but people need to start using automation. for far less people use automation than I would like to see. You can better your communication with your clients. You can improve your skills as a lawyer, you can improve your communication with your team. With automation. You can do so many things with automation and if you’re not using it, you can We’re talking about making more money. There’s two ways of making more money, right? lowering your costs or raising your revenues, you one way of lowering your cost substantially is through automation. Not everyone likes hearing this, but you can lower the number of people that you actually need to hire. And so you could actually lower your staff count if you need to. But you can also use those systems to raise your revenues by following up with leads. Because if you think of it this way, we know our average fee, right? And so that everyone in the office knows what our ever speaks, I let them know on a regular basis, it went up a little bit, it went down a little bit. So they know that every time we miss a lead, that that’s money out the door. And so we preach that to everybody that that’s the you need to follow up with that lead regularly. And so having those systems with automation can allows you to regularly follow up with those leads.

Jim Hacking

Automation is the key to scaling as you say all the time. You know an automation is the way to free yourself up into buy back time that we spend, you know, Kelsey Bratcher always laughs about he’ll he’ll log into his Zapier account. And he’ll count the number of hours that he saved with all those apps. Now he has all of his clients running through Zapier, he’s literally figured out that through Zapier and all of his client work, that he has saved something literally literally 20 years of life, that if someone was doing those things, and anybody can do it. So Zapier and automation is fantastic. I know it’s hard to find the time to work on improving your systems as opposed to just doing it the the lat the task, just one last time. But the other great thing that we’ve come across through automation, is finding that we don’t make as many mistakes that you can really automate out a lot of the potentials for error, and then you’re just tweaking it. And then eventually you just become the Tweak Master General, where you’re just fixing things as they need to.

Tyson Mutrux

Oh, yeah, I agree. And will you screw up some automation? When you first begin? Yes, you’re going to you’re going to send off an email to to a client, and that’s going to be the wrong email that may happen, you know, but you’ll you’ll want to fine tune things, clients will love it, you’ll you’ll be sending off emails to clients, and they’ll be so happy with you because you’re communicating so much with them. And you never even sent the email. I mean, things as basic as that, that clients love.

Jim Hacking

Really, yeah. And don’t use that don’t use the potential for a small error as a reason to just keep doing it the same old

Unknown Speaker

way? Oh, absolutely. No question.

Jim Hacking

All right, so the next one, number seven, the spooky things that lawyers do the scary things. You know, in our office, Tyson will sometimes have clients who are very, very difficult. And a lot of times we’ll let them go and, or they’ll actually be our client through to the end. And they might not necessarily talk very nicely. And I’ll say to Ashley are the other people in the office, I said, you know, we only have to deal with that person once every six months, but they live inside their head. And they talk to themselves that way every single day. And after the conference, I had a lot of people come up to me and talk to me about the ways that they hold themselves back or talk to themselves negatively. And I know that we’re really hard on ourselves, we’re all trying to improve. But there’s really nothing to be gained by talking to yourself in a negative fashion. If you’ve made mistakes, if you’ve had struggles in the past, you know, that’s all just old, old stuff, old news that does not need to be your future. And that filling your mind and your your ears with negative things or being harsh on yourself. That to me, is one of the biggest things that has struck me in the three years we’ve been working with lawyers is to see that the way that lawyers talk to themselves. And I think that it’s time to just let that go.

