In this episode Tyson and Jim introduce themselves and tell us how they began their law journey.
Hacking´s Hack: Go on and listen to Dean Jackson and Joe Polish talk about marketing in their podcast – http://ilovemarketing.com/
Go back and start from the beginning, there are lots of great podcasts about marketing!
Before unit, during unit, and after unit: you come upon them at different stages of your project. Learn how to manage them.
Tyson´s Tip: Basic, but elemental: The Top Five.
Every day you should write 5 things to be done. The same with your week. At the end of the day and the week they must be done. Small tasks are just fine, but write them done and get them done, this will keep you moving forward. Green pen for the completed tasks, and red for the non completed. You will hate to take out that red pen!
The Maximum Lawyer Podcast. Partner up and maximize your firm!
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Transcript: Introducing The Maximum Lawyer Podcast
Jim Hacking
Oh, it’s finally here. I’m glad to get our podcasts up and running
Tyson Mutrux
is we’ve been talking about it for a while. And then we finally hammered something out. And now we’re here. We tell.
Jim Hacking
So I know you’ve had prior podcasts. And I’ve had to and I certainly hope that this one is built to last, I think that we have a lot to talk about, I think you and I have been talking about issues related to running our own law practice for many, many years. And I think the thought process behind the podcast was that we might as well record some of this stuff and put it out there to the community that it’ll help us grow as lawyers help us grow as business owners and hopefully give some tips and thoughts to other people and ways that they might be able to improve their practice.
Tyson Mutrux
Right. And we’ve I mean, we’ve met for I don’t know how many hours on hours with, with our, just you and me and then with other attorneys, where I mean, whether it’s masterminds that we’ve done, whether it’s just, you know, our own personal masterminds that we’ve done, I agree with you, the last one we did, there’s a lot of value that we’ve added that we take a lot from it, too, we learn as we go, I think I think we’ve got a lot to share. You’ve been practicing
Jim Hacking
for how long now since 1997. So 17 years,
Tyson Mutrux
you gotta lay up on me when it comes to the legal experience, you’ve been doing this a little bit longer. But I’ve been doing this for for six years. But I still think I’ve got a lot to add, I’ve learned a lot from you have learned a lot from other sources. I think I think as we go people really get a lot from this.
Jim Hacking
I think this reminds me of how we actually met, you were still a law student when we met. And I remember, I was teaching a class at the law school about how to open your own practice and how to manage your own firm and, and I remember you sitting in the front row taking copious notes. And and there weren’t many people in your law school class who are even thinking about running their own firm, while they were still in law school. But I know there’s a lot of people out there, either because of the economy and they don’t have a job or because they just want to do this. They have an entrepreneurial bent and they want to start their own firm. I think that you are sort of the head of the class when it came to that.
Tyson Mutrux
And I always had that passion of starting my for my head that entrepreneurial bent, I guess, as you put it, and there are a lot of people out there, though, that had really listened my whenever I graduated where they just, they either weren’t ready, they didn’t have a job coming out of law school. So they’re forced into solo practice, they were laid off because the economy was terrible at the time. There’s I mean, there’s a lot of reasons I think you’re right, they’re forced into that, or they just want to do it. And so either if you’re they’re forced into doing it, or if you really want to do it, we can help guide that along the way and tell people the things that the mistakes that we’ve made, the things that we’ve done that have worked, and you’re right, I really had that passion at a law school. And I think so one of the things I do want to talk about at some point is why I didn’t decide to go straight out of law school to start my firms. I didn’t do that. I think that’s a terrible idea. But I think at some point, we want to get into that because I didn’t have the experience, I had the passion to do it. If I had the knowledge, I would have gone straight out of law school and serve on firm. I thought that was a terrible idea. But the reason why I was taking such copious notes is because I knew at some point, I was going to start my own firm, it’s just a matter of time, I needed to gain that legal knowledge first.
