Today Seth and Jay talk with Michael McCready about firm culture and holidays in a Covid time and the mindset to finding the right employees.
Hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of maximum growth live. I am one of your hosts Jay Ruane CEO of firm flicks, a social media marketing company for lawyers, as well as the managing partner of related attorneys. In Shelton, Connecticut. We do civil rights; we do criminal law. But more importantly, this guy right here, Seth price, all things SEO, founder of BluShark digital, and managing partner of Price Benowitz in DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, in Alaska, in Hawaii, in Peru. They’re everywhere. Seth. Oh, are you doing this week?
I’m doing great. I’m excited South Carolina is exploding. We’re up to three lawyers, which is pretty freakin cool.
That is a good buy-a vacation house on the Isle of Palms. And you can, you know, I can come down there and use it every summer. And you can deduct the whole thing. And it’s a freebie to me, right?
And I’m tickled because the oh, we would not have that. But for Dan Phillips joining us, thanks to Max Law Con. So, you know, the fact that this world and what we’re doing here has helped build the firm is just awesome.
And for those who don’t know, Max law Con is an annual seminar put on by maximum lawyer, maximum lawyers, a podcast, we are syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast, as well as our own standalone podcast and we broadcast this show every week, live in the Facebook group, maximum lawyer, you can certainly join that group, you can subscribe to the maximum lawyer podcast, you can subscribe to our store, or watch us on any one of our live platforms. So set; what we have this week is a visit with a friend of both yours and mine. I’ve gotten to know him through John Fisher’s mastermind. It’s funny; you keep hearing the same names come up over and over again; you got Fisher’s mastermind, which is phenomenal. If you want to tackle one hairy problem in your firm, everybody who’s out there should be participating in that at least once in their career. But once you get in, you want to go in again and again. Because it’s just, it’s an awesome community. And then there’s the maximum lawyer community. And I’ve gotten to know Michael McCready, who’s our guest today, through both of those. So why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about?
You don’t look; this is a guy who’s built a PI shop in a very competitive market, Chicago when you have to see for yourself, and you’ll see in a couple of minutes, Michael has done such a good job, not only with systems but with software and KPIs. You know, he’s taken his PI shop with smart advocate, and he has done stuff that I think makes a smart advocate proud. Like, I don’t think they realize how much you know, the smart advocate was created by Jerry Parker, one of the legendary guys in New York, who’s just an amazing guy; we should gotta get him on the show. And Michael took this as a force of nature. He’s, he’s, he’s tried TV’s work with us on digital, he has built just a juggernaut of a shop, and I would argue with tighter systems and culture than just about anybody. So I can’t let’s get him out here. So we don’t lose any time with him.
Yeah, you know, the culture that he’s built in his office is really sort of phenomenal. And it’s certainly something that I definitely want to talk to him a little about because of everything that we’ve gone on. We’re coming up to the holiday season; there’s going to be some definite stuff that we should talk about with him. So let’s do this. We’re gonna take a few moments to hear from our sponsors; as we always do, we’re gonna bring him in. And when we come back, we’ll have Michael McCready, a personal injury lawyer from Chicago, with us, hang tight, folks; we’ll be right back.
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 1400%. 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 has my back
Michael, great to have you here. So excited to dive deep into what’s going on within your shop. We’ve all been struggling with, you know, during COVID. And keeping systems in place that Jay talks a lot about, you’ve done a great job of not just systematizing a firm, but it appears during COVID, coming up with interesting ways to try to keep those systems going, talks a little bit about how, in, you know, in a very competitive market, you’ve been able to keep a ship running with as many people as you have.
Yeah, thanks, sets. Thanks, Jay. Yeah, happy, happy to be here. So COVID has presented a lot of challenges. From an administrative standpoint and also from delivering legal services. So when we shut down, we’re in Chicago, and we had a full shutdown in March, for about two and a half, three months, I had a firmwide meeting on Zoom; this is when zoom was still kind of new and interesting. I know everybody’s tired to zoom at this point. But we had a firm-wide meeting and in my message to the team was, let’s take this opportunity, you know, we’re not going to struggle, we’re going to come out stronger. And what can we do to position ourselves to, benefit and to come out stronger the end of this not knowing when the end was going to be, of course. So we had a very rough month of April and May. And then we started opening up again, I want a personal injury practice 60% automobile cases, 30% premises cases. So when the economy is shut down, people just aren’t out. And there’s just not that many accidents. So we took the time of the complete shutdown to review a lot of our processes and procedures, we reviewed all of our forms. You know, when you’ve got a firm that has enough clients, you have to systemize it, and you have to have forms, you can’t reinvent the wheel with every single meeting, if you have every single letter that you have, I think most lawyers understand that and have their own set of forms. Whether they’re automated templates are not they’ve got a form. So we went through and reviewed all of our forms, which ones are we using? Which ones are we not using? And which ones can we improve? And, and we spent a lot of time on that. Now, but the point is, we reviewed all of our systems from top to bottom with the expectation that things were going to change. And we need to change and adapt, and how can we improve during this period of time?
