Jay Ruane  0:00  

Hello. Hello, and welcome to this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, and with me, as always, is my man Seth Price down there in his home office. Seth it’s been a crazy week. I know you’ve got a lot of stuff going on, but how’s your week going?

Seth Price  0:20  

But I feel I have that envy, like, I feel like I’m not worthy. I need to find that

Jay Ruane  0:25  

Well, I need to get you one of these, you know, for the law firm blueprint, you know. I mean, the reality is 

Seth Price  0:31  

Hat envy. 

Jay Ruane  0:32  

I have an eight inch size eight hat because, you know, I mean, I got a big ass head, right? And I saw these online, and I was like, I can have a hat where, like, it would be bigger than my head. I gotta buy one. It was, it was a spur of the moment, you know, impulse purchase. I spent over $100 for this thing. But it’s funny, my kids love it. And next time I’m on a stage, I’m going to be wearing this. So people remember me as the guy with the crazy hat. 

Seth Price  1:00  

Very good. 

Jay Ruane  1:00  

So there you go. So I was traveling this week. I got out to Chicago to see my friends in DUI. D la actually hung out for a little while with the people from Capture Now, who were there were great guys, and had a really good seminar. Got to see a lot of friends. Couple of members of the mastermind got to have a dinner with them. So I’m getting into my Seth spirit, because you travel all the time. You just had a conference.

Seth Price  1:26  

I don’t, you know it’s, it’s, I do travel. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not nothing. But somebody was saying this the other day, I think, and this sort of dovetails I did my first trip since the summer to Detroit for the Mike Morris Fireproof Conference, and it was first one he was doing as a pure conference for all sorts of stuff. They had Andrew Finkelstein there. They had a whole bunch of cool speakers. But one of the cool things that I loved about it was, I bet, but like raving fans of this show you and I sit here do this every day in a vacuum, more people came up to me at this conference and said, Have they loved it? They loved the themes we’re talking about. They loved how we play off of each other, how we disagree with each other. It blew me away.

Jay Ruane  2:10  

Okay, so pause, folks, before you go any further, if you’re listening to this show podcast style, take a moment and give us a five star review. Write a review, tell us how great we are, because I’d like to actually see that. It’s amazing how I don’t, I don’t get out much as you can tell I’m wearing a hat like this. I mean, the reality is, is, I’d love to get some feedback, so you can send us an email at the law firm.

Seth Price  2:35  

I get more feedback in person than anything else. Never. It’s bizarre, anyway, but it was very gratifying, lots of good stuff. And you know, all the issues that we deal with, day in and day out, all these firms are dealing with and but one of the things that came up at the conference was, I think that because of this show and others, there is a perception, because we are on social, and when you flip, you know, and you see whether it’s Instagram for my law firm revolution, you it amplifies us being there to the point where even if you’re not, you know, there were just four conferences. I didn’t go to any of those the beginning of September. But there’s a perception that you’re everywhere, which the dream is, if you’re Jay Ruane, to be able to sit with your hat in your hovel, and have people have the perception that Jay is everywhere.

Jay Ruane  3:25  

You know, it’s funny, I was well. So I went to night school for law school, and I commuted an hour each way because I was living in Bridgeport, working at bars, hanging out with my friends, and I said, I’m going to be a street lawyer. I’m not leaving this to go to law school up in Hartford and live with a bunch of law students. I’m going to stay with my people. So I would drive an hour each way at night to go to law school. And I think it’s fair to say that if I’m in your class, you’re going to notice me. I got no problem speaking my mind. I’m kind of gregarious. I’m I tend to be loud. Is probably how you notice me overall. But what happened was people would say, What do you mean? You weren’t at this thing? You’re always around. And I guess you’re, you’re the you’re falling for that too.

Seth Price  4:20  

You I have a thing in the back of my door with all of my little, you know, Speaker ribbons from all these different events. So it’s not nothing. Yeah, I’m sure it’s over 100 events, but that said at this point, I mellowed it with, you know, if I’m asked to speak, I go, you know, if it’s just something meaningful, but it’s a more of a balance, and it’s fascinating, because that perception proceeds, and then I think social allows you to fill in those gaps.

