Join Seth and Jay as they talk systems and how small firms can manage all that is necessary to grow as they chat with Charley Mann, President and Head Coach at Great Legal Marketing.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of maximum growth live. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, CEO from 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 buddy over there down in DC, movin’ and shakin’, Seth Price, owner, founder, Grand Poohbah of Price Benowitz, along with David Benowitz, a phenomenal white-collar lawyer all across this country, as well as the founder of BluShark Digital, your SEO for law firms. Seth, how’s your week going this week?
It’s going great. Vegas is hot. AJ is back in business. And it’s been a, it’s been quite, quite a, quite a journey.
Yeah, I’m really excited to hear from you, next week about all your takeaways from AAJ because I think that’s going to be good, but we actually have a guest today that it comes to us via a Great Legal Marketing, the Ben Glass Institute. And I don’t want to, you know, I don’t want to undersell this, but I also don’t want to over I mean, there’s, there’s some good stuff in prepping with Charley, that we’re going to be talking about. So, let’s not wasting any time. How about we get right to that so we can, we can make sure that we give him enough time to talk about all the wonderful things. What’s your thoughts?
Sounds great. Let’s do it.
Alright, folks, give us two seconds. We’ll be right back. You’ll hear from our sponsors, and we come back, we’ll be back with a maximum growth live interview Charley Mann from Great Legal Marketing.
Hi, I’m Jay Ruane, one of the founders of Firm Flex, a practicing attorney for over 20 years. Anyone who knows me knows how my firm runs on the systems we create, and it has allowed us to flourish, even in tough times. I spent years and hundreds of 1000s of dollars until I finally figured out a way to engage my audience and drive top of mind awareness with social media, and what did I do once I figured it all out? I built a system for it. And now you can put that system to work for you. You see, we took the hard part, creating the content and finding the images and made it foolproof. Every day you will have curated social media topics to post designed to make your firm constantly remind your audience about your firm, what you do and how you can help. And the best part, you don’t even need to hire a dedicated social media person to do this for you. In fact, you don’t even need to hire anyone new. We design the system to make it easy for you to delegate to your receptionist, assistant or paralegal and have them execute solid social media for you in just five minutes a day. It’s like having a content writer, researcher and graphics designer at a fraction of the price it would cost to hire in house. Sign up today for the social super system and start building your brand where your clients already are on social media.
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 bigger impact. You have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically, throughout the time that we’ve been working with BluShark Digital, our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group grew over 14 100% they truly understand where we’re headed, and how we want to get there. I have a team in BluShark Digital that I feel like have my back.
We’re thrilled to have Charley Mann, president and lead coach for Great Legal Marketing. Welcome, Charley.
Thank you so much, Seth, Jay, it’s great to be here to talk with you guys. You know, I sort of known both of you from a distance. Jay just getting a chance to meet you. Seth, you and I have had a chance to meet and greet, and dine together, but I’m excited to sort of talk shop with you all from each of our independent perspectives of being in law firms and working on law firms.
Well, that’s what I want to ask you about, I mean, it’s funny we, as the crow flies, we’re about 15 minutes apart, but to two different worlds and you spent the better part of a decade plus working with coaching developing lawyers on a myriad of different issues. What are some of the biggest sort of takeaways or biggest things that you’ve seen lawyers, you know, struggle with that, that you, that you work, you’ve worked with over the years?
Yeah, so, yeah, 11 years now of I like to say working in, on, for and with law firms, I worked inside of Ben g Glass law firms, starting out answering the phones and producing little videos, and writing blogs for him. And over the years turning that into a robust coaching ecosystem had been an already started through Great Legal Marketing. And it’s interesting, some of the problems that we were solving for Ben first started 15 years ago, when I came on board about 11 years ago, are still the same problems that we’re solving for today, ad a lot of it stems from I know, you guys have experienced this, but you have managed to course correct, which is a lack of the business education early on in law firms. And really, one of the core issues I’ve seen, and this is like root psychological issue almost is, when you come out of law school, you have been produced, not just as a lawyer, but to actually be the product you are selling. This is one of the true differentiators between a good and a service, right? A good, I can go and build a whole bunch of leather wallets. So, I do leather working. So, I like to use leather as an example. I can manufacture a bunch of leather wallets, establish brand margin marketing, you know, kind of build a system for all of that, and I can fully step away from it early on, I can just go if I wanted to, I could take someone else’s leather goods and sell them, but as a lawyer, you come out of law school and you are the product, you are the service, and early on a law firm gets built based on the amount of time that you put working on the service side of everything, as opposed to early on trying to decouple time and money. That’s the biggest challenge is how do we, how do we get the attorney away from that link of if you spent 40 hours a week working in the firm to use the Michael Gerber, Gerber parlons working in the firm, how much money you’re gonna make? That’s going to be your locked in potential life making, you know, money capacity, as opposed to, well, what if you spent 20 hours doing the service and then 20 hours building the business? And that’s just not taught because it’s designed as a widget, right? Even though you’re coming as a full-fledged individual with these incredible rhetorical capacities and everything, it’s thinking capacities, you still are being launched into the world with go work for someone else. They’ll bring in clients, you do the legal work.
