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Pop-Up: Metrics and Measuring with Jim Hacking 211
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In this pop-up episode Jim discusses metrics and measuring with his friend Felix.

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Transcript: Pop-Up: Metrics and Measuring with Jim Hacking

Unknown Speaker
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. And no Tyson on this one. So this is a pop up episode, I was supposed to be a guest on another podcast with my friend Felix. But Felix decided not to launch his podcast, but it was such good content, and such good info. It’s about metrics and measuring, and those kinds of things. And so we wanted to release it as a pop up standalone episode. It’s just me and Felix, it’ll feel like a podcast once you get into it. But I think it’s, it’s pretty good stuff. And we wanted to get out to you as soon as we can. So thanks, and hope you enjoy it.

Unknown Speaker
Welcome to the show, Jim hacking. How have you been?

Jim Hacking
I’m doing okay, I’m doing okay. You know, obviously, it’s a crazy time to be recording podcast or running a business or live in life. It’s a strange, strange time. But I’m trying to keep positive. I’m trying to focus on where I’m headed and not get too drawn into the emergencies of the day.

Unknown Speaker
Oh, yeah, I know what you’re talking about. That’s what I’m trying myself just not not to get distracted, actually decided. I’m going to look at the newspapers and the news. Once a day at the lunchtime, and that’s it. Actually, we caught ourselves our children just told us the other day dinner. Can we like stop talking about this? And let’s stop stop talking about this. Let’s focus on what we are in for Well, we haven’t met in person yet. We’ve met online, a started a thread. On Superfast Business, we’re have James Schramko, where you and I are members of and it’s on data or how data can help us run, manage grow our business? And you responded, you said yeah, I’d be interesting to discuss that. And let’s do this. And I was really interested in in talking to you because I saw you’re a lawyer, or I’m just gonna introduce yourself. And I mean, I work with 20 plus different industries 500 Plus executives that work with lawyers. So I’m looking forward to our discussion. But why don’t you for our listeners, Jim, just tell us who you are and what your business is all about.

Jim Hacking
So I’m located in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, I started an immigration law firm. So we help people come to the United States stay in the United States bring family members to the United States. We try to keep people from getting deported. We try we help people get work visas. We started in 2007. And I was a history major in college. So I had very little experience in running a business. My father was always hustling when I was growing up, he always had side jobs and things to help us make a little bit of extra money. So I had seen him and then he had run his own business, or he had started his own business. So I’d watched his sort of entrepreneurial journey. And I’d always thought, as a young lawyer that I’d like to have clients of my own. I’d seen the lawyers who controlled the clients sort of ran the firms and the lawyers who depended on attorneys to bring them work were sort of dependent on people, even if they weren’t the nicest people. So I never wanted to be in that position. So I’ve been practicing for about 10 years, and I decided to launch my own immigration firm. So we did that in 2007. I was lucky enough to hire a young lady who came to work for me, and she’s still with me now. She sort of runs our Office. She’s grown with me as the firm. And so right now we have about 15 employees. We have four attorneys. My wife, who is an immigrant and who I met in law school, is also practicing with us and she helps run the day to day I am I am more visionary kind of a person. I don’t spend a lot of time I don’t find my energy in, you know, management or running meetings. I understand the value of all those things, but it’s just not where I’m at. I’m always sort of focusing on the future, focusing on growth, focusing on hacking things like making things easier. So so that’s sort of one business I have another business that I have is sort of a younger business. We started we started a podcast for lawyers. Four years ago, it’s called Maximum lawyer. And it’s to help lawyers learn how to market how to run their firms, how to improve their systems, those kinds of things. So I have a partner on that, who’s another lawyer. And that thing has really grown. We now have about 2500 members in our Facebook group. We’re getting about 15,000 downloads a month. And then we just started a sort of a paid membership group, which is sort of like a one up from the free stuff. We actually just launched that last Friday. And I followed a lot of James James Franco’s principles. And I was really happy because I had no idea whether it was the right time to go to market, whether people would respond to it positively. But we had 45 people sign up. So we’re really excited that we sort of that’s sort of the fun thing that I’m working on now. While we’re still trying to keep the firm going. And that’s sort of me.

Unknown Speaker
Okay. Well, thank you very much. It’s just one thing to mention. You are in St. Louis. Well, that’s where I studied. Like, Oh, God. I was, I think, late 80s. I spent two and a half years in St. Louis, myself, I thought is really interesting. City. So just a really nice coincidence. Now. Your law immigration firm. I know nothing about law. I know a bit of about immigration I had, I was facing issues. When I was in the States, I was facing facing issues. When I was coming to Germany, I come from Slovenia. Right now. It’s not a problem. When I moved to Germany, 30 years ago, that was a big issue for me getting into Germany and get all the papers. So I think there’s a lot of things that need to be done there. So what is actually then the result, I always talk about well measuring. And so if we measure something, right, then we need to know what we measure. So I always ask people, so what is the result? What is the deliverable? What you do?

