S6:E17: Choosing Coaches with Tim McKey | LFB Summer Series

S6:E17: Choosing Coaches with Tim McKey | LFB Summer Series

Welcome to another episode of The Law Firm Blueprint #summerseries! In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price are joined by Tim McKey of the Vista Consulting Team, a seasoned expert in law firm operations consulting. He emphasizes the importance of understanding law firms’ business aspects to enhance efficiency and client service delivery. Tim delves into the nitty-gritty of choosing coaches, discussing the unique approach Vista Consulting takes in assessing firms comprehensively before providing tailored advice. Tim outlines the firm’s methodology, which includes a thorough 360-degree assessment covering various functional areas such as intake, case management, and client experience. The episode wraps up with an insightful discussion on the importance of mindset, choosing coaches, and strategic planning for law firms, especially those looking to grow. Tim shares valuable advice on balancing the roles of practicing law and managing a firm, stressing the need for clear goals and a roadmap to achieve them. The hosts also explore the challenges of maintaining quality service while scaling operations, reinforcing the idea that consistent improvement and a focus on client outcomes are key to long-term success.

#LawFirmGrowth # #Coaching #SummerSeries #LawFirmBlueprint #VistaConsulting #TimMcKey

Links Mentioned

The Law Firm Blueprint 

Vista Consulting Team

Transcript

Jay Ruane 0:07

Hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts Jay Ruane, with me, as always is my man, Seth Price down there in the Price Benowitz and BluShark headquarters. But we are joined today by another very special guest in this summer of Seth series. You know, give me a little Seinfeld reference there it’s the summer of Seth, we are joined by Tim McKey. Tim, we’ve had you on the show before. But thank you for being back with us again. Because I think you know, this, this whole summer series that Seth put together is one that I think is timely. And I think we have a lot of great stuff to talk about. So Seth, I’ll turn it over to you to start the show.

Tim McKey 0:44

[inaudible] by the way

Seth Price 0:46

Yeah, big thank you for being here Tim. We’re big fans. And you know, look, we’ve talked during the series about different philosophies on law firm coaching, and you’ve been in this game for a bit now. And you’ve kept a very sort of substantive, focused on digging into the operations and management of the personal injury organization, that’s not for the faint of heart, tell us a little bit because you, you’ve had a pretty solid model. And while it’s evolved, you really, you know, carved out a niche for people who need a 360 on their department, and figuring out how to get that team running at a different level.

Tim McKey 1:28

No, well look first, thanks for inviting me on, and I hope that I can provide some information, I’m not going to say I’m an expert at much. But you know, we’ve been doing this law firm operations consulting for 15 years, believe it or not, Chad Dudley, and I started this back in, ’08, ’09, somewhere in that range. And Chad’s not with the firm anymore, but still a great friend, and, and confidant, and we work well together. And that’s a long story about why he’s not here. But but he got us really started in this. I mean, he’s the lawyer, I’m the CPA slash consultant. And what we found, or what we saw was just a real hole in the business expertise in running a law firm, and our expertise is the business side of running a firm, you know, that you can practice law, and you can run a business that practices law, and our plugin is to help our clients who may not have that business expertise, run their firm, and deliver services to their clients more efficiently and effectively. That’s, that’s our MO. That’s what we do.

Seth Price 2:41

Right? And Tim, what I loved about it, and I was, you know, a client much earlier on. But you know, it’s not, like whether you can run a firm or not, half the time, you don’t know what’s going on below your nose. And I think that the world has evolved, and we’ve had an EOS consultant on and, you know, people are much more focused on culture and team and organization. But getting in to find out what’s really happening, who’s doing what, and the larger you go, you may not really know what people are doing or how they’re feeling. And that sort of the playbook that I loved about what you did was starting off with that 360 where you’re going in, you’re interviewing everybody, just to figure out where are you at, get a baseline, before you start making recommendations of what comes next.

Tim McKey 3:27

That that is something that I would again, I’m not gonna say it’s unique to VISTA, but it is certainly something that if we stand on the table about anything is we must assess before we advise, if we don’t know what you’re doing now, how can we tell you what you should be doing? You know, when you may be doing things better than we’ve even seen it before. So that when Seth says 360, that means I look at the entire firm from soup to nuts. And that’s what we do. We assess the firm in 10 different areas. And I can go into all that detail. But I want, I will not, we we look at what’s working and what’s not. From all the functional areas with the firm. Some of the things are intake, case management, your training system, your client experience cycle, and we want to know what’s going on. And our work is inherently critical, because we’re looking for the holes, the things that we’ve seen, that the high performing firms are doing, that your firm is not doing. And then hopefully we can tweak your systems and processes and coach your team toward those best practices. And at the same time, lay an accountability system over that to where you know whether your team is actually performing well or not. I mean, we’ve seen firms that, that hey, you know, our team should know what to do well, they may should know to do it, but are they doing it and are they reporting it? Because if you’re not getting that reporting information back, quite honestly, you’re just guessing, and we don’t like to guess. So that’s that’s what we do and how we do it in a nutshell.