Right, and you know, this whole, our podcast, our lives, your coaching, all those things are working in that direction, right? We had Gerber on, and that’s the, the, you know, the ultimate, like you actually are McDonald’s rising, and as we know that that’s not an easy process, we know it for ourselves, we even saw it discussing with Michael, the friction between emailing everything and what allows you to keep your bar license and not going to jail. So, what you know, what are some of the trips or hacks or not, you know, that tracks but what are some of the steps I should say that you see effective in allowing people to balance that working on a business or taking the steps towards that as opposed to just being a practitioner?
So, great question, you know, usually what we want to find is a first little win, a first, and by the way, this is just as true, I’m working with a firm that’s doing $300,000 a year in revenue, or $3 million a year. It’s just, it’s just a different scale, maybe a slightly different problem, like person who’s down at $300,000 a year in revenue, can I quickly introduce to them what life is like? If they’re not personally answering every single phone call? Or doing every single intake? Can I remove them from that necessity? Which I believe that necessity of answering the phone and put someone into their lives, get them to hire someone who will take care of the phones entirely, and all of a sudden they go, whoa, now I can just like focus on driving more calls to the law firm because think about the natural human behavior, if you’re the one answering the phones all the time, doing all the intakes, if I go to you and say, I want you to get double the number of calls to your firm, you’re gonna go nope, nope, don’t waste time doing that. I’m on the phone enough, that sounds super stressful, but if I saw the first problem, say, here’s the best news, we’re gonna drive double the number of calls and you’re not going to touch any of them. Now we enter into that business building territory, if I can get them to take that first. We’ll call it a leap of faith. I call it a leap of faith, but I call it a leap of faith in the way that indeed takes a leap of faith in in The Last Crusade, we’re, you know, he’s stepping out for that leap of faith moment but there’s actually the rock bridge, right? There’s just hidden because of the design of the rocks. And so, we know that there’s firm footing for them. I know that if they hire the intake specialist, they will make more money. Now at the $3 million firm. It might be hey, here’s what happens if you work with some other service providers and you start managing some service providers. Maybe it’s a, it’s a BluShark, right? So, Seth’s company, go work with Seth’s company and instead of you being the one who has to be the Rainmaker all the time, why don’t you give away some of the rainmaking responsibilities and focus on developing the operational capacity in your firm to take on the next million dollars of clients? Maybe hire an operations manager to help you with that, maybe spend more time coaching your team on handling high value cases. So, you don’t trap yourself in the I’m the only one who can handle my high value cases spot. So, that’s like a long answer to a good and simple question, but that’s kind of what I do.
Right. One of the things and like we talked, we banter back and forth, and much of what you’re talking about resonates with me and Jay, Mr. Systems, and you know, you’d see him thinking that way, but one of the things we talk about is, you know, that’s easy to say, and you know it’s the right answer that somebody has to get to, but at least in my experience, and I’ve crowdsourced, I can’t tell you I’m a scientific study, I should get a case study on this. Generally, when you go to hire to an area you’ve never hired before, it’s not like you go out to like, you know, you go to Costco, and you find that, that intake coordinator who’s gonna like step into the shoes and do better than you, you’re gonna like A, you know, the first person you hire probably won’t work out; the second one, it may take you to three before you figure that out, right? We don’t want, you can’t wake up in the morning knowing that, but like, in reality that’s there. How do you, knowing that there are, especially if you get someone who’s coming without that business acumen, you know what steps need to be taken, right? If you don’t have an intake team, you can’t go on with your life. Although, day one, whoever you hire, without the systems that Jay would put in place or without the coaching that you have, that you’re, you’re not really at a place where you’re going to lose a client or two, when it’s not done as well as you could do it yourself. Now, some people are really bad at it, who are better off outsourcing. But for many people, when they’re a one-man band, they have it down, it’s, and there’s that balance because it’s two steps forward one step back where, you know, you need to do it. But as you just said, walking off, you know, walking off the cliff or whatever analogy you wish to use, it is daunting, because it’s not a straight line, like you do this, this is going to get you more revenue, it’s but if you don’t start down that path, you can never get beyond yourself.