Jim Hacking
Right, so people, always, especially lawyers, in our group, like to think that lawyers are these fancy artists who can’t be contained to, you know, just sort of think up these really great results for their clients. But I say all the time that we are a logistics company, just like Federal Express, and we are taking someone from one position and moving them to another position were getting in the truck, and we’re driving them from Washington, DC to Dallas, Texas, or whatever we are, we’re taking someone at one immigration level, and advancing them to the next immigration level. So one nice thing about our businesses that sometimes we help people go from a student visa, to a work visa, to lawful residents to citizenship. And then once they’re a citizen, then we help them bring over their family members, right. So it there’s a virtuous cycle there. But basically, our job is to help people move from one immigration status to another, they might do that here in the United States, they might do it. The so like, if, if you were if you were married to someone in the United States, and you were from Slovenia, we could sponsor have them sponsor you to come to the United States and get a green card. Or if when you were here studying in St. Louis, you, you were on it, let’s say you were on an f1 and you wanted to get a job, then we would sort of help work with your employer to get you a visa. So it’s always about getting an immigration benefit, either from the immigration service or from the State Department. Okay,

Unknown Speaker
so result for them is having the papers, right,

Jim Hacking
and you win or lose. You know, I had a really tough asylum case that I’ve been fighting for the last couple of months. It’s probably one of the strongest ones that I’ve ever filed. And I lost. I had a long conversation with the client yesterday about why I think his case didn’t go the way that we wanted. But that’s one of the interesting things about immigration is it’s a zero sum game, you either win or you lose, there’s no ties you don’t like if people get in a car accident, and they sue each other. You know, you come up to some kind of settlement and immigration, you either win. And it’s and it’s people’s lives. So it’s pretty meaningful work, which is one thing I really liked about it.

Unknown Speaker
I can very much relate to that. I was for years, I was always Okay, can I stay here? Or will I be a setback? Okay, that was a really bad feeling that I can very much relate to this, but let’s not go down this line. Okay. Now before we start talking metrics and data and growing business, and so just out of curiosity, Jim, when was it the first time in your career where you said, Oh, having data or understanding the data is really important for me?

Jim Hacking
Oh, that’s That’s great. So like I said, Before, I was an arts and science major. I never took a business class in my life. And so everything I’ve learned about running a business I’ve learned either from my dad or on the fly, and most of its been on the fly and reading books. And one of the greatest books that I’ve read is a book called Traction by Gina Whitman, and it’s it’s an actually traction didn’t resonate so much with with me. He has another book called Rocket fuel which really draws that distinction between the entrepreneur, which is or the visionary, which is me. And then my wife, who’s the implementer, she’s very much about strategic, thinking about measuring things, and, you know, measuring success. And so when you have two employees, you don’t really need to worry about that so much, you probably should. But I didn’t write. And so it wasn’t until we really started growing. And I was going to have to be less involved in each and every case. That’s sort of when I realized that we needed to get into metrics and measuring. And so with traction weed, so we have attraction coach, and we’ve been implementing traction for about a year now, a little less than a year. And we’ve been looking at what are our key performance indicators? So I’m, I’m always, I am a 10 Quickstart. So I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a Colby test. Yes. Yeah. And my wife is a one, right? So. So my wife joined our firm four years ago, right. So she came out of academia, she came from a very safe job, but the university was sort of downsizing. And she took a buyout and came to work with us. And that was the best thing that ever happened. Because that woman that I told you about who helps run the firm, she had been banging your head on the wall dealing with me, because I understand the value of all that stuff. But I’m too focused on the next thing, right, I’m bound. And maybe I’m not focused at all, but I’m bouncing around. But when Adela that’s the office person had Amani, my wife come join us, they were able to join forces and teach me the importance of metrics and meetings and, and checking on cases in a way that we could do it from afar, where we’re not the ones, which is actually handling the cases when, as you as you grow, I think that’s really when the metrics come in, because you have to have a way of measuring them in the way that our attraction coach says to us is, imagine you’re on an island. And the company is running itself from, you know, 5000 miles away, what are the exact numbers that you would need? And you don’t have 100 of these numbers? He says, you know, between 10 and 15, what are the exact numbers that you want to have, in order to be able to gauge the health of your company? So that’s, it’s really It’s been only in the last couple of years that I’ve come to realize the value of all this? Oh, that’s

Unknown Speaker
cool. Now, let’s put some context. That is, because what I’d like to discuss with you what I’d like to you to share with the listeners is, what are you tracking? Now? But before we know what you’re tracking? Why don’t we take a look at, let’s say how your business goes? How your business? how your business is running? Meaning? How do you bring in new business? How do you generate leads? How do you then convert those leads into customers? How do you serve them these customers? And then what do you do to get paid for your valuable services? Well, then also there’s going to be one business function. What do you do in terms of business development? Okay, so Well, I just kind of what I’m asking for is, this is what I call a value growth chain. Okay? And so please tell me what you do in all these different business functions. And then I’d really like to hear it, I’d really like to ask you to share, what are you measuring about all the processes and activities that you perform within those business factions? Alright, so why don’t you start with how do you generate leads? How do you bring in prospects?

