On today’s episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, Seth and Jay are joined by Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up! to discuss what to focus on as you scale, the common mistakes lawyers and other professionals make, and how to make the best plans to grow. Verne shares his experience in growing his own business and how scaling for a greater impact on the world can be just as rewarding as scaling for revenue. Seth and Jay ask Verne about the biggest misconceptions when it comes to scaling. Verne talks about the profit share versus market share of growth, the importance of bringing in help for scaling, and shares details of an event he has planned for scaling and other aspects of growing a business.Seth and Jay ask Verne what the best course of action is when you feel you’ve maxed out your growth and what the next steps of growth should look like. Verne shares real world examples of successful scaling and growth from Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, and more.
Welcome to the podcast edition of maximum growth live. The number one program for lawyers who want to grow their practices. Each week, our hosts Seth Price and Jay Ruane, tackled the fundamental questions about how to grow the profit and profitability of your law firm. To watch the program live, submit your questions and hear the latest episode. Tune in every Thursday at 3pm Eastern on Facebook for our live show. Maximum growth live is a production of maximum lawyer media.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of maximum growth Live. My name is Jay Ruane, the CEO of Firm Flex, your Social Media Marketing Agency for lawyers, as well as managing partner of Ruane Attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm in Connecticut. With me as always, my co-host but my good, good friend, Mr. BluShark Digital York, SEO for law firms, pay per click for law firms, as well as managing partner of a DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina power house law firm with over 40 lawyers, Mr. Seth Price. There he is, folks. Seth, I see you back at home, back in Maryland, you’re no longer down in Florida, and I just want to check in with you. How’s your week going this week?
It’s going okay, you know, it’s, I always feel like in life and business two steps forward, one step back. I’ve been struggling with intake, which is one of the things I’m most proud of and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a constant, you know, we’ve been working with the overseas teams, building those up in anticipation of some future work, having some management issues, having to make some changes there. It’s definitely, you know, a continued challenge, and one of those areas that, like, you know, essential to everything we’re doing and trying to maintain our short talk today, make sure we maintain the culture of that group in a remote environment. It’s definitely, I feel like I’m seeing some of the polls and tugs that have taken place during COVID. It’s great to say everything’s great remote, and certain things were like less drama, and a cohesive team, but I’m seeing inefficiencies, particularly within that group that I need to figure out how to address and it’s just been a bit of a frustration.
Yeah, one of the things that’s been challenging for me recently, is, as I sort of stepped back from being in the day-to-day management of the lawyers and the staff, is knowing that I have good people in place, and still being close enough to the day to day that I can see the issues arising. And the managers who are perfectly capable and that’s why they’re in these roles, are making decisions and it’s not necessarily the decision I would make at that time, perfectly good decision, justifiable, it’s certainly an approach, but I would have approached it a little differently, or maybe a lot differently, and I have to recognize that everybody has their own way of looking at something, and I shouldn’t insert myself into everything. And that’s been a struggle for me, it is that I need to insert myself when it really matters but, on some things, I can just stay out and let, let the managers do their job, like, let, let the people I’ve hired do their job.
Yes, we’re at a whole nother show. So, because, what I really want to get our guest out, who’s amazing, but the thing I struggle with is there are times when you know something’s wrong and you can, yes, you want to empower a manager, but what do you do when somebody’s entrenched? You know something’s wrong. The extraction as you scaled is not always so easy to answer. You know, you’ll hear, you put something on a listserv and everybody, you know, a Facebook or, oh, fire immediately. Well, yeah, but you also want to make sure that you don’t, you know, if it’s something like intake, you have an entire revenue that’s coming from it. Obviously, there’s poison or somebody’s doing something awful, you need it out, but there are times when you know it’s not right and how do you make that move, and I think, too often I am guilty, and I did something, I work towards which is waiting, not being proactive, but like watching something break and waiting for that person to leave rather than making those moves. And it’s really, really tough because as you, especially in the remote workforce, extracting problems, there’s not always so easy.
You’re right, and one of the things that I think I’m at a point now, right, you know, my team numbers about 20, so, you know, we are, we are big enough that everyone has a role. There’s not really jack of all trade’s players, you know, everyone knows what they’re there to do and that’s their job, and they summon stay in their lane. But what my plan is for 2021 going forward is we are going to start to search for utility players, and try to cross train one or two people that we can add to staff that don’t have day to day roles, and so, they can handle intake, if there’s somebody out on intake, they can handle some legal admin stuff, you know, following our systems, if there’s somebody down there, they can handle some, you know, some other things. Because I think I’m at a point now, Seth, where I need to have like two or, two solid utility players who can fill in for people or bridge us, which is probably more important, If we have to remove somebody, I can slide somebody in, who can last six weeks in intake, and, and cover as we hire and train.
