Struggling with the Vision of Your Law Firm?

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is struggling with mapping out your goals? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, co-host Tyson Mutrux explores the critical role of having a clear vision for both your law firm and personal life.

Many law firm owners struggle with creating a vision for themselves and their own businesses. Tyson shares the creation of his tool, the vision finder and what rules are needed for people to create their vision. These rules include writing your thoughts down on paper and sitting down to let your mind wander. Tyson also goes through some of the personal vision questions law firm owners should ask themselves to understand where they want to be. It is best to think about how you perceive yourself and how others perceive you as well as thinking about who the most important people in your life are. These rules and questions in this tool are meant to help you create a vision that you see for yourself.

Take a listen to learn more about this great tool.

Episode Highlights:

• 00:24 The struggle with creating a vision for law firm owners 
• 2:09 Detailed rules for creating a vision
• 4:58 Questions and considerations for personal vision

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Transcripts: Struggling with the Vision of Your Law Firm?

Tyson (00:01.358)
Welcome back to another Saturday episode of the Maximum Lawyer podcast. This is Tyson and today what I'm going to talk about is vision. And it's something that I know people struggle with quite a bit. I know that because of guild members quite often have asked questions about vision and sometimes people just say they don't know or I think something more often that we see is law firm owners or attorneys that

you know, they're 10, 15, 20 years into their career. And I think that maybe they think that they can't have a vision, it's too late. And that's not true at all. And so I wanted to do this one, there was a vision finder that I put together for the guild, and I'm not gonna be able to go through the whole thing on one of these short episodes because they're so, it's such a long questionnaire, but.

It's one I put together because I've asked people about their visions and it's a lot of the questions that I ask them, where I put them through it. I did this, Stephen Lefkoff may or may not remember this, but a couple years ago, I think Stephen, I don't know if he was struggling with vision, but he was asking questions about vision and I talked to him for about an hour and I asked him a bunch of questions and it was very, very detailed in what I was asking him. And so I put these questions into…

into this questionnaire, so I'll go through a little bit of that. Before I do that though, I do wanna remind you about maximum lawyer and minimum time. It's something that Jim and I have put together. It's something that we have spent a lot of time on, and I gotta get my notes up, so give me a second.

Tyson (02:00.302)
Sorry about that. I didn't quite have it up yet.

Tyson (02:40.365)
Here we go.

I'll just redo that part of it.

Before I get into today's episode though, I do want to remind everyone about shooting me a text if you want to get in on stage one of maximum, lower, minimum time. It's something that Jim and I have put together that we think is the foundation for getting you to where you want to be, whether that's a stage one, stage two, or stage three law firm. If you want stage one, which we give the entire maximum, lower, minimum time, all three phases, two are…

Maximum Lawyer Guild members are gildians. Absolutely free, but we'll give you stage one free just by texting stage one to 314 -501 -9260 and we will get that out to you right away. All right, so let's get to the vision finder. And there's some rules right off the bat that I've got to get to you to set the groundwork for that. And it has to be in writing, okay? That's number one.

Has to be in writing, and this is for your personal and your professional visions. I have them, I write them out separately. Do you have to write them out separately? No, not necessarily, but I would say that I would write them out separately. They're very intertwined, but our personal lives, our professional lives, I think that we get so wrapped up into our professional lives that sometimes we forget about our personal goals as well. Has to be in writing, though. Keep it at four pages or less. It's rule number two.

Tyson (04:16.43)
You wanna keep it short or shorter. I think a page is fine too, but four pages or less, it doesn't need to be a novel. Number three, you're gonna have to take some time to really open your mind and let your mind wander. Don't just sit down, get down to business. I think you need to let your mind think for a little bit and let it wander because…

I think sometimes we will sit down and we'll force our minds to go a certain way and think that that's the right way, or that's the way we're supposed to be doing things. Sit, go find a place, a happy place, and go let your mind wander. Rule number four, you need to think big. Let your mind to go to where it will go and then think bigger from that. You don't want to get trapped into that middle class mindset.

Christopher Nicolason has talked about it before. You don't wanna be capped at that. So let your mind wander, let it get to where it is, and then think bigger than that. And the fifth one, and this relates quite a bit when it comes to number three, unless you can let your mind wander in your office, but get out of the office when writing your vision. Go somewhere else, go sit under a tree. I don't.

Go sit next to a river. I don't know get out of the office go to the library go somewhere where You can be a little bit more creative when you're writing it and the way you write it. It doesn't matter All right Let's talk a little bit about the personal vision first and again, I'm gonna keep this short so I'm not gonna go through everything If you are in the guild listening to this you're gonna you you have access to all these in the vision finder but for

for this, I'm not gonna go through everything. But a couple of the personal vision questions. And this is, I want you to be thinking about what it looks like in the future. So think about, you know, the way I like to put this is, and I know that people struggle with this, in 30 years, okay, how does your life look? And I know that's really hard. Some of you that are a little bit older, you might think, well, I wanna think 15 years. Okay, that's fine, think 15 years, all right.

Tyson (06:41.902)
But for me, I like to think out 30 years. Now that I'm 41, maybe I need to be thinking like 20 years, but I still in my mind, 30 years. And no matter what it is, around retirement age, okay? Think about retirement age when you kind of want to hang things up. And as I'm talking, the birds have started chirping. So hopefully it's not too distracting. They're right outside my window. There's a tree out there, but.