So, one of the tools that, and this kind of comes from so many years of observing the inside of law firms, when the tools that I’ve developed is a way to do a quick law firm health check because one of the ways that I can help a law firm owner is for them to better understand kind of their place in the, in the rankings chart of running the business, are they doing it efficiently, right? how much risk are is available for them to take? So, what I started studying was, both inside the legal world and outside of it, was revenue per employee and how can we use that metric to help drive growth in the firm and not be so afraid of hiring people, or firing people as well. So, this revenue per employee metric, so and I’ll give the example of what it is from zero to $500,000. So, from zero to half a million dollars in revenue, in my experience, and the data that I’ve tracked, a law firm should do about $100,000 in revenue per employee, this is exclusive of what we would call a super profit firm, which is like one of our friends, Bob battle in Virginia, who does on the higher end towards that half a million dollars and runs a true solo shop, you can get there. But for most healthy law firms, you’re going to do about $100,000 per employee, up to that first half million dollars, from half a million to about $3 million, you’ll do in the range of $150,000 per employee, by using this type of health metric, and by the way, there’s a stretch of eight of $25,000 on either end, that’s dependent on growth. So, let’s say you’re a million-dollar firm, and you’re doing just about $125,000 per employee. So, you’ve gotten your eight people on board. My expectation is if you’re at the lower end of that, that you are going to that you are in growth mode, you’re actually anticipating next year, you’re going to be doing 1.2 million your staff up to be able to do that right. Or, on the other hand, if you’re up at $175,000 per employee, you only got say six people on board at the million-dollar mark. And you’re wondering, why does it feel like I can’t push any higher? It’s probably because you need someone to fulfill the legal service or someone to generate the next set of leads for people to operate on within the law firm if we’re talking marketing and operations departments. So, by using a metric like that, we can be less afraid of, oh, I’m gonna have to turn over this intake specialist space because I start seeing I am at the place where it is appropriate for me to have three employees and, by the way, you as the owner are counted in this count, right? Which means a journey to your first bout 100 to $125,000 is usually owner only firm, and then we start needing people pass that but that way, again, it provides confidence because you have a better sense of how do you stack up and I truly see, Jay and Seth, part of my responsibility in coaching law firms is to shine light, where light hasn’t previously been shown. And you guys are doing that as well, Jay with the systems that you talk about, undoubtedly, you have your big stack of systems for folks, there’s going to be systems that they never even thought about, because they were kind of afraid to ask someone, you know, should I do something about this particular part of my practice about the handoff between my prelit and litigation department, because they’re afraid to ask other members of the community because they don’t want to seem like they don’t have a system. But Jay, you’re already telling people, you’re supposed to have a system for things like that. So, our job is to shine that light for folks and I’m doing it through that revenue per employee metric.
Jay?
Yeah, you know, I love that revenue per employee because it really sort of breaks it down very simply to allow people to make that sort of critical analysis. One of the things that I have found in this community and I’m wondering, since you have a large community of sort of entrepreneurial based lawyers, these are lawyers that have gotten sort of the bug, right? They’ve been bitten by the bug, I can scale, I can grow, I really enjoy this type of things. We see a lot of them saying in the forums, you know, I want to get to a point where I’m out of the business, so I can work on the things that I like, which is marketing, right? Why do you think so many entrepreneurial lawyers are drawn to doing the marketing of their firm when they went to law school to be able to actually accomplish the law part of the firm? But once they, once they start to see the scale, everyone always says, I just want to do the marketing, I don’t want to do anything else. I mean, I’m talking, I’ve heard this from 500 people. Now, I have a, you know, I always counter by saying, so do you know about, you know, do you know about drip campaigns? Do you know how to set up a paperclip campaign? And I’m like, no, I just hire somebody to do that, right? You know, but, but so, so they want to do the marketing, but they don’t actually want to learn anything about it. But why do you think the marketing draws so many people into it? Rather than saying, I’m going to focus on the finances of my firm and I’m going to know everything about the finances?
I love that question so much and I feel like there’s such deep psychology we could go into ranging from they became a lawyer because they were told from the age of seven that they were going to become either a lawyer or a doctor, and now they’ve gotten hear and, they’re going, I don’t think I really wanted to be a lawyer. But let’s set that subset aside for a moment and focus on the ones who, yeah, you know, they, they made the choice to go to law school, being a lawyer sounded cool. It sounded interesting, obviously, potentially civic minded, etc. And let’s also be honest, the paycheck at the end of the road sounded really good without having to go through, you know, 12 years of medical school, residency, etc. So, the reason I think that they gravitate towards marketing is because there’s always some new fun thing available. There’s always fun in marketing, there’s always this opportunity to be the next viral YouTube star or to have your Instagram have 20,000 followers and be an influencer of sorts or the drip campaigns, right? To look at the cool way that you can assemble this campaign that has a reactive measure where when people click this link, they’re put over into it, like this is all so cool, and interesting. And we are naturally as human beings attracted to something that is new, and look lawyers are good at figuring things out, and being presented with a new and novel challenge of figuring out marketing is innately exciting. I absolutely get it now. It’s funny, I haven’t been doing marketing for as long as I’ve been doing it now. I have team members who now handle it for me because I don’t want to be involved in the tiny little machinations of marketing.
As Jay was saying, I’m not sure where’s this exciting marketing dilating to everybody’s trying to see.