You know, part of it is keeping your team motivated. And during the, you know, the non-pandemic time you go around, you pack them in, in the back, you say hello, you could actually tell by body language, how somebody’s doing, how have you adapted to keeping morale up and keeping people motivated in a time where you don’t have as many touches with them?
Well, it’s certainly been a struggle. I can’t say that I have any magic answers. I think what helped our firm was what we had in place before COVID-19. And you can’t plan for that. Nobody expected a pandemic and a complete shutdown to the economy. But for years, we have been working come completely electronically. I’ve got four offices, we all work interdependent. Many of my staff don’t even see each other except in person at a Christmas party, but know each other very, very well just through the means of communication that we have. So when I sent everybody home, it was a Friday, I said everybody takes their voice-over ID phones home with them, plug them into the internet, made sure everybody had a computer, everybody could log into our system and Monday morning. I mean, we never missed a beat. So logistically, it was okay for us. But from a culture standpoint, I think that a lot of the groundwork was already built, which is allowed us to continue. If you don’t have a strong culture, if you don’t have people that love what they’re doing and believe in your vision and what you’re doing. Sending him out sending him to work at home is a nightmare. We do have extensive metrics that we keep track of in terms of productivity and so on. But frankly, we really haven’t needed to, to enforce very much of that because everybody’s doing what they did when they were in the office.
You have multiple offices as is we do something that I’ve experimented with with mixed results, I’m wondering how you’ve done is to keeping a video chat going to try to simulate some of the interpersonal that they might get in the office even free COVID where we have multiple offices and there might be an admin by themselves at a satellite location. Have you know, have you had any either positive or negative experience using sort of a video hangout that people can participate in when needed, unmute and ask questions. So you get some of that serendipity rather than waiting for more formal meetings.
We haven’t found that to be effective in our firm. Listen, Zoom meetings were cool and unusual in March. And then by the time April rolls around, everybody’s like not another Zoom meeting.
What I was talking about like a, just an ongoing Jay, and I’ve talked about this, the ongoing video hangout so that it’s basically, I’m trying to figure out ways to keep people not being isolated. They’re doing their work. And in theory, they know what they’re doing. They’ve pivoted into that. But if you’re working in your own world, our intake team, for example, normally can shout around the room. Hey, I got a client asking about this. Anybody have any experience? And you lose that? Is there any sort of chat and or video chat that you’ve been able to use to sort of help simulate what you did have at least for the people that were together before?
No, we really haven’t. We communicate primarily electronically between the offices, we use teams, just like a Slack, just. And we’re bouncing things between everybody all the time. I think it’s a good point, it may work. Also, I’ve got a lot of different personalities in the firm. We all respect each other, we all work together. But we’re not necessarily buddies. You know, as my firm has grown, and it was me and three, four or five people who is just one of the teams, you know, we go out for a beer after work on Friday.
Anymore, is it? Yeah,
But now I’m the boss. I feel you need to separate myself. And then same thing we’ve got, we’ve got millennials that are interested in going out and doing their own thing. I’d have people that have been with me for 15 years that have got kids that are in college. So we have a lot of different interests that socially, I don’t know if necessary, it just wouldn’t work with my firm.
You know, you’re talking about some ideas. You know, we’re all trying to figure out holiday parties coming up. Maryland just reduced the percentage of people to 20 People max at an event, and restaurants have 25% capacity, you had some creative ideas of what you thinking about the holiday party was?
