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Max Law Rewind: Don’t Go Broke
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LET'S PARTNER UP AND MAXIMIZE YOUR FIRM


In today’s episode we’re throwing it back to one of Jim and Tyson’s favorite episodes: #158 Don’t Go Broke.

In this episode, Jim and Tyson join Brian Mittman, a worker’s comp lawyer based out of New York. In this episode we’ll cover naming your firm, shifting your mindset from learning to implementation, KPI’s and measuring firm health with metrics, and avoiding “growing broke” while scaling.

To keep on maximizing your firm, stay connected!

 

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Transcript: Max Law Rewind: Don’t Go Broke

Brian Mittman
But we realized we got to the certain point we just weren’t going further. But by doing all these little things, this consistency over and over with that bias towards actually taking action. It’s unbelievable where we are today compared to where we were just one year ago.

Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum liar, podcast, podcast, your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson metrics. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm. Welcome to the show.

Jim Hacking
So maximum lawyers, Tyson, I wanted to hop on real quick and give you an intro to this new concept we have going

Unknown Speaker
called Maximum lawyer rewind.

Jim Hacking
There we go maximum lawyer rewind. This is a brilliant idea. From our very own Becca Eberhart and Tyson they they’ve come up with a lot of good ideas. And one of them is that we want to bring you some of our best episodes, some of our favorite episodes. And I haven’t seen the list of what those episodes are. But I sure want to make sure that law firm Roulette is on the list, because that’s one of my all time favorite episodes.

Tyson Mutrux
Jim has not seeing the list because he’s not completed his portion of it. But i i The first one I picked was the roulette. So, website roulette, it was the very first one that I picked. And I picked a few other ones. And there’s some really, really good ones in there that I had completely forgotten about. And Jim, so you need to finish the list. And so that people can can listen to the rest of our top 10 Maximum lawyer rewind episodes.

Jim Hacking
All right, I’ll do it. Alright, enjoy everybody. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking.

Tyson Mutrux
And I’m trying to see what’s up Jamie

Jim Hacking
Tyson, I am on the west coast of Michigan hanging out on Lake Michigan. I’m looking out at a bunch of ways. And it’s fun because a lot of times I remember exactly where I was when I recorded a particular episode. I remember when we did with Ed, I was outside the immigration office in Kentucky. And I’m sure I’ll remember today’s interview because I’m sitting here the sun just came up a little while ago and the lake looks beautiful.

Tyson Mutrux
Is that the area that’s considered the up the Upper Peninsula.

Jim Hacking
Now we’ve never done it that far. Where over I guess I met on the globe on the hand part. We’re in Holland, Michigan. So we are across the lake from from Chicago. And in fact, this time for the first time ever, we had been in Minnesota before. So we took this 1920s Barry that used to be used to transport trains across the lake, we took this four hour ferry ride across Lake Michigan, which was great, because I’d always wondered how long it would take to get across the leg.

Tyson Mutrux
That’s awesome. That’s really, really cool. Awesome. Well, we do have a guest today I do want to introduce our guests.

Jim Hacking
Our guest is Brian Mittman. He’s a worker’s compensation lawyer from New York. Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Mittman
Thank you for having me, guys.

Tyson Mutrux
Right, you had a really cool domain in the disability guys, that kind of that’s pretty cool. I think you can do a lot of fun marketing with that. I think you could even do like a podcast with the disability guys or something. That’s pretty cool. So tell us a little bit about your journey led by your story.

