As your firm gets larger…
In this episode Tyson and Jim discuss about the perks of managing a growing firm.
As you hire more people, there are more people that are dependent of you. Sometimes this consumes your time and your energy. Don’t become a bottleneck in your firm.
Keep track of what it is that needs to get done. Make a list and then figure out who’s the best to do it. This will give you more space and time to you to make the things YOU need to do.
KPI: Key Performance Indicators: Things that you can identify, you can look at, that give an idea of what the direction of your firm is. For example: new clients, new leads. If you have your KPI’s in place you can correctly determine whether to hire or not a new employee or which decisions should be made. Put plans in place and follow through.
Hiring employees is difficult and expensive. Not financially but everything else> the time assisting, developing and growing them.
Sometimes, hiring a non experienced employee is better. They don’t have preconceived notions coming to the office and you can train them the way you need.
Hacking’s Hack:
Zig Ziglar’s podcast. https://www.ziglar.com/
Automobile University. You can learn and listen in your car as you commute or travel.
Get the most out of everything. Maximize.
Tyson’s Tip:
The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea (Bob Burg, John David Mann, Penguin UK, 25 feb. 2010).
You give more to referral partners, to your clients, you give and you receive. A simple book, it breaks things down for you with 5 principles.
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up and maximize your firm!
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Transcript: Managing Growing Pains
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. This is episode four. Hard to believe,
Tyson Mutrux
Oh, what’s up? How you doing?
Jim Hacking
Good. Good. Talk to me about our topic for today.
Tyson Mutrux
I may get the wording wrong on this. But the gist of it is, is we’re going to talk about managing growing pains. As your firm gets larger, there are more and more growing pains. Both you and I have experienced this. And it’s something that’s it’s actually constantly frustrating to me, because you should be as a firm constantly growing. I mean, maybe you don’t want to grow, I guess at some some people just like being solos, and they don’t really want to grow any larger than themselves and an assistant or maybe two assistants, but I know I have aspirations to grow my firm. I think you do as well. But there are definitely growing pains that come along with as you hire employees, as you take on more staff as you take on more clients. There are definitely growing pains that come along with
Jim Hacking
that. So you know, when I started, it was just myself and then Adela, my assistant pretty quickly. And back then life was a whole lot simpler, we probably opened up 80 or 90 matters a year and life was good. And we were busy. And the other day, I was sitting here up in my office and you know now we have 12345 of us altogether. And I was thinking to myself, when all with all this activity swirling around me I had one person wanted me to sign some stuff and other person trying to talk to me about a case that they were working on and Marwan was talking to me about scheduling some stuff. And it literally was all this activity like floating around me. And I was thinking to myself, Man life was simpler when it was just $1.09. You know, there’s maybe some nostalgia there but man it’s it’s when you get bigger it’s it’s a lot more hectic.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, there’s definitely I think hectic is the is a good way of describing it. There’s there’s chaos at times, you’re, even though they’re there to get more work done. Sometimes it creates more work for you. And that’s part of the process of growing. But as you hire more people, there’s, there’s more people that are dependent on you. And they don’t have the answer for everything. So they’re coming to you for guidance, or they’re coming to you to figure out how to do something, since you’re the attorney. It is one of those things where it is a gift and a curse at the same time. Because it’s great having these people getting work done and everything else. But it definitely is that takes a piece away from you that of each day, I don’t care how great you have your firm setup, it’s still a piece of us taking every day, just to deal with the people in your firm.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, and you’re getting more done, and hopefully getting it done in a better and more efficient manner. But still, at the end of the day, if you become the bottleneck, that’s a real problem. And I think that’s one thing I really like to keep my eye on is how often am I being the bottleneck for things? How long are things sitting on my desk? How often are people having to bother me, and that suggests that there’s a breakdown in systems or an issue there.
Tyson Mutrux
But sometimes you are the bottleneck around the bottleneck. And I think that’s a common problem with firms. And it really boils down to being you’re caught up being inside the firm working inside the firm and not working on the firm. And so you constantly have to be trying to work on the firm and removing yourself from being in the firm. So working in working on the business, you need to be working on the business as opposed to working in the business.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, and you know, that’s one of the problems with sort of dealing in emergency mode or reactive mode is that when you’re doing that, so often, if you’re spending 90% of your time in reactive mode responding to the needs and concerns of other people, then you’re not doing much of that big picture stuff. And, you know, sometimes it’s a battle to just carve out that 10 or 15% of your day or your week to try to improve things to give yourself more of that space to think and to to expand what you’re doing.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’m gonna put you on the spot here. What are some things that you did things that worked for you things that didn’t work for you during the process of growing your firm that I guess things that worked and things that did not work? Because I know I’ll get some things I’m curious to see what your what your things might be?