Yeah, so the holiday party is a really big deal at my firm. Because it’s for me, I mean, I really look forward to it. Last year, what we vary from year to year, so one year we will do staff and spouses. And then another year, we’ll have a big party where we invite our referring attorneys and doctors that we work with. So one year we rented out the House of Blues for a big party. Last year, we went to a really nice steak restaurant in downtown Chicago with just spouses and last year. The thing about the holiday party is it’s not about me, right? It’s not about my ego, I don’t need anybody to say oh my gosh, you know, it’s for everybody else to get together and their spouses to get together. And people, when we have the various offices is one time a year they are in the same room together. And last year, we had dinner, we did everything we normally do the rest of the bar closed at 9:30. And I’m not kidding, no one left. Okay, no one from the Christmas party. You know, listen, the bar closes, everybody leaves, right? It gets to be 10:30. And the end, the restaurant kicks us out. But to me, I just sat around and watched and was so proud of everybody that was there at the firm, and their interactions, you know, and even their spouses, you know, oh, I can’t believe you work with Ray was wonderful. So that’s the history of our holiday parties. I looked into having a holiday party in person, and it’s just not happening. You know, it’s no matter how much I want to do it, it’s not safe. And now Chicago has shut down again. So it’s just not feasible. So we’re we’re investigating a virtual holiday party. And I didn’t even want to do it because I was afraid a virtual holiday party would sell. But we have gotten some creative ideas. And we are in the process of implementing some of those. So here’s what we’re working on. And I’d love if anybody else who’s listening to the podcast has any other ideas to share them because, to make a new virtual the holiday party is a challenge. So the first thing we’re doing is we’re hiring a comedian to do the MC. The holiday party has set a very strict schedule. It cannot be free for 30 people on Zoom and everybody talking, Hey, how are you? How are you? There’s got to be a structure professional. So the comedian is going to act as the MC. He’s going to send out a questionnaire to the firm, with some questions that will you he’ll be able to use material. Couple other things. We’re doing a website called cameo comm where you can get minor celebrities, personalized video. So we’re here in Illinois, and our former Governor Malloy joins us now on cameo. So like thanks for it, they have not Boy, I wish everybody a very happy holiday. And you can say whatever you want. We’re also going to use pre-recorded videos, referring attorneys that we work with, actors that we work with, really quick, everybody at McCravy law, shout out. I’m Dr. Doe. And so I want to wish you a happy holiday. I love working with you guys. And intersperse those around the evening. It’s a holiday party drink. For some people, Hey, we’ve got something after don’t drink. Others that? Well, that’s reason they go to the outer corporate drinking game and have a flashcard come up like every 10 minutes or so.
Like when they put the number up, you have to write down.
Right? So if you have a dog, take a drink. Okay. And even people that aren’t drinking alcohol, I mean, if they have water or pop or something like that. So just something that will encourage people to drink. There was one card that said, have the number of drinks as the number of countries that you visited. And a lot I’ve been to 31 countries. But so we’re trying to do that. Yeah, well, I mean, that’s what else we do. We do a white elephant, which is like a gag gift every year. Usually, we do it and you can steal from the person or so. So someone opens up a president, and they keep it in the next person to say, All right, I’ll present or I can stick with the one that someone had. We really can’t do that remotely.
Actually, I just came up, you just inspired me. Why can’t we if you’re using it on Zoom, you have it each person has it there it’s opened, and then you could somehow maybe if you use the phone as well as the computer, you could then have the present on zoom. And then people could steal it and take it that just, you know, there seems to be some way that you could do that.
You could but here’s the problem is that, you know, when you’re doing it live, you physically move present, right? So you just stole my present. Now my bottle of scotch is sitting in front of you. And then Jay comes along and says, Oh, no, no, I’m gonna take that. So we can’t physically move it. The other thing is logistically at the end is how do we get all these presents that remover. So what we’re going to do, what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna have everybody pick a name, you know, almost like a Secret Santa. And then, that person will be responsible for buying the gag for that person and shipping it to them. And then but we’re gonna have people open them up on screen. And so we’ve, we’ve had just a lot of fun with that over the years. The difficult part is when you’ve got new staff, that I’ve never been to one of our Christmas parties, they don’t understand how, you know how raunchy, some of the gifts can get and just tell off color. So we need to try to come up with really detailed explanation. You know, here’s some things that other people have gotten from other years. And then, you know, people can open them up on screen, you know, on screen and say, Oh, my gosh, look at this, you know, it’s a pair of Donald Trump underwear or whatever. So so we’re going to incorporate that.
Over the years we’ve had between, the extensive BluShark, white elephant party and the drinking, there have been some contentious moments as those gifts moved around. So, Jay, leave it to you. But Michael, it’s possible to just adjust the mic slightly.
Let’s see. Adjust the mic. Perfect. Oh, okay. All right.
That’s great. So like, you know, I love what you’re doing, and I can give you one tip, I found this company that’s based in LA called Drink Smith. And I’ve ordered from them three times. Now in the last couple of weeks, they sell pre-made cocktails, with like organic juices. And they have this uniquely chambered bottle. So they pressurize the drinks. So the fresh juice sits at the bottom, and you have to twist the bottle to cause the mixture. So it’s like fresh juices, and the cocktails are amazing. We’ve ordered now three times, I’ve got another one on the truck for delivery today. Every time we get them, you know it the name of the company is drink Smith. And it was a bunch of bartenders got together to put this out for a specifically for like offense happy hours. And it’s better than just having like a bourbon in water. It’s like a true bourbon drink. So we love it here. And I’m sending some out to all the members of my office as part of some of our stuff that we’re doing for holidays. So you may want to check that out. But one of the things, one of the things I want to talk about with you is systems in this term, because I got to meet you sitting at one of John Fisher’s masterminds next year. And I kept turning to you, instead of turning to whoever was leaving the room. But somebody said something to me interesting lately, and I want to get your take on it and then talk and follow up question. They said, systems make a good person great, but they can’t make a bad person good. And the quit. And I want to know if you agree with that. And then the second question is COVID, Corona, whatever you want to call it has really challenged the way our firms are operating now. You know, there’s talk this week of a vaccine, say everyone in your office, it can get the vaccine February 1. Does that mean February 2? We’re just opening back to business the way it used to be? Or Is there stuff that you can take from what we’ve gone through over the last 8-10-12 months at that point? And make your firm even better?