Jim Hacking
And why did you know that? How did you know that so early? I think that’s unusual that I want to
Tyson Mutrux
start on firm. Yeah, it was, you know, I don’t know. I that is, you know, that’s a good question. I don’t know why I wanted to do it. It’s something that I just knew I wanted to start and build something I guess I feel like I’m a builder. Like I really have this passion of just building growing things. And so it’s interesting. I don’t think you’ve ever asked me that question. I can’t tell you why I started want to start the firm. I can’t tell you though, I do have a marketing background. And I the firm that I used to work for I did see some some of the issues that I didn’t like where I thought that the clients weren’t the center of the universe like they should have been. So that was a problem for me. I do know that, you know, it was weird. So like my perspective has changed quite a bit but it’s still similar but at the time I remember thinking the client is everything, you know, the client is everything. You want to make sure that the client is always taken care of. And you know, they’re a very difficult client So that’s why my focus has shifted a little bit on that. But the client, for the most part should be the main goal, you should be there to help them. And I don’t think all attorneys think of it that way they think of it. As you know, it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all about me, it’s all making money. And I do remember I wanted to really help people that’s still true to this day is where helping people solve very difficult problems is part of what I like to do. And I will be completely honest with you, I think a lot of that stems from where I used to work when I used to work for State Farm Insurance, their main goal, which is sounds weird, because everyone knocks insurance companies, but it was always about the insured, always taking care of the insured, do everything you can to take care of that person and solve their problem. And so I think that’s a lot where that comes from, and my parents own own business and growing up, they’ve owned the business. And so I think a lot of that entrepreneurial spirit comes from that part of it as well.
Jim Hacking
Well, here’s the interesting thing. I think that it’s not unusual that you couldn’t put your finger on the fact or the reason behind why you wanted to go out on your own. I think a lot of lawyers, either those in law school, or those who have been out for a while, I think there just comes a time where people start to have that itch that they want to scratch. They think that they’re good lawyers, and that that’ll make them good law firm owners. And you know, the gap between being a good lawyer and running a successful firm is huge. And no matter how long you were practicing, you know, I was out 10 or 11 years when I went out on my own maybe even 12. And I, you know, you just don’t even know what you don’t know. So I think that for anyone who has made that leap, or thought about making that leap that, you know, there’s a lot you can do to get ready for it. But there’s also a lot that you’re just gonna learn on the fly.
Tyson Mutrux
It’s interesting that you kind of describe it as an edge. And it’s almost like a fire, though, isn’t it? Someone’s like this deep burning fire where you’re just it from them. At least that’s how it was. for me. I mean, it’s like once things where you just, it’s brewing, you want to do it, you want to do it, you want to do it. And finally, the flame gets big enough for you, it takes off, you know, the fire takes off. And I’m assuming that’s probably how it was with you. I mean, you practice for that long before you took that leap. What made you what lit that fire to to get it to spread?
Jim Hacking
Well, this is great, because it gives me the chance to point back to our new blog at the maximum lawyer.com website. And that’s sort of what I wrote about this week in my introductory blog posts, which is sort of having seen my dad go out on his own when he was 47. My dad after he was in the Marine Corps, he started on a survey crew, for a small engineering firm, and all of that, and he sort of helped that firm grow in size. He eventually he started on the survey crew. And he eventually worked his way up to be the head of marketing for the company. And so in 1990, he and his partner, David went out and started their own architectural engineering firm, they started with three employees. And interestingly, last week, we went out to brunch with my parents. And afterwards, my dad wanted to show my kids, his company, and they have like 140 or 150 employees. Now they have a huge space. And it was very motivating for me, because I was sort of doing the math and trying to figure out how old he was when he went on his own. And I just think that when you have good role models, and you, you know, I was lucky to work with some really successful attorneys who did good legal work and ran successful firms. So I thought that I wanted to do that too. And I’m sure you’ve come across attorneys, Tyson who are disheartened and sort of somber and sort of down in the dumps about running a law practice or about being a lawyer. And many of them are tied to other attorneys for their business. They depend on other attorneys for their livelihood in that they don’t necessarily have their own client base. And so I realized, after a while that an attorney is only as free as which clients he or she has that if you are beholden to other people, for legal work for your cases, then you’re going to be really hamstrung in your freedom to decide what you want to do.
Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and it’s let me say that because I there’s there’s a time really and actually all the way back to law school. I think about that, because Debbie champion who is a good friend of yours and who I know well, through you, Debbie champion talked about that, and her big whenever her firm split up. And she talked about how different it was between the people that had clients and the people that didn’t have clients. And that really stuck to me. So that’s from the get go. I always worked on getting my own clients. It’s something where whenever I speak to law school classes, and I know you do too, I always ask the question, what’s the most important thing about practicing law? And everyone talks about, oh, it’s about you know, knowing the law or being good in the courtroom. And I say wrong to all the questions because none of them get it right. It’s getting clients. Because you can’t do any of that. Unless you’re a client. Unless you have a client, you can’t, you can’t take care of that client, you can’t be best at the law, you can’t be best in the courtroom, you can’t do any of that you can’t write appeals, whatever, unless you have a client that comes through that door. That’s absolutely the most valuable resource you have, the most important thing to do, as an attorney is get those clients in the door. Because otherwise, you’ve got nothing, you get fired, if you’re 510 years, 20 years into the practice and you get fired. Guess what you’re looking for a job, you can’t go out on your own. If you have to, you’re not very valuable as an employee, because you don’t have a client base, you’re just more valuable. As an attorney, you can make a lot more money if you have those clients. I mean, that is a big part of it. If you’ve got that steady flow of clients, whether it’s from referrals, whether it’s from a website, or videos, whatever, whatever Facebook, whatever source you have of getting those clients, that is gold, that’s the most important thing. And you definitely know that. And one of the things that you and I are not really different on but how we approach things. I’m more about the during unit stuff you’re more about before unit. But both of us know that the most important part of it is bringing those clients. It’s so
Jim Hacking
great that we’re talking about this in our very first podcast, I think it’s a sign of things to come. Because I do think there’s an eternal debate between those attorneys that are the rainmakers, that bringing the business and those attorneys who do the legal work. And I think that a lot of law firms break up. And I think there’s a lot of times that there are resentments, because everyone thinks that what they do is the most important, but I think it is absolutely undeniable that you can always find lawyers to do the work, and that it’s the ones who bring in the business who really set the tone for the success of the firm. You’re absolutely right, that you can’t do work for imaginary clients. And you can also, if you’re the best lawyer in town, but nobody knows about you, it’s really doesn’t do much good because you’re gonna be bankrupt. Pretty quickly,
Tyson Mutrux
I want to mention something about what you just said, there’s an attorney, I know he’s fantastic. I’m not gonna mention his name. But he is fantastic. I think he’s great in the courtroom. I’ve actually tried a couple of cases with them. But the problem is, he told me, he said, You know, I wanted to focus on getting becoming a really, really good attorney. And I figured I’ll make money in the on the back end. That sounds like a really great theory, it really does. Because you should focus on being a really good attorney. But just because you become a really good attorney doesn’t mean those, those clients are just gonna start pouring in. And I think he’s starting to see that now. He and I have had more and more discussions. And he didn’t focus on bringing those clients at the door, he focused on being a really, really good attorney, which he is, I think he’s a fantastic attorney. But I don’t think he’s doing too well, with clients, you know, financially, because he hasn’t focused on bringing those clients in, you’ve got his parallel channels. And this one was things where it’s, it can be very difficult about practicing law is you’ve got to not only focus on clients, but also be being a really good attorney, you only focus on one of those channels, you have to focus on both. And so that’s a very, very important part of what we do.
Jim Hacking
Yeah. And we’ll be talking about this later on with our guests and with everybody else. And in my mind, that debate is over. And you know, one of the things I wanted to point out to you just mentioned a really good lawyers, I worked for a guy right out of law school, who was just a terrible person, he would curse out the people that worked with him, he would yell at attorneys. He was just a mean, nasty person. And there was an attorney who had worked for this person for 10 years. And he basically had to take it because that other attorney had no business and he got all of his work from this terrible person. And it was readily apparent that my friend, the nice attorney who worked for the mean, attorney was miserable. And he just stayed there because he had bills to pay. He had golden handcuffs. He, you know, had no real clients of his own, and he just had to take it and it was not fun to watch. It was not fun to watch. And it’s not, you know, anything that I ever want to be a part of.
Tyson Mutrux
I agree with you. I didn’t want to shift focus a little bit, because I mentioned before Yeah. And during it. Do you want to kind of explain that for Buddy, what, what we’re talking about and where we get that from?