Brian Mittman
Yeah. Oh, thank you very much, again, guys for having me on. And I’m really excited because I’ve been following you guys for quite some time and got to my first event this past June, which was not just eye opening, but reassuring and reaffirming. So again, thank you for all that you guys do in terms of bringing this great world together. You have to do disability guy. So it’s an interesting journey. I’m originally from Philadelphia, and became a New York transplant when I went to school for engineering of all things. And I and I met my my future wife in college. And when I switched over to political science, and trying to figure out what to do, I decided, oh, I want to go to law school in Washington, DC and save the world and did not get into the school I wanted to the time. And I ended up going to school in Brooklyn. And at that point I was working for just to kind of a Court Street attorney while I was in school, and I quit on the guy because he was insane. I don’t know if any of you guys have had those experiences, but I learned a lot but it was a little a little insane. And I said to my father in law at the time, he said Hey, he said hey, come work for me while you look for a job. And here we are 25 years later and I’m still kind of looking for a job. So I got involved in the family business. His father had founded the firm back in 1933. And I came aboard in the early 90s. And it was kind of you know, I’d call it just a regular typical law firm, though We all know and experience. And shortly after 911, and we were in lower Manhattan at the time, shortly after 911. I was wondering, heck, what is going on, and that’s when my father in law surprised me as well and said, You know what, I’m gonna retire, like, okay. And that included by the way, at the same time, we were in the middle of litigation with a prior prior partner, because I was trying to, they’re trying to make me a partner, and it wasn’t working out. So here I was around 30 ish years old, and I experienced 911, working in a firm having my father in law retire and actually take a bite out and having to deal with a two years of litigation with a former partner who wasn’t even really my partner. So at a very young age, I was kind of wondering, what the heck am I doing? And that’s where I started my own, like investigation into things. I think I started with a Stephen Covey course, the seven habits. And and after that, I just got into some various legal marketing things. And and I like to look back now and say, What I have is I have a startup entrepreneurial law firm that just happens to have about 85 years of experience. So that’s, that’s the big picture of the disability guys. And when we came up with that name a few years back where we were really trying to capture, what are we doing? I think part of it came from the Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack and I grew up going to Pep Boys to fix my car. And I liked that idea that guys, that’s where I am now.

Jim Hacking
I think it’s a great piece of marketing. I think the word guys makes you much more approachable as a lawyer and a law firm. Talk to us about the reactions that people have had interacting with you as a disability guys, as opposed to some big law firm with a long name of a bunch of lawyers, a bunch of lawyers last names.

Brian Mittman
Yeah, it’s a great question. A German, it’s interesting, because right, our ethical rules require us to have a firm name. So we’re mark off and Mittman PC, the disability guys. Luckily, in New York, we can really lean on kind of like a DBA or a business name. And it’s not really frowned upon. The reaction has been interesting, how am I go back? And I know, there have been a lot of podcasts where everyone’s talked about books and writing books and whatnot. And I did the, the the consumer guide a bunch of years ago, our first consumer guide is actually 10 years ago, I found the original manuscript, and that’s when we came up with the disability guy’s name. And it was a kind of a cool thing. Like, wouldn’t it be great to have a series of books by the Disability guys, and we could even eventually franchise it, or have other people use it type of thing. And, you know, particularly our colleagues were like, What are we? What is this crap? What do you mean the disability guys, but the fact is, it has a visceral component to it, if somebody hears something that disability guys, you know, we’ve been mistaken for other things, oh, do sell insurance, or, yeah, who exactly are you. And that’s really part of the umbrella that we’re trying to create as I want, I want to go beyond just being a law firm, the disability goes, I can envision doing a lot of other things and a lot of other stuff that’s in line with helping disabled and injured individuals get benefits or get resources that they need. But when I wrote that book, originally, I gave it to my office manager who had been with the firm for about 30 years. And I think everybody on the podcast that’s been been around a little bit knows that this isn’t just a book about this is what workers compensation is, or what Social Security is, it was really all about, you know, the five deadly sins that could happen if you screw up your case. And the things to do. And this is really was a marketing piece, to agitate that the fears, worries and concerns of people, and let them know that here’s a guide. Here’s some guys that can help you through the process. And my office manager at the time she was editing and I said here, take a look at it. And I think she ended up crossing out about two thirds of the book. You can’t say this, you can’t do this. Why would you say this? That’s not professional. And I think that was the big reaction of a lot of colleagues as well. And I just ignored them and I’ve gone forward since then, and now we’re running. We’re in a good we’re in a good place and it’s having a lot of fun with the name.