Yeah, let me address that part first, because we’ve had, we’ve had the executive team talking about this quite a bit. And we’ve made it clear from day one, that working from home, not a permanent solution. You know, I think a lot of our physicians can work from home, if it was designed, they work from home position. But here’s the problem that we run into is a lot of our people have got children, and children at home, and they don’t understand dads at work. You don’t understand that mom can’t do that. So people who work from home generally have to dedicate the offense; they close the door to know not to disturb them, the husband, the wife, though not to disturb them. So that can work. But we’re not going to be remote law firm, there’s something that is lost. Positives are that we don’t have to meet a client. Okay, I mean, everybody is now accepting the fact that we do electronic signatures. And we can do intakes on the phone, and we’re signing up 90% of the people electronically. The reason why we have physical offices were for people to come in. And when people aren’t coming into the office, physical offices aren’t as important and manning them not as important. So we do plan that we do plan on coming back to the offices, everything clears up. However, we have also expanded our, our, our job description, and our searches, start hiring people from around the country. So I mean, there’s some very talented people around the country that don’t live in Chicago, that that very easily converted remote. We really started our path around the country.
It’s funny, we just talked about that on our Tuesday show, which was, you know, look, we were talking about outsourcing overseas. But you know, some of the most successful lawyers domestically, are in the panhandle of Alabama, where cost of labor is a lot less. And you know, as being in Chicago and the New York Metro and DC there’s such a premium and that we are we paying an exorbitant premium just to get people to get downtown. The commuting costs are tremendous. So I’m giddy about the idea that I feel like to a certain extent the band has been ripped off, but I’m sort of with you that there’s a certain amount that you gain by being together. That you know, I’m hoping that we I think that you know like most things in life, we will see a greater movement towards certain positions being telecommute and I feel like things that might burn people out five days. is a week, commuting an hour each way is very different than three or four. And the idea that you may be able to retain people longer by having that mental health day where they don’t need to fight the traffic and the commuting, I think that’s going to go a long way, given that we now know, we’ve had a test period who does work well remotely and who doesn’t? And that’s been a, an eye-opener to see what does work. And one of you guys was mentioned a moment ago, I think maybe Jay was, you know, the idea that like the people that were a players, you know, they were a players remotely, and they followed the systems and the people that were on the bubble, you know, those are the ones that we had, most of them are been washed out. But the people who went home who are not a players, they’re the ones we really struggled with. And I think that how we hire going forward, knowing that telecommute is gonna be part of that formula may be different than what we did before we knew somebody was going to be in the office full time.
You know, that ties into Jay’s first question about whether process these make a bad player, a good player, and also with you in terms of who you’re hiring and what traits you’re looking for. So we hire for training, not for the most part, we teach the people at our firm schools they need and the processes they need to run. But we can’t we can’t teach somebody how to be a good worker. One of the personality traits that we like, are people who follow directions, and like systemized, answers to everything. Now, that’s not what you want. If your Google wants a foreign people, I don’t need creative people. I don’t need a whole team of creative people. Okay, I need people that can do the work and follow the systems and the way that we’ve set them up. Certainly, there’s room for analysis. And there has to be, but you know, if you have that personality trait, if you have somebody that just wants to do things their own way, in arms and rebels, that’s not going to fit within our firm. So I really haven’t had a problem with, you know, with poor performance on our systems. As an employer, as the boss, I have to present I have to provide them with the training. And I have to provide them with the tools. Okay, if I give them the training and the pool, and they’re on their own, because you shouldn’t be able to feed if you can’t see with our training and with our tools. And the question is either you don’t have the mental capacity, you’re just not quick enough to do it. Or you’re not a hard enough worker.
What I’m Giddy about is the idea that right now, and I guess I will say for myself, I hate to admit it. But there are times, we have a limitation, we have so many applicants that are willing to get to our office on a daily basis, the idea that you’re doing a national search gives you so much more of an opportunity to find people that will fall into your systems, you may get somebody who’s like they have 6 out of 10 things, but you can get them to come to the office on Monday. Whereas I’m cautiously optimistic that as we move borders around, that we will be able to get 8 or 9 of our 10 things that we really want more easily. That again, maybe it’s different in your market, but I’ve had issues where, you know, we get people that might be great, but we can’t make it worth their while to get downtown. I’d love to be at a point where I’m able to get some of those people that were 8, 9 10s that I just couldn’t grab otherwise.
