Can you ever have too many clients?
The tactician and the entrepreneur. The two sides of the business. One gets the clients, and the other works on the clients. In other words, both faces depend on each other. You should never focus on only one of them. Bring in the clients you want and need, but make sure to be able to work on them. If you can’t be efficient with the clients you already have then you have a problem. It’s time to grow.
Organize yourself. Eliminate, automate, and delegate. Maximize your time.
When you are building and starting out you are less busy. It’s a good idea to use the time you have to build the systems to keep track of your clients and provide them a good service, so when the time comes you are already systematized.
Tyson’s Tip: Infusionsoft. https://www.infusionsoft.com/. Sales and marketing automation software built exclusively for small business success.
Hacking’s Hack:
Learn the ins and outs of Infusionsoft: http://www.monkeypodmarketing.com/
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Transcript: Before Unit vs During Unit
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer podcast. I’m your host, Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Oh, Tyson, it’s good to be recording. Once again, I love doing our podcast. And I’ve really enjoyed actually listening to our own podcast, it seems sort of strange to listen to yourself. But with the editing and everything, they sound very professional.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, much more professional than we really are. So that’s great. It’s, it’s actually Sinhalese building some steam. John Fisher gave us some props on his Facebook page. And then also on a webinar he did, it’s pretty awesome.
Jim Hacking
So this week, we’re going to talk about whether there is an inherent conflict with the part of your business that brings in new cases in the part of your business that handles the cases. And so, you know, a lot of solo and small firms. That’s all in case in one person. So, you know, the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber talks about the conflict between the tactician who’s doing the actual work in our case, it’d be the legal work. And then the entrepreneur who thinks up ways to bring in new cases, I think that in a lot of ways, lawyers can become susceptible to this. And they may have subconsciously, tried not to bring in too many cases, because that means they’re going to have to do the work to get those cases completed. I know that sounds counterintuitive. But I think that when you really get to a place where you’re scaling and you’re growing, that there does become a conflict between bringing in the business and actually working on the cases.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and you and I kind of talked about this before we started recording how there’s sometimes whenever you may be in the middle of doing a bunch of work. And you get a new phone call about a new case. And sometimes you almost cringe, because you know, you’ve got to get the legal work done. And this is natural. But the lifeblood of your firm is are the new clients. And so you do have that natural conflict with each other. I’ve got to take care of the files I have, versus I still need to bring in new cases. And so I think our topic of the day is can you ever have too many clients? And I think, yeah, I guess but no, it’s kind of a weird thing, where if you have so many clients where you’re not getting the work done, I think that that tells you, you’re in a growth phase, and you need to probably start and find ways to add new people to your firm and find ways to become more efficient.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And I think that does happen where you get to that spot where you’re just so busy that you stopped doing the marketing. So there’s sort of a yin and a yang effect to it, I think that you have to always keep your eye on the ball and bringing in new clients. But at the same time, obviously, you have to be able to perform the work and to do it well. And you know, there may be times where you’re focused on different things. But I think that some lawyers fall into the trap of just thinking that cases fall out of the sky and aren’t doing much affirmative work. But I really think it helps. When considering this to think about, again, I go back to Dean Jackson and the before unit and the during unit. And that is that. If you think of the before unit, which is the unit of your business that’s charged with bringing in new business, if you think of that as its own separate unit, if it was its own company, if you had a company, or a subsidiary whose job it was to deliver as many quality law clients to your law firm, if that’s all that it had to do if it did not have to give thought or concern to the actual processing of the cases themselves, if all it had to do was deliver leads, quality leads and set up appointments for you so that when you are at the office on a day where you’re not doing work, but are doing intake of new cases, if you had a solid, you know, eight hour day of quality leads, if that’s what their job was, then I think that that would open your mind to the possibility of maybe you’re not doing enough to bring in those cases. Does that make sense?
Tyson Mutrux
It makes perfect sense. And you actually I will give you a lot of props, you’re far better at this than I am, you have a very good system of actually for your intake and actually taking on new calls and things like that, where you talk about how you have your days broken up, where there’s days where you don’t take any new meetings. There’s ways you handle your phone calls and stuff like that, can you kind of go through your system and how that works because you do a very good job, because I’m including in your before unit, your intake processes, the calls come in and take meetings, in addition to all your web videos and everything else, but can you talk a little bit about how your process works for bringing in onboarding new clients?
Jim Hacking
Sure. And as an aside, an attorney contacted me yesterday she wanted to refer me a couple of new immigration clients. And so obviously I was interested in that and I picked up the phone this morning and called her and she answered her own phone and I was just so struck by that because I haven’t answered My phone. And you just said hello. It was it was very interesting.
