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This week on the show we have Melissa Shanahan, founder of Velocity Work, a law firm consulting and coaching company.

In this episode we’ll discuss how Melissa started in the consulting industry, which KPI’s are important and how to track them, how she keeps her law firm clients accountable on goals, and how she keeps level-headed when working with such a diverse client pool.

Hacking’s Hack: 

From Ashley: Don’t let the muggles get you down

Me: Read the book 5AM Club, its amazing. My wife doesn’t like getting up that early so she’s starting a 5-minutes early club so she never feels like she’s running late by arriving 5 minutes early to everything.

Tyson’s Tip: 

If you’re like me you’ve got post-it notes everywhere. Post-it has a new app that lets you write post-it notes on your phone that follow you around at all times. It’s a convenient and fun way to keep track of all the little notes we leave for ourselves.

Melissa’s Tip:

My tip of the week is to reduce your inputs. Be intentional about the media you let influence you.

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Transcripts: Accountability and KPI’s with Melissa Shanahan

Melissa Shanahan
So this person really does own sort of pushing being the force behind like, hey, let’s get these things accomplished. We said we wanted to get accomplished, because that should not be the owners job. The owners job should be focused on some of the bigger moving pieces. And there needs to be someone sort of ground level who’s willing to cross off that action. Right. And you got to

Unknown Speaker
run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking, and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome

Jim Hacking
to the show. Welcome back to the maximum ROI Podcast. I’m

Tyson Mutrux
Jim hacking. And I’m talking to Jimmy

Jim Hacking
long time to see my friend. For our listeners who don’t know this. Of course, yesterday, you and I had lunch up here in St. Louis, we were hatching evil schemes, as my friend Dean Jackson would like to say, and we, we think we’re going to be taking maximum lawyer to the next level don’t think

Tyson Mutrux
I do. I think we’re about to level things up quite a bit. It’s gonna be pretty sad.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, well, I’m excited about our guest today, she was introduced to me by our good friend joy, vitality. And she’s had an interesting last couple of months. And during that she’s launched velocity work, which is a sort of lawyer coaching and focusing in on site retreat running group. Her name is Melissa Shanahan. Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Shanahan
Thank you. Thank you for having me. I’m so pumped to be here.

Tyson Mutrux
Melissa, I think you work with Christopher nicolaysen as well, that right? Yeah, that is right. So So Christopher and Joey, both sing your praises quite a bit of talk about what you do, and then how you got into it.

Melissa Shanahan
Yeah, sure. Well, sort of at the core, whatever Woody, it seems like the most fun piece of focus on a velocity work is that there is this four quarter framework that I lead clients through that, how it basically allows them to take a step back, and instead of working in their business work on their business, and helps us, we basically create a space where they can create a really solid strategic plan for not just a year, we look at it a little bit further than that. But then, once we have a solid plan for the longer term vision, and then we have a plan for that year. In terms of goals, then we just take a look at okay, well what needs to happen this quarter in order to be on track for that, every quarter, we’ll come back and revisit and sort of process the lessons from the previous quarter and figure out how to apply those to the next quarter. Set goals for the next quarter so that we’re on track and adjust goal if need be, whether they need to be adjusted down or adjusted up if they just knocked it out of the park. So that is that’s the piece that I think it seems like people get most excited about, right up front. But the piece is that and I and I do think that goal I have that for my business, I think that’s important. But the thing that I love the most about working with clients is that you can’t just have these meetings, you can’t just get in a room and not do any prep work and not like not have your house in order, so to speak, and be able to create a really solid plan. So there’s a ton of groundwork that we have to do in working with the client to, you know, pull metrics from their business and really, really understand their business and understand their history in terms of different things that should be measured the different things that should be tracked, right. And so I our velocity work creates this really highly customized tracking portal for clients to be able to sort of put in this information. There’s a bunch of calculations in the portal that help us focus on the things that are the most important metrics to focus on, then we know then we can get in the room and we know what levers to pull, we know what goals to shoot for, we know that we thought we know the strengths and that, you know that that process of that groundwork is really empowering. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s really empowering for an owner and for the business. And that’s one of my favorite pieces is really just helping them become, I guess, a way to say it is to help them become who they need to be in order to have the success that they would prefer to have. Right. So and there’s a bunch of accountability baked in and built in along the way too, which which is great. And I could talk more about the actual product but I just thought it you know, I feel like it’s a missing piece is that it that you don’t just get in a room and talk about what you want. I’m way more involved than that. And which makes the journey really customized and, and really exciting for, for the the owner attorney.