Yeah. So what I the way that I look at it is, you know, you guys, both run firms and respected and they’re a good culture, it’s a great place to work, right? I mean, I’m not I’m not saying anything, people, my firm wouldn’t tell you, you know, we’re very careful about who we let in as part of the team. But there are a lot of players out there that are working for seed law firms, and they’re not being challenged, they’ve been doing it forever. And so we really try to appeal to those kinds of people that aren’t necessarily looking for a job. It’s a good analogy that they use is that if you’re in a long-term relationship, you know, you got a boyfriend, girlfriend. You know, I don’t really want another, I’m not looking for a girlfriend. But you know, let me see what the personal ads today and just something attract. Wow, who is that person? And that’s kind of how we look at our job search is we’re looking for the people that you know are comfortable that got a job really good at what they do. They know that they can be better. They know that are better places to work out there. And we tried to appeal to them. And I mean, I’ve had people tell us that I wasn’t looking for a job, but your job posting spoke to me more than one person that said our job posting has spoke to them. I look at social media as one of our greatest recruiting tools is people that are looking at our firm to work there look, and our social media is who we are. Right? You know, it celebrates birthdays and accomplishments and, fundraisers that we’re doing. And, you know, we’re a fun place to work and, that’s the kind of person that we want to attract.
Just give me an idea we, you know, I don’t think we do our birthdays on social media. That’s a great idea. What do you do anything something we’ve had some success with, with internal recruiting, you know, having a bounty for people with the firm bringing their friends who may not be looking, but knowing that it means something to their, to their bottom line if they bring in good people.
Yeah, you and I have talked about this, I’ve never implemented a bounty. But I will say that some of my best hires have been recommendations. Hey, you know, my bet my friends been working at such and such a firm for 15 years. Now I’ve got a little bit with working in person, I’ve got a little bit of different dynamic than you, my main office is on the south side of Chicago. And so an attractive part of working at my office is not having to go downtown. Alright, so we have attracted some really high-quality people that just don’t want to go downtown anymore. And now they can come to our south side office, the drawback of being on the south side is limit the geographic scope for the people that can come to Iraq. So anybody on the north side is not going to travel all the way to the south side to come to our firm. But we’ve got downtown things. So we try to get more people.
People, you know, a price battle tool that has satellite offices out there, the main office being downtown, but I live this experience, I get it. I had BluShark when it started in Bethesda, Maryland, walking distance from my house, which was freaking awesome. But people from Virginia didn’t want to come to Maryland. So by putting something in DC, you’d get the people that could come from anywhere. And it’s like that, that that is definitely an advantage. But what you can’t get is the people who are local, where it’s like it’s a dream job, it just limits the scope. Chicago is large enough that you’re fine limiting it to a third of your geography because there’s just the population is so massive that you probably still have talent. And I can see that right. There are people who are a player’s downtown, that you could that you can attract because they’re like, Hey, we can pull right into the joint don’t have to fight traffic and, and public transportation gets to work.
I mean, I’ve hired attorneys that literally live in my neighborhood, I used to live a mile from my office, and I can’t underestimate how nice it is to avoid a commute. For a year, well, when I was living there for years, I didn’t even have a computer at home, what did I need a computer home for I could just run into the office anytime I needed. Now I’m dating myself a little bit. But the point was, you know, being a mile from the office, if, if, if I woke up at five in the morning, I could go work for an hour or two, and they’ll be brought back for breakfast. So that was a benefit.
You know, you’ve been great. I don’t want to geek out too much on the PI specific since you know, our audience is pretty general. But one of the things that when we went virtual that everybody was sort of struggling with was checking on productivity, what are some of the things I know you have a ton of metrics that you look at, but what are some of the key metrics that might be good for our general audience that you’ve looked at to ensure that you’re getting solid productivity from employees when you can’t see what they’re doing day to day.
Now, the first step, of course, is you need something that can track all of this. So our case management system tracks all of this. And we have different positions in the firm that have different metrics that we can track. But across the board, we can keep track of how many cases worked on on a weekly basis, how many notes were created, how many tasks were completed. And I think that those things will translate to anything. For example, our negotiators, we keep track of how many settlements they have per week, how many negotiate how many demands they sent out. So every firm, every practice area is going to have their own key performance indicators, right, that those that it will keep track of, you’re going to be able to know whether the work’s being done or not. But you know that the case is worked on tasks, you know, I think what else client contacts we track which is really important.
So Jay, and I-
I have a question about that because there’s sort of a, there’s sort of a debate, whether you want to have, you know, for a role, here’s your 10 KPIs, or here’s your one, what where do you fall in that spectrum? When it comes down to it, because, you know, you can overwhelm your people with a lot of KPIs. But at the end of the day, there are sometimes one real thing that matters. And so So how do you how do you sort of deal with that spectrum? Michael?