Jim Hacking
Well, yeah, so this is actually Tyson and I are going to end the podcast with a tip from Tyson and a hack from hacking. And I guess I could just go ahead and give my hack now because I would be remiss if we didn’t start our first podcast by mentioning someone that I probably mentioned a lot on this podcast, and that’s a guy named Dean Jackson. Dean Jackson is the co host of one of our favorite podcasts called I love marketing. I highly recommend that our listeners go back and start at the beginning of the I love marketing podcast, they’re up to about 250 episodes. And Dean Jackson and Joe Polish I think are two of the smartest people that I know when it comes to marketing. I really enjoyed their podcasts I’ve Believe it or not, I’ve listened to the first 100 episodes twice, and I’ve listened to all the episodes once and I started late. So I had a lot to listen to. And I listened to it in the car at the gym, and I highly recommend it. But Dean Jackson and Joe Polish talk a lot about the before unit, the during unit and the after unit. And this is sort of talking about clients and interactions with clients and sort of how they you come upon them at different stages. And the before unit is really about marketing to prospective clients and sort of everything that you do to encourage them to raise their hand to let you know that they’re interested in what you have to sell. And then the during unit is from the time that they’ve agreed to hire you to the fulfillment to making them happy and giving them sort of a wow experience. And then the after unit is what you do after the fact to encourage them to use you again as your attorney or to refer you to other people. And I love marketing is not certainly not focused on lawyering and lawyer marketing, but there’s a ton that we can learn from them. And from that approach in thinking about how to grow our firm and grow our client base, and to help people know like, and trust us.
Tyson Mutrux
That’s that was a fantastic description. So now Yeah, give us your hack. What’s your hack?
Jim Hacking
Oh, my hack is that everyone should go ahead and listen to that podcast. Gotcha. You know, go back started episode one. And I do enjoy when Joe and Dean have on other guests. But to me, if you don’t want to listen to all of them, I would listen to episodes one through 20 All the ones where they don’t have guests. And I think that just hearing their approach, Joe Polish will tell you and you’ll hear often that he was a dead broke carpet cleaner, who was living off credit cards. And he came across sort of direct marketing principles. And, you know, learned about how to make an irresistible offer, where he would offer to clean a room of someone’s home for free just to show them how wonderful his service was, and how that invariably led him to, you know, a good carpet cleaning business. And then eventually he grew that to a coaching business. And now he runs the most successful mastermind group in the country. He charges $25,000 a year for people to be in his mastermind group, Dean Jackson advised real estate agents and how to grow their practice. He’s super smart. I love listening to him. I’ve taken one of his courses. I think he’s absolutely brilliant. And I it’s I guess it’s strange that people on a podcast would encourage you to listen to another podcast, but there’s really just no no other free learning out there that I’ve come across as nearly as good.
Tyson Mutrux
No, it’s really addictive to listen to, they break down things in a such a great way. They break down an advertisement, Dean Jackson has the part about creating an advertisement for print. And then they I really love the before, during and after part of it. They really break that down and how to analyze your own business and the before, during and after. And one of the things I want to talk about is the reason why I wanted you to explain it because you do a much better job of just describing the before during and after that I do is that you focus much on the before and I focus a lot on the during we both use Infusionsoft and you primarily use it to bring in business as the mean. And just so we’re clear, I also focused my business upbringing in business. But when I when we were talking about before, during and after I focus a lot of really my teaching on the during unit. And that’s because they focus on really things on making yourself more efficient and effective and running your business. 99.9% probably of my firm is run on Infusionsoft automating letters, phone calls, emails, tasks done and you focus a lot of your practice on the automation of the bringing in the clients. So I think when people listen to us talk, they’re gonna see the Oh, yeah, Jim talks a lot about the referring before unit. And Tyson talks a lot about the during unit. So there it is interesting how you and you notice that one day when we’re talking because as we’re as, as we were planning this podcast, and the website and everything else, you had noticed that you said, here we go again, we’re going back to I’m talking about the before unit, you’re talking to the during unit. So it’s really interesting to, to really, we kind of break things down. That’s how you and I divide
Jim Hacking