Tyson Mutrux
Brian, you hinted a little bit at the future of the disability guys. So Well, I guess 510 years from now, what other things might you be doing? If you want to do more with it? What are you going to be doing? What are you? Where are you headed?

Brian Mittman
Good question types. And what we’ve done is we’ve worked very hard in the last couple of years on really focusing on creating a business versus creating a law firm. And we’ve adopted pretty intensely the the concepts of Vern Harnish and scaling up. I think, especially the three of us on this podcast today, we’re probably voracious readers, checking out tons of stuff, trying lots of different things. And about two years ago, instead of reading another book and trying another process, we decided to really dive deep. And the big thing we worked on is we worked on a vision. And we worked on our purpose. And our big, you know, our B hag, our big, hairy, audacious goal is to help a million people have an unexpected illegal experience in the world of disability. And that doesn’t mean I want to represent a million people, I think I would definitely be gray haired or no hair, if I did that, but the reality is, we have a very high volume of people coming to the website, there’s a lot of people that can get resources from us. So we see the disability guys, as that resource platform, there’s the direct law firm side of it, we actually have a very healthy coming out of our lead generation we and marketing, we have a very healthy mass tort component, which had started where we were just skimming through our own cases, trying to find mass tort cases that we could refer out to other attorneys. And we realized we were very good at attracting those cases. And we’ve made relationships with attorneys around the country to provide them leads and things like that. We are looking at seeing what other potential resources and businesses that fit within the feeling of who we are in terms of how we’re helping people. And even if it’s as simple as just being that resource where people come to you and say, hey, you know, I have a disabled adult child, where do I find housing and and kind of almost like the Amazon of disability type of thing. So that’s where we’re focused, we’re, of course, focused on the law firm piece for the near future, because that will be the cash and the money and the resources to be able to do more. Brian, I

Jim Hacking
really appreciate what you said about making that shift from reading one more book, listening to one more podcast, trying to find one more hack or tip that put you over the edge and instead trying to shift more towards implementation. Talk to us a little bit about how you made that shift. And how you had success with that?

Brian Mittman
That’s that’s a great question. Because it was that overnight success has taken at least a decade, actually, probably two decades because I’ve I’ve found some old old paperwork that I wrote off in the early 2000s. And I read it today. And like I laugh, because it’s the exact same struggles and things that we’re looking at. We’re really came out as I was, I was in a kind of a little private mastermind group, there were a bunch of really forward thinking attorneys who we had left a prior group, and we still were getting together. And one of the guys comes in, and he’s talking about the book traction. And like, oh my god, wow. So I had already ordered it. And you know, I downloaded it. I was listening to it on the flight back from San Diego to New York and like, Oh, my God, this idea that I did. And that’s where I had my aha moment. I said, Wait a second. I said, continue. continuous learning is important, but it’s how do we dive deep? How do we create a predisposition towards action towards doing things and my, we had structured this farm and where we are now is we have a leadership team. And it’s six of us. There are three attorneys and three non attorneys on the team. That’s myself, my partner, my senior attorney, my director of success, who’s our marketing director, my project boss who has, we don’t really have an office manager, so she has taken on these big projects, as well as my senior paralegal. And we really started looking at what we’re doing, what are these problems that we keep having over and over that we keep trying to solve? And it wasn’t until last year, in October, a year ago that we actually had our first annual meeting. And we were going to the scaling up summit in Denver, Colorado. We went out two days early, we rented a we work space, and we ended up with whiteboards. Lots of good snacks and good company. And we literally went through everything in the office in detail and created action plans. And some really, really difficult decisions as well, because of some things that had transpired in the prior year and where we were almost, I think I mentioned to you briefly, when we were at the conference, Jim about almost going broke, no growing broke and saying what, what just happened. And we committed to ourselves, not only to spend that, that blue time thinking strategy and learning, but to really digging in and doing the tough read work. So here we are in the beginning of the circle, yeah, finishing up the first month of the third quarter 2019. And this year, for instance, we have now developed the key performance indicators for every single person and position in the office. We rolled it out officially, we had been doing it last year, but we rolled it out officially in January of this year. We have created instead of just the old annual review, we’re now doing quarterly KPI reviews, where it’s a combination of Did you meet your number as well as are you living up to all the other expectations we’ve created in the values of the firm. And we’ve dug very deeply into that to get buy in and commitment. We’re we’re focusing on one thing at a time per quarter in terms of where we want to be. So for instance, q1 of this year was all about cash, what are all the things that we can do to try to improve that cash flow? This quarter, we’re digging deep into people. And that doesn’t mean that we ignore everything else. But we try to make and create this rhythm that allows us to have a bias towards action. I think you mentioned in a previous podcast, I think you guys were speaking with John Fisher and says, we do daily huddle. For the leadership team. We’ve gotten daily huddles going for a couple of the other teams, we do our weekly meeting, we do a monthly and a quarterly meeting now. We’ve used coaches, business coaches in the past who got us to a certain point, but we realized we got to the certain point, we just weren’t gone further. But by doing all these little things as consistency over and over with that bias towards actually taking action. It’s unbelievable where we are today compared to where we were just one year ago. The Brian