Jim Hacking
Sure. So one of the things that I did learn early on was in the I learned this from Dean Jackson. So I found James Schramko, through Dean Jackson. And that’s sort of how you and I met was through James and Dean Jackson and Joe Polish have a podcast called I love marketing. And the way that that they teach it is the before unit, the during unit and the after unit. So the before unit is from the moment you get somebody how do you get someone to raise their hand? Exactly, until the moment that they hire you. That’s the before unit, the during unit is from the time they hire you until you get them the benefit that they’ve requested. And then the after unit is referrals, and repeat business. So in my before unit, I started making YouTube videos five years ago, okay. And I’m all about long tail search and long tail questions. And what that means is, you know, I don’t do videos about how great Jim hacking is. I don’t do I don’t do videos about, you know, how many years of legal experience I have. I don’t do like TV, commercial type videos, our videos are all about answering questions. So I have this little notebook that you can see. You can’t see it if you’re listening, but I write down questions that come up during the week. And then on Monday, I record seven five minute videos, three or four or five minute videos, and I add a new video every day. I started that this year before that I was doing about three or four week but I just answered people’s questions and so people have started subscribing to the channel we have about over a little over six 10,000 subscribers to the YouTube channel. And so I can post a video now and things are off a little bit right now because of the Coronavirus. If I do a video about the Coronavirus, it gets a ton of views. If I do one about regular immigration stuff, it gets less than it usually does. But typically, when we post a video, we get 1000 views within 24 hours. So it’s it’s a highly engaged group, they seem to be watching the videos all the way to the end. And then I started a Facebook group, which is called immigrant home. And so when I when I end each video, I say, you know, you know, if you want to reach us by email, you can email at info at hacking law practice that kind of I give him my phone number, I invite him to join our Facebook group. And then I tell him about to subscribe to the YouTube channel so that things really been taken off. So that’s sort of the part of how we get them to raise their hand. And then if they then we have our phones are actually answered in California, we don’t answer our own phones, because we get about well, in normal times, we get about 40 or 50 leads a day. And then we have a team that answers the phones. And then we have a team that here that follows up with leads. Now, in all honesty, Felix, we have probably been a victim of our own success. And what I mean by that is that we’ve been doing pretty well, we’ve been keeping pretty busy. But we’re not in any way shape, or form, maximizing the value of all of our leads. Right? So um, while you asked me my next question, I’m going to pull up this this chart that I made. So I went through, and I figured out, you know, how many leads? Are we getting a month? Or? Yeah, how many leads? Are we getting a month? How many are we converting? And then, you know, if you compare the number of actual leads we get, what percentage of people are actually hiring us. And when I looked at that number, and I’m happy to share with you when I pull it up, it made my mouth hit the floor.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, now that that’s really interesting. So, okay, now we just touch on one business functions lead generation, which were you seems to be pretty good. I mean, now, obviously, I cannot relate to what 50 leads per day means that looks. sounds impressive. Okay. But what you already addressed? And this is, it gets us into the next business function, your sales funnel, right? It seems like not too many are ending up there. Right? Right. Okay. Well, I would assume that. So what do you do to bring them now into your sales funnel? I mean, you’re quite agile on the creating all these videos and your Facebook group? And by the way, I mean, you mentioned there’s a fun thing, where, you know, you get the calls, how do they people get the number to call,

Jim Hacking
but it’s at the end of every video. So I listed at the end of every video, it’s all over our website. So I have that whole little rant memorized. Really?

Unknown Speaker
All right. Okay, so then what do you do to convert those into customers?

Jim Hacking
Well, so that’s, that’s where I think the real problem is, is that we’ve we’ve all been mean, literally, we’re really busy, right? Like, even right now knock on wood, we’re really busy. So being busy is sort of the enemy of really being great being good as the enemy of being great. So I think that we’ve been sort of, I would say, sloppy, or lazy. So we have two people, really just one person who works six hours a day who’s been following up with the lead. So in the last two weeks, as the market has slowed down, we’ve really been digging deep into this. So where we are in the process right now really converting our conversion system, we’re really gonna go to a whole different model, I sat down with my wife and with a deli yesterday, and we talked about if we had a million dollars, and could and had all the resources in the world that we wanted to track down and follow up five or six times, what would we be doing because it’s very different than what we are actually doing. So our our conversion rate right now of actual leads, so we get a lot of opportunities, and then we we screen them, and we take out all the junk. So if you look at all the leads we had in the last 12 months, and compare them how many people contacted us and how many people actually hired us? It’s 7.9%. Okay,

Unknown Speaker
I think you’re good, or is that not good?