Jim Hacking
Well, I think one concept is to just keep track of what it is that needs to get done. I think that you know if you can come up with a laundry list of all the tasks that have to be done at the firm and you know in a global way not particular case things but you know this the mail needs to go out the phones need to be answered the discovery needs to be answered or the forms need to be prepared and And you know, when you come up with that whole laundry list of who or what needs to be done, then you figure out who’s best to do it. And you want to give yourself more space to do the things that only you can do, and to try to push down to other people, the work that they can do efficiently and well. And that’s going to free you up to do the more important work.
Tyson Mutrux
I think it’s great advice. Now you’re talking about like the day to day stuff. What are your thoughts on this is something that I mean, early on, I had no idea what the hell this term meant, but, you know, KPIs, key key performance indicators. I think that is a crucial part of growth. And do you know what I’m talking about? Are you sure, okay, I figured you did. You and I have never really talked about KPIs before. But I’ve got a big getting more and more into them. And just given an idea of people that are listening, what that means key performance indicators are really things you can identify to look at, you can look at it, whenever you’re after one month, six months, one year, five years, it really gives you an idea of what the direction of your firm is. And an example of what that might be is new clients signed up, that’s a key performance indicator for me, you know, so how many, and I track it based upon the last 30 days, the last 60 days, the last six months, and the last year. And so it really gives you an idea, and you compare it year to year, month to month, that gives you a really good idea. It’s just one of them, you know, the amount of money you’re making, it can be another one. But number of new clients, not new leads, but new leads is one of them. For me, I guess for you, I think you do too. you track your leads. Is that right?
Jim Hacking
Yeah, I mean, I think the best way to think about it is, you know, look at the whole collection of your different efforts. So and then you in the drill down, drill down, drill down. So how many people visited my website, then how many people raise their hand and let us know that they were interested in what we provide as immigration attorneys, and then other people that raise their hand? How many schedule a Skype call, or a face to face interview? And then of the ones that actually meet with us? And are considering hiring us? How many of them actually do and then once we sign up a new client, then what’s the lifetime value? And how, you know, how much do they end up paying in legal fees over time? And what kind of a value is that? And then, you know, how many people are we getting referred, and how many people are using us for repeat business. And I think that if you if you think of it in that kind of a flow, it tells you a lot of what you need to know about your KPIs and honesty, our tracking of KPIs is probably a little bit more random and not as detailed as it should be have a general sense of how many cases we open each month how many people meet with us, but we’re working on our Infusionsoft app to do a better job of tracking the hands raised the appointments, the signups and then the overall lifetime value of a client. And
Tyson Mutrux
so let’s wrap this back around to how this even relates to growing pains I had to me, here’s how it does, is it I think most attorneys and this is just based on our multiple conversations, several conversations with attorneys, mastermind groups, things like that, I think what they do is they look at the their bank account. And then they think about how much work they’ve got. And they say, Okay, it’s time to hire a new person. And that’s probably not the right way of doing it. I mean, it works for a lot of people. But if you have your KPIs in place, you can look at, okay, we are increasing our numbers every month, our bank accounts in a good position, our leads are increasing, let’s hire a new person. And if your numbers are going the other way, it’s a huge indicator. That’s why they’re called key performance indicators that you should not hire. So if you’re seeing over time, I mean, I won’t mention his name. But there was a guy that we did a mastermind with it was talking about how, you know, business seemed to be kind of plateauing. It was steady and everything like that. But I bet if he looked at his numbers, he is probably probably seeing a decrease in leads a decrease in new clients. And something like that should not hire a new person that just shouldn’t even though you think that you, okay, I want to work, I want to work on my business. In my business, I want to expand that all the all these great plans, these big schemes, but there are times when you need to look at your firm and say, You know what, this is part of standing outside looking at your business and working on it. I don’t need to expand this point. I don’t need to hire a new person, because I’m just not ready for it. I need to work on other parts. There’s other things in my business and you look at to fix before I hire new staff.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, my wife asked me last year, and my dad asked me because we were just talking about the firm and everything about, well, how much money you’re going to make this month. And and I would say, I don’t know, you know, I, you know, I know we have clients coming in, I don’t know, I can’t give you an exact number. And that’s, you know, one of the issues of being, you know, running your own law firm as you don’t necessarily know, it’s not like a paycheck situation. You don’t necessarily know what kind of month you’re going to have but the KPIs give you the chance to forecast and to sort of see trends so if For instance, if I know that in February I have a lower number of signups then probably in March or April, I’m gonna have less clients and I’m gonna make less money. And conversely, if I have a lot of signups and a lot of new cases, then a little bit down the road, I know a little bit more about how my money’s gonna go.