Right, and I think, maybe a step beyond that, as we’re probably, you know, 80 to 100 employees, you know, the idea being, having a manager and a junior manager so that if something happens, the pit by the bus, the person decide they want to go somewhere in their career, whatever it is, you’re not left in the lurch. That’s the issue, and limiting the number of positions where, you know, there, there are very few positions but there are some left within the organization, where if somebody were to give notice, it would be a risk factor to the business, that again, you figure out a way to move on, but it would certainly not be a good thing, and how do you make it so that you have that redundancy? You’re talking about it during the scaling process and utility people, you know, for me, it’s making sure that there’s bench within departments so that there’s somebody who stepped in, you know, and give them a track and a possibility. But we got, we got this great, yes, we can’t let, let me just…
One last thing I want to say about this, and then we’re gonna bring in our guest, is really the issue that I’m having is, at my level, if I add somebody who is that utility player, who’s not filling a seat that’s needed right now, that is directly impacting my net revenue to myself, because I’m not, and that’s, that’s…
You have to get that to your head, because otherwise it’s not, it’s, if you have a job that you’re plugging holes with, it’s not stable and what, so like, I’m looking at this level of, you know, we always looked at it, like, from an ops point of view, right? There are certain things in OPS in HR that are not quote, unquote, revenue producing, they’re not helping you service the widget, but as I think our guest going to talk about today, with culture, if you don’t have that redundancy, you end up squeezing your own employees and creating ramifications you don’t want so that, you look at him, and I say that not to spend, it is almost business malpractice, you’re, you’re damaging the culture. So, when we talk today about, you know, culture, and how do you build it, one of the things you do is make sure that you’re not working somebody to the bone anytime somebody leaves, and the only way you can do that is to have that extra redundancy.
I think you’re right; I think you’re right. Okay, Seth, so we’ve got a rockstar for a guest today. A great guy, I mean, just a great guy. I gotta give it to you for being able to make this connection that you make happen. Tell us about our guest today.
It’s Verne Harnish. He is sort of, like, you know, Epi Center, not, you know, sort of, of entrepreneurs, he is where, where things started, you know, way back when I when I started my entrepreneurial journey, really mastering the Rockefeller habits, more recently really diving into scaling up, for those people that are EOS fans, and traction. Gino Wickman, he came out of the Verne Harnish world, for those of you that have done, what was YEO now EO, for those of you that knew YPO, these are all things that have come from our guest, who is just a remarkable sort of birther of entrepreneurs and, you know, I just can’t wait to see what he has to say today. Tons of free resources out there, he’s got an event coming up. He’s got his, he has sort of taken the same philosophy I’d like to think that we do, which is put all that information out there and people will come, and he is certainly live that, that and can’t wait to have him out here.
Can’t wait, can’t wait. Okay, folks. So, he’s in the greenroom now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll have the maximum growth live interview of Verne Harnish. Stay with us, hear from our sponsors, and then we’ll be right back with our interview. We’ll be right back. How many times have I said right back? There we go.
The lawyers who will succeed in the next decade are the ones who are focusing on building their brands where people meet, and there is no place better to build your brand than on social media. With the firm’s likes DIY social media plan, hundreds of lawyers like you are using social media to build their brand and become the one lawyer in their community that people know, like and trust. By spending even just five minutes a day on social media marketing, you can engage with hundreds or thousands of people in your local community who will need your services. By cultivating a network of followers, you build a book of business that you can market to the next decade and beyond. If you are looking for a solution to help you jump start your social media marketing, look no further than the DIY plan at getfirmflex.com. The DIY was created by a small firm lawyer for people just like you, helping you connect with local people online and build your brand, and engage people in the topics they want to talk about, all for under $100 a month. To find out more, visit getfirmflex.com.
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a better impact. You have to have a digital blueprint, that says statistically throughout the time that we’ve been working with BluShark Digital, our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group, over 14,100%.
Seth and his team have years of experience in this area. BluShark is truly a part of the firm. So, I don’t consider BluShark any different than the employees in my office.
We are honored to have Verne Harnish here today, mastering the Rockefeller habits and scaling up to seminal books in my business career. Welcome, thank you for being here.
Glad to be here, Seth.
You know, I’ll start off with, with a question, which is one of the things, and I love your work, I was a member of YEO, which then turned into an EO, and follow up, followed you for years. But the dichotomy that I’ve seen that the, the challenge is scaling a professional services group, a law firm, seem to be, you know, in addition to all the normal scaling issues, we have some special ones, and I’d love you to sort of, sort of start with, you know, what, you know, how you, how you would talk to our audience, who are for the most part lawyers attempting to scale a professional services practice?