You know, I love it, and I’m like, I’m, like…
I, you know, I still love it, like, let’s be point blank here. And if you put me in like a little hole with a laptop, all they’d be doing is like copywriting and assembling these campaigns, and constructing automated marketing systems and sales letters, all that stuff, for sure, but when I think about what my focal point is, in terms of what do I want to accomplish in life, which has very much to do with myself and my family, and I look at, okay, I can spend a ton of time doing new and novel marketing things, or I can take the systems that have been constructed and hand them off to someone else to make them better, to maybe put more leads into them whether it’s an internal resource or an external resource, and handed that off someone else because I’m actually going to focus on, now building out the operations side, so people couldn’t see the conversation that you and I were having right before this Jay, so, let’s just bring them into it, which is in, you have kind of three pieces within the firm or within any business argument, you have your marketing sales, you have your operations, you have your finance, and I was saying the job of each one is to make trouble for the next. So, marketing should bring in so many new clients, that operations, the problem that needs to be solved. So, we focus on solving that. And operations should do a great job of bringing of actually working on those. So, that way, now we have the financial metrics that have to be solved for it to create efficiencies in operations, and reinvest in marketing, and every single piece of this is causing problems for you. Good businesses that are growing, are just constantly creating problems for each one of these spheres and if you find yourself with everything running smoothly, you know, there’s this thing called the Red Queen hypothesis, which in Nature says that if you’re not evolving, you actually are going to die out, you have to be moving constantly forward, because everyone else is getting better. So, if you sit on this and think like, I’ve got it all figured out, everything’s smooth, you don’t know it yet, but you’re actually dying out. And that’s why the job of a business owner to solve these problems does last forever, but you can bring in people to help you out with it, right? You can bring in an operations manager, you can find outside and inside marketing help, you can have a good financial team who provide you with the select number of metrics that allows you to make smarter decisions, and that’s, that’s why we eliminate the businesses.
Well, that’s what, you essentially describe what I describe as Whack a Mole, you know, as soon as you solve one problem, that’s, that’s sort of my, as a managing partner, that’s, that’s the life. And, you know, you’re, I think that, you know, the metrics you talked about a moment ago, as far as money per employee, or revenue per employee sort of is telling, because that’s a question we get a ton, like, when do you make that next hire? And, you know, a lot of, I can speak for myself, I wish I had more metrics like that because a lot of it went on gut, and some of it is, as you alluded to this, you don’t always have the revenue, but you see it like realistic as an on ramp, and that’s the scary part. And I think that one of the things that we, that we talk a lot about is not looking at it, Jay was talking the other day about possibly bringing on a videographer to produce content, right? Awesome idea. If you look at that as an annualized number with benefits, and you know, space, etc. It’s a pretty daunting number. But if you say, okay, I’m gonna do a four month or, you know, a one quarter project, all of a sudden, you’re like, okay, that’s there, and you’ll then have it, you know, again, you have to be managing, you have to play that Whack a Mole, and if you’re not in, the revenue isn’t there to support it, you got to, you got to be careful, but if you look at these things, incrementally, it seems that it, otherwise, there’s never a moment where you’re like, okay, I have an extra and Jays case $70,000 to put towards it, that’s a large nut. At the same time, you know, if you could get through three or four months of content and have proof of concept of what you’re building, you know, that that’s much easier to get to from day to day.
You know, that’s, you know, that brings up a really good point, and I’m curious, really about your, your input on this, having been in firms and helping firms through it. So many lawyers, and so many business owners think that every hire is a lifetime hire and, and that’s something that, you know, because, because it’s our firm, right? So, I know I’m going to be working at Ruane attorneys until I am done. So, I’m thinking 20, 30, 40 years, I’m going to be here, Seth, Price Benowitz 20, 30, 40 more years, gonna be there. But, But I think for a lot of people out there, they have to realize that you could hire somebody who’s only going to be with you for six months, and that’s okay. And so, you know, well, I mean, that…
Like that, like, there’s a happy medium, because if it is six months and you’re constantly training, the thing I see with young attorneys, I’m gonna pivot the ques-, I want to sort of combine this into one question, which is looking at associates, right? People always turnover, any firm, if you look at the difference, this is sort of putting some, some thought into recently, any attorneys zero to three years versus three or more and the, you know, and that piece, because if you’re bringing somebody in and yes, Jay, they are that six month, you’re figuring out if they’re any good for you or vice versa, if it’s a year and you, you know, they’re gonna be so marketable that you won’t be able to retain them, great, but if you have it, there’s a distinction between bringing somebody on who’s more senior who you think is moving into the machine, we’d love to hear your thoughts on how you do differentiate between yes, this, this might only be six months versus how do I build something sustainable long term?