Tyson Mutrux
Attorneys think that that’s a good thing. I don’t think that’s a good thing. People think, oh, you know, clients like an attorney that’s going to answer their phone. Yes, they like to go and get their attorney. But there is a definite negative connotation that goes along with an attorney answering their own phone. I think that if you want to see more established, you need to have at least an answering service answering your phone, we can get into that in another podcast. But I think that that’s important that you have someone else answering your phones for you. Yeah, I
Jim Hacking
mean, this was at 750. In the morning, I was just pretty much thinking I was gonna leave her a voicemail message. So she might have people that trailer phone but but just generally, I think that our intake is multistep it is there’s definitely a system to it. I don’t answer the phone, I don’t take phone calls, I don’t take unscheduled phone calls. If people want to talk to me on the phone, we’ve got to block it out and set it aside, I try to batch my phone calls, I try to do phone calls when I’m in the car so that I can maximize my time. I have a really great frontline assistant named Marwan. And he’s very good at screening calls. And at first, when he started, people would trick him and be able to get a hold of me by saying they’re like a friend of mine, or, you know, everyone has sort of an angle as to why they don’t have to play by our rules. But our rules are pretty simple and straightforward, you know, the best way to get a hold of me is by email, I email twice a day at 11. And four, I batch my email. And then I also as far as intake, you know, someone generally raises their hand, they call the office or they contact us through the web, they get put into a sequence and Infusionsoft that sends them a series of emails, both introducing them to the people at the firm, and telling them about the kinds of cases that we handle. And so that when the time comes for me to sit down and do intake, which I do on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, I don’t see any clients on Wednesdays, or Mondays, today’s a Wednesday, when we’re recording this, and I’m wearing shorts and a T shirt. And I’m just cranking out on the work. So we’re pretty rigorous about it. And every time I’m not rigorous about it, I sort of kicked myself in the head. More and more, we’re charging for almost every console, very few people are coming to see me for free. And the more restricted access that people have, to me the the more successful our firm is, and the more the people that don’t want to follow your system at the beginning, are generally not going to follow your system when you’re processing their case, they’re difficult to deal with. And I just assumed know that early on and choose not to do business with them than to get dragged into a crummy situation.
Tyson Mutrux
So what’s your thought process on charging for the consultation? Because that’s not something I do? What’s your thought process all that?
Jim Hacking
Well, we have a couple of different things. So a lot of people that contact us say, you know, I just want to know how to stay here, right? They want to know, you know, how do I stay in the United States? Or how do I come to the United States? Well, those are generally going to be people that are not going to be able to hire me, there’s not gonna be something immediate that I do. So we make it clear that there’s probably not gonna be anything we can do. But if they really want to come in and sit and talk, that they’re gonna have to pay for the counsel that they do end up hiring us for them, we would give them a credit towards their legal fee. You know, obviously, we’re not working on that contingency fee model. So it’s a little bit different. And, and for you, it’s probably a little bit more competitive. But I do think that really shielding your time, you know, which is obviously your most valuable asset, and getting other people to help you, you know, get out from the clients why they want to meet you. I think it’s really important to make sure that when you do have a limited amount of time to meet with clients, that those are quality meetings, you want to screen out the people who are the tire kickers or the looky Loos, and you want to screen out the people who you probably can’t help so that you’re maximizing the amount of time that you spend doing quality work.
Tyson Mutrux
You do a really good job of doing all that. Are you still doing the Skype calls?
Jim Hacking
Saloon? The Skype calls? Yep,
Tyson Mutrux
I think this guy calls a great, that’s another it’s actually another revenue source for you too, right?
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And I don’t want to spend all my time on Skype calls. But if I think that they’re things that might lead to actual cases, I’ll do it. Yeah, so yeah, we’ve been getting cases around the country through those Skype calls. So I haven’t happy with that.
Tyson Mutrux
So there’s the intake part of it there’s the bringing in the clients there’s that part and and that’s in conflict big time with the during unit or the production unit. And so that goes along with you got to make your practices as efficient as possible. And a part of that is what you were talking about with your protecting your time shielding your time. You and I I don’t know if you’ve got it from John Fisher. But I got from John Fisher just with not taking the unscheduled phone calls, setting blocks of time to return phone calls. I don’t do this but I was curious if you do do you set aside time for marketing each week?