Tyson Mutrux
Well, so let’s back up a

Jim Hacking
minute, how did you get into this space, I know you have a lot of experience working with businesses, talk to our listeners about why they should listen to you, or what your what your experience

Unknown Speaker
has been.

Melissa Shanahan
Sure. So I about 11 years ago, a little bit over that now, I decided to become a certified life coach, I didn’t even know what that meant. I just knew that. I mean, I’ve always been into self help self development, and I was wanted to learn actual tools to be able to teach people. So we did that. And that was awesome. It gave me this incredible foundation to be able to work with people and sort of get them from point A to point B, whatever that meant for them. However, I I learned really quickly, I didn’t want to just do general coaching, that wasn’t the people that were finding me weren’t weren’t my piece, it just wasn’t the kind of work that was, I was enjoying. And so before that, I had a background in Dental. And so I ended up about seven years ago, beginning to work for a consulting company that works with medical professionals, like doctors and dentists who own their own practices, basically. So that was interesting, because it allowed me to blend my two backgrounds in a way that I was pretty excited about. And as I got in there, what I learned was inside of the firm that I was working for, there were a lot of influence from Gina Whitman, which is CEOs, and then also Dan Sullivan, which is strategic coach. And so, you know, inevitably, I’ve got a lot of training that sort of trickled down from many different mentors, but those were two of them, and had a lot of influence on how we ran things inside the company and allowed us to sort of help our clients get on track the way that they had taught us to get on track. So what was interesting is that I was learning, it was a really rigorous process to learn this skill, the skill set, and I was delivering this, these retreats. I mean, I was totally immersed in this, I was doing 10 to 14 of these a month, and traveling all over for these. And what you know, being so deep in the trenches, what we had put together for clients, and what I was teaching was pretty awesome. But they were some missing missing pieces, there were holes, and I could, I could see them. And I can as I was working with the owners of small businesses. And I really wanted to make changes, but in an organization the size I was working in, that’s really slow. And they weren’t really receptive to the feedback. And I wanted to not only Yes, it was great that they had this awesome plan that they were going to carry out from quarter to quarter, but I wanted them to experience some of the you know, I wanted to experience and experience less of the unhealthy stress. I wanted to train them more on how to set up a solid system and processes that were telling them they need to put into place, I wanted them to be able to decrease their dead, I wanted them to have more competence. I wanted them to increase their capability to grow and run their own practice. It was all these things I felt like we’re missing between our meeting. And so eventually I went out, I sort of formed velocity work as a test, product test company, but it wasn’t even a company then about a year and a half ago. And I had this hypothesis that small businesses, generally speaking, even if they had been trained in business, that they knew that this is the kind of work that they needed to be doing for themselves, they probably weren’t doing it. So I went out to see if that was true. And lo and behold, it was true. And so I was kind of taken any small business that wanted to work with me, which was very eye opening, and very difficult to learn those businesses inside and out type of different business. And eventually I ended up working with Joey Vitaly, and he was the first attorney that I worked with. And everything clicked into place. Everything felt like, oh, this translates really well. And this and this is sort of similar in that, you know, attorneys kind of like medical professionals, go to school to learn how to do law and how to be a really great lawyer. But then you get out in the real world and if you decide to go out on your own, it is a whole different beast, and there isn’t really training for that in school. And so there has a lot of room for help and provide organization. So that is sort of how it morphed into law. That was about 15 months ago that I met Joey started working with him and then just niched down from there. And it’s been, it’s been a really wonderful ride, I would say that

Tyson Mutrux
that was extremely helpful, I want to kind of get into the the nuts and bolts of this a little bit more. I believe that we’re kind of what you’re working off of the basic framework you’ve expanded on as the framework contraction. And so can you talk a little bit about just the mechanics of what you do when you’re working with with your clients?

