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This week Tyson and Jim discuss mistakes they see related to intake and firm owners not knowing their numbers. 

2:35 the earlier you set up systems up the better
4:40 jumping from system to system
6:00 leads
12:50 maximum law in minimum time
13:58 how many qualified leads do you need
17:00 increasing revenue by knowing your numbers
18:34 polishing the silver
20:28 product and process goals

Jim’s Hack: Bullet journaling – helping with daily tasks and accountability.

Tyson’s Tip: Google Tasks – scheduling tasks with the Google tasks app which syncs with your Google calendar.

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Transcript: “Intake and Numbers” w/ Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux

Speaker 1
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.

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

Tyson Mutrux
Today’s music what’s up? Jimmy?

Jim Hacking
Is that fun how we can just start a show like out of thin air and just like we go from talking like regular people into having an actual podcast?

Tyson Mutrux
It is it’s, it’s, it’s like we’ve done it before to know I think it’s I think in Florida, it’s a lot of fun is really interesting. Like, we get to edit it out. And I always whenever I’m listening to podcast, I’ll hear like an abrupt stop to a conversation. And then it begins on another topic or something. I wonder, like, no wonder what they cut out there. So it’s Yeah, it is interesting.

Jim Hacking
So we were talking with some friends recently, maybe yesterday about their law firms and about intake and their numbers. And I thought that continuing our conversation about some of the mistakes that we see people make, I thought we could talk about the mistakes that we see with intake and the mistakes that we see with people not knowing their numbers.

Tyson Mutrux
I think that’s a great one. I think that’s a good one that you just pick two. That’s because we just had that conversation. So what do you think are the are the key numbers people need to know?

Jim Hacking
Well, and it’s great, because the two things do tie in together your intake process and your numbers. And I think we should get to the numbers. But I think maybe we want to talk a little bit about intake first. Now, I don’t know how much of my series with Gary Falco, with to listen to, but it’s certainly the kind of things that we talk about a lot. In fact, we just talked about it last Saturday, but you know, the lawyers being involved too much. But I think with intake, the main problem that I’m seeing with the people that we talk to is that it’s sort of haphazard, there’s not a system to it, there’s too much attorney time involved. And it’s sort of directionless, and there’s not really a sustained system for filtering out good leads from bad leads.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and it’s I think the mistake people make is they think, oh, it’s not that important, I’ll do that when I’m bigger. And in, in reality, it’s the earlier set these systems up, the better it is for your firm, because you can just grow upon them, and build and build and build and then your you’ll those numbers will help you accelerate your growth. But you and I have done it too. We, we didn’t do a very good job of tracking our numbers early on, either we should have. And I can only imagine where I would have been if I would have tracked my numbers earlier. I remember starting with a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet became just too burdensome to deal with. And so I should have started a long time ago with a CRM and I didn’t, but there’s, there’s no better time to begin than now.

Jim Hacking
That’s right. That’s right, especially as people are thinking about their goals for next year. And you know, this conversation that we’re having is all a precursor to the maximum law minimum time course that we’re launching in January. And even I would say some sophisticated law firm owners are still sort of futzing around with the wrong intake system, and they’re doing the wrong thing. So try to segment out who’s a good lead and who’s not a good lead?

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I’m not gonna, I’m not going to call out because it’s not it’s not even really a call out. But I’m not gonna mention this person’s name. That was that had asked the question yesterday, because they were asking you, you know, which what’s the right system? Jim, what’s the right system? I don’t think the really matters the system, when it comes to CRM, it matters a little bit, but not as much as what people think the main thing is just having a system, you know, having a system in place that tracks them. Because what you really need is, you know, you want to be able to track who they are. So like the type of contact they are, whether it’s a lead, or whether it’s a client or an attorney, or whatever it is, you know, what they are, who they are, and their contact information. If you can get a CRM just with that basic information. That’s a fantastic start. So don’t get bogged down in what’s the right one, what’s the right one, because 99% of them is that you can migrate the data away from them into the right platform once you find it. But the most important thing is use one of the free ones, if you don’t have one to use right now, if you don’t want to pay for one, if you don’t have the money to pay for one, just get one of the free systems and run with it.