Jim Hacking
No, I’m working right now on a content calendar. You know, I was thinking about marketing and networking and all that stuff. And one of the things I really enjoy about building out a vibrant website and you know, the videos and everything is I don’t have to do as much networking as I used to. I definitely still get cases from a lot of other attorneys and from Pat as clients, but as far as the legwork of going out and doing networking, I don’t have to do that much. I do spend time, you know, shooting videos and that kind of stuff. But it’s been sort of haphazard. And that sort of gets to the point that I was talking about earlier is that where that conflict really comes into play, is when you get so busy in your during unit and in helping people with their cases, that you neglect the marketing, and then things sort of slow down.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And so you definitely can never neglect the marketing. I do want to encourage people that if you’re to the point where you’ve got a bunch of clients, and you’re kind of you’ve got that growing pains, I think that there’s something you need to do, and we’ve talked about in the past, but you need to go to sit down and mark down the things that you can eliminate out of your daily routine. And we talked about this before, but eliminate delegate automate. And I think something if you’ve people and you mentioned Infusionsoft, I think that people when they first look into Infusionsoft, they think it’s just a marketing thing. I looked at it completely different. I looked at more of as an efficiency thing. You use Infusionsoft for primarily marketing, right?
Jim Hacking
Yeah. So here’s an interesting thing. So the other day, a guy reached out to me on the website, he filled out our Contact Us form. And he has a pretty nice Spouse Visa case that I’m excited about. He was on the website at night, and I emailed them back. And I said, we’ll get back to you on Friday morning, last week, which I forgot to do. But he got a series of emails between now and then. And today. He called me back and now he’s coming in. And I’ve already told him what we cost. And he’s ready to sign on the dotted line. And that was all done by Infusionsoft. So I guess, yeah, it’s marketing. But I really view it as the backbone of our firm. That’s where we keep all of our client notes. It’s where we keep track of what’s going on in cases and sort of as people move through our processes, we can look pretty quickly on Infusionsoft and see sort of what they’re up to.
Tyson Mutrux
And that’s the automation part of it, which is fantastic. And so I’ve had this conversation with attorneys, and they talked about how you can automate things and how it’s, you know, just cheapens your brand, everything we’ve talked about this before, it doesn’t, it allows you to increase the number of touches with your clients and actually prospective clients so that they’ll actually hire you, they think that the emails are coming from you, they don’t know that they’re just automated emails, we automate a lot of our letters, a lot of our emails that go out to clients, once they progress through certain stages of the process, which allows me to handle a lot more clients than I would be able to, if it was just me and my staff, I would need probably double the staff at a minimum to handle all the clients with God. But and that’s not to brag This is to tell you that if you get to that point, you start finding ways to automate, I think you can early on if you’re starting your own firm, I think if you can start the automation process early, it’s going to allow you to grow a lot faster.
Jim Hacking
Absolutely. I’ve seen about the day how I really wish some of the systems that we’re working on now we had earlier, I think that our clients, we would definitely have better reporting and tagging, if we’d started earlier and done it the right way. I know that’s a lot to sort of think about as you’re getting your cases done. But Tyson, what about you? Do you find yourself in conflict between you’re doing your legal work and doing your marketing
Tyson Mutrux
all the time, because our work just as a small firm, it doesn’t just include you know, the marketing, it doesn’t just include handling the clients includes doing the bookkeeping and everything else. And good friend of mine, Chris Vinny, who you know, as well, we just had this conversation last week about just how much just bookkeeping alone can just really drag you down and really take you away from things that you need to be doing. Otherwise, you use a virtual CFO, and that right?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I told her, we needed to have her on the show, because I think she could really help out a lot of lawyers, I didn’t do much bookkeeping at all, I don’t do payroll, I don’t do bookkeeping, I just sign off on things. She keeps all that stuff, you know, sometimes, like, you’ll have to give a refund or some people, the fee ends up being a little bit lower. And for me to figure out how to work that in QuickBooks would make my head explode. So that’s money that’s very well spent. And it’s as if she’s right down the hall. So yeah, I mean, that’s one of the things when you’re talking about eliminating or delegating, that’s definitely something that you should let go of.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m going to after the you and I were talking, I know that you’ve been using Jill. And so I think I’m gonna actually referred Chris to Jill, I think I’m probably going to head to towards that model where I delegate that. And I just, it’s one of the last things I wanted to let go of. And so that’s part of is we got learned to let go some sometimes let go because we want to, we want to hold on to certain things. We just gotta learn to delegate those out, because we got to free up our time. But yeah, I think it’s natural for every firm, every solo or small firm to go through those pains. Because there is that constant struggle. And there’s times where I’ll notice myself, just kind of getting away from either the marketing side of things, or sometimes I’ll spend a week spending too much time on marketing. And so you’ve got to balance that out. And I think that something you and I both need to work on is setting aside blocks of time, just for marketing each week, so that we’re not having to do it that way so that we’re not nickel Selecting one side or the other, you systemize it. And that’s, I mean, that’s one of those things where I think you and I all have to work on,