Melissa Shanahan
Sure, and you do like to know about the actual day itself? The way it’s set up? Or just? Yeah,

Tyson Mutrux
take a little deeper, dig a little deeper into, like, what your principles are based

Melissa Shanahan
on? Yeah, and then how are you? Okay, so? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So principles are based on the fact that it’s really hard to, like I was mentioning earlier to have any sort of productive meeting unless you have a lot of information. And most business owners don’t have that information. So the first step is getting, it’s like getting your house in order. Really, that’s kind of what it feels like, yeah, so we get all this key business data that is not necessarily fun for the owners, but I geek out about it, which is great, because I can help kind of pull it together and, and analyze it that way and work with them on that. So there’s business data, but there’s also, you know, intake about where how things are, in terms of how they’re operating, how’s the culture inside the business? Do they have core values do they have, it’s almost like the, I’m putting air quotes around the soft stuff, that that stuff is super important. Because if if, if you if you aren’t really grounded or connected to a vision that you’re working towards, and a team that wants to show up to work with you, and is bought into the thing that you’re working for, then it’s really hard to have any to make any sort of plan that makes sense. So the soft stuff we work on first, when when I we actually get in the room for the meeting, we make sure I already know kind of where they are with everything. But we cover, we review it if they already have it in place. And if they don’t have it in place, we get some we get some solid stuff in place in terms of they don’t have a mission statement, we work on that if they don’t have core values, we work on that. If they do have core values, we revisit them and see, are they outdated? Do they still feel fresh and like us? So we we go into all that we talk about leadership and how to be good leaders, not just for each other in the practice, but how to lead ourselves and how to really show up well, and then we start to start to move into the numbers and look at the numbers into then with the numbers we look at okay, well, we’ve sort of established that this is where you want to be in five ish years. So let’s work backwards from that. And we kind of focus on the three, two and one year is mostly on the one year and think about where does that mean, we need to be where do we need to end up where to be on track for your your big ultimate goal? Where do we need to be in three years. And we do talk about revenue pretty heavily when we’re talking about this, and some people don’t love that. But the truth is, that is your the stuff that has to be in place. And as long as you’re grounded and connected to your culture and your vision and and the work that you do and why you’re doing it, then the numbers should not be an issue. The numbers should be like we do need if we want to be making $4 million in five years, that means okay, what do we need to be making in three years to be on track for that. And it’s not just about the money. But the money is sort of the measuring tool, the measuring stick, that helps us identify what we’re able to do. And so if you want to have more than one location, or if you want to be able to give this huge chunk to this cause that you care about, then you need to make a certain amount of money. And so we actually do hone in on that the dollar amounts that they want to be shooting for. And we back down from there. So figure out the revenue. And then when we’re looking at the one year, then we look at, okay, this revenue, how are we going to get there? What’s our average revenue per case? What are their acquisition costs? What are the what are the levers that we need to pull inside the business? Do we want a lot more clients? Or do we would just want to raise the average revenue per case? And what are some ways that we can do that? And so we really kind of worked out a strategic plan to help them get to where they want to be instead of just turning up the dial and cranking harder. What was that you said that

Jim Hacking
there’s sort of accountability baked in and one of the problems But I have is we have these retreats or even our monthly for meetings and everybody has all these great ideas, but they don’t seem to get implemented, which is not surprising seeing as, at least me I’m a, I’m a two on follow through. So I’d be interested to hear how that accountability gets sort of