So, great balance of questions here because it is like we don’t plan for having a six-month hire, but we have to accept the reality that it may only be a six-month hire, so, you know, when I get on calls, so I have some private clients who are doing multimillion dollars in the firm’s, I have some who are just under half a million dollars and they come from two sides of the spectrum here in terms of what’s their risk tolerance on an employee. So, the guy or gal who’s running a firm at, say $380,000 a year in revenue, when they’re hiring, what tends to prevent them from hiring is thinking about that annual not, right? When I can reframe it and say, look, our hope is we have, if we’re doing our work well, on this, we know why we are hiring this individual because it fills an important gap for us that will ultimately generate new revenue either because they are a revenue generator, or they free you up to generate new clients. If we’re doing this in a smart way, and this is why hiring, you don’t go out into the world and you sort of you never just look around and say, it might be good if I had another paralegal, why? why the paralegal? Just tell me, why the paralegal? You might be right, but tell me why the paralegal? Don’t just jump to conclusions here, that drives me crazy, right? You can hear the tone of voice and eyes popping out of my head that drives me crazy. So, when we’re about to hire, and they’re thinking to themselves, okay, I’m going to hire a paralegal, we’re going to pay the paralegal, let’s say $45,000 a year and they go whoa, that’s, that’s over 10% of my firm just write to that individual, they will, don’t think of it as $45,000, it’s less than $4,000 a month. Because if this doesn’t work out, you are the owner and we don’t want to make the decision of having to let someone go potentially after six months, because it doesn’t work out, but you enter into this not saying it’s $45,000. It’s I have work that needs to be done in the next 90 days. Would I be willing to trade say $12,000 to have that important critical work done? Because they’ll actually be working on say, 36 to $50,000 worth of client work? Would you make that trade? Would you trade $12,000? For $36,000? I sure hope so. I mean, that’s the common business trade, that triple of, of salary that you’re paying. Now, on the flip side, you know, we don’t, when you’ve got, say, a larger firm, we do think about making longer bets on people, and actually what the fundamental differences in hiring between a six-figure firm and a seven-figure firm, so six figure firms, we call it for us, that’s our hero level, seven figure firms, that’s what we call icon level. So, the difference, one of the differences that we’ve observed between a hero firm and an icon firm is the hero level, you’re often hiring more generalists, you’re hiring people who, okay, they’re going to answer phones for you and they’re going to file some documents with the court, and they might be doing some correspondence with clients on an ongoing basis, right? They’re doing a few things, maybe even a little bit of marketing for you. And, and they’re putting the paper in the copier there, they’re also ordering snacks; they’re covering more ground, and as you build your six-figure firm towards seven-figures, you tend to onboard several generalists. Now, when you’re in the seven-figure world, actually, I’m going to talk about videographer in just a second, Jay. When you’re in the seven-figure world, you start hiring specialists, and you start making bets on specialized employees, and I’ll use Great Legal Marketing as an example. So, we’re a seven-figure business and we decided core to our business is video production. We do a lot of training courses, we need to film events, we do live webinars, we have a YouTube channel, social media content, etc. If this business, we’re in the mid six figures, I’m not going to go out and hire a full-time videographer just for that, I’m going to figure out a way to have a marketing assistant who handles my video, but we’re in the position of, we’re getting ourselves a full-time videographer because it represents a leverage point in the practice. When I think about saying an estate planning firm, I work with a lot of state planning firms who are around the million dollars currently cracking into the seven figures and a couple multiples of that. For a lot of them, one of the leverage points they can create is getting out of signing meetings, right? Get out of signing meetings, and get out of drafting documents, and you can hire because if you’re that size, you probably have enough signing meetings that you can hire a paralegal who can specialize in handling those signing meetings for you, and they’ll review the documents before the signing meeting, they’ll do everything, but they focus on the signing meeting, same way in a PI firm. You can have a legal assistant who specializes in requesting and getting medical records because that’s a leverage point, and we all know how difficult that can be, and if I can have someone who focuses on that when I’m at that seven-figure level, that’s going to crack open the next opportunity for me and that’s a fundamental hiring difference between those spaces.
You know, it’s really brings back memories and I think you, as you’re saying this the 678 figure concepts, you know, it brings back when we had an early staffer and she didn’t answer the phones because we very rarely had a separate person for intake, first made a cell phone that didn’t take personnel 12-person team, when this woman left because she was doing reception accounting, paralegal, you know, just about everything, but intake and marketing. When she left, first we replaced her with, got fired within weeks, that the idea was we had been, we were now at the point where that job was four jobs. We weren’t, you know, we didn’t acknowledge that we were getting a deal paying her acts when we really needed four people, you know, and she turned out to be a superhero. How do you deal with that? Because I’ve seen this over and over again, that what you sometimes get lucky, you scale with somebody who both is maybe exceptional, and may also know, has sort of been grown by you. When those people rotate out, she went to law school, how do you end up, how do you have that realistic conversation that you are now, let’s say you’ve gone from six to seven figures, these are now multiple jobs, and it’s not going, you can’t just throw fairy dust and get that person cloned.