Tyson Mutrux

Yeah, so it’s interesting. So you’re at max law con 19. Your our presentations, were actually very complimentary of each other. Right. Yeah. And it was really interesting. We hadn’t planned it out that way. It was not something that’s playing out that way. But they worked really well because lawyers do talk negatively to themselves. And it’s, it’s unfounded. They shouldn’t they should really competence, if you want to level up to the next level, if you really want to go to that next level and the level above that. It’s confidence and it’s that positive self talk, it’s not the negative self talk. And in the reason why it’s unfounded, that people talk negatively about themselves is that especially the people that listen to this podcast, they are the highly motivated, they are the talented people, right and they’re wanting to get better. And so they are on the top end they are the the elite of lawyers, okay, that you are if you’re listening to this, you are because you’re trying to get better. The bad lawyers aren’t trying to get better. They’re set in their ways and they don’t care, right? You are trying to get better. And so You need to know that you’re awesome. Alright? You do, you need to know that you are a superhero, and that you can kick ass because you, you’re amazing. And so you gotta, you gotta think that you’ve got to know that. And it’s just all about positive self talk. It’s simply what it comes down to, is talking better about yourself to yourself, and you will see huge gains over the next year. If you do that. I don’t want to be I don’t want to beat that like a dead horse. But that’s just a nutshell what it is. Alright, next one. Number eight. This and so I don’t know, this is kind of mind boggling to me, just the attorneys that they don’t know what to do or how to do it. And it’s, it’s mind boggling, because it’s not because the lawyers don’t know what to do and how to do it. It’s that for some reason, we don’t teach this stuff, right. And in law school, they don’t teach this stuff. And as the legal field has shifted over the last 30 years, we’ve got to start teaching this stuff in law schools where they need more classes, like your class at SLU gemmy, where the law practice management stuff, where you actually teach you how a law firm works and how it operates. If they taught more of that I think people would understand that they would they be better able to serve their clients and run firms when they get out of law school. And I just, it’s I think it’s unfortunate. And luckily, there are plenty, plenty of there’s plenty of information out there, we’ve had plenty of guests that come on and teach those basics, but it’s just an add on. It’s kind of disheartening. I don’t know what your thoughts are on it.

Jim Hacking

I was really excited this weekend, a new member named Matt Brown hopped on the Facebook group and talked about how he’s taken an entrepreneurship class, and how he was directed to write a business plan about opening out a solo firm. And he was, he said, helplessly lost until he found the podcast. So he’s been binge listening. And so I mean, that’s that’s sort of why we did this. We’ve been trying to fill a gap for the things that people don’t know. And, you know, obviously, one of the great benefits to you and I is that when we’re struggling with something, or we have a question about something, we just go find someone who’s doing that. And we asked him about it on the show. So it’s like a learning lab for us, where we’re getting first dibs at great information, and we’re getting to share it with everybody else. So yeah, that’s that’s definitely a problem.

Tyson Mutrux

It’s funny. So I recently hired my wife. She’s our marketing director now. And she’ll ask me a question and say, posting the Facebook group or go search in the Facebook group, because there’s just so much information on that in that group. And it’s just amazing. I mean, it really is. I mean, I want to go back over the last three years and just see what things I’ve missed, because I’m sure I’m missing. Because it’s just a wealth of knowledge. It really is cool.

Jim Hacking

It’s a great time to be a lawyer for sure. Yeah. All right. My last scary, horrible, spooky thing that I’ve noticed are lawyers who are afraid to take action. And I will say that a lot of our members in the group are action takers, and maybe maybe some to a fault where we jump into the next thing a little bit too quickly. But there are some attorneys in the group that I’ve spoken with. And it’s certainly outside the group who no matter what have an excuse built up as to why X or Y or Z will not work for them. Oh, that won’t work. I mean, Dan Kennedy talks about it all the time, that won’t work in my business. And, and I never really understood what he meant until I would connect with lawyers, like sometimes I’ll see somebody struggling on Facebook, and I’ll just call them up. And I’ll say, you know, you might try this, you might try that. And it just becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where they’re, they’re in this box, and I’m giving them eight different rope ladders to get out of the box. And they keep throwing the rope ladder back over the side of the of the wall of the box, because they want to stay in their little box. So usually, that involves not wanting to take action, and I’m talking about things that don’t cost much money or any money, you can do a lot of this stuff without a big budget. But that unless you’re willing to do that, I mean, people could do an email newsletter with MailChimp for like $30 a month, that’s nothing. There’s all kinds of things. We just got done saying that’s a great time to be a lawyer. There’s more tools and resources out there than ever before. But that unless you’re willing to as my good friend would say, Stop the bullshit, and take some action, you’re gonna get stuck right there.