I’m more of the 10. Okay, I think there’s just different things that different people do, different positions do. And when you get to the point that you’ve got two people doing the same position, then you can compare the two. And you can see that now, we have never implemented quotas. You know, all of our data, for everybody in the firm all of our KPIs for 30, people who share among the firm, so everybody can see what everybody else is doing. If you want to know, you know, how you’re doing go look at the case managers, you know, go look at the series.
Do you have somebody who manages that data and those KPIs to produce them?
Here’s the best part is that my case management generates them. And every Monday morning, they get an email with their numbers, and each person within their own numbers. Okay, I could automate that. I mean, I could have those numbers pre plugged in, I want them to look at their own numbers in, like, 2-5 minutes.
Can you break that down a little bit?
Yeah. So Monday morning, everybody in the firm gets an email. And it shows how many cases they worked on how many settlements they had, how many tasks they completed, you know, whatever their KPIs are, then we have a shared XML document. And each person has got their own tag or their own sheet. And so they will go onto that sheet for them. And they will fill in their numbers. How many cases that I worked on last week? How many did I complete? So we do that every Monday? And then we aggregate?
This information is not already in your case management system. This is stuff that they’re putting.
It’s coming from the management system, but the idea is this Excel sheet, everybody can see everybody else’s comfort. And, and, you know, there’s a little bit of competition, right, everybody wants to, you know, have the most settlements, the only thing I don’t share are the dollars and cents. So I don’t tell anybody, how many, how much money in fees or settlements do. But in terms of the product, each of them enters that information themselves. And if you want to know how you’re doing, look at one of the you know, I had five settlements, this is like a, you know, well, and the month before that he had nine, well, what am I doing wrong? And we do go over the person that our annual revenue, but they kind of take care of them. I mean, I could put in place you did this, probably tax, you must do this many. You know, there’s many client contact, but we’re dealing with everybody works pretty hard.
And one of the things I’ve struggled with is every time I’ve tried to have something like Jay was talking about a metric, what you’ll find is people move to whatever incentivization you give them. And the truth is you want a well rounded employee doing everything. And so the moment you see that you’re incentivizing a task, you’ll see behavior move that way, which is life and people but you that may not be in your best interest, it really, you want to focus on it. It’s one thing and you want to sort of like remind people, but if you put too much of a thumb on that, it’ll end up being disproportionate and things that you’re not measuring, you know, which are still important, don’t get done or don’t get focused on.
Yeah, there are great books that I’ve read about incentivizing employees. And it’s hard because you need the incentive to match up with what the behavior is that you’re looking for. And sometimes it has the reverse effect. Sometimes it impacts some other metric, as well. Finding the right incentives is difficult. This is not incentivized. This is just general data that everybody has. And we need people who are self-motivated. One of the one of the things we say around the law firm is our competition, other law firms, our competition is ourselves. They work I don’t care what anybody else is doing and we’re in the top 5% whatever we’re doing, but we can do better for ourselves. And, and we can and we can improve and different air arenas, and once you’ve mastered, so I’ve got a young attorney who’s just been fantastic for my firm in last year, you know, he just settled cases, settled cases, and not for short money. And he set goals for himself. And I said, Jess, I mean, you can’t do more than you’re doing with no, that’s not my point. He was, I wanted to map through this. And then next year, I’m gonna go on to a different skill has already mastered, you know how to negotiate and settle cases, by doing by moving our goal for now I can move on to something else. I didn’t tell him to do that. Right. These are the kinds of people that we try to hire that are self motivated. You know, that they do it for themselves and do it for the firm, not, because there’s a supervisor telling them what to do.
Gotcha. Jay, you get the final question.
Wow. That’s just how do you find those people? That’s really the skill set. And that’s what I want to get from you. And maybe some advice to the people who are listening, you know, how do you find those people that are self-motivated, because, from my experience, even the most self motivated people, they tend to ride sort of a roller coaster, because, you know, your work life is only part of your whole life. And so someone who’s self-motivated in their early 30s, could change when they’re in their late 30s. And now having kids that type of thing. So how do you find those people and keep them working for you?