Jim Hacking
I don’t think What do you think? I don’t think it’s,

Unknown Speaker
I mean, see, I’ve seen people where say 1% is fantastic conversion. And I’ve seen people say 14, that’s not enough. So for me, this is it. That’s the question is what is good? Okay.

Jim Hacking
Yeah, that’s a good question. And I probably, I mean, industry wise, I think, I think, in particular with immigration, that there are a lot of people who contact us who a may not have a lot of money, and be just have a quick question. So I also do a free webinar every year, every month, every other every two weeks, I do a webinar, and people can come in and ask free questions, one free question during that hour. So it’s, and we charge for our account So for someone to consult with us, we charge them $100 For the half hour consult. And it’s not because I want $100. It’s because I want to sift and sort. And I don’t want to have consults with people that aren’t likely to lead to a case. So I think 7.9% is okay, I think it could be a lot better. But I don’t really have anything to gauge it to because lawyers don’t talk about this stuff. Lawyers only talk about the cases that they want, or how experienced they are lawyers don’t talk to each other about what their metrics are. And there aren’t many lawyers who are actually, you know, checking that out.

Unknown Speaker
Because what I was going to say, for you to say whether it’s 7.9, or 7.5, which you’ve got is good. You should benchmark yourself with other liars. But you just said, Well, that doesn’t really work. Okay. You know, but one way of seeing whether this is good for you is there’s it’s generating a business for you, number one, and does it allow you to grow? And if yes, then it’s good. And if not, then well, there’s probably something you want to do about it to increase it. Yeah.

Jim Hacking
Well, yeah. So So in 2018, we opened up 370 matters, because my goal that year was to open up one matter a day and one new case a day. Last year, we opened up 570. So on growth, yeah, on that question. That’s, that’s good growth. So now this year, we’re just going to try to maintain that because of what’s currently happening, and we’ll see. But I think, you know, we can, we can increase the number of people that scheduled consults with us. And then if we increase the number of people, that’s the other consults with us, and then we try to increase the people that actually hire us, you know, based off that. So these are all hinges, each, each stage is a hinge. And if you open up one hinge, it’s not going to be a one to one improvement, it’s going to be an exponential improvement, because you’re always, you know, increasing your percentages of each type of person.

Unknown Speaker
Exactly. So what I’m obviously not very much interested in. So what do you measure along this process currently?

Jim Hacking
So right now we measure we measure the number of new leads, Okay, number of leads that schedule, the people that schedule that hire us, or actually the people that scheduled this people that schedule with us that asked us to send them a contract, the percentage of people who asked for a contract versus the people who actually signed the contract. And then the other thing we’ve been starting to track for the last 14 months is, then in each case, type, how much is it costing us to deliver that service or that that outcome for people? So that sort of into the during unit

Unknown Speaker
costing in terms of money and or time?

Jim Hacking
Time? Yeah, because we’re time. So we do everything on a flat fee. So all right. And so most, and so most of our cases, except for deportation cases where you’re trying to keep someone from being deported, most of our cases, the legal fee is going to be about $3,500. So, you know, but not every $3,500 is created equally, we have some case types, where you’re going to spend 35 hours on that case. And we have some case types that you’re going to spend three hours on that case. So obviously, we want to have more of the cases that you can make 30 hours, three hours versus, but we do view immigration as a calling. So I’m willing to subsidize some of the less lucrative stuff because we’re actually really helping people. So it’s for us, it’s not just about the numbers, but But I shouldn’t be I shouldn’t be making that decision if I don’t really know the numbers, if that makes sense.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, of course. That’s the point of this discussion. All right. So whereas I still didn’t really understand is, you’re measuring the leads, and then how many calls you have with them? How many kind of hard you call those discovery calls? You call them? consultations, consultations? Yeah. consultations, and then you measure how many consultations you convert into matters. Did you call that your cases matters?

Jim Hacking
So so we say how many people contacted us? How many people are actual leads? How many people scheduled a consultation? How many people asked us to send them a contract? In other words, they were considering hiring us. And then how many of those people actually signed the contract. And then we take how many people signed contracts, and we go back to the overall number of leads, and that’s where we get that 7.9%.

Unknown Speaker
This is cool. This really is very good. Now, let me ask you a question. Where’s the leverage here?