Tyson Mutrux

I don’t know. That’s something that’s frustrating on Ireland to because there are a lot of lawyers that are just so talented. They just need to, they just need to take action and do it. So get out there. If you’re listening to this and that strikes a chord with you go do something. Turn off the podcast now. Just go do something. Go do it. Alright, so number 10. Yeah, number 10. I know number 10 is overspending, and i don’t i i think this kind of relates back to a few things that that we talked about, you know, whether it’s systems or whether it’s not not knowing what to do you know, Sometimes we just like to throw money at things or we don’t keep track of our spending. And there are two ways of increasing how much money you make. Lower your cost, or increasing your revenues. And if you’ll just go through your bank feed a bank feed, things like Facebook feed but your your your bank records and just see you know what money you’re spending what what you know what one of those monthly costs you can cut out, because I guarantee if you look at your your bank statement today, you can cut out five things probably that you don’t really need to be spending money on. And that’s money directly into your pocket, especially if you’re a solo. Let’s begin then money that money goes straight into your pocket. And so I’m overspending is rampid, for solos and small firms, and I part of it is some people are in growth mode, and I understand growth mode. That’s not overspending. I’m talking about just spending money on things you don’t really need. And so go through bank statements and get rid of those things. Or, Jamie, let’s wrap things up before I do want to remind everyone to go to that awesome Facebook group that we talked about, and then go and register for Max law con 2020. We are going to pick a venue in the next couple of weeks, I think and so we’ll announce that but it’s it’s gonna be freaking awesome. So go and register there. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking

Well, before we get to our hack of the week, I do want to point out that in that awesome Facebook group that you just mentioned, we went over 1600 members, we welcomed 38 new members this week. So things continue to grow. You and I are spending some time we hired a virtual assistant. And we’re getting ready to apply a lot of the principles that we talked about our law firms to maximum lawyer and we’re excited about that. But make sure to join us in that Facebook group. It was exciting to have those 38 new members, I asked them all to say something about themselves today. And we’ll see what kind of feedback we get on that. But for my hack of the week, I had one that I was going to use but I’m gonna use a different one because it’s one that I really like and it follows up on what you just said about overspending. friend of the show just Birkin suggests that lawyers keep a spreadsheet of when all their automatic software renewals are. So have a list of all the software that you subscribe to and make sure that you know when the renewal dates are so that you can notify them if and when you stop using that software. So you don’t get keep getting billed. It’s sort of a proactive way of what you said of watching your bank statements. But it’s also right along those lines.

Tyson Mutrux

Yeah, I thought the spreadsheet thing was really, really smart. Because I don’t know about you. But I’ve been I’ve had in mind a monthly subscription that I wanted to cancel, and I waited to wait to the last minute wasn’t able to cancel in time. And then I paid for the follow the next year and they wouldn’t even move money back. And so having that spreadsheets are really good idea.

Jim Hacking

Yeah, it was maybe alarms or something.

Tyson Mutrux

Absolutely. All right. So here’s my tip of the week. Mine is very simple. All right. We talked about systems and all that kind of stuff and building up things. I want people to go and build one zap, one zap the you go to Zapier, Zapier is it’s you can get a free one, right? You can go and do a free zap and just go build one zap and see what you think about it. You know, dip your toe in the water. See what you think. And I don’t know about you, Jimmy, I think we’ll probably all fall in love, but um, who knows, maybe some of you will hate it, but just gonna build one’s app. Alright, Jimmy.

Jim Hacking

Yeah, you should put that in the Facebook group. You should just have a little post about hey, we’re gonna do a zap challenge. I mean, this thing is going. This thing is gonna drop tomorrow on October 30. So see how many people can do a zap within the week?