Jay Ruane  4:46  

Oh yeah, for sure. You know, it’s interesting, folks that Seth brings up the fact that he is, he has all of his speaker tags on the back of his door, the back of my door, there’s two things. Number one, it is the former employee graveyard of business cards. So once somebody leaves us, I take one of their business cards to the back of my door. It’s getting up there with a lot of people on there. But it’s interesting. I had an employee come to me this week, send me a message on Friday, I’m in Chicago, I’m just getting off stage, and I get a message from him saying, Hey, can I get 15 minutes of your time over the weekend? And I said, Sure. Now, normally, as an employer, when somebody says I need 15 minutes of your time, but they won’t tell you what the time is for, it usually means they’re giving you the news. Hey, I’m leaving. I’m going another direction, and they want to break up with you to your face. So I’m like, Hey, what’s this? What’s this? About these? I don’t worry about it. I’ll talk to you. How about Monday? I’m I’ll be in on Monday around 11. Can we meet Monday at 11? Interesting. And this is, this goes to something that we’ve talked about. So sit I get into the office Monday at 11 after doing my morning issues that I work on out of the office, I sit down with him, and he says, Look, I want to tell you I got a job offer on Friday. He said, Okay, he’s like all my friends tell me, I need to leverage this back to you and get more money. But I don’t think that’s the move here. I’m going to tell you something. I love the culture that you’ve created. I think I’m fairly compensated. I’d like to see a growth for me. I don’t think this job offer, I applied for this job with with the Attorney General’s office. You know, four years ago, when I got out of law school, I know what I have here, and I’m staying. And I’m sorry if I freaked you out asking you, because in retrospect, I could see how you’d be like, Oh, fuck, he’s leaving. And I said, well actually, I thought, yeah, a, you’re leaving, or B, something’s wrong with one of your kids, and you need to tell me that you’re gonna need some time off, because, God forbid that would happen. He’s like, Oh, my God, you thought that maybe something might be wrong with my kids? I said, Yeah. I mean, you know that’s the kind of culture we built here, that we’re here to support your family as first. And he’s like, see, that’s why I’m staying well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not leveraging this for a raise. I hope I’ve earned a raise.

Seth Price  7:06  

Look great for the Jay Ruane firm. Love it. But it does bring up that issue that as business owners, everybody watching the show has that moment where you get the text saying, Do you have time to talk? And right? It’s like you get to the point over time where you kind of already know what’s going on. Now, here it had a happy ending. Rarely does.

Jay Ruane  7:27  

Well, I think, I think Seth, this was one of my employees, and now, right now, all of my attorneys, every single.. Well, that’s not true. One of them isn’t. But all of my other 11 attorneys have had other life experiences outside of my law firm. So they’ve either been lawyers or real life experience type two, ex military, that type of thing. And so they know what they have here. I was hiring straight out of law school for years. You know this? We talked about this on the show, and I would get people at 18 months or 24 months leave because they’re like, “Well, I can’t stay at the first job I ever had. There’s got to be something more out there.” And I would get feedback from people saying, Wow, I didn’t know how good I had it now that I’m in this miserable other job. But what I think you have brought me to the vision of, if you can hire somebody who’s two to five years out, they won’t necessarily have the years of bad habits that can’t be fixed, but they will also appreciate what you are offering them in a good culture, a good place to work, that’s less stress, that’s not people screaming at each other. So I want to thank you that you got me that point to hire people that weren’t right out of law school, pay them a little bit more, and now I’m reaping the benefits.

Seth Price  8:43  

That’s awesome. You know what? That brings me to a question, what positions, because I over the years, I can still go back. There very few things I can remember as I age and memory slips, but what positions when you get that call are the most painful for you?