Melissa Shanahan
implemented. Yeah, absolutely. Which you just said to on policy that every client takes the Colby can help me really communicate with them and know how they work and help them set themselves up for success based on their Colby. So the accountability that we provide outside of the meetings is we have a meeting every month with the owner or the partners. And that is to be on track off track with the things that you said you were going to do you were gonna be responsible for. And that’s usually less. In the beginning, that can be different. But usually that’s less execution based and more. Are you delegating the way that you said you were gonna delegate? Are you? Are you able to focus more on the business the way that you, you said you were gonna schedule your time, are you so they kind of have to answer for becoming more of the CEO, or having a little bit of space carved out for that. So that their business actually keeps moving in the right direction. And then they’re leading that the second accountability call we have every month is with sort of the right hand person. And that looks different in every firm. I’ve, I’ve learned that along the way. But there’s someone inside the firm needs to be sort of have ownership over execution of all the things that said that we’re going to get done during these retreats. And it doesn’t mean they’re the boss, it doesn’t mean that, you know, they, they have this weird authority, it just means that it kind of I get to, they are answered to us. If, if things aren’t getting done, where’s the accountability? What kind of things are you guys doing? Or do you need a weekly check in with one another, this person really does own sort of pushing and being the force behind like, hey, let’s get these things accomplished, we said we wanted to get accomplished, because that should not be the owners job, the owners job should be focused on some of the bigger moving pieces. And there needs to be someone sort of ground level who’s willing to cross off that action item list. Right and, and see that through. So that’s the second accountability call. And in the, in the retreats, we talk about what kind of meetings are important to have, so that they can stay on track and good structure for meetings and, and tracking, they have to stay up on their tracking, because we don’t have a tracking portal is we call it the source of truth. If the numbers, the numbers tell a story. And if the numbers aren’t in there, we can’t see anything. So we, the person who’s really in charge of execution, oversees and make sure that everything is up to date there as well. So that’s the countability, that’s baked in, of course, I’m there, if they need more than that, and most fine that they don’t, it’s enough in between, you know, once a month is enough of a touch to sort of push the reset button makes sure they’re staying on track with the things that they said they want to do.

Tyson Mutrux
Most of you this is a really good segue because this is what I want to ask you about. So people ask us all the time about okay, what numbers should have a tracking? And how do I track them? You mentioned the portal. So huge, like what number should people be tracking? And how do you track them?

Melissa Shanahan
So the numbers that are there, this can vary from practice to practice. But the numbers that are sort of key and core and they’re non negotiable, are we have to know what the revenue is for the business. We have to know how many new cases were taken on each month, we have to know how many cases were closed each month. And for those three numbers, you can calculate? Well, with the closed cases, you can calculate your average revenue per case really like on how much that each case is worth. And so when you’re tracking how much each case is worth, that looks very different. But I have learned this from firm to firm depends on how they bill right. And so what they are, what I’m noticing is that typically firms are not great at staying on top of although it’s in their software somewhere. It’s not they can’t they don’t have visibility unless they go pull that specific data for that specific client. They don’t they don’t have an easy way to read what their average revenue per case is. They might have a hunch, they might know where they want it to be, but they don’t really know where they are. And so those are the first three things. But when I say revenue for the business, it’s how it’s coming in matters. So you know if it’s based on billable hours and we create we set up a system and calculations are based on that. If it’s a flat fee, we do it that way. If it is contingency, which is the easiest of them all we It can calculate it that way. And it’s easier in terms of input of data will see in terms of we do track hours, and not so like I know that they track their own hours, but it’s more to see what levers they can pull and push against. When we’re talking strategy. Does the does the the owner attorney need to take a step back? Are there so many billable hours in there that they can’t be a good leader? So then we’ve got to figure out a transition and a smart transition that way. So ours power relay chap revenue, I make sure we have it in there for them. So it makes sense for them. Also marketing? How much are they spending in marketing every month, which you’d be amazed how many people do not know the answer to that I was, I thought that was an easier number to get to. But I’m finding it’s not for people, they don’t really have that track. Specifically, they can go back and look at their credit card statements and sort of figure out what they’ve been spending every month. But that is something that we track, we also track the number of new cases that are brought in each month. So that we can look at, generally speaking, and acquisition costs, is not the same thing as like, you know, you need to get really granular on the back end for the businesses. Or if you’re running Facebook ads, there’s an acquisition cost there that you can look at, there’s for each sort of effort, but generally speaking, what is going out? What are you spending? And what are you getting? Generally speaking, that’s a number that we look at just a measure and sort of look at the health of the business. And there’s a range that that is where we know, it kind of makes sense. Based on their average revenue per case, I hope I’m not getting too much in the weeds. I’m just trying to be like, give as much clarity.