One of the core examples is, I’m going to use the title of office manager because that’s the most common position title that kind of lands in this. They got hired when this firm was doing $300,000, it was you and the office manager, right? And now all of a sudden, we’re a million dollars past that, we’re at $1.3 million dollars, but that person holds so many keys to the kingdom, they’re stretched exceedingly thin, which may be one of the reasons they’re thinking like I need to go find another opportunity, whether it’s law school, or I want to narrow down my role in another business, and that person ultimately decides to depart. So, the first thing we have to focus on is there are probably let’s, let’s run with the four core responsibilities of that individual. In just about guarantee one of those responsibilities can be handled very comfortably by a, by an outsource provider. The most common one with Office Manager is the bookkeeping responsibility, right? Great. Outsource bookkeeping doesn’t have to be done in house, let’s leverage an outside provider. Now we’re down to three core responsibilities, two of those responsibilities are probably going to naturally go together, right? It might be that they really represent, I need a paralegal for these two responsibilities because it was corresponding with opposing counsel or filing briefs motions, you know, so it was legal work in two separate categories and then the last one was intake that they were doing. That’s, that’s a common line of before responsibilities, but I’ve narrowed it down to where I really need two employees, this legal work, since it’s two responsibilities, I know I really need to replace this person with a paralegal. For the intake, temporarily, I may go to, again, an outside provider, such as a vendor, or a specialized virtual assistant, who will handle my intake until that sphere grows just enough, maybe I need to have the next, you know, $4,000 per month in revenue to be ready for it, and then I’m going to hire that person in house. And so, if we break it down to its key components, and we accept one of these can be taken away from, away from the office, by the way, the bookkeeping, maybe that’s taken away from the office until you’re at $4 million a year in revenue, right? Maybe five, this other one temporary patch with an outside person, and then full time hire because this is a core part of my practice, same with videographer, we realized was core to Great Legal Marketing, way that Ben Glass Law recognize medical records requests are core to the business, we don’t want someone doing medical records request and we want that just doing medical. So, that’s how I break that down. I will say I wish that I could go to every single law firm owner back when they had that first employee who’s going to be with them for the first 13-17 years in practice, and had them have an upfront conversation with that individual saying, hey, we’re going to grow, now as we grow, I’m going to add new things to your plate, but there’s going to come a time where we actually need to reverse that course, we need to reverse you back into really focusing on just a couple of things. So, let’s during our every six months reviews, let’s keep an open dialogue about the best use of your time because I have seen more acrimonious firings leaving the practice etc. because of that problem than almost any other in a law firm.
Jay, you got a final question? I’m smiling just before you go because I literally am having a second bite at this with BluShark our, you know, unicorn that’s doing everything having a certain literally take stuff off their plate so they can survive. So, I’m smiling like you. it is such a truism that it’s like, you know, every, at this stage of your business, you’re gonna have that issue. But Jay…
it’s funny, like we talked about how the state changed their laws and my pardons practice is going to disappear in 18 months. The paralegal that runs that department called me up crying and was like, what am I going to do here in the firm? This is what I do. I’m like, but Krista, you were with me 20 years ago, you’ve done intake, you’ve done PI, you’ve done, you know, you’ve done everything in the firm, we will have worked for you to do. You’re not going anywhere, you know, but Charley, I have one question for you, and somebody who’s coaching, and this is something that I think might be important for people to understand. A lot of people hasn’t had a lot of lawyers, I see hesitate to create the systems, they need to move their business forward, to move their practice forward because they say, well, look, it only takes me five minutes to do it, I do it three times a year, and it would take me three hours to document the system and I don’t have the time to build out this system for everybody. I could just do it; it’ll take five minutes. How do you get somebody over that hurdle? Of saying no, no, wait, take a step back, spend that three hours now, and you never have to touch it again, when they’re like, it’s just five minutes, I can do it, I can do it, you know, with without, without thinking? How do you, how do you get somebody to sort of get over that hurdle, which is what they need to get their business to move.
So, the first that, and it’s so funny, back in November, I onboarded, November 2020, I onboarded a new private client and this was the exact discussion that we were having was this mathematical model. What I said to this particular private client is, I said, the first thing you need is just need to have your system for creating a system. That’s the first thing you need in place because if you’ve got…
This is like Jays fantasy; this is like Jay porn.
I actually have a speech assistant for building systems.