Yeah, well, you know, the toughest thing, and we run a professional services firm as well, so, we can we represent these comments that I’m about to share, but, you know, we run an inverted pyramid, you know, the traditional organization, the people that are doing the work are at the frontline and then you’ve got leadership, but in a professional services firm, the people that are actually selling, the people that are actually delivering on the service are in many cases the principals of the organization, the co-founders, if you would, and so there’s really no, in a sense, leadership at the top, it ends up not being a coherent organization but a set of practices that have agreed to just kind of hang together and do business under maybe a common brand. And so, when we look at our face to our function, accountability chart, we say, who is the head of the company? And the rule around accountability is that needs to really come to one person. I remember one of the first law firms we worked with down in Dallas, they shoved like four initials in his head, a company, it was the four principles, they each own 25% of the firm, but then when we said, all right, the number one job at a head of the organization is to make sure we’ve got all the rest of the boxes filled, who’s driving marketing and sales, and operations, and IT and HR, but you’ve got all those same functions as any organization, and it was interesting. Three of the lawyers looked at the fourth and said “You’re it”, and he knew he was it, he knew he was the only one in the organization that enjoyed doing that, could do it, and so, all we had to do was spend time clearing his calendar of really legal work, so that there could be actually somebody driving the business. And so, ou, our very best early law firm client out of Atlanta, the founder didn’t do any legal work, he truly was CEO of the organization, and made sure that he got the traditional functions in place in order to scale the organization.
Jay?
Sure, you know, that’s a really interesting point because a lot of lawyers have this negative self-image and a lot of doubt when it comes to actually running a business of a law firm, because it’s sort of looked down upon in law schools, and even among lawyers and law firms, there’s a lot of negative, sort of messaging out there when it comes to being the person who actually can move the law firm business forward. How can lawyers sort of understand those who are more entrepreneurial mindset, that their role truly is important? What would you tell those leaders that are struggling with that negative self-image?
Would they like to make more money and work less hours? I mean, that’s the, that’s really the goal of all of the organizations. At some point, if you’re just selling ours, it’s hard to scale beyond a certain level, and so, the extent that you have founded or you’re the founders of a law firm that you want to scale, you know, at some point you want to get a life and, you know, we, we say, you should be out, It, on the flip side, you can actually leave the organization about a half a day to a day a week, so you can still be out doing those markets, facing activities that you really enjoy, and that’s, we got to get to that next thing that I think is the most important, KPI for the leaders of any organization preferred, especially a professional services firm. So, it’s also not all consuming, it’s not 40, 50, 60 hours, or opening chapter in scaling up, that everyone can download for free, you don’t have to buy the book, it’s gotoscalingup.com, look for the picture, and it’s a couple of free chapters, and it’s called the barriers, and we talked about how Alan, Rudy, who I feature in that chapter, literally was working 80-hour weeks, and once he put our principles in place, he was able to get that down to eight hours. So, it’s not all time consuming but it is the thing that will give you the most leverage in terms of both your time and ultimately your income.
And I think that really goes back to developing systems to help you run your practice a lot better. So, let’s talk about that most important KPI because I think it’s something…
That’d be my next question too, Jay.
Yeah, yeah. I know where it is because I’ve watched videos on your site and that type of thing, but I think our audience needs to learn about that. So, let’s talk about that.
Yeah, well, clearly, the single most important function in scaling is marketing. Yeah, all the rest are critical, you got to keep track of the billing and all of those things, but it’s marketing, that the research has been clear whether it’s high-tech firms or professional service firms, or others, that drive scale. And it’s not just marketing for new clients, but it’s talent, the lawyers and others that you need to bring in, its attention in the marketplace, and maybe it’s other influences that you need to bring into the fold. And so, if marketing is the most important function, then what is it we should be doing? Particularly the head of the organization, and that’s where I want to turn to Regis McKenna. Regis was the marketing consultant to Steve Jobs before they even had their first product, Intel, Genentech and, I called him as a college student in 1983, and said, hey, Regis, I want to build the world’s largest entrepreneurship organization, which it is today, and I said, I’d like your help, you help Steve get to 2 billion, maybe you could help me, and so, he took me on as a free client, and he said, look, there’s just two things you’ve got to do. One, have a marketing meeting, separate from sales, even if it’s with yourself, and it was 10 am, every Monday, he had a young guy Rich Moran, assigned to me to spend that hour. By the way, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, it was a three-hour marketing meeting every Wednesday afternoon that he chaired, and that was the one function that Steve drove, Tim Cook drove all the rest. And then he said, here’s what you got to do next, take a piece of paper out, and he asked me a question that Bill Gates considered the best question he had ever been asked, and as you guys know, our work is not so much about the answers, but getting the right question. That question is, what are the relationships, the influencers, the brands, you need to bolt on to your brand, that are gonna allow you to 10x the organization? Not to 2x, but when you think about 2x, all you have to do is get incrementally better. But if you think 10x, then often, it frees up much more creative thought and how to do that. And so, I took a piece of paper out, and look, I was young, dumb and broke as a song goes in college, and I wrote down President Ronald Reagan, I’m gonna make him be the first president to utter the word entrepreneur, but, by the way, I did and got invited to the White House, and I said, look, I want Steve Jobs involved, and I want Michael Dell, and Ink Magazine. And it was crazy, work in that list, Jay and Seth, for an hour, every week and 36 months, we were global. And I had hosted the first public speech of Steve Jobs after being fired from Apple, with Michael Dell and Mark Cuban’s sitting next to Ink Magazine covering it. So, for the law firm, generally most industries, local or, whatever the geographical expanse of the law firm, there’s probably 100 to 250 people that are key, relationships with judges and others. You know, when I got involved in my only lawsuit, I appreciated the John Fisher, my lawyer, really had the relationships in the community, through negotiations and other stuff, that he could bring to bear in our particular case, and of course, looking for new opportunities, and then, you know, lead sources if you would, and then what you want to do. This is now the most important KPI, is not the number of minutes but the number of hours you’re spending every week, nurturing those relationships. And look as soon as you can get back face to face, i think talk time is critical, more important than email, but to the extent that you can go break bread, have lunch, have breakfast, have coffee, the word company means Latin derivative to share bread, the more powerful, so, so, for instance, I had you guys saw in our virtual summit, I had a chance to host Monty Moran, and people are considering Monty possibly a presidential candidate here in the future as he scaled up Chipotle to 23 billion in market cap, and so, I had a chance to fly across the country a few weeks ago, and have dinner with him for three hours, I could add a zoom call, you know, prior to him speaking, and that would have been useful, but that three hour dinner breaking bread with Monty, that’s more important than the other 30 hours of emails I possibly could have got done. Plus, I got a lot done on the flight anyway, so number of hours that you’re spending every week nurturing the key relationships, media, influencers, others that are going to help you scale the business is the number one KPI.