Tyson Mutrux
phenomenal answer i Here’s the question. I’ve got it. You mentioned about the KPIs for each individual position. And that’s a question that we get a lot from people they want to know how do you how you track performance? So we talked about the process of developing those?

Brian Mittman
Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I’m happy to also get just some photos of our, of our KPI board that we’ve created, started out with a whiteboard. And then one of our interns happened to be my daughter, this summer creative, unbelievable, a gigantic fell board that we have hanging on the wall. Not an easy process. I’m not going to be anybody it takes and it’s not a one and done. It’s all about iterations and testing isn’t trying. So we all have KPIs to some extent, like anybody listening today has a minimum key performance indicator of Gee, are we making revenue and paying bills? Right? That’s a that’s a KPI. It’s about asking the tougher questions. So there are certain parts of the business that are super easy to measure a number with. And then there are other things that are a lot harder, more gray more kind of amorphous. One thing, though, that we have done, and we made a and I’ve made this a personal big point is we are not just tying the KPI into a number. We are also tying it into what we call happiness. So we have a big on our board, we have a big heart. And the two things that go into the heart are the metrics right, the KPIs is the stuff we do, along with what we call our happiness score. And right now, you know, the happiness score is we’re doing things like how many reviews did we get? How many substitutions did we get? We started a net promoter score thing, which we’re trying to still figure out. And we don’t exactly have a quote unquote, number, but we have a feeling for kind of how happy are people working with the disability guys wanting to work with the disability guys. So knowing that our referrals from other clients are increasing, you know, 10% a month, it’s like, wow, we’re doing something right. So keeping those two things together. And what we’ve done is for every single position, we’ve made sure that there is both a hard KPI hard metric and a soft metric. So the easy guys are the tourney’s, right. We’re on a contingency business workers comp and Social Security. What’s your revenue? For the month? Did you meet your revenue goal? We have a couple internal factors that we measure, which I’ll talk about in a second, which I think is is the AHA piece. And then each attorney is how many reviews did you get or positive feedbacks that you get? Because you could, and we’ve had this experience in the past where I’ve given a number to an attorney. And he will just kill the number and piss off a ton of people in the process. So it’s great, you made $100,000 in revenue, but if I got substituted, like crazy, because you’re a jerk, then it’s not worth making $100,000. I’m sorry, because it’s not going to be able to, we’re not going to be able to last with that. So that’s the big picture, our front desk, you know, like, wow, we call our front desk, the welcome team, right? Because those are the people that make people happy when they come in, or they answer the phone, right? I happen to think they’re probably some of the most important people in your office, for all the marketing we deal with. And the front desk to answer the phone in a funny way, then we’re kind of screwed, right? And so we have metrics for them. One of the metrics is, they’re responsible for scanning all for paperwork, well, everything has to be scanned and associated to a file within 24 hours. They’ve kept up on it, that’s kind of easy to measure, right? If there’s stuff that’s in the scam folder that’s not associated, we know that it’s they didn’t they didn’t make it, we use a VoIP system called Nextiva. But any of these systems has data. And one of the things that we do is, there’s a data point called abandoned calls. And those are the calls where the phone rings. And the person either hangs up before you pick it up, or they hang up like right when you pick it up. And our goal is to keep that down below 13% Abandon rate. So for every 100 calls, I mean, start 10 people hung up, it seems a little crazy. A portion of the abandoned calls are telemarketers and garbage like that. So it’s really not that high. But we have a super high volume. I mean, I hope you’re sitting down with we take in over 13,000 calls a quarter. So that’s four to 5000 calls a month, and over a 20 day work month. That’s a lot of calls. So for instance, yesterday, I think we had something like 263 inbound phone calls, and we had an 8% Abandon rate. And we see that we have less complaints and stuff when the numbers have a certain level. So that’s how we measure them. And the final piece is, I think any business can figure out what we call the feed generating activities. I don’t know what you guys would know what you guys would consider that like in the immigration world, it might be filing a petition in the pie world, it’s you know, how many settlement demands went out, things like that. But we have figured out about seven or eight things that show up on our calendar, at deposition, I hearing a new appointment that we can easily associate a revenue number to so it’s not a direct number, but we say hey, we made again, $100,000 in this time period, and we had 100 of these fee activities during that time. So we now know that that was worth right, you know, $1,000 in activity. And we’ve been looking at that data and really figuring that out and saying what are all the things that we can do to do the right activities. And that’s how we’ve come up with it. And we’re constantly tweaking and changing and getting input about it, because you can also overwhelm yourself with it.