Perfect, we’re well aligned here, Jay. But truly, that was the first thing we needed was a system for constructing a system, and then when you have that, and you can teach that first system to your internal team, you can now hand off part of creating the systems to them, because they know what a system is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to be steps 1, 2, 3, if it is a software piece, we document it in loom, so that way people can look at how it is practically done. And oh, by the way, we also have a policy to review our loom library every six months or one year to see if any of our software has been updated, and a new video needs to be created. So, now we have a system for managing the systems and then there’s a great book, and maybe you’ve read it Jay, systemology by David Jenkins, and he talks about this idea of having a systems champion, someone in the business of the practice, who is the, the overseer of the system. So, I don’t know if you’ve read the or watch the movie, the watchman, famously a comic, previously, but there’s the question asking it who watches the watchmen, right? And in this case, it’s what’s the system for overseeing the system. And then who’s doing that, who’s doing that one part of it, overseeing the use of systems enforcing it. This is obviously far more difficult if you run a $400,000 practice, a $700,000 practice than if I’m giving this same speech to, you know, the 2 million or $8 million practice because we’re like, yeah, I can bring in an operations manager, great, but if you’re trying to get it off the ground, the other thing to consider is, starting from the perspective, I like to talk about systems and then below systems or processes. So, this is just our parlance, right? So, in our case, a system might be the talent acquisition system, and the Talent Acquisition System lays out how we proceed, step by step from an overview, philosophical perspective of hiring someone, okay, first thing we need to do is accurate determination of the position. Second thing we need to do is accurately describing the core responsibilities, write the job ad, that I think goes down through there, then within each of those, we can add processes, but I would start from the System area of, okay, like hiring, hiring a person. Do we have at least enough information to say, I need to figure out the right position to hire the right type of person for that position, write the job ad, run the job ad interview, round one, round two, round three, personality tests, hiring decision or, and let’s never forget this, press restart from the very beginning. Once I have that, now I can go into the run the job ad thing which may say pull template A if it’s a support position, pull template B if it’s a lawyer, position associate or senior attorney, etc., and I can get really granular with it, but I would start with, do you even have a basic framework for what to do, if I put that problem, you need to hire a blank in front of you. Do you have a methodology for doing it? Once you grasp that, now we can add all the little processes into it. And mathematically, especially with a bigger practice, or even a small practice, if it is the like, I do it three times a year, it takes me five minutes, can take me three hours to document, okay? You say that a half million dollars now you’ve told me your goal is $5 million a year in revenue. So, what’s the actual cost? Eventually, the actual cost on that it’s going to be 10 times what you’re talking about and it’s every single year, get it done now, life will be easier.
I love it. I love it. Charley, you are preaching to the choir here, man. This is, this is the stuff that I love and I hope the audience is out there picking up on this that, that there are ways to move yourself forward, but, you know, the ways to move yourself right. You know, I know you referenced the Watchmen, I referenced the Mandalorian here in my office, because we’re a bunch of Star Wars nerds. This is the way, this is the way, this is the way that we do things, and we do it this way because this is who we are as people. And I think it’s, I think it’s a wonderful way of approach. Seth, anything else you need to add?
I don’t want to ruin the moment.
Yeah, this is great. Charley, thanks so much for being with us. You know, tell us a little bit about how people can get in touch with you.
Thank you. Yeah, so the best way to get in touch with me, you know, if you’re interested in one of the coaching programs, at Great Legal Marketing, you can reach out to me via email, Charley, C H A R L E Y, @ greatlegalmarketing.com. You know, just let, let me know that you heard about me on this podcast, and we’ll arrange a time to talk or go to greatlegalmarketing.com, we have a lot of free resources you can start with in this journey. So, if you’re a smaller practice, and you’re thinking, I need to get my feet wet a little bit. That’s a great place to go as well. Jay and Seth, thank you guys for having me on. I always love talking shop in this way with people who have, you know, multiple businesses that you’re working in. So, we kind of have all seen multiple examples, which is interesting.
Yeah, it’s really been fascinating. Thanks so much, Charlie, and folks, we’ll be right back with more maximum growth live. Cool, we’re out. Awesome.
Well Seth, I mean music to my ears, I mean, it’s, I love talking systems, I love talking these types of things and, you know, it’s interesting to me and talking to Charley, and thinking about my practice, thinking about firm flicks, how I grew it, after I grew up playing attorneys, thinking about my latest venture finalize, which we’re going to be talking about in the days to come, you know, you really grow, you know, and you’re gonna make mistakes every time you launch a business. And I think a lot of our audience needs to recognize that I’ve made mistakes, Seth you’ve made mistakes, we’ve made monumental mistakes, I guess. But what we do is get back up and keep going forward, right? And that’s what, that’s what one of the takeaways I think people should have today.
Yeah, and look, the thing that, you know, watching the two of you guys go back and forth towards the end, you know, what, you know, when the idea of having a system to create systems starts to hurt, but I know is right. And it’s, it’s one of those things like with figuring out when you do it because I was talking about negotiations, you ever, like you have a deal with somebody, you’re trying to do a business deal, and you could spend your whole time negotiating an actual deal, which is the right way to do it, but you may never actually get anywhere or do anything if you spend all of your time versus having a handshake. Now, you know, I’ve even talked about I’ve been burned by plenty of people I’ve had handshake deals with, but I still keep going forward, because I can’t build and create, looking at the systems by analogy. You know, there are times where if everything gets documented, would it slow somebody down and that’s what I personally struggle with. And I love the idea that there’s a default, you don’t have to think about it because if there’s a system to create the systems, it’s more likely to happen as opposed to waiting for something to take place, figuring out that it actually is a system, it is systematizable and then putting it in place. I love that part of the conversation because it inspired me to sort of go back and figure out what can I do to close that loop.