It’s also, it seems hard though, one things that I’ve seen, I’ve seen from both sides, right? So, you know, get it, getting jealous of all the scaling that you did, and through my mutual friend and mentor, Devin Shane, watching what he’s done over and over again, I launched this digital agency BluShark Digital, where many more of these principles, it seems it’s much easier to apply scaling up outside of professional services in certain, in certain ways based on your sort of opening statement that you made, but you’re talking about 10x, it seems daunting, when you’re dealing with those interpersonal connections, because you could put your hours towards it and take all the lunches, and Jay and I are about as good as anybody about staying in touch and having those meetings, and breaking bread and doing all those things. It just seems that it’s really, a that, that the ability to scale and those multiples really gets limited when it’s interpersonal versus things when you’re leveraging additional marketing power behind it, you know, how do you speak to sort of the people who that are in the trenches to say, okay, I’m going to free up X percent of my time, I’m going to do these things. Is it even possible or is 10x, like an aspiration, but you just want to keep pushing forward?
Yeah, well, in 10x, doesn’t necessarily have to be revenue, it can be 10x in your bottom line, it can be 10x in your reach, it could be 10x whatever your purpose is, in terms of your personal injury law firm or whatever it might be criminal law firm, where just the amount of justice that you’ve brought. Look, at the end of the day, you want to bring justice, I was going to be a lawyer, and it’s a space that I dearly love, and the sense of injustice that you’re out there fighting it to the extent that it’s one of the reasons somebody got into the into the business in the first place, to be able to 10x your reach in that particular field is powerful. So, it’s, it’s mostly a mindset, but if we even go back to your individual effort, your ability to attract in the right next lawyer, who is going to be able to, that has the talent, that’s going to be able to further the goals of the firm, what a multiplier effect. For me, I can only serve a dozen clients, but now that we have almost 200 partners on six continents, we’re as a professional services firm global, and I’m able to touch 3000 companies directly in any one day and, and we’re now working to 10x that to where we can get that bit closer to 25,000 clients in the next five years. And so, it’s about fulfilling our purpose and the difference that we want to make in the world.
You know, that’s really interesting, you know, coming from my perspective, I have a criminal defense and civil rights firm, here in Connecticut, and one of the things that scaling my firm allowed us to do was take on post-conviction Innocence Project cases that matter to me, and we’ve been able to walk two guys out of jail on murder cases that they haven’t, been, that they didn’t do, because we had to scale. So, so that’s a really good point that you made that, you know, my, my, my scaling my, you know, my general DUI criminal practice, just it didn’t necessarily increase my revenue, because God knows those Innocence Project cases don’t pay, but my impact on the world certainly has been has been able to be 10x because I was able to do that, and I think that’s something that that our audience really needs to know is that, that the idea of scaling doesn’t necessarily mean revenue. It can mean so much more that we can derive from, but one of the questions I have for you is, is just a really sort of simple one that probably would take you hours to answer but, what is the biggest misconception when it just comes to scaling? When, you know, I’m, I’m a professional service provider, I myself, I’ve hung a shingle, I’m out there doing it, and now I say to myself, I want to build something bigger than just me. What’s the biggest misconception I need to sort of understand before I can really make that next leap?