Jim Hacking
Brian, that is great, great stuff. I think that that last answer you gave is going to be gold for a lot of our listeners and I want to follow up on it by asking you how do you have the data reported back to you and do you have like a dashboard for overseeing it? How often are you looking at it those kinds of things?

Brian Mittman
That’s that is the question. So my my my my business partner, Michael. We call him the numbers ninja because he he loves diving deep. And we realize that as he started looking at various points of data from our both our case management system, our lead system, we’re like, wow, we have everybody has all the information there. So here’s how we figured some of the stuff out One is, I got our accounting together. And this is a whole story in and of itself. But when my office manager of 30, some years when I asked her to leave a bunch of years ago, when she left, I took over the books again, right? Why don’t Why don’t you take over the books, guys, you know, you’re, you’re on the business. And you know what it’s like dealing with actually trying to run a practice and actually doing accounting. So I learned a lot. Kind of getting back into that, I ended up hiring a bookkeeper who came in a couple days a week, that type of thing. And then I had a very forward thinking that at the time it company and they were doing a lot of their accounting at their site overseas. And they built a little overseas virtual account bookkeeper for me, and that was really cool, because now we were scanning stuff and all this stuff was happening. But I was quickly outgrowing it since I had to deal with all the stuff all the time. And I ended up going to a virtual accounting company. And, and it’s been unbelievable, because what they did was they got me onto QuickBooks Online, they helped me get all my accounts in order, they asked tons of tough questions, and helped me from that perspective, think about, hey, here’s your books, your books are now cleaned to an extent. And they report to me each month, we do weekly stuff. I don’t do the weekly stuff anymore, but we have a monthly call and we get certain reports, just out of the accounting data to see where the trends are. What is our cash flow? are we predicting some stuff, things like that. So there’s a ton of useful information just in your own accounting systems. And to be honest, you know, I took accounting for lawyers and law school, I got an A I love that stuff. But I don’t understand accounting concepts, the way accountants and bookkeepers do, and they don’t understand how to talk. The Business People write to us. So So that’s been a process. And we’ve learned a lot it says, Okay, from an accounting perspective, here’s my numbers. We then also turned to the case management system said, Okay, we have all this data in our system, what the heck does it all mean? I’ve been, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, we’ve been around for 85 years, I think we have something like 60 70,000 names, individual names, just in our database, with some type of case or thing or number associated to it. So we started digging into that say, Okay, we know that we have calendar entries for every client, because that’s how the business is driven by showing up at a hearing or a deposition, we were then able to actually export that to an Excel spreadsheet and start to manipulate that I’m not very good, I’m good at spreadsheets, I’m not good at pivot tables and stuff like that. But if you can find somebody or teach yourself a little bit, you can eventually pull out a really good data. And we’re now down to the point that we’ve gotten the hive, the