Tyson Mutrux
Absolutely. The the KPIs, the there’s fantastic, the forecasting, I couldn’t be any better. That was great, because it really does lie to forecast. And I’ve been really confronted this issue, but I think if for firms that buy their own buildings, things like that, I bet if you went to the bank said, Hey, Jeremiah KPIs, they’d be more willing to lend you money. So that’s another thing, another one of those things where if you’re wanting to expand to that extent, grow that rapidly, I’m sure that’s gonna help with your bank to get loans and stuff like that.
Jim Hacking
So you put me on the spot? I’m gonna put you on the spot with another question. Sure. We’re talking about growth and sort of growing our firm, and what percentage of lawyers that own their own firms do you think think like we do? I think a lot of lawyers don’t necessarily think about, you know, the big picture stuff about growth. I mean, I think everybody wants to make more money. But I don’t know how many people actually spend the mental bandwidth on, you know, envisioning and developing steps towards growing. Do you get that sense? I mean, you talk to a lot more lawyers than I do.
Tyson Mutrux
I think the number is bigger than you think it is. Because I think they think about it. I just think the difference is they don’t, they don’t know how to go about, I guess, putting their plans in place. I think that’s the biggest problem. So they think about it, it’s one of those dreams that they have, they’re always constantly thinking about it, not necessarily even talking about it, but they don’t know how to put an action plan in place and then effectuate that plan. So I think that most people do not have that same thought process that we do. I think you and I just have maybe gotten lucky. And so one of the things I mean, just one piece of luck is you know, we met each other, you know, and so we we constantly talking about it, and we were holding each other accountable. I think that if you have certain people in your life that hold you accountable, then you’re more likely to to lay out plans, and then follow through with those plans. But I also have a marketing degree, which really, I think gives me a huge advantage over a lot of attorneys because I think about the the practice of law way different. Whenever you think of practice of law, people think actually about practicing law. And I think of it as running a law practice. So I think that that definitely changes my perspective on things. But I think I think it is shifting, I think that overall, the practice of law is turning into the business of law. It’s taking a very long time. And I still think that the practice of law is way behind when it comes to technology. It’s way behind when it comes to just the idea of running a business because there’s still a lot of people stuck in practicing law that just they’re old school, they don’t want to advertise things like that. So I think it is, there is a portion of the bar that just won’t move on will never move on. They’ll never get to that point where they’re gonna think about like running a business, but it is a it is a low percentage. Yeah, you’re right, that think like we do. But well, let me think let me let me rephrase it. A lot of people think like we do, they just don’t put plans in place and then follow through. I think that’s the biggest part of it. Yeah, I’m
Jim Hacking
sort of laughing to myself, because we did meet at the law school. And I always like to say, well, they don’t teach you this stuff in law school. And the one class that did offer this kind of, there was no class like this when I was in law school. And when you were in law school, you took my class on basically how to open your own law firm. And that’s how we connected and I think of Perry Marshalls book about the 8020 marketing principles, and about the Pareto principle and about how you know, in the whole law school, only 12 students took that class on how to open your own firm. And of all those students, I think you were the one that it resonated with the most. So I think that within the legal community, I think it’s the percentage, I think there’s a certain percentage of people who do think about big picture stuff and who want to grow their firm. But I also think there’s a ton of lawyers who are stuck and frustrated. And they feel like they need some training and some skills and some motivation to take their firm to another level so that they’re not just simply trading time for money. And that’s, that’s sort of the killer. And that sort of when you’re trading your time for money, when you’re only making your money when you yourself are doing the bulk of the work. I think that’s the telltale sign that growth is needed that help is needed, that expansion is needed and that you’re sort of spinning your wheels,
Tyson Mutrux