Hi, two different questions, retaining them, once again, learn culture, and how to be in an environment that you like, our culture is not by accident, right? It’s very deliberate. The things that we do, do, you just need to find your own. It can’t teach culture, just it develops the skills that you can do. But in terms of finding people, you have to understand that the hiring the right people is so important, I just don’t think enough people bring up the time and money into it. You know, we have youth recruiters, I gladly pay, you know, four or $5,000, for somebody screaming all these applicants and show me two or three hours, we’ve hired two people, right? I mean, we, when we have in the NFL Draft, okay, you draft the player, even you don’t need that position. When you come across the quality candidate, you find a place for that. And we have somebody has applied for one position, and said, You know what, we really think you would rate this position and hire him that way. We, we have a very broad, very broad search radius around the country. Our job descriptions are very, very detailed. But once we and we can read out many of the resumes, but when we start getting quality resumes, that’s when the work really starts. So for example, if the person is going to be on the phone, the first thing we do is, before an interview before anything else, please call this number and ask for extension 123. And in one minute or less, why you’re the best person for this job. Right. And we get a voicemail, and if the voicemail is high, you know, I you know, I’ve always wanted to work in a law firm and your law firm looks kind of cool. And I mean, we know you’re leaving a voicemail for one minute, you better be prepared, and you better come across well on the phone. My name is Michael McRaven, a young attorney, I’m really, really ambitious. I love your firm. I think I can learn a lot from it. And I think I could bring a lot to your firm. Here’s some of the things that are important to me. Hope you consider this quick. So we don’t even bother with phone interviews. Take 10 minutes. So the next step would be a phone interview where we can ask you know, we do what we all do. We do our zoom meetings now. We do a lot of personnel testing and personality testing costs money. I mean, we’re investing the money to find the right person to hire the wrong person. We lose so much more money, a bad lawyer.
What do you like for personality testing?
It depends on the position. We use the discontent wheel we still use the Myers Briggs because it and people love those kinds of lessons. But for higher level stuff I use the J Henderson’s test is axiomatic pricing, you know 100 To 250 bucks. But when we’re hiring attorneys, we’re high level hire. I would never hire somebody without that. Just when you, when we see how spot on it is, alright, so here’s the thing with testing for me gets a lot of red flags that I might not have seen, they might have aced the interview, they might have aced the resume, but personality testing will show you now everybody’s got their own predilections and their own personality, what you really need to watch for are ones that are so ingrained, that nothing you can do is going to change them with that personality trait. Okay, and, and, and that’s not always bad. But once we know what those traits are, then we can accommodate them and make sure they fit within this system. Here’s a perfect example, I’ve got one of my star employees, off the charts with status and recognition. Okay, just love status and recognition. So that, of course, translates to pay, you know, I’ve got to pay him well, but it’s much more than that, is that, you know, when he settles a case, you know, we make a real point to say, you know, hey, so and so just settle this case, and this is what he did firmwide. So when you know these things about people that how they communicate, you know, some people are introverted, some people just will not come to come to my firm administrator, or they won’t come to me, we have to go to them. So all these things, you’re trying to create a team, and you’re trying to find the best people to fit in the best positions, and work together as a team. And I’ll finish up with one thing that I learned a couple years ago that I really liked. So I started my firm, and I always felt it was a family, right, we treated everybody like family. And it’s a great analogy. And it should be however, if every family might have a crazy uncle out, okay, so just some relative who was just a nut, or just a not a pleasant person, he’s your family, there’s nothing you can do about them. So we changed the analogy is we’re a team. And now everybody is on the team, and you owe a responsibility to everybody else to carry your weight, to act as a team, you never say that’s not my job, you help everybody else. And if you can’t help the team, you know, we’re going to replace you, you know, we can’t replace a family member. At now, just because you have all the data and the metrics in the world. And, and you want a team environment, there’s still that personal decision, right? You know, I am the I’m the final say, and I go against the data sometimes on decisions, but at least the data is there to make an informed decision. You can’t run a business strictly on numbers, not illegal business. There are cases we shouldn’t take, because they’re not going to be financially worthwhile. But we’re gonna take them out of principle. But anyway, I treat the treat the to treat the office like a team and not a family.
I like that. It’s kind of like that a lot. Awesome. Well, thank you.
Thank you so much. This is this has been great. And I hope we get to see you in person sooner rather than later. It’s been through long.
Alright, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks, guys.
Thanks so much. Have a great day. Thanks.
All right, Seth. Wow. You know, I always say, we’re going to do another half-hour show today. And we never go a half hour, but that was just an hour of pure gold. I mean, you know, almost an hour, of course. But, I gotta tell you, I’ve got from notes that I’ve taken to myself, like six or seven takeaways, just stuff that I want to be thinking about over the next couple of days. What were your takeaways? No, absolutely.
Like, he does stuff. I mean, I’ve spoken to Michael a lot. So there’s things that he’s actually helped to, we’ve sat down and looked at Smart advocate with him as a firm, but little things, you know, I’m doing social media, I hate the sort of regurgitated social feed that a firm needs, but he’s like, yeah, for birthdays on there. We already doing them internally. Why aren’t they being done externally? He does a great job of sort of his recruiting process. I feel like you know, look, I have a full time recruiter, we do a good job, but I see this and I’m like, Hey, we got a long way to go. We could continue to raise the bar, and it dovetails to our last conversation, which is moving the geographic boundaries so we can get the people that fit the culture and have that internal drive and something again, I struggled with talked about on the show, the idea that because of geo geographic limitations, I feel sometimes you take who you can get who checks six, seven, maybe eight boxes, but We should be getting 8,9,10. And, you know, Michael, I think is an inspiration when it comes to pushing you because you see, he could do it, you can do it.