Tyson Mutrux
We want the weeds as perfect.

Melissa Shanahan
Okay. Yeah, I think, you know, it depends on if their average revenue per case is, I noticed was really, really low. But like, let’s just say it’s, you know, 2500 bucks, then it makes sense to me that, and I, we asked them, it’s not just what I think I care what the Congress thinks. So it’s like, okay, are you guys willing to spend $175 to get 2500? On average? Does that sound like a good deal? Yes. Okay, awesome, then we’re in a good range, maybe we can. And there’s times where it’s not just about whittling the average, or the acquisition cost down, it’s, it really is, this is where I’m talking about the levers really strategically talking about, well, maybe let’s make a push and be willing to spend more, because we know we’re working really hard to increase our revenue per case. And so if we are shooting for a $6,000 versus $2,500, I know these numbers are really low, I’m just kind of using examples. If we’re shooting for $6,000, that’s what we want to get to in the next six to 12 months, then, okay, we need to be spending more, because the quality is going to be very different that there’s, there’s just different things to look at. And I will say this, I’m not a marketing expert. I do not I do not advertise myself as a marketing expert. My My husband is, ironically. So I mean, he’s kind of he’s come to a couple of retreats and been helpful where he needs to be helpful. And that’s fantastic. But I do know, I know. And that’s most of the clients I work with, have someone they’re working with, from a marketing perspective, which is fantastic, because that’s not what I do. But I do know how to look at the health of things. And so that’s what we focus on more than anything and have strategic conversations around and, and they can, you know, pull in their their specialists to sort of deepen that conversation. But so with marketing, those are the those are the things we look at. I don’t get granular although I encourage them that they have to on their end that they’re spending, they need to figure out with each channel that they’re spending money in what’s happening in that channel, and so they have to track more granularly on the back end, or have someone do it for them.

Jim Hacking
Would you be willing to share a story about a client? Obviously, you don’t to name them or anything, but just talk about a success that they’ve had or how you measure growth or improvement for

