Some people are just don’t made to run a law firm or solo practice.
1. You don’t like hustling for clients.
Finding the people that need our services in a way that is energetic, purposeful and deliberate in a way that attracts people to you and makes them want to hire you.
When you run a solo practice, hustling is fundamental. It’s the only way you will get clients and grow, therefore, it’ll be the only way to keep your firm running.
2. You don’t want to monitor your numbers. KPI’s.
Key Performance Indicators. The number of potential clients. Cash in – Cash out. Numbers, statistics. Information that will show you how the firm is and how it will or can be.
KPI’s will let you modify, improve, reduce, fasten, the way you work and systems and that way maximize your firm.
3. Risk
You’d rather be comfortable with a monthly paycheck as opposed to the risk and reward of running your own firm.
There is definitely some internal strength that you are going to need in order to be able to soldier through when things get tough and there are ups and downs to practice.
Sometimes you feel the risk is greater than the opportunity.
Hacking’s Hack: http://sproutsocial.com/. Social Media Management Made Easy. Sprout’s collaborative platform ensures smarter, faster and more efficient social communications.
Tyson’s Tip: The Inc Magazine App. http://www.inc.com/. A great and easy app to use. Up to date marketing trends, business advice. Really cool.
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Transcript: The 3 No More Signs
Jim Hacking
I would just want to say that we’re not here to judge anybody. We’re not here to put anybody down or make anybody feel bad. We want you to do what’s best for you. And obviously only you know what’s best for you. So, don’t think that when we talk about these things, or we’re trying to put anybody down, we’re just sort of saying what works for us and sort of where our minds are at.
Tyson Mutrux
Oh, absolutely. And we talked about that. And then the other podcast is being being positive and the positive people, there’s no way in hell, we never want to be negative about anybody. And that’s not the idea. The idea is, I think, is we’re trying to let people know things are tough sometimes, and running a firm is difficult. And the idea what this podcast in general is to help people out and to get them out of those ruts.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking, and Tyson nutrix.
Jim Hacking
Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome, Judy show. We are back on the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.
Tyson Mutrux
And I am Tyson music’s what is going on Jim? Nice. And I have
Jim Hacking
to say I really enjoy recording these early in the morning, as opposed to after my day is underway. Once I get sort of distracted. I think that last show was sort of all over the place, because we did it sort of midday. And I just think we are much clearer and focus when we do it. First thing.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. And I think that one was sort of an impromptu one as well. So that was we were a little less organized. But I was also coming off of that sickness. So I was a little worn out. But I’m really excited about today’s podcast is gonna be a really good one.
Jim Hacking
Well, you came up with it. So I’m gonna let you sort of take the lead on explaining the topic.
Tyson Mutrux
Okay, the topic is the three signs you should close your firm and get a job. There are two types of listeners I think we have is the people that currently have a firm and that they’re kind of moving through things and trying to get better and trying to prove there’s also the people that are trying their their thing about starting their own firm started, maybe they work for another firm, or they’re just at a law school. Those are kind of the two categories, I think. And I think this one is for the people that you know what, maybe you’ve gone down that path, you tried it out, and maybe it’s just not working for you. Now I have
Jim Hacking
to tell you, this topic just brings me great sadness, even to hear you read that sentence of what the topic is. I mean, the idea of closing your firm and getting a job that just to me, it’s almost a Shakespearean tragedy, I know that this is probably not for everybody. And I know there’s probably times where you have to make a good decision and do something like that. But man, it’s it sure bums me out to even think about what set of circumstances would have to occur and what life would look like if we were having to make that kind of a call. And I
Tyson Mutrux
agree that it’s extremely sad. And but some people just they’re not made out to run a law firm, a solo practice a big, firm, whatever it is, maybe they’re just not made out to do it. And so that’s why we came up with this. I’m gonna go ahead and introduce number one. And I think number one is we’ve touched on it before another podcast, but I think it is by far the most important and it’s, you don’t like hustling for clients and maybe you don’t like hustling for clients anymore? And that may be okay, maybe you’re burned out. Maybe you’ve been hitting it every day. I don’t know 15 hours a day for several years now and maybe it’s just not working out and maybe you’re sick of doing that. And if you don’t have the hustle anymore, you should probably hang it up.