Jim Hacking
You’re telling one of the software systems executives, right? Yeah, one of the mistakes that we see people making is that they get so latched on to while either jumping from one CRM to another or looking for this world class, CRM that does absolutely everything. And that’s, that’s sort of crazy. And it’s sort of preventing you from focusing on the things that are really important and the things that are really important. Are you know, who’s contacting you the number one thing is you have to be capturing everybody who contacts you so somebody can As your office, you’re definitely getting their full name, their their email address and their cell phone number, those are must and then the topic that they’re calling about, you’ve got to start recording that right from day one. And then you have to be able to market to those people on a regular basis, they’ve called you for a question, you’re going to trade the answer or the direction that that they might need to go in, in exchange for that cell phone number and that email address. And I don’t necessarily like the concept of a funnel. But and the reason I like the concept of a funnel is because it’s just so overblown, and everybody’s talking about fix your funnel, or, you know, you got to get more people in your funnel. And I generally don’t like that. But conceptually, if people could see me now, if you’re really talking about how do we get more people into the top of the funnel, and then how do they narrow down so like you said, there’s people that call your office, that’s like, the basic big group, and you’re gonna split that group right away into current clients and potential clients. And then when you you call out the current clients, because they’re going to go into a different system, they’re going to be dealing with your paralegals, and the people handling their case. So so now we have all the potential leads who have called your office, and then from there, we’re going to go to all the lead to call your office who might have a case. So that’s going to take a big chunk of those people out, and the funnel is going to narrow. So now we’re at people who have people who’ve called as a lead, who have the kind of case that you would like to handle, that’s the most important number right there, that’s the first most important number, that’s where you really want to drill down to, you want to throw out all this stuff that aren’t those. So let’s say you’re getting 20 of those a week, that’s pretty good. You’re getting 20 of those a week, and you’re happy with the 20 that you’re getting. And then how many of those people actually schedule a console, so that number is probably gonna drop, or that our console worthy. Either your, your leads team is vetting them out, or they’re a little bit weird, or the central limitations ran, or whatever, I’m trying to think of your cases more than mine. So now we’re down to the people that we’ve qualified. So we’ve gone from cases that we want to qualified leads. And then the next big question is, of the qualified leads, how many? Are we actually signing up? That’s the next really big question. And I think most people are full of shit when it comes to that question. I was right, Harland cylinder said something in the big group about a year and a half ago, two years ago. And I was like, man, he said, about how you have to know your numbers. And I was all defensive. Man, I know my numbers. I know my numbers. I know all that. I didn’t know my numbers at all. And I think most law firm owners don’t. And the two people that were talking to yesterday don’t really know their numbers. And these are the numbers that are most important. And then, and then of course, how does that translate into revenue?

Tyson Mutrux
In what you’re going to, as you grow, you’re gonna get pushback from your team, and you got to know that this is coming going into it, because they’re gonna say, well, this isn’t even a case, why do I have to put it into the system? You’re like, why don’t I? Why do I need this information, let’s just get them off the phone and move on to the next person. And, Jim, you know, best as to why that you need to track this information. But so you can mark it to them later on. I mean, that’s a big part of it. But then you but you can also track those numbers. For example, let’s say that we’re getting 100 calls a month on, I’m gonna say 1983 cases, because we’ve been getting a lot of calls on those. And we don’t like taking those cases. So we’re getting a lot of calls in 1983 cases, we put them into the system. And then we were basically just refer them out to someone, I want to know, if we’re getting a bunch of calls on that. It doesn’t, I think that they think, Oh, we don’t need this information, because we’re not gonna take them on as a as a client doesn’t that’s not what matters is, if I see that we’re getting 100 calls in 93 cases, and it’s eating up our time, we need to then go and look at our videos that we’re recording, we need to look at our website content to see if that stuff needs to be adjusted. Because that’s a problem. We were getting a lot of nightshade, three phone calls, which we don’t want. And so we’re referring them all out. And they’re not very generally not very good cases. So we’re going to call blue shark and say, Hey, let’s let’s take down the 93 content, because it’s getting a bunch of these calls that we don’t want, and they’re not good cases. So there are all these other reasons why you will want to track this data, not just because, you know, they might be a client or you can market to them down the road. And