Yeah, you know, one of the things that’s really interesting to me taken from this conversation is, you know, two of my really, you know, rock solid. Staffers now live in Florida, and my practice is here in Connecticut. Now, they were with me here in Connecticut, and subsequently moved in technology allowed it to do it. And I’m thinking to myself, while we’re having this conversation, maybe there’s somebody who’s a rockstar, that’s the perfect fit for us, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, or in, you know, Des Moines, Iowa, and maybe I should be expanding my footprint, even looking for some of the intake positions, the legal administrator positions, that type of thing. Because it really with technology, there’s no reason necessarily to limit yourself just to a small geographic footprint, unless that’s something that you’re specifically looking for, you know, in the office, that type of thing.
And look with domestic hires, at least for now, you can fly those people in. So it’s not like they can’t come for a period of time for training, given that everything’s online anyway, they may just be getting that initial day or two. And that’s what we did, we just on boarded to South Carolina lawyers over the last couple of days to expand the criminal footprint down there. And in doing so, they each flew up, they had already done a zoom with everybody. And then they got the second touch, where they got to see people in person, you know, again, it, it is not, you know, we are already trying this is not easy, because you have two things, you also have the person at the other end, where you know, very often people are looking for jobs, there’s so many scams and different jobs and partners and Craigslist has failed to deliver is that it got too flooded, you couldn’t find the real jobs in there. Because it was so many get rich, quick things going on, that people move to indeed very expensive for us. So while I’m playing that game, it is not easy, you know, you can put your ads around the country, we’ve also experimented indeed, as a program called indeed higher, where it’s a 10% placement fee. So it’s not extraordinary compared to a local group that might be 15, to 25%, where they essentially put those ads out there, and you only pay when you hire. And we’ve used that as a way to try to crowdsource something nationally because if you do a national search, the cost on indeed is x is pretty extreme, I do a whole show talking about how to leverage because we for me, I built my firm on on Craigslist, and it was free, and then 2,3,4,5, maybe 4-5, depending on your market per ad, not crazy, getting more expensive. But the, indeed, clicks are so pricey. And then if you have a lawyer and you say I need somebody who has this experience, I need criminal defense, in Connecticut three plus years, it dramatically reduces who you get, you still get some clicks, right? They’re not dense, but it’s not crazy. But if you want intake, and you put that out nationally, it’s you know, it’s just a click fest, and you’re, you know, the cost is so high, all of a sudden, those recruiters don’t seem so crazy anymore. And it’s I go back and forth.
You have the click tracks that I’m deed really kills me because I mean, you have people who literally will just submit their information to every open job, that you know, that’s there, you know, you put somebody else for intake, and you’ll get somebody who’s a warehouse worker, and you’re saying, You’re not what we’re looking for, we’re not what you’re looking for. And you know, I just paid for your resume that we’re never going actually to go through.
But right now, at least in our market, it is still very, very powerful. And the but it’s expensive, and that dealt like everything is getting more expensive. You know, we talk to you about health care shooting up, recruiting is going up, and like it’s not like our revenue is going up as proportionally to what we’re seeing. So I feel like, you know, again, looking for the more specific you could make it with experience. But when you get out of the legal space, where you don’t have requirements that are hard, it just opens floodgates, and it’s tough.
Yeah, it’s tough. Well, that’s a downer way to end the show on a downer.
No. We’re gonna figure it out and look. So we have our core people in South Carolina. And I think part of it is focusing in on an area. It sounds crazy, you do a national search. In theory, that’s a great idea. I haven’t figured it out yet. I find sometimes if you say hey, here’s our you start to get a sense for a market for what PI is for what you know, of what makes you know what is good and bad expectations. They’re like it’s a challenge. Again, we’re not won’t be our last time talking about recruiting. We talked about always being recruiting. But you know, again, we talked about last show, whether it’s overseas. I think there’s a whole other world of how maybe this is the question, maybe we find a guest for this. How do you recruit nationally in a cost-effective way?
All right. Well, if somebody out there has an answer to that question, please leave us a comment down below or send us a DM. We would love to talk to you and maybe bring it in on the show to talk about recruiting nationally, in our, you know, in our space, because these are the types of answers that our people, our audience who wants to grow their firm are looking for. And with that said, I think we’re going to end the show this week. I want to thank you for being with me. As always, I love spending this time with you. So if you want to catch this podcast, you can certainly do it syndicated on the maximum lawyer podcast as well as our standalone. You’re always welcome to go back on maximum growth live here on Facebook. You can watch all of our prior shows. With that, I’m going to leave you now. My name is Jay Ruane from firm flex. He is Seth Price from BluShark. We’re gonna wish you a fantastic weekend. And we’ll see you next week on Tuesday with another edition of maximum growth live. Bye for now.
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