Yeah, that’s a great question. As I, as I think about how to answer it, just remind me, let’s do an interview of you, Jay. We’ve got media site called scaleups.com, where we feature all kinds of scale ups, there’s a lot of, you know, things that love to feature sexy startups in the Fortune 500 get plenty of coverage, but the mid-market scale ups don’t. And so, let’s tell your story about how scaling the one side has allowed you to have this kind of impact on the other. I just, I love that story. Jay, it, I hope that connects with everybody on this, this podcast. Back to your question, I think it’s believing that everyone is your customer, and that’s the biggest misconception like, so let me tell you a quick story. You know, we hosted Nate, the co-founder of Airbnb a few months ago, just before they went public, and I knew Nate and, and some of the guys back when they launched, and they believed Airbnb should be a global company, and in some sense, it needed to be global for the business model to work, but they never could get it to work. I mean, folks don’t realize they stumbled for five years, with essentially zero revenue, and they finally talk their way into Paul Graham’s YCombinator. They’re still flailing. And finally, Paul came along and said, look, who’s your best customer? And they’re like, well, everybody, right? It’s some sense if your VRBO or Airbnb, or links, or any of these folks, it’s everybody. Paul goes, no, no, no, no, no, where do you have the most customers? and at the time, they’re living in Silicon Valley. They said, well, New York City, we have 20 beds, think about it. After six years have been busy, they get 20 beds in one of the most lively cities in the world. And Paul goes, alright, pack your bags, you’re moving to New York, and you’re gonna stay till you’re 10x in New York, and they did they, they literally lived with those customers, which you could in an Airbnb model, to figure out what wasn’t working, they fixed it, they then took it to 200 beds, and then it finally took off. And so, we have what’s called the 770 rule. You don’t want more than 7% of the market, you want profit share, not market share. And if you think about Amazon, the, you know, wealthiest guy on the planet, one of, you know, one of the top market cap companies in the world, they only have 2% global market share of retail, 2%. IKEA has only got 7% global market share. So, what you want to do is, you want to say no to more opportunities than yes, and that’s what’s counterintuitive. You want to find…
That, that’s the theme of our show, we go back and forth. Idea, idea quarantine where you do a, Jay comes up with a genius idea, that’s a great idea. Let’s put it two to six months and then decide if we’re if it’s still a good idea.
Yeah, so that is the misconception. If I’m going to scale big, I want the market. No, you want to think profit share. That’s not market share.
That’s such a huge revelation right there because I see so many people saying, I want to own it all, and gosh, that that’s not necessarily the way to approach it. It’s really, it’s really not, I mean, I’d love to have Amazon’s market share of 2%. But, but let’s talk about that because as you start to scale up, you know, I’ve been very successful taking my practice from $0 to seven figures, mid seven, you know, I’m doing okay, but I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve exhausted my abilities at this point. And while I can be a visionary and say I want to get into there, you know, as my, as my staff has grown as my, as my marketing has grown, maybe I’m not the person who can get us to that next level, and what level of sort of self-actualization, self-realization should an entrepreneur get to when they say, okay, I, I’ve gotten us this far, but I can’t make us to that next level? When does the entrepreneur have to say, let me bring in people for more things, so I can focus narrowly on what I am best at?
Yeah. The, the thing you want to tune into is your energy. You know, we’re, you know, time management’s important, but time is limited, energies unlimited, and so, if you want to use an alternative, kind of acronym for CEO, its chief energy officer and it starts with your own energy, what gives you strength, that’s what a strength is. And if even if you’re good at it, if it wears you out thinking about it, then it’s a weakness. So, I’m gonna go back, I, I nailed the LSAT, I won every mock trial I had ever been in, I’ve got and I crushed this poor guy, and one only lawsuit I’ve ever been in, never want to be in another one again, but I crushed the poor guy. As, as he needed to be, but just send me a contract to look at, just it’s showing up in my email, I’m exhausted, thinking about having to just open it, and look at it and, and I realized, it doesn’t give me energy. And so, if you go back to Steve Jobs, and I think he’s a good rest of soul, even though his title was AI CEO, he wasn’t CEO, he wasn’t head of the company. The only thing that gave him energy was design and marketing, and so the only function he chaired was marketing. The only time, the only daily huddle he was in was with Jonathan and I for lunch every day around design. They let Tim Cook run everything else. So, more to a mere mortal. One of my favorite clients, Randy Amon. Randy built a company in Baltimore called AVL cables, he got his about 30 million, and I love this title, founder and head of customer service, the only thing that gave him energy was the customer service function roll, and so we brought in a CEO and a CFO, and COO, and folks to run all those other functions, so he could stay focused on the customer service side to the point where even though he was founder, he essentially took a year off from his company, and together with a young IT person built out his industry’s first automatic online ordering system that saved him millions, that he then showed it a trade association and a $2 billion company, Jay and Seth came along and said, look, if it saves you millions, it’s gonna save us hundreds of millions, bought his company for a gazillion dollars, and here’s what’s beautiful, you know, most entrepreneurs don’t last very long in quote, corporate world. Today, you can look them up on LinkedIn, Randy Amon, A M O N, he is senior VP of a $40 billion global company, and you can guess what he’s senior VP of, the customer experience. So, he really, really stuck to his knitting. So, Steve Jobs stuck to what you love, marketing, which is very analytic, and design, and Randy stuck to customer service. So, Jay, that’s what I would suggest for you what part, what aspect of the organ, for me, I don’t want to be, I’m not head of the company. I used to run marketing, I don’t. The only thing I love is to hear myself talk, as you guys have learned here on this particular broadcast, I love the r&d side of our particular business.