Jim Hacking
you might shoot a video that says here’s why we don’t take 1983 cases, right? to actively repel the people that you don’t want to call and clog up your phone line. But the other thing that might happen is somebody calls up and they have a dog have a 1983 case, but they go into your database. And you decide, Alright, once a month or once every two weeks or once a week or once every day, I’m going to email my list and tell them different things about what’s going on. And then six months later, they’re on your list. They’re sitting at the dentist’s office waiting to see their dentist they pull up their phone, they go Oh, an email from Tyson. I haven’t heard from him in a while. I’ll look at that. So Tyson talks about this med mal case that he partnered up with Gary Burger. are on, and they got a $3 million verdict. And they’re like, Oh, my aunt just died on the operating table I should call Tyson. That’s the reason why that’s the whole value of it. I mean, that email list is your most valuable commodity. No one else owns your email list. Only you own your email list. And the Facebook algorithm might change. Google ads might go through the roof. But the one place you can compete as a small firm solo person is with your email list.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I’ve always said this, you’re way better at doing it than I am. Let me ask you something. You have good stories of your clients on there a lot. And that’s my favorite part of your newsletter. That’s the only I will skim through all the other BS that you’ve got in there just to read that stuff. I’m wondering, do your do your clients like want to be on there? Like, are they like, oh, I can’t wait to be on Jim’s newsletter. Is that something that you ever get from them?

Jim Hacking
Immigration is weird that way. But yeah, we do. Just because there’s so much of a thirst for knowledge in my practice area, like people aren’t sitting around thinking, you know, what’s the statute of limitations on a slip and fall on city property. So an article like that isn’t going to connect, but you’re right, those success stories are people’s favorite ones, they love to hear about, you know, helping a client overcome a problem. Those are there ones that they love to see the clients faces, they love to see the progression, like when we can tell people we’ve been helping this guy for 10 years, and we’ve taken them all the way from undocumented to citizenship or something like that. Those are the ones that really resonate with people for sure.

Tyson Mutrux
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Jim Hacking
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Tyson Mutrux
I want to go back to your main topic, I’m gonna kind of circle back Sure, I want to talk about one of the numbers in particular, and that’s average fee. And that’s, to me, that’s the number one number. And I think you probably think it’s a different number. But I think that’s the number one number. And I just wanna get your thoughts on on tracking the average fee that you have for each for each of your cases.

Jim Hacking
Well, in our course, when I make another plug, maximum law, minimum time, we we sort of look at this as sort of stage two stage three type stuff, right? I absolutely agree that looking at your average case, value is important. I think, looking at what your average case value per case type is important. Because not every dollar is made the same. If you can think you spent 20 hours Tyson on a case that’s going to bring you $100,000 fee, or 20 hours on a case is gonna bring you a $10,000 fee, you want to figure out how to get more of those $100,000 in that and less of those $10,000 cases. So not everything’s the same. But I think that that’s that average case value is important. And then when you get more sophisticated, then you’re going to try to figure out how to improve your margins. I mean, you’re really good at boosting the case value like because of the conversations you have with your clients and the ongoing relationship and your your growing reputation among the defense bar, your lack of fear about going to trial, those are all things that are gonna help you increase that case value. And the reason it’s important to know your average case value is because if you know that funnel that I just talked about, if you know how many qualified leads I have to get in order to get X amount of cases, then you’re going to be willing to spend more than the next person who doesn’t know their numbers. If you Tyson, if I told you that you could spend $500 on a lead, you know, Amani and other attorneys that I know would go holy cow, you’re gonna spend $500 on a lead. That’s insane. But if you knew that you spent $500 on a lead, and that brought you in $25,000. That’s what Dean Jackson talks about the vending machine. If you could put in $500 and take out $25,000 You would stand at that machine and do it as much as you can. Right. You just be shoveling money in there to get the money to come out. And and I know that sounds fanciful. I know that sounds absolutely crazy. But after 13 years, we’re finally there where I know how much I spend gets me how much on the back end so so that’s when you can really amp up your marketing because you know that it’s just putting money into that vending machine.

Tyson Mutrux
I love it. And the only thing I’m gonna add to that is what you touched on. What I like about the whole idea of tracking average fee is that you can tweak things to increase the cost is value in for us, you know, because we’re contingency because we’re injured. We’re an injury firm, we tweak little things, I just checked my numbers because we had, I was making sure that we’re still above that number over the last two years, it was prior two and a half years now, we’ve doubled our average fee. And we doubled our average fee. And we just had that, for for last few months, I’ve been saying we’ve almost doubled our average fee, we finally hit it, where we’re, we’ve doubled our average fee, which is fantastic. And so it’s like free money. Yeah. And it’s we’ve been able to tweak now whenever you’re doing something like a transactional type of case you’re doing estate planning, you can also do little things, I think, to tweak it to add value to increase the value of the case. So maybe you add or even something else you could do is you can do upsells when it comes to like estate planning, and I don’t, I just kind of think of like when you go to some of the business state plan is they do wills, trusts, things like that. And then I’m assuming that all the power of attorneys and all that sort of come with it, maybe I’m wrong about that. But if not, you can upsell those things. Or if you’re someone like Russell Knezovich where he can then upsell them to his investment company that he works for. So there’s other things that you can do to add value to to increase the how much money they’re getting from, from each client. So they’re in that’s just one example, I think with family law, Cordell and Cordell, they’ve got it down, because they’ve got these things that you have to do as an attorney for the firm. And I understand that some of you say, well, that’s I don’t, I think that that’s all Bs, and they shouldn’t be doing that stuff. But what you can never do is look at their files, and they didn’t do the things they were supposed to do. And they build they can Bill and Bill and Bill and Bill and Bill and make a bunch of bunch of money on each client. And I’m not saying you do that just to get money from the client, I’m just saying, there’s ways things you can do that adds value to the case, that can also increase value for that for that client to the firm.