Jim Hacking
Hold on. Before I get to that, can I just say one more thing? Sure. There’s one other piece to this that we’ve done, and I’m sure that you’ve, you’ve done these kinds of analysis too. So then you take your marketing budget. And you compare that to all of these stages. So like, right now, like let’s say, I don’t I don’t know exactly how much I’m spending each month, right? But let’s say it’s $10,000. And let’s say I’m getting 500 leads a month. Right? Then each lead cost me $20. And if I sign up 50k cases, then each case cost me $200 To bring in the door. So I think that after you do that analysis that we just talked about, then you have to compare it to what you’re spending so that then you can say to your team, hey, if you don’t follow up with his lead, it’s like throwing a $20 bill in the trash. Or if we don’t sign up this contract as someone that we did, I mean, because that’s all the time and energy that you’re spending putting into this. You’ve got to compare it to that as well.

Unknown Speaker
Yes, yes. And there’s another component gym that I think it’s important, and I don’t know, to what extent are you incorporating it? It’s the time that you invest in your Yeah, for sure. Because this consultation calls cost your time. Yeah. And

Jim Hacking
right now, right now, Felix, guess who’s doing the consults its attorneys. So

Unknown Speaker
that’s the most expensive people. Right? Right. So

Jim Hacking
that’s really what we’re what my one of my homework assignments after we figure out exactly how to improve this conversion thing is how do I do this? Maybe without attorney time? And I’m really, I’m really floating around for that right now. Because my model has always been lawyer does the council because people want to have immigration questions, but I think that we could do a lot. And so I was talking to Dean Jackson’s right hand man, Stuart Bell about this the other day, and that we need, we actually have a problem of too many leads, and we need a better system to sift and sort them before they get to the, to the consultation, because having a consultation where I just answer someone’s questions for a half hour for $100. That’s not so good. What I want our consultations where people are likely to hire me. So we’re going to build in some intermediary steps, maybe with some automation and some questionnaires. And and actually, like Dan Kennedy would teach, we’re actually going to make it harder for people to get counseling, so that are more meaningful.

Unknown Speaker
Exactly. Because those then who will get through, they will be much more valuable prospects. Right? For you.

Jim Hacking
It’s so much Felix Felix, there’s so much to worry about, man. It’s like 30 different moving parts, brother.

Unknown Speaker
Is it really? I don’t think it’s that many. Jim. I mean, what is really, really good about you, or your business? You’re very, very structured already. Okay. I mean, I think, quite a few listeners who, who will listen to this and say, oh, okay, well, that’s how my process could look like as well. And even if they do not practice law, or immigration law, so this is really good. Now, again, I think one addition, that is here, very important for you would be the time that you guys are spending your time also shooting all these YouTube videos and doing all these webinars. Yeah, when you do this, you don’t do anything else. Okay, now,

Jim Hacking
the videos I love doing, and I’d rather know, stuff. Yeah. But then the funny thing about YouTube is that I thought that YouTube’s greatest value would be as a lead generator, but it’s not the YouTube where that comes in. Once someone finds my YouTube channel, and I would say 80% of our consults, start almost always start like this. Oh, Mr. Jin, I can’t believe I’m talking to you. I’ve been watching your videos for six months, I’ve watched every one of your 500 videos, or I’ve watched every video you’ve ever made about citizenship, I can’t believe that I finally get to talk to you. So it’s a lead conversion tool much more than than a lead. I mean, people know me like you can’t, you can’t make 500 videos, and not have your personality and your passion come through. Oh, yeah. So people know who you really are just and that’s what’s great about your podcast, is, after a while when people have had your voice in their head on a regular basis, they know who you are, they can tell that you’re a nice person, that you’re a good person that you care about processes, and you care about metrics. And that’s why you started your podcast. And so that just comes through. Sorry for that aside.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you very much. That’s my motivation to now where you seem to be very well organized and is your process. We still haven’t discussed the what I say what I call service delivery part, service delivery business functions, and this is where your lawyers, if I remember correctly, you’ve got like four of them. Right?

Jim Hacking
Correct. And each lawyer has one or two paralegals. So the paralegals do a lot of the preparation. We actually also have a team in India that so lots of different lawyers who have tried to start software that works well with PDFs, but you know, PDFs, are and paper are the lifeblood of our firm. So we all live in Adobe and and we’ve tried every different kind of immigration form software, but we found that none of them work very well. And we actually have a team in India that we outsource the actual form part peroration. So like, I don’t have people here who are typing out. And then 400, which is the form to naturalize or an i 130, which is the form to bring a spouse here, we actually have an intake form that our team in India then and that’s a Word document, the team in India than at manually and puts the forms and they do it really cheaply. So for us so far, that’s been beating using any kind of software.

Unknown Speaker
Jim, what I’m interested in, in your, let’s say, product delivery, service delivery business function, what do you measure currently?