We love hearing you talk too. Tell, tell the audience you got a great event coming up in April that is not only, you know, we’ve heard your talk many times but can’t wait to hear what, what goes on here. Tell us a little bit about that. But also free, which is also good.
Yeah, yes, we, our way of kind of giving back to who we consider the first responders of the global economy, the scale up. You guys are the ones generating all the net new jobs, all the innovations, not the large companies, it’s not the startups. So, to support you, again, April 22, 90 minutes, it’s free. We’ve got four outstanding author gurus with latest books, including the icon, iconic CEO Alan Mulally, who turned around Boeing, then he turned around Ford, and he’s going to be there for 24 minutes, kind of sharing his latest wisdom, along with sales and marketing and relationships. So, 90 minutes, April 22, for free. Just go to scalingup.com and you’re gonna see the link at the top to register.
Let me ask you one other question because a lot of people here, you know, I’m a big fan, followed you for years, but for those that don’t know you, and that event sounds awesome. You know, you have, you’ve done both for the John Fisher mastermind and I’ve seen other ones online. What’s the best place if somebody wants to sort of get, you know, unadulterated Verne, and need the scaling up all laid out for them in, which, what do you recommend as a starting point for people who have never really touched you before?
Yeah, just go to scalingup.com. And, by the way, we had to change the name of the firm, and some of your listeners might want to do the same from a branding perspective, you know, you know how important branding is out there, and I see the clever billboards and those kinds of things, but we were calling in sales, but nobody could spell it. How many Z’s how many ELLs, you know, it was there an S at the end. So, we made it very simple. The books called Scaling up, our job to be done is to help you scale up. And so just go to scaling up.com, and you’re gonna see a picture of the book, and next to it is a whole bunch of free links, that barriers chapter, a free chapter on how to drum strategic planning, with our one-page strategic plan, and all of our growth tools, we’re an open-source company, folks can use our stuff for free. And we tried to make the book very how to, now we’ve got all the support services, and we support, you know, multi hundred, million, billion-dollar companies, but we’re really there to support folks as inexpensively as possible. So, scalingup.com.
Jay?
I want to, I want to follow up with something that you, that you talked about a little while ago and that is, is your energy and finding what it is that, that you love, and sort of doubling down on that as you, as you begin to scale, to whatever extent you want to scale your organization, right? It sounds to me like there is a great deal of sort of introspection, and self-analysis that’s necessary before you begin the journey of scaling, because we as, as lawyers, and as business owners, you can waste a lot of very precious money and time, If you haven’t had that sort of self-actualization. How important is that in sort of making your way throughout this journey? And having honest conversations with yourself? And how do you extract that If you aren’t necessarily in therapy? You know, you know, that therapy can certainly help you get there but not everybody is saying, I’m ready for that therapeutic level there. So, let’s talk a little bit, if you don’t mind.
Yeah, Jay, it’s a super important question, thank you. And it leads to if you go to the very last chapter of Scaling Up, my book, it’s called next steps, and one of the top 5 next steps is to put in place a routine, that when I cornered Jim Collins, the iconic, you know, study or a boss, Jim Collins, I said, look, you spent 25 years studying great companies, what’s the one thing that us mere mortals should do that’s going to help us scale the most? And he didn’t hesitate, he said, set up the council. Don’t call it the council, but he labeled it the council and it’s a one-hour meeting, a different than your operations meeting, your executive team meeting, it doesn’t involve all your founders or anything like that but it’s for you to have an hour of talk time, because here’s what’s, here’s what’s important, you said, an interesting term self-taught, what we found is you can’t think your way through any of this, and we can actually look at the brainwave scans, the more you try to think your way through, the more it upsets your stomach, the more you lay awake at night, or, or, or the, like, we’re a being that was designed, Jay, to talk our way through this, and so you’ve got to have the top time, and so that’s why the forums have, you know, where you have small group of lawyers that are able to meet together in a safe place where you can share your darkest moments and secrets that you don’t want to share with your other partners or your spouse, or anyone else. You need that safe place, like every YO member has with their form or YPO and their forum where you can talk out what it is you’re facing. And so, every Monday morning, 9am to 10am is my counsel. And it’s the CEOs of our four major companies, and it’s a safe place for me just to put out on the table, here’s what I’m wrestling with, here’s what I’m struggling with, I’m trying to figure out what we’re going to do next., and 90% of it, again, it’s just getting it out and sending the vibrations to the world. So, you need that small safe group of fellow lawyers, fellow associates and that our, every week where you can talk this stuff out.