Seth Price 5:01

Now one of the things that, that is, you know, humbling, it may be even borderline painful is, we all know where the holes in our firm are, if we are completely honest with ourselves, and that when somebody comes in and does this, it, some of it reinforces what you already know, sometimes it’s worse than you sort of will allow yourself to get to in specific pieces. But the idea that, it’s almost like when a stranger comes into your, to a family, weekend or a family event, and watches the dysfunction, you know that that takes place in any family unit, that all of the sudden that somebody stepping inside starts to illuminate things that even if you show up to the office every day, or virtually or however you’re doing it, that you may be there every day, but after a while, that’s just the way it is. That’s crazy Aunt Sue who’s gonna say stupid stuff. This is the paralegal it’s the one off doing things her own way, not the way Jay’s system is written. And so that to me that, you know, we talked a lot about mindset, this, that, that’s all great, and I think can help move the needle of pieces, but the actual brass tax of where is your specific dysfunction, before you can figure out a plan to move forward, I think is something that you helped pioneer in the space.

Tim McKey 6:21

That 360 look, that assessment that we do will affirm some of the things that you think or the owner thinks there are problems, or maybe just illuminate that there is a problem, but it’s being caused, not right at that site. But maybe two steps behind that, you’re recognizing it here. I mean, I use the phrase, sometimes, you know, if you’re at the end of an assembly line, and products are coming off, and this one’s bad, and all these are good. And then this one’s bad. The problem is not at the end of the line, the problem is somewhere up the line. And what we do when we, we’re able to look at a firm as a whole is to find out, you know where that ultimate problem is. The other thing that you brought up, and this just made me think of something that, hey, you know, you’ve got a paralegal that’s been there a long time. And maybe there’s been problems that you’ve thought about, sometimes it’s kind of like what I call the lullaby effect, that you’ve heard it over and over and over again, to where, okay, that’s just a problem we’re gonna have to live with. And that’s not necessarily true, not that we’re after people or anything like that. It’s that, you know, the, maybe there’s just a tweak in a process or a different type of reporting, or a different coaching manner that can help. I mean, again, going back to one of the things that, that, we’re strong believers in is trying to get objective measurements to systems and processes. So we can go to a team member. And for example, say, look, we have a client contact requirement, you know, every two weeks or three weeks or whatever your firm is it, you’ve got to contact that client, we know that drives client, that drives case value, right? But if we don’t have a system to measure, if that’s happening, then how can you really coach? And so getting that systematic reporting, that information back is so important, because then you can go to the paralegal and say, look, you know, you’re at 30%, of where we think you should be. And they say, oh, no, no, no, I’m higher than that. I just didn’t put it in the system. Huge problem, right? I mean, we’re, those kinds of things, and teaching and coaching your team, to not only do their job and help report it, because management needs that information, is just, I mean, I can’t say any more how important that is.

Seth Price 8:40

So I got one more before I throw this to Jay because it’s something I’ve giving a lot of thought to. You know, as we’ve evolved. And through EOS and other vehicles, including Vista. We’ve put systems in place, maybe not as good as Jay’s, but we have a we have a leadership team, seven people that that are all reporting up, we have a nice org chart, people are sitting generally in the right seats. But one of the things that you never really question is each person, of the, that has their direct reports. now you trust their information coming to you as a firm owner, almost as gospel because you don’t really, if you’re doing it right, and I’ve gotten much better about it. I’m not diving in around the office, if I poke in, I can find shit anywhere I go. If I start talking to somebody, it’s unhealthy, it’s bad. And I can unpeel an onion very quickly with problems. But we generally have said, you know what, we’re going to allow those managers to run their team, we’re looking at KPIs, and if those are good, then you’re fine. I think one of the advantages of the strategy guys employ and then what you’re doing afterwards is you’re coaching up each of those people. And part of that is seeing what is really going on with their team because as the business owner, if you follow best practices, which has taken us a lot of years to get to, I am now one if not two steps removed for much of the sausage making And that when somebody like yourself comes in, it can be illuminating. And that what you think should be happening, again, you’re making money. There’s stuff there. But how much is wrong beneath the surface that may be indicative of exits to come even if your attrition is okay, this minute? Are you looking at something that’s percolating?