Jay Ruane  9:00  

Oh, that’s, well, I mean, for me, it’s, it’s the attorneys that are running a regional office that’s not in my backyard. If I don’t have somebody who can step in to handle that office, then it becomes stressful, because you gotta put a new person in. You gotta manage the transfer of the clients. Maybe people are taking over parts of that geographic area, and it’s getting split up that has always been the most stressful. You remember two years ago? Yeah, a little over two years ago, I had my manager, my COO, abruptly, I was on vacation, and I got a text from a friend saying, “Hey, did you know that your managing lawyer just got appointed a public defender job.” And I was like, I did not know that, but now I do, and so, you know, we had to move kind of quickly

Seth Price  9:49  

Look there’s two different categories. One is, especially if you’re pi firm, or somebody’s taking the cases or, 

Jay Ruane  9:55  

Oh, well, that’s a whole thing. 

Seth Price  9:57  

But to me, I put the order of operations you know, COO. If that were to happen. We had our guy fall off a motorcycle. That was not a good moment in life. And secondarily for us, the accounting position, I know, for some firms, it’s not as big a deal. 

Jay Ruane  10:16  

Well, I have my opinion on that.

Seth Price  10:19  

We were in the first 10 years of our firm, really, maybe even eight with the desert. We’ve had a single homegrown person with us for the last 10,12, years. That said, I know you want to talk about CFOs today, I’m going to tell a story which I think is good for our audience, which is I wanted to elevate to get a controller at one point, and this was probably six years ago. Now, six six and a half years ago, and we first hired a recruiter, we then hired a second recruiter. Did some of our own searches. We made five offers. Five people accepted, not one showed to the firm, all for different reasons.

Jay Ruane  11:04  

How is that possible?

Seth Price  11:05  

First guy came through through a recruiter. The going rate was about a buck 25 for a controller. At the time, they told us to pay him 110 somebody offered him more. Another woman came. She was bought back by her prior firm.

Jay Ruane  11:20  

You would think the controller would leverage that to come back to you and get more.

Seth Price  11:25  

He got what he wanted. Another another woman was recruited back by her own firm. Another guy we knew was overqualified for the job and ended up getting a job for 50k more before ours came through. Another lady was sort of deciding between us that she was from the nonprofit world, which is always a red flag to me, government, nonprofit. We talked about that before she. Yeah, you know what? I want to stay in the nonprofit world. You know it was, I mean, it was a and, you know what? And the craziest part was a friend of mine, who was a similar sized firm in DC, had the same thing, four offers, four accepted. Nobody showed. So we ended up developing our own person internally. And the one we did actually did have a controller at one point that turned out to be a raving alcoholic, and ended up with one of those perfect storms talk about management, sort of cold sweats. We had a fractional CFO, which we’ll talk about in a second. And that fractional CFO, he told us. The fractional CFO told him to lie to us, and all of a sudden it wasn’t and it was a while ago, and all of a sudden we have a perfect storm, because either he’s lying about that, in which case he has to be fired, or it’s true, and he didn’t tell us at the time, and he needs to be fired, so he has to be gone. And now we’re dealing with the fractional CFO. What do you do? Which it was just the you just can’t make this shit up. And those you know, which is why we ended up going with the concept of the fractional CFO world, because a true CFO is 250, to $350,000 a year that most people in this listening audience aren’t going to hire. You’re hiring bookkeeper, maybe a controller on a good day, Director of Finance, controller. But that’s about as far as most law firms are going to get. And so you just you don’t want to allocate the resources for a true CFO unless you’re a mega firm, in which case you’re trying to.

Jay Ruane  13:26  

I would say that 99% of the people in our audience are never going to get to that.