Jim Hacking
So okay, perfect. I’m glad you asked that question. So and I pulled it up right when we started. So we track how many applications are going out the door, I have a little niche inside immigration where I sue the immigration service a lot. So how many lawsuits did I file for delays, we track how many packets get rejected, we track, this is the most important one, the average amount of days it takes to send a packet out and application now, because an application is more than just the forms, you have to submit all this evidence, and it’s all done on paper. And it’s all where, you know, we spend a ton on FedEx, right? And so and then we track so that average days to send a packet is, is probably the most important metric. And the one if we are on the island that we want to keep track of the most, because it’s really easy to let clients or a missing document, delay a case going out the door. But I’m all about speed, right. And so I want those cases, once we have every piece of information from the client, I want those cases out the door within seven days. Now a lot of times clients aren’t very organized. Sometimes they don’t get all their documents to us. And we have to track things down. So sometimes things go off. But that’s the biggest metric to me is how long does it take us to get the packet out the door? And then we see Hang on? Yeah. How does that help you? How does that help me because nothing good happens when a case is delayed. Right. So clients will call I mean, so. So right now, the immigration service, everything is delayed. So one of the value props for us is there will be no delay on our end, there’ll be delay on the government’s and you should hire us because we’re gonna get you through this process faster, just because we know what we’re doing. And if you do it on your own, my biggest competition is not other immigration lawyers. And there’s not there’s not there’s there’s a big demand for immigration lawyers. They’re not enough immigration lawyers, right. And so my but my biggest competition is not other lawyers, it’s people thinking that they can do it themselves. Right. And so I’ve got to figure out where do I add value here. One is expertise into his speed and speeding up that process and eliminating the headaches of dealing with the federal government. Right. So those are sort of the things so I want those things out the door quickly. And then we track how many cases are approved, how many cases are denied. And then we track our net, we have a net promoter score system. So we check in with people during the process to see whether we’re doing a good job. And then we check how many cases get rejected where we get cases back in the mail, because of some kind of a problem.

Unknown Speaker
Hall a lot of things here are tracking. How much effort is that?

Jim Hacking
It’s not in most of it’s done with software. Now, we recently adopted a new during unit software that’s built specifically for lawyers. It’s called file vine. And it’s a great database program. You can use it for lots of different things. But we’re tracking all those dates now. So now when we track the dates automatically, the math is calculated for these metrics.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, so there is no manual work involved in having those metrics graded.

Jim Hacking
A little bit. There’s a little bit of manual, but not much. Okay. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker
What strikes me here in your case, is a whole lot of metrics just in one business function. Is that not overwhelming?

Jim Hacking
Well, I don’t do it. So there’s different people that are in charge of it. So I you know, I’m in charge of the before unit. So they were keeping track of the cases, like all those ones we talked about earlier, but the during unit, I mean, that’s what we do, we’ve got to keep track of those statistics. And you’ve got to, we’ve got to have alarm bells go off when certain things happen. So if cases get rejected, or if one of the other things, we keep track of these things called requests for evidence. So if the government thinks that you haven’t submitted enough evidence, then you have to submit more stuff. So a Request for Evidence can be assigned that a case is off track, or just they need some more information or that our systems weren’t perfect, in that we’d let something go out without a piece of evidence that they now want. Now, sometimes they’re just being difficult, which they do, but a lot of times, so we’re always trying to go back and do these little autopsies to say, well, if if we got a Request for Evidence back, let’s get to the root cause, figure out why that happened, and then build that back into our system. So that doesn’t happen another time.

Unknown Speaker
Understand. Let me take a look at your financial part, not the numbers, but what are you tracking on the financial side? So

Jim Hacking
really on the financial side, I keep it really simple. We keep track of weekly revenue, weekly expenses, we look at the balance sheet, we look at our AR ours. Our business model generally involves people paying 50% upfront and Don’t pay the rest over time, because now things are really expensive. Donald Trump has put in some new things that now make a marriage base case go from $3,500 to two $5,000. So we’re getting 2500 up front. And then we get a credit card to Bill automatically. And I just let people pay $250 A month after that, either. I’m not on the on the money side, as long as people are signing up the agreements. And with the credit cards, we’re always getting paid. I don’t really care how fast they pay us.

Unknown Speaker
Okay. Follow your your cash flow. Yep. The whole Yeah.

Jim Hacking
Especially right now. I’m on the bank. I’m on the bank website every day making sure we still have money in the bank. But yeah, we we keep track of that every week. And then we have through traction, we have what’s called a level 10 meeting every Friday of our leadership team, which is my wife, myself, and Adela. We meet for an hour and a half and go over all these numbers that you and I just talked about. And that’s just sort of one part of the meeting.