Jim Hacking
And getting back to the other way that you can increase your revenue by knowing your numbers. And certainly increasing your average case value is a way which I think is actually a little harder than what I’m going to talk about right now is that if you think about that funnel again, and you think about all those stages, you know, how many qualified leads do we have? How many consults do we have, and how many new cases that we have, those are all hinges, those are all opportunities. So if you can increase the overall number of people coming into your funnel, that’s going to boost the the bottom number, if you can increase the number of qualified leads, it’s going to boost the bottom number. So I’m at the point now, where my leads team can tell me almost two weeks ahead, how many cases we’re going to have paid and signed up in 14 days. It’s almost mind boggling. And it seems like magic. Like Laura Clark said to me, because we have a short week this week, and we lowered our goal for the month because it’s you know, the Christmas and then we’re closing for that week between Christmas and New Year. So we lowered our goal. We’re gonna smash through that. But we signed up six cases yesterday, six cases yesterday. And I didn’t talk to one of them. I didn’t talk to one person of those six. It’s really remarkable.

Tyson Mutrux
And listen to last week’s episode if you want to talk about removing the attorney from the from the equation becomes a setting people up with what Jim just said, I want to get to the next one. Ready, you’re ready to live nine minutes. So this is a shorter topic anyways, but this is I’m gonna call these terms now from now on, Jim. Ding, ding, Jimmy ding dings, I don’t know why like Jimmy ding ding but it sounds so funny. I like Jimmy ding dings and this is polishing the silver, you will tell the story about polishing the silver real quick.

Jim Hacking
Sure. So our first son was never lucky enough to go to Montessori. And I think that’s why he’s sort of struggling. I’m teasing. I wish he had gone to Montessori. He’s doing great. But the other thing went to Montessori. And the cool thing about Montessori is that they sort of take the kids where they are and they let them follow what they’re interested in, right. So you know, you’ll have all these little projects or things around the school that they can go work on. Well, my second son use have moved up to kindergarten when he was four. And he was just killing it in kindergarten, but the the teacher noticed the kindergarten teacher that every now and then she’d find an old use of down with the three year olds doing sort of this manual stuff. And one of those things was literally polishing an old teapot, right? And so polishing the silver. And so I’ve explained that or use that metaphor to talk about when lawyers sort of sneak off from kindergarten and go and hang out with a three year olds to do the things that they shouldn’t be doing. And the reason there’s lots of reasons why people do that, and certainly it’s fine for like a four or a four year old in Montessori to do that. But for lawyers, it’s a real trap because it’s it’s more comfortable. It’s safer. It’s stuff that you know, it’s not pushing you outside your comfort area. And so you and I’ve had many conversations about polishing the silver as it relates to me that I will you know, I’ll push this work off on to They’re people, and then I’ll take it back, I’ll push this work off on to other departments and I’ll take it back. It could be going to interviews or it could be talking to leads, or it could be anything. And so that, you know, in our course, we’re going to talk about the mistakes that lawyers make, and, and polishing the silver is certainly one of them.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, and I, one of the things that we talked about in the guild is making sure that you know, your process goals and your product goals, because if you know those things, so the process goals are the things you should be doing every single day or every single week to get you to your product goals. So think of league lead indicators and lagging indicators. That’s just just different speak. That’s based on the things that Jason self teaches. And if you find yourself polishing the silver, all you have to do is say, okay, what are my product goals, let’s go back, let’s focus on our product goals. And let’s do those things. So let for example, let’s say that your goal is to build your, your YouTube, your your product goal is to build your YouTube channel and get a bunch of subscribers, well, then you know, what you need to be doing your product goal needs to be recording a video a day, right? You need to take the gym hacking challenge and do the one video a day. And so that’s the one thing you need to do that day, right, then I recommend that you don’t try to do more than three things, right. So you have three things in the day. To do that day, you knock out one of your product goals, shooting the video, and then you know, then you focus on the next two things. And then you can go polish a sale or after you’ve done those things. But before you do anything else you need to do your process goals before you start polishing the silver. And we go into more detail about that in our course. So I’ll do the plug this time, Jimmy, check us out, maximum lawyer.com, because we’re gonna be launching this at the beginning of the year. So maximum lawyer and minimum time, Jimmy, it’s

Speaker 2
time to wrap you ready. I was born ready, brother. All right.