Melissa Shanahan
firms that you’ve worked with? Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we work backwards with all math in the retreat to figure out okay, if we want to know this year, we want to be on track for X amount of revenue, then what are the things that that’s a good, that’s a goal, and that’s awesome, but what are the sort of sub goals that need to happen in order to get us there? And, you know, if you’re people who are members of Max law seems like many of them are familiar with traction. And so there’s their goals. And then there’s rocks. So goals are the sort of the, the finish line, there’s a point where you cross it, and usually just the number, oftentimes, but the rocks are the things, what are the levers that you’re going to pull that get you to the goal, one of the things you’re going to focus on the business. So the success that the the exciting success, the easiest to see, for clients and, and us when we’re walking through it with them in a retreat is that whatever revenue goal they had, there’s certain other mini goals that have to happen in order for that goal to, to come to fruition. So for example, we work backwards, we know what their average revenue purchases, if they want to make a certain amount of revenue, they’ve got to have, they have to close a certain number of cases by the end of the year. And so we take a look at and set goals for the number of cases that are I can, we can calculate, on average, how many cases they close, in a month or in a quarter. And we know that we know how many they need to take on in order to keep that train going is that sort of that machine going. And so we can set goals for how many new cases every month, they need to have in order to be on track down the road to close the number of cases that need to be closing. So anyway, we basically something recently that happened is that a client, that a goal that felt lucky, or the number of cases, clients to hire them every month, and they are blowing it out of the water. And what’s funny is that, you know what, I, we talked to them about it, it’s like, they’re so pumped, but they can’t really understand or identify exactly why things seem to be working and clicking better. But it is. And then we talk about there’s there’s two partners, and basically, the partners have both said, it’s almost like just getting your your house in order and focusing on the things you’ve been focusing on, everything starts to click together. And they’re sort of seeing the end reaping the benefits and the rewards, and it’s super exciting for them. Their goals now are too small. So next time next quarter, we’re going to have to look at adjusting those to be a better fit. Because they are, they’re doing so well. And it’s hard to point to specifically the thing, because there isn’t like, you know, there isn’t this grand marketing thing that that they put into place. It’s really just all these things coming together paying attention. Being a good steward of the business, really. And everything starts to come together. It’s just a little, not, it’s never a cakewalk, right, it’s never, but it starts to get a little easier and make a little more sense and be a lot clearer. And things tend to unfold. So that’s an example one of the cases that they’re bringing on are they’re blowing their goal out of the water, which just means that what they’re going to close is going to put them at more revenue than what they were hoping for.

Tyson Mutrux
is pretty good, man. I don’t know. But I don’t know about you, Jimmy. But this reminds me a lot of our conversation yesterday and the conversation or our guild last week about people putting these artificial caps on their goals too, though, where they, they will get this go way too low, for some reason, whenever they can be achieving so much more so that it really is interesting. Jim and I were just talking about it yesterday, he talks about this most of the people that are thinking about using you for coaching or someone else, what is the most difficult thing on your end? What’s the thing that you struggle with the most, that if people the people you were coaching were doing would make your life easier?

Melissa Shanahan
I think a lot of people initially come and I’m really, really cognizant of this. And so I try to be very selective with who we work with. People come and I think they I think generally speaking, people are willing to pay money for someone to fix their problem. And this is almost the opposite of that. Yes, a problem gets solved through our work. But there is it’s a pretty heavy commitment in terms of how the owner or partners needs to be more and I think I know you guys have done a lot of this work on your own. So you can probably speak to this and you have on your podcast some but it is not easy and you can’t just pay someone to make your business better. And so we do guide them. And we do a lot of the heavy lifting, and we point them in the right directions. And we facilitate amazing conversations and plans. But if they aren’t the kind of person who is willing to be committed to this process and show up to actually execute on it, it’s not going to work. And the reason I’m really so when you say what’s the hardest part, the hardest part for me is that that client, because I, I think that they had come here, this fire in their voice when they first talked to me. And every once in a while, you will get one who is not morphing, or changing their habits, the way that they need to, in order to take on the important pieces that they need to take on in order to grow the business. And so I think I’m learning I’m learning real quick, who is how to better vet clients. But I think, you know, it sounds fluffy, but you’ve got to be the kind of person who can own the kind of business that generates revenue, and is really healthy. And if you say in your, you know, you’re busy lawyering, and you aren’t willing to do the hard work, just make a shift to start to work more on the business, then, and we help with that, we’ll guide that. But only you can do it right. And so they don’t, they don’t see the results that they would hope to see. And the reason I’m trying to vet really well is because our clients don’t win, we don’t win, right? Like, the whole goal is to help them grow. And if they’re staying stuck, and that’s not good. For them, it’s a waste of money, and it’s not good for us. So I think that’s the hardest piece in terms of learning. The second thing I would say in terms of just time and focus is getting the tracking portal put together is one of my, one of my greatest joys, and one of the things that frustrates me the most because it’s so I think deeper about their business than they have ever thought about it. That’s so that’s how it feels. They don’t know how to calculate the things that we need to get. They don’t know the numbers that I need in order to get the calculations. And sometimes I don’t, it depends on their business. So it’s really, it’s like a puzzle, every time I sit down to create their customized portal, it is a puzzle for me to sort of unlock. And once it’s done, it’s awesome. And it’s beautiful and smooth. But man, it is, it is probably the most challenging piece of actual work that that I do. You know, I was just talking about the the vision and sort of morphing from operating one way into another. And that’s the only way that you’re going to do the best that you want to see. And that’s the hardest pieces. That’s what I try to instill into clients. We have a manifesto that I love that really speaks to that. It’s more about that than the numbers. It’s, you know, we want to see what we’re made of we relentlessly move remove distractions, we, you know, there’s certain things that talk about how you need to shift who you are, in order to become the kind of person you need to be in order to lead your business to where you want it to go. Do you guys, I know that you’ve talked some about just there is there is like you had a struggle podcast a couple weeks ago that I love. I love listening to that. I think it was last week it dropped. And I would love to know from you guys. Can you see what I’m saying? In that regard? Specifically, does that resonate? at all what I’m trying to convey to you?