big picture numbers that we like to say and infer and trends. And we then are diving deeper, we’re doing things now we’re trying to identify which zip codes generate the better fees over a shorter period of time, something that we would not have been able to do if I was just struggling to try to figure out who who has to cover a hearing? And do we have enough money in the bank? So don’t know if it fully answered the question. But the data is in your system. And it’s about trying to identify what are the I like averages. I think if I had to give anybody tip, it’s about averages. You know, it’s the old revenues, vanity profit sanity, type of thing. And it’s about averages, at least for me, as I know that on average, we’re generating a certain number. You know, what, at $500 per feed generating activity. So what we’ve done, then to extrapolate and tie it all together is our paralegals know that they have to do a certain number of fee generating activities per quarter. Right, so the fee generating activities multiplied by the average, wow, we know we’re gonna have a quarter million dollars this quarter, or a million dollars this quarter, whatever the numbers gonna be. And if we’re and we can start to see the trends like Oh, the other kind of trend piece I’m jumping around a little bit is the predictive value of the data. So we usually docket, we absolutely love it and have have become, I hope, hope to be Eric Kaufman would consider us power users, I hope. But one of the things that we do now is we know we want a certain number of wanted leads per month. Not only do we See the number and report on that in our daily huddle, but we talked about the trends. Hey, on the current amount of leads, we’re going to be trending towards our goal by the end of the month. Wow, we have 21 to the leads. Today, we’re trending towards 40 for the month, and we know that we need 30 for the month to be to get to our number of sign cases. So whatever those particular dynamics are, for your farm is it exists everywhere.

Becca Eberhart
Hey, guys, it’s Becca here. I’m sure you’ve heard Jim and Tyson mentioned the guild on the podcast and in the Facebook group. That’s because we’re seeing some really exciting things happening with guild members and their businesses. The Guild is this perfect mix of a community group coaching and a mastermind. Inside you’ll gain support, tap into a network of connections, and continue learning a common theme among successful entrepreneurs. There are so many benefits inside the guild, including weekly live events and discounts to all maximum lawyer events, head over to maximum lawyer.com forward slash the guild to check out all of the benefits and watch a few testimonials from current members. Investing in a community is like the self care of business ownership. Being in a community with other people who get it is crucial when you’re creating a rock solid foundation to build your business on one that’s strong enough to withstand setbacks, transitions and growth. So head to maximum lawyer.com and click on the guild page to join us. Now let’s get back to the episode.

Tyson Mutrux
Ryan, this is this is great stuff, it really is awesome for my last question. For attorneys that want to grow the way you have what is your in, let’s say that they’re just starting out whether they’re leaving another firm or just getting out of law school, what’s one piece of advice you give them, to get to the point where you are now,

Brian Mittman
you know, the one, the one piece of advice that I wish I had gotten is I would treat whether you’re a solo going out on your own joining a new law firm, I think I would try to