Tyson Mutrux
So I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group. There’s over 4000 members there sharing great information every single day, I will give you a little tip. If you have a question about something search, use the search function because I bet your questions probably been posed. And there’s lots of comments in there. But feel free to post any question that you have a lot of great activity going on there. And if you will take just a few minutes, and gives us or even a few minutes, few seconds, give us a five star review on Apple. That would be fantastic. Help us spread the love, and then checks out at max law guild.com. Jimmy, what’s your hack of the week.

Jim Hacking
So I was in Denver for an interview a couple of weeks ago. And whenever I go to Denver, I always visit my favorite bookstore, which is called the tattered cover. Oh, it’s so great. It’s in, in this old warehouse. Like it’s been three days in there. And I walked around a couple different times. And I picked up a book on bullet journaling by the guy that invented the bullet journal. I like it a lot. I’ve started doing the daily bullet journal just to sort of get in the feel for it. But I like that it’s just a notebook. You know, I’ve I’ve bought Brendon Burchard, sort of formal journal and parts of it didn’t work for me. So I really like this, because it’s very, very customizable. And it’s helping me get my tasks done carrying things over to the next day. And I’m looking forward to sort of building that out and, and working on that. So if there any lawyers that are using bullet journal, let me know, because I’d love to hear how you use it. But I think there’s sort of a little community about it. And I’m excited about trying it out next year,

Tyson Mutrux
that daily self accountability, so crucial. It really is. So I don’t so I don’t think I’ve seen bullet journal. I know I’ve had other journals that I’ve used. That’s interesting.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, the thing I like about it is that it’s very distilled down like I use, I will write like paragraphs of stuff when I’m just trying to get thoughts out of my head. But this is all about like, you know, just small little reminders. You can design your page the way you want, and their systems do it. And you can, you can index your journal so that you can go back and find stuff. And it’s really about like parking ideas where they belong with someone like me who has all these ideas, it’s really helpful to sort of say, well, that that’s probably something I can work on a month from now, this is something for this week, and this is something for today.

Tyson Mutrux
Nice. I like it. Well, it’s interesting, cuz my tip of the week is somewhat similar, somewhat similar to this, I sort of live in this weird world, where half apple half google it, it’s not always the perfect thing. And you know, me, I’ve always written down my top three, and usually top five, top three things for the day. And I’ve switched, I’ve gone digital. Finally, I wouldn’t have gotten away from the handwritten stuff, because I’ll leave my notebook somewhere. And I won’t remember to grab it or whatever. So I’ve got everything on my phone now. And I didn’t I didn’t realize how good the Google Tasks app was. Great. Great. Really, really good. And what my favorite part about it is, is that whenever I’m in my email, which I’m happy to get be in now because I’m Natasha, she has made sure that I’m on top of my email now is there’s a little window that kicks out for TAs and I can just if I need to put something in I can put it on my list and put it on down the road right I’ll need to do it right away. Doesn’t one of my top three, but I just throw it on there really quick and then I can scheduled those out and then they show up on my calendar. So it’s perfect. It is fantastic. And so I really recommend if you’re not using the Google Tasks app, and it works great with G Suite, I highly recommend it really good.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, it’s great. Lauren’s been using that for the last six months or so. And that’s where she parks the email that I actually need to see show me on my email, anything that’s actionable by Jim she just drags into that task. And then I spend like five minutes looking at email instead of half an hour.

Tyson Mutrux
Yeah, I love it. And we so we tried that approach with the tasks and it just didn’t work for me. And I didn’t even realize that was a part of the tasks system. I just thought or the email system. So it was just Yeah, I learned a lot about it. But alright, man, if I don’t talk to you have a Merry Christmas,

Jim Hacking
our brother, you too, and I’ll see you soon.

Speaker 1
Thanks for listening to the maximum lawyer podcast. Stay in contact with your host and to access more content. Go to maximum lawyer.com. Have a great week and catch you next time.