Here's the question. How do you perceive yourself and describe how you believe other people perceive you? So how do you perceive yourself and describe how you believe other people perceive you? And that's how you want people to perceive you. That's how you want to perceive yourself around that time, whatever timeframe you give yourself. Another question is, who are the most important…

in your life and why are they important to you? And again, think about that endpoint. It's not the endpoint because you're not going to die, but around the time where you're sort of retiring, who are those people that are surrounding you? Who are the people that you're with that you're spending the most time with? What are those relationships like and why are they important to you? All right, let's talk a little bit about your health. How would you describe your health? Are there any areas…

of your health that you would, that you wanna make sure at that point are at full capacity, I guess I would put it. That's not one of my questions, but I'm kind of, I'm sort of tweaking this a little bit for the podcast. So for example, sometimes like maybe right now you're having weight issues or maybe you're having health issues of some kind, whatever that health issue might be. How do you want that to be then, right? It may not be perfect, but.

What do you want it to look like at that time? Hobbies, let's talk a little bit about hobbies.

Tyson (08:46.414)
What are the one, and I'm skipping ahead a little bit on some of these questions. So there's some setup questions to this one, but what are the, what are five things you've wanted to try but have never gotten around to it? And this is more currently, because this isn't one of those, you know, prospective, you know, future looking ones. This is a current ones, because this is to get you thinking about the things that you've always wanted to do that you need to start to kind of chip away at.

of questions. And then the last one under personal I'll get to is under finances. And this is, I'll kind of skip ahead here to figure out financial goals. So the question starts with let's figure out some of your financial goals. How much money do you want to make per year? How much money do you want to have in your personal bank account? How much money do you want to have in your business account?

And this is to really get you thinking about the finances part of it so that it doesn't sneak up on you. Like how much money do you want? Do you want investments? I want you to really be thinking about those things if you've not been thinking about those things because some of you are listening to this and you're in a really good financial position. There's a lot of people that aren't, okay? And for those of you that are not, it's completely fine, okay? There's time.

You just gotta start planning for it. And that's what I kind of want you to think about. And you know what? I lied. I'm gonna do one more category and it's under home life. I think this part's important. It's really, really important when it comes to vision. I like this question a lot. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would you want to live? And then there's a series of questions underneath that. But whenever Amy and I are talking, for those of you that don't know, Amy's my wife.

Like we do have that conversation sometimes where, you know.

Tyson (10:47.342)
We talked about where we want to live and why and what we don't really want is that situation where you know, we look back and we kind of regret that we stayed in a certain place because you know, it wasn't, it wasn't, we just, we stayed there because we felt we had to, right? And we didn't really want to have that. We don't really want to have that thought. So that's one of the questions. And this next question is more one of those perspective ones where you're looking into the future.

What daily moments in your life make you the happiest? And you can do that for now and also in the future, but it's really good because it gets you thinking about, all right, what does my day look like from a personal standpoint? All right, I'm gonna skip ahead. There's another category when it comes to retirement that I'm gonna skip in the personal part. Under professional vision, this is one where, I'm gonna ask this question and.

because I do think it's really, really important. Why did you go to law school? Why did you go to law school? Some of you went to law school because you felt like that was the next step. There's nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. Some of you did it because you had a certain cause that you wanted to attack. Maybe you've gotten away from that. And maybe you'd like to get back to doing that. And so, that's why I like to ask that question because…

gets you really thinking about have you gotten a little bit off track? And maybe not, maybe you got off track and it was by design and you don't ever want to go back. That is also fine too. So it's something that, it's an important one. Why did you start your law firm? Very similar, very similar, not the same, but very similar reason why I asked that question too. Are you happy with your career? Why or why not?

If you're unhappy, what needs to change to give you the opportunity to be happy? Let me ask that again. If you're unhappy, what needs to change to give you the opportunity to be happy? And this is one where if you need to pause the episode right now and write this down, I recommend that you do it. If you're unhappy, what needs to change to give you the opportunity to be happy? This is the thing that you need to address now so that…

Tyson (13:10.19)
when you're looking into the future, whenever that future does occur, this thing hasn't kept you unhappy the whole time. Okay, so that's a really important one. And you know, I will, I'll ask a…

One more under the practice part of it. What is your niche? And I put in there that you need to choose one, not multiple, just one. I want you to focus on one. And why did you choose the niche? And what excites you about your niche? So those are two things that I really want you to answer. Because it's very, as you can tell by a few of these questions, we're kind of getting to the core of why you're doing what you're doing, right? We're getting to that.

because I want to make sure you all are doing the things that you really set out to do and that you want to do in your life. And then let me skip ahead when it comes to clients. I'm gonna skip that part. I'm gonna get into priorities and maybe we'll wrap on this one because there's a lot more we could get to. It's 14 pages by the way. So it's 14 pages. It's very detailed.

List your top three priorities in your career. And then there's another one, list your top three priorities in your life. And this is one where it's gonna really, these are very similar to rocks in a way. Very, very similar to rocks. Or really more like bee hags, I guess. They're more like bee hags. And what I would recommend with these things is, and some of these you may have already achieved, which is fantastic.

I would recommend that you choose things that are looking into the future and you try to knock out one of these things at a time as opposed to doing them all at the same time. Because if you focus on everything, you're going to focus on nothing. So I would list these things, the top three priorities in your career and in your life, and focus on them one at a time. Try to knock out.

Tyson (15:17.774)
That is the last thing I'm gonna talk about today. I am sure I'm over time. Yes, I definitely am. I'm looking at the time now. So I'm well over time, but that's okay. This is a, I think it's an important one for everyone. For anyone that wants the full vision finder sheet, it is available to guild members, maxlawguild .com if you are interested in joining the guild. For everyone else, remember to get stage one.

of maximum lawyer minimum time texting 314 -501 -926. You could also text me, just the same number, just to see if you have any questions or topics you want me to cover, 314 -501 -926. I would love to hear from you. Until next week, remember that consistent action is the blueprint that turns your goals into reality. Take care, everybody.