Jim Hacking
So you know I love the show Better Call Saul I can’t wait for season three I’m not sure when it’s coming out but whenever I think about lawyers that don’t necessarily want to hustle I think about him standing over his phone and trying to a shooting magic with his fingers at the phone trying to make it ring and I just think of that as a metaphor for lawyers who struggle with bringing in business
Tyson Mutrux
I love that show so much I agree with you the what they call what’s the name they call it was a slick well you know what slick slick Willie was all that a name for me Don’t talk about where he would he would set up slip and fall cases and stuff like that he would hire people to run out in the intersection get hit by a car.
Jim Hacking
That was when he was still Jimmy so yes, I don’t I don’t remember what the slang was for that
Tyson Mutrux
stuff. I think I agree with you 100% He but uh you know why he end up turned out to be a hustler though but he will in season two he was right but yeah, but so you’re right if you can’t just look at a phone and snap your fingers and hope it’s gonna range doesn’t work that way.
Jim Hacking
I had lunch with our mutual friend Nadeem, the Bosnian dream and we were talking over all things law practice management yesterday and he hustles and Amani and I were talking about him last night. The one of the reasons we love Nadeem. Is he really hustles in a smart and, you know, he graduated a year ahead of you, I think and he started his own firm pretty soon thereafter and my man hustles and I say often that you can’t teach hustle. If I ever get the chance to ask a question for Gary Vaynerchuk I’m gonna ask him Do you think you can teach us all because I don’t think you can’t. I think you can develop skills that liken it to hustle but I think hustle is something that’s internal and no We’re saying hustle, we don’t mean like scamming or, you know, taking advantage of people. We’re talking about finding the people that need our services in a way that, you know, is energetic and purposeful, and deliberate in a way that attracts people to you and makes them want to hire you.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, I sort of disagree with you that you can’t teach us Well, I think there’s a certain element that you maybe you can’t teach. And that’s the energy part of it. Someone like Nadeem, the Bosnian dream, I love it. I love it. He calls himself the Bosnian dream. It’s so great because even when you’re talking to him, he calls himself the Bosnian dream. And it’s great. And he’s he’s someone who’s got the energy, right. That’s the part you can’t I don’t know, you can teach. But I think if you had the long term vision, the long term goals in place and your vision, I think that that will motivate you to hustle more. So I think you could teach it if you could sit someone down and say emphasize to them the importance of setting your long term vision, setting your long term goals, setting your short term goals that will help motivate you and maybe allow you to hustle more, but I agree with you there is that certain energy part of it that it is hard to just ingrain in someone, I don’t know if you can teach it. And if you can get Gary Vaynerchuk on this podcast, I will kiss you on the lips. Okay, so you go and try and get that done.
Jim Hacking
I have a plan to have him on my new podcast when I start my BS, Jimmy, but he’s an immigrant. So there’s, there’s an angle there. I don’t know if I have an angle for us. But I think when I talked about not being able to teach us or what I’m talking about is I think we’ve all met those attorneys and worked with attorneys who just don’t care about winning don’t care about they just want to do you know, their job. They just, you know, you give them an assignment and they just sort of do it half heartedly. Those are the people that I think that you can’t quote unquote, teach hustle to
Tyson Mutrux
I agree. I agree completely. Number two is something that’s extremely important. One thing, I don’t think it’s as important as hustling because hustling is, you know, it’s getting the class at the door and moving and shaking. But number two is, you don’t want to monitor your numbers, which we we call KPIs, your key performance indicators. You want to go over your KPIs, we want to go over exactly what you do, or maybe talk about what they are. Yeah, so
Jim Hacking
for me, I mean, overall, I don’t I don’t know that I have a specific list broken down. But for me, obviously, it’s the number of potential clients we’re meeting with each week, the number of new cases that we’re opening each week, you know, cash in cash out, shipping cases, getting cases out the door. You know, in a volume practice, like ours, we always have about 200 Open matters. So it’s, there’s a lot to keep track of, and definitely making sure that we track all those numbers gives me a good sense as to how the next month is going to be if my intake numbers are low, that means my revenue is going to be low in the next month or two after that.