Unknown Speaker
Oh, that’s really impressive. The, for me, the most important financial metric is cashflow, revenue. Yeah, I can generate a lot of revenue. But if I’ve got too high cost, that’s going to ruin me. Now coming back to the very, very first business function called business development, and the business development is whatever you do to bring your business forward, developing new services, developing new products, whatever. Is there anything you do there?

Jim Hacking
You mean, like coming up with new new products? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker
or coming up with new products coming up with new ways of promoting your business? That’s this business development, typical business development? Yeah. Yeah. So

Jim Hacking
I became convinced through reading some books by Seth Godin, and Gary Vaynerchuk, that because people’s attention spans are so small, right now that we live in a world where what I want is for if people think of me, they think of one word. And then if people think of that one word, they think of me. So the word I chose 10 years ago was immigration. So we don’t do anything else. We don’t market anything else. We’re very focused in what we market and tell people and that has been really good. For the other source of where our case has come from. And that is, other lawyers, we get a ton of referrals from other lawyers are cool. I think it’s because we’re so focused, because we are easy to refer to. And because, you know, lawyers are sort of a covetous group. And they know that if I’m just handling an immigration matter for them, I’m not going to try to steal their work of doing a will for that person or doing their family law problem. I’m just doing immigration. So I think that when you talk about business development, I think right now, it’s so important to focus on one, one thing, because it just makes you much more referral.

Unknown Speaker
That’s super valuable, would you would you just sit? And the next question, obviously, is, is there anything you measure about your business development?

Jim Hacking
Well, sure. So we’re like those things I told you before we’re we’re measuring, you know, how many are you talking about different different than what we talked about? As far as Yeah, as far as the metrics that I talked about?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah. I mean, see, it’s really nice. What you said, Okay, your your word for last 1010 years is immigration. Right. Right. What are you doing, let’s say, for the future of your business? Are you really developing any new services around this? Yeah, I don’t know much about your your business. So are you developing any new courses? Are you? Oh, gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

Jim Hacking
You know what I mean? I do. So I was talking to you earlier about how our conversion process needs improvement. So my team, a team has been pushing back, the conversion team has been pushing back and saying, We don’t feel like we know enough about immigration, or enough about what the firm does, specifically, because we have, we have probably 55 case types that we can handle all with an immigration right. And so Oh, I see what you’re asking me now. So the way that we’re expanding that now is, so I’m going to start preparing lesson plans for our conversion team. Right. So here’s the big picture of immigration. Here’s what a citizenship case looks like. Here’s what a green card case looks like. But I’m gonna use it for multipurpose. I’m going to, I’m going to do it for our team. But I’m also going to do it for our clients like I’m going to try to build information products about the immigration service, at first to use with our team, then to use with our current clients so that I can make it really Good. And then I’m going to offer it as a standalone item for people who might want information, but might not be able to hire us, because some immigration cases we can handle from anywhere, right? So if it’s an overseas case where you’re trying to bring someone’s spouse to the United States, we could do that for anybody in the United States. But if we’re gonna do a citizenship case, they’re gonna have to pay us a lot of extra to like, fly to New York to handle their citizenship case, people do it. But it’s expensive, right? So offering things and I think that the YouTube channel will really help with that, because like when we launched that we have a tribe already. So just so you know, Felix, I’ve been talking about doing this for a long time, I haven’t actually done it. But now with the team pushing me to be better educated, so that they can help us with conversions. Now seems like a good time, especially why things are a little slower to start thinking about what you’re

Unknown Speaker
asking. Okay. And what are you measuring about this? Nothing? What will you be measuring about this? Yeah.

Jim Hacking
So I’m a member of a thing called Strategic Coach, which is a guy named Dan Sullivan and Dan Sullivan. He puts out a little mini book on an issue that he’s been thinking about every three months. So what I would like to do is like, pick our biggest interests, the things that people are most interested in and make a product of some sort around that each each quarter. Okay. Okay, great. You’re pushing me feel like so. Now. I’m putting it out there. So that’s, that’s good. I like that.

Unknown Speaker
So you’ve got your target. Yeah. But by the way, I was a member of strategic coach myself. Okay. So I’m very familiar with all these concepts. I’ve been. I was member for six years or so. Yeah. Okay. So I know what you’re talking about. Well, okay, so what I just wanted to kind of motivate you. It’s your Quickstart. So that’s working already. That’s great. Two experts talking to each other. That’s really great. Now, just make sure that you put numbers that, you know, I mean, as as they say, here in Germany, very old saying, measure it or forget it. Yeah. And yeah, so that would be my G. Actually, I wanted to do about 30 minutes. We’re 45. Now. This would be why don’t we before we wrap up, there’s one thing I’d still like to ask you, Jim, we were talking all about business. Okay, how you measure your business. And it’s really impressive. And it’s really great that what you do, maybe one of the products you might want to think about is teach lawyers how to measure their processes. Because this, I mean, again, I know nothing about the law business. But that sounds to me, like a very oiled, very well oiled machine that you’ve got here. process and that, you know, for someone who is in a different space than numbers, like like you being a lawyer, that’s, that’s really impressive. Really, really impressive. You’re welcome. Now, going to the other side, in your private business, is there anything you measure in your private business, private, private, not private business, but private life?