Yeah, you know, I, a couple of weeks ago, I took a vacation and part of the process of taking the vacation was to disconnect. And so, when, you know, like you said whack a mole or I called when fires happen, and someone needs to put out the fire. You know, we could develop systems to putting out those fires. We can, you know, to help sustain…
And that’s the thing, the fire has a negative analogy with versus the whack a mole where you know something is popping up. That’s the whole point of the game. So, it’s the, there are fires, don’t get me wrong, but part of it is what I think human trolls do a great job of describing is, if you do it right, and you get the marketing right, well, you better get the staff to support that work, and if you get the staff to support that work, you’d better have the finance people to take care of the economics of it. And so, it’s not like a fire, it could become, can become a fire, but it is a known issue of success and if you don’t sort of constantly look at where, if you sort of like a balloon, if you push a balloon on one side, the air sort of pops to the other side, as you start playing with your business and pushing resources in one direction is going to have ramifications in a positive way forever. The negative that needs to be handled.
You know, it’s interesting, with, with COVID, you know, we, we lost some support staff, and we’ve added some support that we’ve gotten overseas. And one of the things that’s interesting to me is, we did a lot of content during COVID, we utilize some of the lawyers to create some content, we, our marketing coordinator really sort of knocked it out the park, and did a lot when it comes to marketing, and we’re seeing a return on that work because the phones are blowing up, and we lost a we lost a receptionist. So, we went from having to receptionist down to one. And I had a conversation with the intake team, and they said, you need to hire two, we need to have three people on phones rather than just two. Which is, which is something that we need to recruit for and, and now, but it opened up a dialogue and I think that it’s moving our business forward, I didn’t recognize because I’m not seeing it daily the volume, we are now getting.
Thats a great example, and again, we could do a whole show, get Falcowitz, matter of fact let’s do that. That, that is a great point, which is we come out at, you see, you see at restaurants, you see restaurants that are closed, they can’t get staff right now, hotels were check ins take longer because they let people go and they can’t get it back fast enough. And I think it’s no different for law firms, particularly like the ones that are in criminal defense where like people weren’t going out, now they’re going out your restaurants are back, your marketing is in good shape, and okay, you have an intake team of x, well, you really need x plus one or two and knowing when that is because there’s a combination, again, if you have systems in place, you might have some better metrics. It is really tough because during COVID, I was always told they were busy, but there was no revenue coming from it. There were people on calls spinning wheels, but now we’re back to sort of the more normal widget, how do you know when you need an extra person? How do you do it? Because if you don’t, you’re gonna lose money, the other way where calls aren’t being answered and we saw that, we saw, you know, certain short plays were down because we weren’t getting through this quickly, so…
Yeah, just a great stuff here, I mean, you know, we’ve talked about this and other shows, and offline, you and I, I really am in a position now where I’m starting to recruit for a utility player, I want the Luis Soho of the late 90s Yankees, the guy who can play first base, get behind the, get behind home plate, you can put them into left field if necessary. Somebody who can do everything.
And I think that It’s a, it’s a psychological help, but pick your poison. I like the idea, for example, that we have generally people that can focus and do a thing like recruiting. If it’s important enough to you and you have enough opportunity, somebody who’s does nothing but that, there are issues because every time, this is the downside, I love it. Like yes, you should have somebody who you need a person who can pivot anywhere, but I’ll leave, I’ll conclude with the, my word of warning, which is people do what they like to do, and that if you have something that real, let’s say videographer was something you added to that popery person, right? And that wasn’t their top priority. Everything else will come first and won’t happen, and that’s why you’re saying, hey, I should get a video guy because I really want this done and I’m sick and tired of not getting the content created, because yes, we have the setup in the closet with the green screen and the thing, but it’s not coming out because there’s nobody where’s their primary responsibility. I wish there was a better way, but I know that like for reviews, until I took a person and made it a primary responsibility. It was much harder than what I said, hey, this part of intake and then just as you said, intake starts taking off. Reviews are gone.
So, I had my intake people doing it. I said, nope, I’m hiring a review Wrangler. We’re, in one weekend, she’s gotten 20 reviews in a week to 10 days. So, you know…
Just a word of warning to everybody, because I’ve been through this and I’ve had several over the years. There is a bump when somebody first starts, there’s pent up demand. Once that’s in, the question is what happens once you don’t have the I’m a fuckup. And I haven’t done them in a long time. And now that we don’t have that backlog, but you’re doing them in the regular course of business, that’s where the rubber meets the road where your attorneys really have to be part of that solution, so we got an intake show or do a review show.
Got all stuff coming up for you, folks. So, thank you for being with us this week here on maximum growth live. As always, you can find this anywhere podcasts are available. We’re syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast or we have our standalone podcasts of course, every week, every Thursday here live, 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific on maximum growth live, but for now, I am Jay Ruane. He is Seth price. We are max growth live, and we’ll see you next week, folks. Bye for now.
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