Tyson Mutrux
So your overall caseload for me and for personal injury firm is a KPI. And here’s why. You want to compare your incoming your your new intakes, to your overall caseload. If you see a decrease in your income and tax, but for some reason you you continue to see for personal injury practice, I’m not necessarily talking about yours for personal injury practice and you start to see your overall caseload balloon getting larger, that means you’re not moving your cases fast enough, and that indicates an issue with your firm. So for me, one of mine is actually that overall caseload. I think most people think that oh, you’re gonna have a really big caseload because it means we’re making more money, not necessarily with personal injury practice, because as it begins to balloon as your index begin to decrease, that means you’re making less money overall. And so you’ve got to fix you got to look into your firm and see where your systems are breaking down, because you’re not moving your cases fast enough.
Jim Hacking
Wait till I show you guys that our next Infusionsoft meeting what Kelsey and I have built out on a way to monitor our new case statistics and monitor the cases themselves we finally cracked the code of how to use opportunities to keep track of the cases and I’m really really excited about it and we’re going to implement it with the team next week.
Tyson Mutrux
Very cool and you put a time limit on him or what are you doing?
Jim Hacking
Well no, it’s more about being able to access all the information from the notes from a particular client’s case and get and organize them you know with reports by attorney by processing time by case type so we’re really excited about it.
Tyson Mutrux
Awesome. Well, I’m sure I’m gonna steal quite a few ideas from you just to give everyone an idea I have very similar ones to you but mine are specifically I have my the incoming leads so phone calls that we get and I I break them down by practice area I don’t I also do some criminal as well. Vast majority my case or personal injury, but I also do a little bit of limited number of criminal cases. So incoming leads and we divide that by practice area and then also incoming or new intakes new signups which you can get a bunch of leads but if you’re not converting them and if you’re not getting those actual clients to sign up. And that’s, that’s an issue. Another one is revenue for the month. And then I was tracking revenue for the week, which I think is just it’s too complicated. And there’s, I’m not sure there’s a point for it. But we do do revenue for the month. Now. It’s difficult whenever you have criminal and personal injury, there’s the revenue for the month is more important, really, for criminal cases, because your it shows that you’re moving on. But also, it’s very important for personal injury, because it means you’re, you’re moving those cases. So you had to look at the revenue from each one differently. So the more revenue from criminal cases, that means you’re bringing in more more revenue for personal injury means that you’re moving them faster.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And I remember when I worked as a paralegal law clerk type at Green return. And I was just surprised that attorneys were sophisticated enough to be able to sort of stack their trial date so that they made sure that on a personal injury and product liability kind of a practice med mal, that they made sure to have things scheduled regularly for trial, because that’s when either mediations occurred or trials occurred. And they knew that that’s sort of the timeframe for them getting paid.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah. And you talked about that before I used to schedule one trial a month. Is that what it was one trial a month, so you can make sure you had that recurring revenue? Yeah, not
Jim Hacking
me. They did that. And some of the other attorneys that I’ve followed over the years do that. And I think that’s, you know, it’s so sophisticated. And I remember the first time I heard even just lawyers talking about KPIs and about the idea that you could track a correlation between the number of people that come into your office, and the amount of money you make three months out, I just thought that was sort of mind boggling.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s all about moving those cases. And they’re a very well respected firms. They’ve been doing this for a while. And I think they’ve, they’ve sort of corrected as well, and they figured it out something and I’m not sure if they do anything like this grand Ritter, but something that we also do. And I think maybe you do this, and I’m not sure many people would call the KPI but I consider KPIs is I break my cases down by phases in mind, the personal injury, it’s, there’s five pre litigation phases that we have, and then the litigation phases are broken down into another 10 steps. But I can look at my cases right now and see which cases are in which phase. So it allows me to show where the bottlenecks are. So that’s, that’s another advantage to me where I can look and say, Okay, we’ve got these cases all here stacked up ready for demands we need to get a move in? Or why do we have so many cases still pending medical records? We need to get those moving? If we’ve been requesting them? Why haven’t we received them yet? So there’s, there’s all these that we can look at that allows us to see what’s working and what’s not working? Got it sounds like good stuff. If you’re not breaking them down by that I think maybe you are because you’re using tags, right and moving your cases from one stage to the next. Yep, we are.