no question. I think also if you break down the numbers, there are some people that just want to work for a large firm and so they have no interest in actually running a firm or even they want to they want nothing Need to do with it. And I’ve got some friends where I talk to them, you know, hey school on their own, and they just say no, I have no interest in it, I like my job, like, do what I’m doing. And that’s fine. And then there are those portion of people that really are, whether they started their firm at law school, or they started their firm after leaving a firm, they are frustrated, because they’ve never, they’ve never operated a business before no one ever trained them on how to do it. There’s a lot of roadblocks that you don’t think about as you expand. And I do want to talk a little bit about that for people that are listening, that just some of the, I guess, issues that you encounter that you don’t really think about as you do grow. Because I will tell you, the first time I hired somebody, it was terrible, I thought I did a terrible job of training them, I didn’t know it, I didn’t know how to manage an employee, it is so much easier when it’s just you and you and one other person or whatever it is, it is so easy. You can you can leave when you want to, you don’t feel that obligation of getting to the office earlier than your employees. There’s just so much more to it. It’s just so simple. I mean, I can roll out of bed whenever I wanted to if I really wanted to. But now that I do have staff, I feel like I need to get to the office before they do. I’ve got to beat them there. I don’t know if you have that desire. I don’t know what it is what it is, but I’ve had that that urge to to get there before they do I want to be be them to the office. But there are costs are like one of the things that was just really shocking to me, is how expensive it is to hire an employee, not the salary. But just everything else. Am I in the minority on that? Or did you have the same similar shock to hiring a new employee,
Jim Hacking
there’s definitely a cost to it. And I think that there’s the financial, but also just the time of assisting them and developing them and growing them. And then there’s always a chance that they leave, and they do leave and you know, so it can be you know, you don’t want to grow for growth’s sake. But when you need to grow, you need to grow. And I really believe that in a lot of ways, there’s a ton of luck involved. I you know, I think there’s people that do all these psychological tests and character matches and all this stuff. And I understand, trying to micromanage that or control that. But to me, it all comes down to hustle, it all comes down to how much they want to work and how willing they are to be trained and flexible, and also how much they want to win. I think that people who’ve worked. And you know, what I in my hiring philosophy is that people who’ve worked since a young age who know how to hustle. And you know, who want to win, you know, I like to find out what people had to overcome what their hardest things were to deal with in life. And I think those are the kinds of things because the rest of it, you can teach. And you know, I once had a friend who owned a restaurant, he said that they would much rather hire waitstaff who’d never waited before then people who’ve done it before, because they always have their own ways that they want to do things. And that made them a lot less malleable and less interested in learning.
Tyson Mutrux
I cannot agree with that more. So I’ve gone through I’ve had, I’ve had multiple people work for me now. And I recently hired Kelsey. And Kelsey is fantastic. She is an English major. She’s not graduated college yet, but she is an English major. She is a bartender was a bartender, and she had numerous bartending jobs, zero, I’m talking zero Office experience, none, right. And I got to her by someone else recommended or they said, Hey, she’s great. And she the person recommended her is the assistant of another attorney office, and she was a bartender. So I was like, You know what, I’m going to interview her and see what what she you know, what she has to offer. And she’s been fantastic. I could not be more satisfied with her. She doesn’t have any of these preconceived notions coming into the office, she doesn’t think that she knows everything, because she works for some other firm that did it. And those are some of the issues I hadn’t ever people would come into the firm, they would say, Well, we did it this way, the old firm. We don’t do it that way anymore. You know, we we do it this way this firm. Shut up. Yes, I can. It is so frustrating having to tell a person three or four times we do it this way, you may have done it that way at that firm, but we do it this way. And I that is more frustrating than one of the one of the most frustrating things I’ve dealt with, with hiring people. But having someone that was zero expensive spirits that you can just completely train to do things your way, is a is a huge advantage that finding that person is gonna be is extremely difficult. I know, some of the things I was I talked about luck. I mean, as you got lucky with Kelsey, she’s great. Well, you know,
Jim Hacking
the interesting thing is bartenders work hard. They’re on there. They’re on their feet. They’re people people, they have to communicate with all different kinds of people. They have to be ready for anything they deal with drunk people. So you know, they work long hours, and so they appreciate I think what working in an office environment with a nice boss can be a nice contrast to that.