Tyson Mutrux
treat your

Brian Mittman
entity as a business. And to actually create it as though you have your 50 employees and you’re $25 million in revenue. So you have a CEO role, have a chief finance CFO role, have a CEO role, have a chief technology officer, chief marketing officer have those roles spelled out and the product and start to create the processes for each of them. So whether it is accounting, marketing, conversion, case management, whatever the pieces of the business are, you may be doing all of them. And you probably do do all of them to begin with. But if you can actually be clear to say, well, this is a specific role. It’s almost like sitting at your desk and having literally different hats and saying, Oh, I gotta do accounting stuff. Now you go put the little green accounting advisor on, right, you spend a half hour you do your accounting work for the day, then a client calls you put your attorney hat on, I think that’s the most important thing, because we get quickly lost in the weeds and the kind of the doing of stuff. And you’ll, you’ll wake up at the end of the week and say what the heck does happen this week. But if you have those very specific components in place, and you’re always working towards that, as you get busier, you’re going to be able to then offload or delegate certain things and not feel as bad about it, because you really understand it. I think that’s my biggest challenge is even in this even today is I like to understand that the engineering background, I really like to understand what’s going on. I’ve gotten a lot better letting other people do it. But it kind of freaks me out if we start something and I know nothing about it. So just plant you know, just map it out and treat yourself like you’re already there. That would be my advice.

Jim Hacking
I Brian, from my last question, you touched on something that you and I talked a little bit about at the conference and that is growing to a point where you get into financial trouble growing out of business, I think you called it can you talk a little bit about that and maybe wrap up with that?

Brian Mittman
Yeah, no. I had mentioned it as growing broke. So there’s somebody mentioned that the conference is a great book the simple simple numbers simple isn’t it? I fully i is a guy by the name of Crabtree wrote it. I don’t remember the full name and I can get it for you and it’s out of the whole Vern Harnish Rockefeller habits scaling up world and it was this whole idea of, of not growing broke, right? We become successful. You have a big hit. You do a lot of things. So what do you do? I think as human beings, you innately look at that and say, Wow, that’s kind of normal. And then you start building things around it that are normal. So I’m not talking about Oh, my God, I want to bake cakes, and I ran out and I bought a Mercedes. I’m talking about the same way you want a big case where you have money coming in a good time. So you hire more people, and you’re not too big. Oh, yeah, no big deal, give them a $20,000 raise, and, you know, whatever, whatever it is, and then you wake up one day, and you’re broke. So there are countless businesses that have 3040 $50 million in revenue, and then they shut their doors. Like, how did that happen? And you know, that that started happening to us, we were doing pretty well, a lot of stuff, we had a lot of moving parts, I was doing a lot of different marketing, spending a lot of money, and I wasn’t really paying attention at the time to the numbers the way I do now. And I didn’t see the trends, and all of a sudden, the revenue starts decreasing, but we’re gonna hang in there, the revenue decreases. We’re hanging in there. And then I wake up one day, saying, Oh, crap, I gotta, I spoke with my banker about something. And they basically said, No, you know, we’re not renewing the line of credit. It’s like, what do you mean? And it was that catalyst that led eventually to the meeting in October of 2018. Where were, you know, we had looked back at the beginning of the year and said, Oh, my God, you know, we were literally, you know, not even months, maybe weeks away from that was it I had never thought of the idea of bankruptcy or anything like that. I said, What am I doing? Right? You know, I have all these people that work for me, that count on me. But at the same time, you know, I can’t just blindly go forward, because I have myself and my family and all that. And we made a lot of really, really hard decisions. And, and it was worth personnel decisions we made, which suck, I don’t care who you are, anything that does, those are, those are tough decisions. And we made some really tough business decisions about everything from marketing to when we’re going to spend stuff, but we didn’t just do a blindly, we force ourselves to start learning. Learn it, learning our numbers, so we know where the things are. And I’m happy to say that we’ve gotten to the point where we now the core business is sustaining the the poor expenses, and my livelihood and my family and a lot of other people. And every time we’ve now tried to make a decision that has any type of impact, which is most decisions, we have data and thoughts and a way to look at it, because frankly, I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m sitting there saying, Okay, I’m not paying myself just to meet payroll. And I’m grumpy about certain people, and I’m feeling negative, I don’t want that I want to work with people I like and love. And I want them to work in a place that they like and love and to understand, you know, what’s going on. And that’s really driven everything. And that occurred 20, some years into my practice, where, you know, I was blessed to inherit a foundation had been working on building on that foundation, and looked back and said, What do I get myself into? So it is just that awareness. And I think that’s the most important thing.