Jim Hacking
And I don’t know that I have a set analysis based on that, because usually I get paid up front. So I don’t have to track that for the purposes of knowing when my revenue is going to be coming in.
Tyson Mutrux
And that’s, that’s a different way of looking at it. There’s different practices, some people get paid up front, some people get paid on the back end, so or some people are hourly, and they get paid throughout. So really, there’s different ways that you’ve got to look at it. If you are not someone that wants to track your numbers, you may not be made up for this, because the numbers are crucial. You can get by on a day to day basis and yearly basis, making just a regular paycheck, if you don’t care about tracking the numbers, but if you really want to grow and have a really good firm, that’s the importance of the KPIs. And that’s what we’re talking about. And if you’re not wanting to track those, if you don’t want to grow, that’s fine as well, I guess. But if you really want to grow, you need to track KPIs. And if you don’t need to wrap things up.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I think we made that point. I think you’re right about that. So number three is risk that you’d rather be comfortable with a monthly paycheck as opposed to the risk and reward of running a firm. And I think that there’s definitely some internal strength that you’re going to need in order to be able to soldier through when things get tough, and there are ups and downs to practice. You know, a lot of people sort of glorify going out on their own and thinking, well, I won’t have a boss anymore, and I’ll be able to do what I want. And I don’t have to worry about all these things anymore. But there’s just a different set of issues, a different set of challenges, when you go out on your own. And so not everybody is necessarily cut out for this, I think that you have to be able to stomach those things. You also have to be able to think down the road and think ahead and sort of look at your practice from all angles and, you know, explore your weaknesses. And I think that some people just want to handle cases and and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m just not built that way. I don’t think you are either. And I think that’s sort of why we’ve been drawn to the kinds of practices that we have,
Tyson Mutrux
you know, I was listening to To I think it was NPR the other day, and there was the founder of the awesome Institute, and I don’t remember her name off top my head. And she, it was really interesting to hear her talk about risk. And whenever we made up this list of topics for today, we did a we did this before, listen, this podcast, but doesn’t change what it is. But she talks about how entrepreneurs, the ones that really want to go out there and be entrepreneurs, like running a solo practice, they view risk differently. And this kind of goes back to what you’re talking about before where maybe you just can’t teach hustle. And this could be you may or may not be able to teach being an entrepreneur at this level, because the entrepreneurs, the really the ones that want to be out there and be on the road and hustling and working, they view risk, it’s not viewed as risk. It’s viewed as opportunity. So we look at things differently. And the Aspen Institute is kind of what it sounds, she tries to teach people to be awesome. That’s the kind of way she puts it. I’m oversimplifying it, I think it’s a coaching kind of company, but they’re very successful. And listening to her speaks great, because I think he’s completely true. I mean, whenever I started my firm, I thought of the opportunity side of it. And the risk side of it. I didn’t really look at as much. I don’t know what that was like for you, you had a different path to be where you are now, whenever you worked for firm, did you look at all the risk? I mean, we were You were married at the time, right?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, so I had two or three kids at the time I went out on my own, I was lucky enough to have a wonderful wife who worked full time. And we knew we had our health insurance through St. Louis University where she worked. So that was sort of my, you know, we knew that Imani could pay the mortgage and get our insurance based on her salary. And so then everything else was sort of on me. And I would say that she encouraged me to do much more analysis of the risks, and she wanted, you know, a binder of why I was doing this and where the money was gonna come from. And I was just sort of like, I was not as detail oriented, then as I am now. And I certainly didn’t break it out, like I have lately,
Tyson Mutrux
right? And it’s okay, some people just don’t want to take the risk. And that’s okay, you may view it as a risk as opposed to more of an opportunity. And that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with that. So if you’re running your firm, you’re sitting there, you’ve got your, your box of clients, and you’re thinking, You know what, I’m kind of kind of sick of trying to meet the monthly rent, I’m sick of trying to pay my employees, if you have employees, it’s okay to hang it up. It is it’s not made out for everybody. And so you’re if you’re feeling that risk, I think maybe it is best for you to you hang it up, and you join another firm. And I think if you do if you’re a person that has a box of clients, you can easily find a job with another firm because you’re, you’re very marketable. So I think if someone came to me and said, Hey, I’m kind of sick of running the day to day stuff. I’m gonna box clients, can I just kind of plug into your firm? I don’t know about you, Jimmy. But I may be okay with that. So I think it’s okay, if you if you don’t like the risk, it’s okay to kind of go into another firm.