Well, and that’s what I’m really excited about with the podcast is because I think that we both still have a lot to learn from each other. And from hopefully, we’re going to build a community around this maximum lawyer thought this idea that we can help other attorneys and that there are attorneys out there who want to win who want to succeed, who want to grow, have a growth mindset. And so I’m really excited about the blogging and the podcast because I think it’s really going to help us become more focused. And I want everyone who’s listening to know that I don’t hold myself out as any kind of Guru. I don’t think you do either. I think it’s much more that we’re all going to sort of learn on this together that we all have a lot to learn that we don’t know where this podcast is gonna take us. We don’t know where our law practice is gonna take us but as long as we’re focused Son helping people solve their problems doing good work and trying to automate things. And I think we’ve got a lot to talk about in this podcast. I think there’s a lot of topics. There’s a lot of great back and forth that is going to help both of us as we make the podcast become better lawyers and better managers of our law firm. We
Tyson Mutrux
don’t hold ourselves as gurus. I think it was kind of eye opening to us as we were doing masterminds. And when we when we go to speak at places, we’ve got something to share, people take away from what we what we have to say. And so that’s why we’re doing this. We’re just doing this. We’re trying to share what we know, because it makes other attorneys better and makes us much, much better. So it’s that we do feel like we’ve got something to share with people, whether it’s just one small thing and episode, whether it’s 10 Things In episode, we do feel like we’ve got a lot to tell people. Do you only get in my tip? Or do you want to keep going for a little bit?
Jim Hacking
No, I think we’re about out of time. I think it’s time for Tyson’s tip. Let’s hear it.
Tyson Mutrux
Alright. So this one is so basic, but I love it and people who every time I share it, people love it. And it’s something that I got from Brendon Burchard. And it’s an adaptation between his and then John Fisher, who I’ll talk about a lot, I’ll probably talk about John Fisher more than you will, because I love John Fisher. But he, they both do something called I don’t think Brendon Burchard calls it this, I think John Fisher call it has something like this, he calls it the top five. So what every day. And actually sometimes the day before I’ll do it is I have my five things for the day that needs to be done. And I also do it for the week. So the really the most effective way of doing it is you pick five things for the entire week that you need to get done. And by Friday at 5pm, they must be done. And then you should start your day also your day with five things to get done. And it can be small tasks, it can be as, as small as I need to send this email to somebody, whatever it is, but you think about your day, you get these things on the back your mind, I’ve got to get this done, I gotta get this done. And then just never get done. Because you’re not you don’t put them on your list, you don’t check them off. So every day I get an index card out, I write the five things that need to be done that day. And before I leave that day, whether it’s five o’clock or eight o’clock or 10 o’clock, whatever time it is, I must have everything checked off. And if I don’t have yet, I’ve got two pens, I’ve got a green pen, and I’ve got a red pen. And the red pen means I didn’t get it done. And I hate getting that red pen out. Because it’s just a sense of failure to me. So at the end of the day, I mark out green, green, green, green, green, to make sure that I’ve gotten all those things done. And then by the end of the week, you want to look you want to go through and see okay, what things have I gotten done? What things have I not gotten done? And then also look at your top five for that week? Did you get those five things done? And you should? You absolutely should if you don’t get the red pen out market not complete. What it does is it does two things. One, it moves you forward, because you’re getting things done. The other thing is, is it’s keeping you accountable. And if you have a staff like you and I have staff, we do it as a team. I don’t know if you do it, but we do it we meet at we actually meet every morning via Google Hangouts. And then also at the at the end of the week, we meet as well to go over are we getting the things done that we need to get done? And I will tell you, it’s so simple, but it helps your practice so much because you start you’ll see oh my gosh, I’m getting so much more done next, I’m keeping myself accountable. So that’s, that’s Tyson’s Tip of the Week.
Jim Hacking
And that’s a great tip indeed. So we’ll have my hack and Tyson’s tip in the show notes. I’m really looking forward to the podcast today. And I think we’ve got a lot to talk about. And I’m excited about doing this with you.
Tyson Mutrux
I have to I’m incredibly, incredibly enthused about this. I can’t wait to share a lot of stuff you and I have a load of things that we just want to just let people know about and I’m super excited. I think people are gonna get a lot out of it.
Jim Hacking
Alright, but we’ll see you next week.