Tyson Mutrux
Ryan, these are these are just great insights. And just you gave so much great information. Thank you so much. I do want to wrap things up. We want to be respectful of your time, or do I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group get involved there, lots of great activities growing every single day. And also, if you don’t mind, taking a couple minutes, stopping right now and giving us a five star review on iTunes or your podcast. We would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what’s you’re going to be

Jim Hacking
thinking about this the other day, as I was explaining to someone how we generate attorney client agreements. In the old days, it would take a day or two for me if if one of the attorneys or if I had a console, I have to go work on this Word document, I have to change out their names and everything. Then I would print out the contract, I email it to them, I scan an email to them, and then they might get back to me in a day or two we have greatly streamline that process where I can actually send an agreement right out of the docket. And with Zapier forwarded on to them while they’re sitting in the console, they’ve had numerous people sign up in our office and my hack of the week is to figure out whatever you can do, to squeeze that time out to make it as easy and as quick as possible for people to sign up with you.

Tyson Mutrux
Good stuff. I love it. Hi, Brian, do you have a dipper hack? The week worse?

Brian Mittman
Yes, I thought about this. So I have to, I have two quick ones. And I also want to again, thank you guys for, for having me on. And I and I want to be clear as well as and I want to thank my team. Because whether you’re a solo, you’re not really ever solo. So be aware of your team and all the great stuff they do. Two quick hacks, whether you use an online bookkeeper or not, we switched over to a program that ties into QuickBooks called bill.com. And it allows us to not print checks. So the bills go, basically the bills go into the system, I can go through check off what I want to pay and all that stuff, and boom, it goes out. And they either send electronic funds, or they send a check out to the other people. And that has been a tremendous help. I mean, there have been times where I’ve printed up a ton of checks. And I forgot to sign everyone and I mailed them out like and the other very quick hack is, you know, physical, spiritual, emotional well being, as we know is beyond important, especially in this wonderful high stress business that we’re in, and my wife and I found a gym that we go to, and it’s a high intensity interval training, the hit training, and it’s literally less than 30 minutes. So within an hour, I can be in and out in the morning or in the evening. And I think that if you can find one of these places near you, we do a thing called Fit Body Boot Camp, that’s a franchise as f 45. Orange theory is a little bit longer. I think that don’t don’t neglect that. And again, it’s an hour from start to finish at most. And that usually includes travel time. And I think that’s a huge, huge help for any of us.

Tyson Mutrux
Those are great tips to add on to yours. The bill.com. One day, if you have Bank of America, you can do the same thing. I forget about it all the freaking time. And bill.com might be easier used to so I don’t know. That’s, that’s a really good one. So my tip of the wig actually is an app to Udemy. I’m sure many of you have heard of it. But you d e m y. And I had heard commercials for Udemy. And I’ve seen Facebook advertisements woman, David Terry had mentioned a couple of courses to make. We’ve had a couple discussions about pay per click and SEO all kind of stuff. But check it out a download of the app, and it’s pretty damn cool. My operations manager took a couple of management courses through it already is really neat, super cheap. I’m talking like $12 for a course and it’s really, really cheap. So you can do it right there from your phone to do from your computer. Whatever. Use your views. I highly recommend it. Brian, thank you so much for coming on. I’ve learned so much in a short time. So thank you so much.

Brian Mittman
You’re welcome. And thank you guys for having me on. Thanks, Jenna. Take care.

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