Jim Hacking
The only other thing I would say is that I think that sometimes you and I might come across as pretty strident, especially me in our views on things. And I would just want to say that we’re not here to judge anybody. We’re not here to put anybody down or make anybody feel bad. We want you to do what’s best for you. And obviously, only you know, what’s best for you. So don’t think that when we talk about these things that we’re trying to put anybody down, we’re just sort of saying what works for us and sort of where our minds are at.
Tyson Mutrux
Oh, absolutely. And we talked about that in one of the other podcasts is just being being positive and any positive people, there’s no way in hell, we never want to be negative about anybody. And that’s not the idea. The idea is, I think, is we’re trying to let people know, just give them ideally, it’s okay to wrap things up if you want to things are tough sometimes. And running a firm is difficult. And if if you’re listening to this, and you you look at these three things, you say maybe maybe they’re right, or maybe, maybe it’s allowing them to identify things they should be doing to improve so that they don’t have to wrap up their shop, they don’t have to join another firm. That’s that’s the idea that the idea what this podcast in general is to help people out and to get them out of those ruts. So I completely agree with you. Give me your hack of the week.
Jim Hacking
My hack of the week is Sprout Social Sprout Social is a social media aggregator where you can get on it’s sort of like Hootsuite, but I like it a little bit better. Where you can get on and put your posts across many platforms. Google Plus still isn’t doesn’t allow there’s no API for Google Plus. So you can’t do it for that. But I don’t think anybody is on Google Plus anyway. But Sprout Social lets you put your all your fees in together and then it also does a really nice job of tracking all of your engagements on social media. So I’ve really enjoyed it during this free period. I think I’m gonna subscribe to it.
Tyson Mutrux
Cool. Now the one that’s monthly subscriptions you’re paying for Jimmy?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, Monty would kill me. I think it’s only 20 bucks a month, but I think I’m gonna go ahead with it.
Tyson Mutrux
You know, I think that $20 A month is like the key number, because I don’t know how many times I’ve heard you say it’s only 20 bucks a month. It’s only 20 bucks. So maybe that’s the number but I guess the key numbers, how many times do you actually keep those services? So that’s really the key number. But yeah, my tip of the week is such a simple one. It’s the Ink Magazine app. And the reason why I like it, even if you don’t subscribe to ink like I do, there’s a today’s most read section from the website. And it’s such a great, easy app to use. You just click on it, and it gives you all the up to date marketing trends, everything else, just a aggregator of articles is what it is, but it’s really cool. So if you if you don’t have the Ink Magazine app, I think it’s really great and such a simple thing. It’s an easy way of getting free, free marketing advice and free business management advice just right at your fingertips.
Jim Hacking
Cool. I just downloaded it.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s really cool. Alright guys, I have nothing else, Jimmy, you
Jim Hacking
know, that’s it. We’ll talk to you next week.
Tyson Mutrux
I’ll see you soon.