Jim Hacking
So as far as getting your headspace, right most are what exactly do you mean?

Melissa Shanahan
Well, like, you know, you can sit in a room and have plans that are awesome. But you can’t keep operating the same way you’ve been operating if you want to take your business to a different level. And it’s there subtle shifts that are that you got to be willing to make. And it’s never easy to sort of get out of one mode and put yourself more into another mode. And stay committed to that process. Right? The I don’t know, have you? I know you guys. You do quarterly meetings. So like, what is it like for you? And maybe now you’re in a better groove, but especially when you started these? How did you have to shift and how did you think about that and how did you honor that? Well,

Jim Hacking
I think that for us. A lot of that comes with the Colby and recognizing your strengths and weaknesses and not necessarily you being the one or me being the one to personally shift. I’ve had more success it seems by bringing in people who have skill sets outside of mine I certainly had to stretch in different ways and to accept things that I have to work on. But I think that this is powerful is is sort of finding the who not the how is Dean Jackson? And Dan Sullivan would say,

Melissa Shanahan
yeah. Okay. That’s why yep,

Tyson Mutrux
I think, I think that’s, I think that’s, I think that’s a big part of it, Jimmy, but like, most of the people that listen to this podcast are solos, or they’re small firms, and there’s not, they don’t have a big crew, you know, so I think we’ve got to look at that look at this a little bit differently. And I think that a big part of it is, you’re not going to make this gigantic mindset shift, I think you can try. But I think it’s crucial your you’ve got to do it incrementally that to do it one thing at a time. Because I think what happens is, as people try to, I’m gonna do all this other stuff over here, because everyone else is doing it. And they, they do none of it. And instead of doing one thing at a time, and improving on that one thing and getting better, that that’s what they should really, really be focusing on. Is that one little bit thing, a little thing, and then also daily tracking, tracking yourself and holding yourself accountable. I think if you talk to, I’d say I dare to say 90% and above of highly successful people track their their successes every day. I mean, they’re, they’re tracking, okay, am I being accountable to myself, and I think that that is a big part of it to the daily accountability, and then those incremental shifts, because Jimmy, you didn’t get to where you are right now, with a big shift. You did this one thing at a time, you fill butts and seats, one person at a time. And so that’s the big part of it is incrementally shifting over.