Jim Hacking
No, I wouldn’t say that we do measure my kids grades. Were certainly disagree on the targets, right? I would say that, first of all, thank you for saying what you said about how you think we’re doing with our numbers, because I feel like we’re not doing a very good job at all. So to have feedback like that, and I don’t say that so that you give me more positive feedback. I say that because I don’t find myself satisfied, right. Like I I think we’re so much further along than we were two years ago. But I still have, you know, like now now you’ve lit a fire under me to get these metrics done for more business development. And that’s like, Man more to do so. I would honestly say Felix in answer to your question about private metrics is that I’m so focused and so in the firm that I don’t really spend a lot of time measuring things at the house.

Unknown Speaker
I was not suggesting your shirt. Yeah, I just see. I had one of my podcast guests. He told me what he is measuring. He’s into cycling. He’s measuring everything is heart rate and, and I’m crazy I’m measuring quite a few things. I mentioned on one of the podcasts before, you know I need to right now you know, having this love downtime. I take everyday walk. I find the time now for for a walk. I take a like like an hour and a half walk. And you know what I do? Me silly, you know, I take everyday exactly the same The route, okay, and I measure how much how long it takes. Today I beat myself 12 seconds to yesterday and I go you crazy man.

Jim Hacking
I mean, that’s the great thing about living in 2020 is you have so many tools to measure things that we did. You can you can take a picture of a barcode of any food that you eat or put in your food. I mean, there’s all kinds of things you can measure.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Now, but there’s there’s something. Well, we may agree to have a second episode. That in the future, because what is bugging me? Now, you said that you’re not happy with what you’re measuring today? Now let’s let’s kind of maybe just for for for for a second, think about what is it that you’re not happy with? What would you think you could? What do

Jim Hacking
you think you could be better? Well, certainly 7.9% has been sitting in my craw for, you know, a month and a half since I sort of came to that realization. So getting all those numbers about conversion up art is something that I’m not satisfied with. And then, you know,

Unknown Speaker
you’re not satisfied with the values of your metric. Right, right.

Jim Hacking
Ah, okay. Yeah. Okay, so not much. That’s why I said, I feel like we need to be measuring more things because I don’t think we’ve got the right.

Unknown Speaker
Well, that’s, I was gonna tell you, man, you are measuring a lot. But let me tell you, that’s exactly the purpose of measurement. You’re not happy. Now. You know, what, you know, you know, your value your you know, your 7.9%. Okay, now you say it’s not good enough? Well, that’s exactly the power of knowing the value of knowing. Now it works in your head, and your Quickstart okay, it’s it’s bugging you. Well, that’s exactly the purpose of it. Okay, because now you’re gonna start making some decisions. You’re gonna start, start taking some actions, okay, now you’re tracking this man value this, this conversion. Okay, and what’s your next goal? 8.1. What’s going to be the next 181817? Well, then you’re gonna get stuck, you’re gonna fall down to 8.4, then you’re gonna get you’re gonna start thinking, Well, why does it need work? Okay, well, you’ll get some more data, you’ll start making some more decisions, start taking some more actions. And that’s exactly the power the value of knowing. Okay, I love it. Okay, so, you know, if you ask me, that’s why I was kind of, I wanted to understand. I don’t think it’s more you should measure right now. Okay. I think it’s action taking time. Right. Okay. It’s say, I think your challenge right now is in your value growth chain, the way we discussed it. Okay. Let’s see, I asked you before, where, where’s the leverage in here? Okay, which of the hinges you mentioned? Okay, would have the biggest leverage. And now you’re at the very advanced point, Jim, where you say, All right, now I see this, my, all these numbers that I’ve got here. And there’s one I don’t like, it’s 7.9. This conversion rate, that’s something I would like to improve now. Focus on it. Okay. You’ve got your how’s it called the Impact filter? Right? Well, right on impact filter on how are you going to bring 7.9 to 8.5? What were you going to do? And then measure it? Yeah. Okay. Measure it in your weekly meetings, measure it in your monthly, whatever you do, okay. And see, this is then how you’re going to leverage what what your, your, the numbers you have got, and what they tell you,

Jim Hacking
not? People who are listening can’t see me nodding, but I’m nodding with you.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, Jen, so we need to wrap this up. It was a great, great episode. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. I learned myself something and I think quite a few listeners should take an example of what you do. And I’m gonna say that in introduction as well. And well, I hope I’ve given you a couple of ideas.

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