Jim Hacking
for sure. So I think that there’s lessons here for everybody who’s practicing. I think that if you’re just starting out, this is definitely, you know, a problem that you’d like to have. I know, it seems like you’ll never have a time where you’re going to be this busy. But I think that the point you made is a good one, which is that you can use this time when you’re not as busy to build in the systems to keep track of your clients to make sure things don’t fall through the cracks, to give your clients world class service and to do a good job for them. So that when the time comes when you are extra busy, I think that it’d be nice for me if we could find an expert on sort of firm growth to talk to like, how to know when to expand how to know when to hire somebody, how to know when to outsource, how to know, when you’re spinning your wheels, doing things that you shouldn’t be doing. I think that this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about, I don’t think there’s really in the legal context that many people that sort of advise on that view,
Tyson Mutrux
there is a guy I know and the name escapes me, I’ve got his business card I met with him about a year ago. And he was it wasn’t about that it was actually just to it was a BNI kind of thing. It was a he knew someone in my BNI group at the time, actually maybe a little bit longer than that. It’s the same group that you and I were in. And we met and we connected and I’ll let the put that on the website, because he was the guy. That’s what he actually focused on. He works in St. Louis, and he works with companies on growing. And it’s not just a brand thing. It’s just how to effectively grow how to grow the right way and not do it the wrong way. Because what we do as business owners is we do kind of stumble along sometimes because we don’t know what we’re doing. And we need to rely on the experts to tell us how to do it. So I think
Jim Hacking
it’s interesting because I think that this problem does occur with regularity of people feeling overwhelmed and not having enough time to keep doing the marketing and keep all the cases going and you’re torn, lots of different directions. And obviously you have a life and a family that you want to keep. Keep happy and keep going. And so I guess balance is always part of it.
Tyson Mutrux
All right, Jimmy, let’s wrap this topic. I’ll go first, this time with the Tyson’s Tip of the Week. And you can give your hackings hack. We’ve been talking about it a lot of this episode and a lot of last episode is Infusionsoft you use it we always kind of joke out you’re kind of the before unit guy on the during unit guy. And so I use it a lot for during unit stuff. I my practice is extremely efficient because of that and use it for a lot of the before unit stuff that I saw highly recommended. If you’re at the point where you’re ready to start automating things, I highly recommend doing it.
Jim Hacking
When I first heard about Infusionsoft I thought it was way overwhelming and that I had a lot to learn that it was very confusing. And I have been all over the block within fusion software. I wasn’t using it very much. And now I’m using it a lot more. But one person that I came across who’s been tremendous for teaching me how to use the software is a guy named Greg Jenkins. He used to work for Infusionsoft. And he he’s developed an Infusionsoft starter kit video series that you can get for I think it’s under 50 bucks that it’s been the best I’ve seen it’s about 25 modules. It’s very reasonably priced. And it’ll really teach you the ins and outs of Infusionsoft. He used to work for Infusionsoft as one of their main trainers. And it’s really in the name of his company is monkeypod marketing. And it’s really reasonable to teach you how to use the software.
Tyson Mutrux
I think he’s been advertising on Facebook recently. I’ve seen him a couple times. So he is for sure. So you went through his program?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I have a couple of them I did is campaign builder thing, which is about 40 bucks, I think and then this new one is I think it’s under $50
Tyson Mutrux
Is there a program you have not gone through? That’s my question.
Jim Hacking
That’s funny. So you and I were talking the other day I clean my office today I have a box of all the different programs and things that I’ve done over the years some to great effect some to no effect. So yeah, I’m definitely a serial Joiner.
Tyson Mutrux
So you and I this last thing I’ll say and then we’ll kind of wrap things up you and I went to gkc whenever the info summit whenever it was in St. Louis. And you were like a little kid that saw candy every time they were selling something you wanted to jump up and you had to force yourself to not do it. It was so funny to see you just want to jump up every time to buy every single thing that came through. It was
Jim Hacking
really bad especially I don’t know if you’ve ever won Robin Roberts presented on this she sort of is a coach for it guys. A business coach for it guys. I just thought she was fantastic. I thought she gave a great presentation. I started all the way back then and then I just forced myself to turn around and not buy it.
Tyson Mutrux
silly things like sell those guys cuz she is very established and some of those people were like one hit wonders, like one good idea and like they were selling it for like $30,000 It was kind of absurd, but as we’ll wrap things up, I do want to do some credits because we don’t do this enough. I do want to give things to the person that transcribes our podcast, Gino Medina, and then our producer Francisco liro Do So let’s make sure we give them the due props that they deserve. So that’s it. Thanks, Jimmy.