Yeah. So, basically, what you’re telling me is that when Seth calls me every night at 11pm, and says, here’s my problem of the day, we’re actually doing what’s necessary to solve it, because I don’t know, the minute a problem pops up, it’s let me dial Seth and see, and see how we can solve it together. So, that’s been good, but here’s another problem that I think you all.
You’re so lucky, you’re so, so blessed. And I, and I want, I want to mention, probably the single most important thing, and that is, and this is Marshall Goldsmith, good artists borrow Great artists steal, we’ve done nothing but just borrow from 40 other great, you know, books, just in my book, and the power of having a peer coach, not a mentor, not an advisor, all those things are important but if you can only get one thing, and that is a peer coach, accountability partner that you can communicate and talk to every day, and so. I just love the fact that the two of you have that, it’s powerful.
Yeah, it truly is. Now, one last question I want to sort of talk about is, a lot of people as they start to scale, they will see their competitors mimic them, and it gets very frustrating because you’re saying, hey, I came up with this idea, I researched it, and I, you know, I started doing it. And three months later, now, four of you guys are doing it, and what’s going on? How can an entrepreneur deal with people that are basically just mimicking them? Or is that something that they should just ignore? And say, you know what, there’s always going to be people who are following me, but I’m still leading the pack.
Yeah. I was, just the other day rents his soul talking about Herb Kellerher, you know, the iconic leader of Southwest Airlines. And if, if you think about it, starting with Michael Porter’s famous article, we encourage everyone to read called What is Strategy?, Michael Porter lays out Southwest Airlines strategy down to, like, the interview question that differentiates them in hiring people than everyone else. And, and so we had a chance to host her at a YPO event and Aspen, and we asked him this question, and he goes, look, everybody knows exactly everything we do, but the reason they can’t fully copy us is because of the secret weapon we’ve got called culture, and it really is a thing, and it really does matter, and that was always their secret weapon. And so, there’s a book that just came out, I highly recommend folks read called Culture Renovation, and I, by Kevin Oaks, and we just hosted him on our February 24 summit, but I think he got the word right. It’s not culture change, just change everything, there’s a lot you want to continue with, but you often have to continue to renovate it as you would your home or any other place, and if you can keep that culture strong, that is a competitive weapon that is very difficult to copy. And then we also like to think it comes down to execution, and that’s where we think we’ve had great strength. We, in the, in the crisis, a woman that runs one side of the Canadian government emailed and said, look, we’re working with Scale Up in Canada, but it seems like those that are practicing your tools are crushing the market versus the other Scale Ups, and we’re like, yeah, we see the same thing, and so, we just want a significant contract with the Canadian government to both test our stuff in the Northeast, and then move it across the rest of the country. So, we like to think our tools, Jay and Seth, have been really a competitive advantage, because you can have a great idea, but if you can’t get everyone aligned and executing on it, then, you know, it’s at some levels worthless.
I’ll make my final question. What are some of the things when you, when companies come to you and they come through a lot of different funnels, I’m sure right through the YPO or EO are just watching your stuff, and they come in, okay, you get it, you get the culture is so important. What are some of the sort of, I would say easiest, but most impactful early first steps that can push companies in the right direction when trying to improve culture?
Yeah, well, the first is to truly discover your core values. A lot of folks kind of did it amateurishly and they ended up with this kind of honesty, integrity, teamwork, customer service, they were exactly Enron’s, you know, core values that didn’t turn out so well, for them. And, in, so, you know, I’ll tell you a quick story. The job, one of the guys had endorsed my book, Scott Fuqua, yeah, they only had 50 employees when they first came to my workshop in Sydney, Australia in 2005, and we educated them on Jim Collins, Mars mission exercise, the discovery of the right core values. Today, they’re 3,500 employees worldwide, market cap, close to 60 billion. And I had a chance, and Scott and I’ve stayed close, and I had him at an event a year and a half ago in Vegas and he said, look, a lot has changed from 50 employees to 3,500, but what hasn’t are the five core values that have been at the heart of our hiring decisions, and then everything and the way to think about it is you’re playing a game, and all sports, all games have a set of rules, and look, most of the arguments occur over somebody violating the rule. And this is your rulebook and these are the boundaries, and without boundaries people don’t even want to play the game. And so, that’s how powerful getting the right five core values, and I would encourage you to Google Atlassian core values, and see how their phrases, not single words, how they’ve described them in a paragraph, they’ve got a cool video of how they express those and you’ll see it’s on their recruiting page for the next talent that they want to bring in. So, alignment around a set of really properly discovered core values is at the heart of a strong culture. Southwest happened as well.
That’s Oswald Laverne. Thank you so much for your generosity of your time. Honored, privileged to have you here. I hope, I will certainly be there in April, getting, getting my, my fix. And really, thank you so much.
You bet. Seth, Jay, you guys keep doing your important work.
Thank you so much. Folks, we’ll be right back with more maximum growth live.