Seth Price  13:33  

Yeah, and I know you want to talk, I’ll just throw you know, verbal diarrhea here, but we’ve had one fractional CFO, who was a local person, basically, just come in, totally F with us, and then, like, sent us, didn’t do the work, sent us a bill and then threatened to sue us if we didn’t pay her $5,000 bill. Another person came in gave, you know, totally bad advice, totally didn’t execute, you know, one of these programs that, like, you know, you’re getting this many hours for this, this and this, we it just, it has been such a bear to find somebody because you don’t know what you don’t know about finance, right? All you want is somebody to be proactive and lead you. And what I find is, you know this, it’s a it reminds me of early days when it was both my real estate company and then with the law firm, where I learned a lesson, never have your bookkeeper negotiate a bill that’s not their skill set. If you want to get a bill down, either do it yourself or have your office manager do it, but your bookkeeper by death. The reason they’re a bookkeeper is to keep numbers. They are not there to negotiate for and they will do a terrible job at it, or it won’t happen at all. And that is sort of the the the I’ve gone through these different levels of how do you get each of those pieces connected to? And to me, you know, we all need, I need somebody who is going to not just what is your issue today, but help you see what you should that’s what you really want. The CFO for, right? That 250 $350,000 person is to help show you what you don’t know, and lead you to the promised land. And rather than what is on your mind and causing you problems, you need somebody to help lead you to where you need to be. And that’s the most frustrating thing, because some of the fractional CEOs just want to come to the phone call say, what’s your problem today?

Jay Ruane  15:35  

Luckily, Seth, in the last decade, probably really the last five years, there have been fractional CFOs that have come up in the in the legal space. I had a nightmare experience a decade, maybe 15 years ago, where I hired a fractional CFO. Came from a manufacturing background, but he was the one in my local area, and I was pushed to him, and I was like, I want to set a budget. And he’s like, Well, we don’t really do budgets. We look six months in advance, and that’s what we’re you know, you never know what contracts you’re gonna get. I’m like, but I know what my client list is you need somebody six months from now. Say is so we really

Seth Price  16:12  

it is a rough, rough place out there. You

Jay Ruane  16:29  

something is up. I don’t know my computer

Seth Price  16:32  

for a second. We’ll see if it’s me. I

Seth Price  17:01  

I’m at 850 so I’m in good shape today. Okay, so just do one more try. Let’s start again.

Jay Ruane  17:10  

So luckily, Seth, in the last decade or so, there have been instances where people who have gotten some experience as a CFO in the legal space have been able to help lawyers, and you can find them. There’s some listeners to the show who are in that space, but I had a terrible nightmare experience with one years ago who came from manufacturing. He was looking for what kind of contracts, and he just didn’t understand my business. And for me, in a criminal, there’s not a lot of firms my size in criminal, but we practice law, but also, like sometimes it’s FU, that’s why. And we take cases for next to nothing, because I got my nose out of joint and I don’t want to back down. So it’s tough to find the right person.

Seth Price  17:53  

You need legal specific. I get it, but just be careful. There’s a lot of Charlotte’s out there, because the moment look, part of what I got into SEO was because there were plenty of people, the people, when I started that were saying, we’re SEO for lawyers. Weren’t great. A lot of them were fraudsters. I mean, a lot of them still are fraudsters. But like, it was, it was, I found that it was that we basically so no. The good news is, you need somebody in the space. The bad news is it’s still buyer beware. Be wary. Do your due diligence, and you know, using the Jay Ruane theorem, find somebody who’s used the person for over a year. 

Jay Ruane  18:31  

Yeah really, you know, it’s funny calling nightmares in the SEO space. I was with a friend of mine this week in Chicago. He got a call from his SEO firm, who also answered his phones for him. And was like, we can pre sell your leads and help you with intake. And they just, he asked a couple of questions. Of them, like, well, what are you doing for me for my 10 grand a month? And they’re like, what we’re doing your phones, we’re getting your leads, blah, blah, blah. And he pushed back a little. Was like, Well, you know, you say you’re supposed to be making me content. What kind of links are you doing? And they’re like, we’re firing you as a client. You have 24 hours to find a new host for your site. We’re taking it down. And then he found out he doesn’t even own his domain name because he had, they had him transfer the domain name to them because it was necessary for the SEO updates. I mean, talk about a charlatan ripping people off. He’s lost his main domain name that he’s had since 2001

Seth Price  19:32  

you got to call this one out. 

Jay Ruane  19:33  

Well, I know I gave him some resources he can help.

Seth Price  19:37  

That’s ridiculous. I’ve been there was a guy, though, in South Carolina, they did that people within 510, years. And he’s like, oh, yeah, good luck leaving. Good luck. Yeah. I mean, it’s just

Seth Price  19:47  

a much better business model than mine.