Tyson Mutrux
And I’ve talked to her about that. You’re right I it’s one of the things whenever I was interviewing her, I asked her about the customer service aspect of it and I did ask her because I asked her about give me problems with sometimes clients can be difficult, you know, they want to I was talking to her about the phone policy where they want to talk to me and I even though I explained to them up front, you know, I don’t take unscheduled phone calls. I’ll tell her, you know, sometimes people can get difficult and they really want to talk to me. And they say, it’s a murder. She’s like, What? She said the exact same thing you did. She’s like, No, I have to deal with drunk people on a regular basis. And they can be very difficult problem with doing that. And you’re so right. I think if I could hire 12 bartenders, I would because it’s just it’s, it is so good. I mean, in having someone that doesn’t, doesn’t come into the to the position with all these preconceived notions is so great, really is,
Jim Hacking
was great, because when you come into the office, half in the bag, she’s ready to deal with you.
Tyson Mutrux
I’ve got a wife that makes sure that that doesn’t happen. So
Jim Hacking
hey, by the way, you busted on me last week about the train coming by now you to bust on you with your dog barking in the back.
Tyson Mutrux
I know. I could tell. It wasn’t sure if you could hear it or not. So all right, we got to wrap it up. Oh, geez. Wow, I didn’t realize how much time we had. Well, you got to do your hack attack. And I’ll do my my tip.
Jim Hacking
Hacking hack comes from one of my favorite podcasts, one of my favorite thought leaders who is no longer with us, you wouldn’t think that you could have a podcast after you were dead. But Zig Ziglar does have a podcast it’s put on by his son and a host. And they play clips of Zig. And then they talk about they do riffs off the things that Zig talked about. I’m sure that someone like that, who gave so many speeches, has tons of recordings, and they sort of found a way to bring that to life again. And one of the things that I heard him talking about the other day was automobile University. Now, you know, zig was from down in the south, I think from Texas, and he would talk with drawl. And he goes, I want to talk to you today about automobile University. And so automobile University is the idea that you can read books, or listen to podcasts in your car that if you turn off the radio, if you turn off talk radio, and, you know, listen to things that are beneficial, they’re going to help you grow that help you think things like our podcast or things like books from Audible, these that you can really make the most of your time. You know, if you’re driving half hour to work each day, that’s an hour a day, and that’s five hours a week, you can get probably 10 or 15 books, read it in a year, if you make the most of that time and a lot of what we talked about maximum lawyers getting the most out of everything that you got. And I really think that automobile University is a way to really develop some skills. Certainly, I’ve learned more about marketing, because unlike you, I was not a marketing major. And I’ve had to sort of teach myself all this on the fly. And so there’s some podcasts that I’ve listened to 150 or 200 episodes of and I’ve just learned a time.
Tyson Mutrux
That is actually a great segue into what my tip is. The book is The Go Giver. And I think the Go Giver is one of the most influential books I’ve ever read. Have you read it?
Jim Hacking
No. But you know, our friend, Virginia muskies interviewed him the other day.
Tyson Mutrux
You’re kidding me? No. Oh, wow. I didn’t know that. That’s Bob
Jim Hacking
Berg, right? Yes. Actually, she did. She interviewed him on YouTube. I don’t know how that happened. But he’s a really great guy. He always responds to my tweets. He’s a really good guy. But I haven’t read his book. So
Tyson Mutrux
Jim Gura thinks he’s a fantastic guy, too. And these people don’t know Jim gurez or Virginia Miss Keyes is. But Virginia Miss Keyes she runs? Is it the regional area of BNI? Yes. Okay. She’s one of those people where you see her and you’re like, oh, my gosh, she has all this energy. I don’t know where she gets his energy from. She’s always constantly moving. She’s She’s a great person too. Then Jim Crow is a financial advisor over at Oppenheimer. He’s a good guy as well. He’s also one of the guys has a lot of energy. What the tell the story about the mastermind, where you called him out sometimes. So maybe, well, maybe well, we will have him on so we can talk about it. But so the Go Giver, the ethical good for principles. And I’m not gonna go through all of them because I know we’re going through time. But the basic gist of it is, is that you give more to your referral partners, to your clients to people in general. You give and you’ll receive that’s the basic give and take of it. But it is just one of these very influential books. So once you read it, you’re like, oh my gosh, and it seems so simple wherever you read the book, but it really just breaks things down for you. And there’s five principles that they go by and I read it in a night I read the book I was so just sucked into it that I read it. I was up till three in the morning reading the book. It was incredible. So I recommend the Go Giver by Bob Berg.
Jim Hacking
Cool. Check it out. Cool. All right. So thanks, everyone, for listening. Make sure to check us out on our Facebook page which you can reach at maximum lawyer.com backslash FB, Tyson. You got anything else for us?
Tyson Mutrux
Nope, that’s it.
Jim Hacking
I will talk to you next week.