Melissa Shanahan
I love that. There’s a saying that there’s a soccer coach in England that says he’s famous for saying, The Weeping matter that I use that my retreats because I can just speak to what you said the consistent, we think, are, are, are what sort of help make some of the biggest movement, not not necessarily the big things where you can just wave a magic wand and there’s a bunch of change. It really is the small things, which is just what you’re speaking to. And that was awesome. Really well says, well, thank

Tyson Mutrux
you. So do you ever get caught in 20 minutes, so I need to wrap things up? Before I do, I want to I want to remind everyone, go to the Facebook group get engaged there. There’s a lot of activity. Also go to iTunes or I guess it’s not iTunes anymore. Apple podcast, wherever you get your podcasts, give us a five star review. It makes a huge difference. Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking
So my colleague Ashley’s in here, we’re getting ready for a case, case review. And I asked her what my Packard Tip of the Week will be. And she said that it should be don’t let the Mughals let you down but or get you down, I’m going to go with something a little bit different. And that is I read this book The 5am Club by Robin Sharma. I really like it. I’ve been getting up at five o’clock most days. And that’s been giving me a lot more time for headspace and thinking things through but Amani read the book, and she doesn’t like to get up that early. So she’s come up with the five minute early club, she’s allegedly going to appointments and meeting five minutes earlier than usual. And that’s supposedly going to cut down her stress levels. But all that being said, the real advice is if you feeling like time is working against you just get up a little bit earlier, it doesn’t have to be 5am. But just see if coming into the office at 830 Instead of at nine helps things out. It really for me, I am a morning person who gets me going in a in a way that doesn’t want to

Tyson Mutrux
sleep in later. And Jimmy That’s great advice. But let me say this if you’re getting the option nine Come on, come on. Eat a little bit earlier than that. Give me Give me Give me a break. What’s your tip or hack of the week?

Melissa Shanahan
Oh lining something that I encourage people to do inside of velocity work and I practice myself and it’s simply put reduce your input we have you know we’re we have a lot of inputs and controlling knowledge is really important, not just social media, which is sort of the easiest stream of of information that can come at us. But like I heard Jim talk recently about at some point I heard Jim talk about switching away from watching so much news, like reducing your inputs, right or controlling your inputs. Because there’s a inverse relationship with how much output you create. The more input you have, basically the less output you you create in the world. And the reducing your inputs containing them, right like I love the game you read every morning, for example, like you have time carved out where you deliberately sort of absorb inputs. And that’s awesome. But people do so really unconsciously typically And it affects their output. So I would say if, if that, that will probably speak to if it doesn’t speak to you throw it out the window. But if it even remotely sounds interesting, pay attention to it and try to reduce your input so that your output

Tyson Mutrux
is greater. That’s great advice, Jason, so called Left channel capacity. And he’s, he’s written a book about this, too, it’s the same thing. It’s just controlling that, that channel capacity. And so that’s, that’s really, really good advice. I really, really recommend it. Alright, so my tip of the week is actually something I was pretty excited about. I’m sure as I’m talking right now. So you’ll either in the car, or at your desk, you get little sticky notes all over your desk. And like, like in your like on your computer and on your desk, and over, maybe on your dashboard of your car, while they’re posted has a new I don’t know, but the new app as needed me, I was actually searching for something else. And I found that it’s really cool. You can create post it notes on your phone, just like a regular post it notes when you add it, I I’m just doing it right now on the phone, you can actually write on your phone, if you’re doing a like you’re writing a regular post it note and just add it in, boom done. It’s really cool. An efficient way of doing it, you’ve got those post it notes with you at all times and reminders. It’s sort of little bitty things that you needed that you need to write down every single day. Everyone’s got their phone next to you all the time. And so it’s an easy way just to keep the posted note, I honestly don’t know yet whether or not it’s an efficient process. But we’ll see. It’s fun. You see, I can email those notes myself. I can text them. So it’s kind of fun, too. So that’s mine posted. Melissa, thank you so much for coming on. That it’s been really, really fun to do that. So thank you.

Melissa Shanahan
Thank you guys. You’re always a blast. And I just have to say thanks for the community that you’ve created. i you i hope. I hope you hear that as often as I think you probably do. I what you’ve created for attorneys is pretty incredible. It doesn’t seem like there’s anything else out there like it. So yeah, just awesome work