Jay Ruane  19:49  

You know, the the you know, well, I mean, I know a lot of drug dealers. I could become a kingpin if I decided I wanted to sell crack and heroin back in the day, but I don’t want to do. That, you know, and just like you, I don’t want to do the negative stuff, but you can really hold people, and there’s a lot of lawyers out there

Seth Price  20:06  

I used to see that, like with immigration locally, there were immigration lawyers that made a lot of money by finding at risk people and saying, Oh, let me, yeah, I know that the law tells me nothing could be charging $15,000 and then come back a few months later. Ah, nothing’s gonna be done. That does suck, but what is the last topic for today?

Jay Ruane  20:28  

Well, the the theme, really, is, you know, buyer beware. There’s so many lawyers I know who just want to be lawyers. They don’t want to think of that they’re running a business. They don’t want to think about the marketing. They’re just like, let me get my files and work them. And I gotta say it’s tough to run this business in this industry. And if you really love being a lawyer and you don’t love the administrative stuff and the marketing stuff, I mean, I gotta say you were probably better suited to find a great job than put up with all of these headaches,

Seth Price  21:02  

you know, I think I was with some people the other day from Boston, where an owner of a firm realized that he had lost a bunch of lawyers, etc, and brought in an amazing operator. I think they got some points in the business. And you to me, you know, I go to these masterminds. And the number one thing that I see across the board, from junior onto senior firms is the non lawyer operator. What could be a lawyer operator? The operator inside and to me, if that’s not your thing, you’ve never run a business before. You’ve no interest in it, you’re gonna turn a blind eye to it, finding somebody great and paying them enough that they don’t leave and do and basically making sure that that’s there, because you can solve eight out of 10 of those issues with the right person if they’re vested. 

Jay Ruane  21:52  

Yeah, find your job. I mean, that’s really it. Like, find somebody who has a mind for business, who wants to run a business, is intrigued by the service businesses that we offer people, and whether it’s family law, trust and estates, pi, criminal, bankruptcy, whatever it is, find somebody who wants to do that and allows you to be you. And too many lawyers I know are like, I get to, I get to be me, 40 hours a week, and then I got all this other shit. I hate doing.

Seth Price  22:19  

That’s, that’s life and business, right? I remember as a baby lawyer, I would, you know, you would take meetings all day, and you had to start billing at five o’clock because your meetings were over. Now you could, like, get shit done. And I think that the problem is, when you start, you’re not paying enough to get the right person to do right and the rule of three, you don’t even know what you need.

Jay Ruane  22:40  

I mean, the reality is, is most people who launch a law firm are truly under capitalized, you know, and so, you know, and they’re scraping by, and that’s just the way it is. It’s funny, I have a lawyer I know here who’s about to launch a practice, she texted me and she said, Hey, can I ask you some questions? So I said, Sure, no problem. I answered her question, and she’s and I said, so how are you holding up? And she said, I am stressed and overworked. And I’m like, yeah, and you’re launching your firm in a couple of weeks. Wait till you see what your life becomes.

Seth Price  23:13  

And I think the secret to success of our firm is that I find people who don’t want that, who got the Jay Ruane speech literally interviewed a guy today who was prosecutor for quite a few years, been on his own for four months. You could just see it. He’s like, I just want to try cases. This is not for me. And you know that’s that’s our avatar. Because if you find those people, that’s how you build your firm

Jay Ruane  23:35  

Absolutely. All right, folks, that’s going to do it for us this week on the law firm blueprint. Thank you for taking the time to spend your time with us. Of course, you can catch us live every week, live on LinkedIn and live in our Facebook group, the law firm blueprint. If you’re not a member, you should join it at 3pm Eastern, 12 pm Pacific, live on Thursdays. And of course, be sure to give us that five star review and give us a good review. Tell us what you like about the show. Tell us what you don’t like about the show so we can avoid that in the future by giving us a review wherever you get your podcast. Thanks so much for being with us. He is Seth Price. I am Jay Ruane. We are the law firm blueprint. Bye for now.