Hey, it’s Becca here. I’m sure you’ve heard Jim and Tyson mentioned the Guilds on the podcast and in the Facebook group. The Guild is this perfect mix of a community, group coaching and mastermind. Guild members get so many benefits, including weekly live events and discounts to all maximum lawyer events. Head over to maximumlawyer.com/theguild to check out all the benefits and watch a few testimonials from current members. So head to maximumlawyer.com and click on the Guild page to join us. Now, let’s get back to the episode.
Well, Seth, I mean, these interviews, they keep getting better and better, and there’s so many takeaways, I can’t wait to sit back and go sort of, I’m going to get a transcript of this one and rock through it, but one of the things that you always say is that you do what you love, right? And if you don’t like to write, don’t try to write a blog, if you, if you don’t like to do videos. And I think Vern talk a little bit about that, about your energy, energy is finite, and so, you find the things in your firm, as you start to scale that you love and go with those. What were your takeaways?
No, it’s sort of, you know, I was living it, I got the family to Florida this winter, and you know, staying here is fine, but it’s kind of depressing. My friends in the Northeast don’t really leave their houses, getting a coffee takes an act of God. You know, slowly as the weather warms, people are going outside. But being in Florida this winter, I felt that energy,, that’s, I’m that guy, you know, that Verne talked about where we, you know, I live off that interpersonal energy and get getting to sort of visit people taking the family truckster on the drive back making sure that we saw friends and family, and business contacts in, you know, along the way, that’s what gets me up in the morning, and I feel that I’m that much more productive, even today. We regret that we had this to work with, but it was just the fact that it’s cold and rainy outside today. We didn’t, I, just was unproductive for the first few hours of the day and the idea that in Florida, I was able to get outside sit at my Tiki hut. There are things you, figuring out what drives you, you’re going to be that much more productive. So, you know, it was, I think, great to get this perspective and the fact that he would take his time speaking to our audience was just awesome.
Yeah, I mean, this is, this was just rock solid for me. I mean, there’s so many things that you have to consider as you’re growing your firm, as you’re scaling your firm, and really, what we need to do is double down and really sort of take a systemic approach to the scaling. And we didn’t even get into all the different systems that you can build on that type of thing, I mean, we can have Verne on every week for the next year, and not even scratched the surface of the advice that he can give to our people. But I want to thank you, Seth, for arranging this for this today. I mean, it’s really, it’s been a great week. We’ve had some great stuff over the last couple of weeks and it’s only getting better, folks. So, I want to thank you for being with us each and every week here at maximum growth live. Of course, you can always find us live every Thursday on our Facebook page and in many, many Facebook groups as we are syndicated. We have our standalone podcast where if you want to hear this on the go, you can take it with you. Of course, we are syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast as well. Seth’s got a great show if you want to double down and get into the thing that he pulls energy from and that’s digital marketing. You can follow that on the BluShark pages, SEO insider, where he’s interviewing people that are really, really pushing the envelope in digital marketing. And of course, we have our group Systemising your law firm for growth that you can join and we would love for you to join that group. I put some stuff in it this week about how to do a system for doing a visual check of all your websites, that got a lot of good response, and we have a lot of other systems that we’re putting up there. So, there’s a lot of good stuff out there, folks, as you are growing your firm, and I want to thank you for being with us. Seth, you got anything else for the people today?
No, I just said, what a great day, this a great day for the show. You know, we’ve been doing this for about a year now, and to have a guest like this and the fact that we’re tracking it says that I think we’re onto something really good. So, can’t wait to see what this next year is going to bring.
I, as well, this has been a wild ride, we are almost at a year. I think our first show was in early May. So, we’re coming up, we’re gonna have to have an anniversary show and, and it’ll be a lot of fun. We can maybe relive some of the highlights over the last year. Some of the low ones to folks, some of my production values early on. This was not great, we were having…
I don’t really, yeah. And I would say take it as a metaphor because I, I, very often, am guilty if I can’t get something right, I don’t want to do it. And I want to thank you because there were times, we had meltdowns. We’ve had software issues. We’ve had all sorts of stuff. We had guests not show up when we’d already promoted them and having to, like, scramble to get them there. And the fact, you know, that, you know, there’s a certain value in just doing things, getting it out there having the time, even if nobody’s listening, the fact that as, you know, that I have a person to run these different business issues by and have that brain trust. That alone has been great. And the fact that we have a whole audience to give us feedback and let us know what they think about these different issues has been awesome.
Yeah, it really has been, folks, thank you so much for being with us. We are maximum growth live. He is Seth Price, I am Jay Ruane. And we’re with you every Thursday. We’ll see you again next week, but for that, bye for now.
Thank you for listening to maximum growth live. Please remember to subscribe to our podcast for the latest episodes and tune in live on Facebook every Thursday for our live show. For more information visit maximum growth live on Facebook or maximumlawyer.com, and be sure to share us with your friends.
Subcribe to our newletter to receive news on update