Tim McKey 10:19

Yeah, Seth, I want to change that, I’m gonna talk about what you said. But I’m going to take a little bit different angle on it. Yes, we want to empower our team. And we want to give them KPIs and reports that work for them. That owner, that, or that higher level manager should get what we call scoreboard reports, reports that just says, are we winning or losing, it doesn’t tell you who’s not blocking or tackling because that blocking and tackling should be coached at that, one level down, level, if you will. So when we come into a firm, and we look at, you know, what information we should be getting that owner, or high level manager usually wants to know, are we winning or losing, because their job is to be doing those other strategic things, to bring in more business, to decide what our next goal is, and but they want to know, the firm is doing well, okay, winning or losing, we call it winning or losing. The diagnostic type things though. And, for example, we know what intake stats should be, you know, if you got this many leads, and you want this many clients, or this many meets your criteria, then this many you sign up, you know, that is a scoreboard report, but who is making the calls, and who is taking the calls or the the leads and handling them, there could be five different people, the owner and man-, a high level manager doesn’t need to know that. But the intake leads absolutely need to have that information. If they can, you see how that’s almost the same information, but it goes into detail. And those people down below should have that level of detail and should be coaching from there. So you know, that’s just the levels of management to be able to free up the people at the top of that pyramid to do the most important strategic work without having to as you say, find shit in the, in the details, your team should be doing that. And if you can monitor it by the winning and losing, and they can handle the blocking and tackling. That’s a huge win, in my opinion.

Seth Price 10:23

Jay?

Jay Ruane 10:58

So, Tim, you know, this is something that I’ve been thinking a lot over the last, you know, 24 hours, because I saw a LinkedIn post, by Tom Growth who’s one of the members of our audience, who actually just did some legal work for me to, this morning, which is why it came up when I knew I was going to be meeting with you. And there are a lot of people out there in the legal space, who have, calling themselves a consultant, or a coach. And that, you know, there’s a lot of marketing companies that also add the coaching aspect of it, because it’s another way to, you know, get revenue out of a law firm. But you’ve been around as an OG in this, in this industry for a long time. How, and I’m sure you’ve dealt with all sorts of law firms throughout this period, how can someone who’s engaging a coach come to the realization that they may not have the right relationship, or they may have chosen the wrong coach because it was pitched as an add on to one of their other products, or they just saw some, you know, some posts and said, I gotta hire this person, and they didn’t really do any due diligence. So now, like, what are the hallmarks of somebody who’s a bad coach for you? Like, you know, what I mean? Like, like, how do I know if I pick the right guy or girl?

Tim McKey 13:51

Well, you know, look, what I think we’re in business to do is to bring good feelings and solve problems. And if you’re out there as an owner, and you feel like, you know, you’re, you’re doing a lot of talking, but your needle is not moving, hey, I like this person, but the needle’s not moving then then there is an issue. I mean, I think, well, the way we try to solve that problem is define what outcomes we really want, and how we’re going to measure toward those outcomes. And, you know, that relationship is very, very important. You know, I’ve got, you know, you can have good relationships in a business sense, but that, but the needles not moving. You know, I think it, you know, the good consultants, the good coaches do both and, you know, they’re able to build the relationships, they’re able to gain the confidence of their clients that hey, you know, we and again, I hate to say this, but now that I’ve got gray hair, I guess I can say it that, you know, I want to talk to somebody whose nose has been bloodied rather than getting my own nose bloodied. You know, the benefit, you know, you’ll gain knowledge in two ways. One is getting your nose bloodied. And the other is talking to people who have. And, you know, we’re lucky enough in Vista that we’re lucky enough to say we’ve had our nose bloodied a lot. You know, we’ve seen it, our team has worked within law firms. But again, I don’t want to get off the topic too much its defining what outcomes that that client is really looking for, and talking to them on a very consistent basis as hey, we’re making progress or we’re not. And if we’re not, here’s the, here’s why we’re not. And it may be that, hey, Mr. Owner, your a person that you’ve got in this situation, in this position, is not able to help us move the needle. Then we go into another situation, which is 100%, you know, I’ll say is typical Vista, have we given that, we look at ourselves first, if someone’s not performing? Have we given them the tools to do their job? Have we trained them to do their job? And here’s the biggie, have we explained to them what we truly expect out of them? And if we’ve done those three things, and that particular person is not performing, it’s either they’re unwilling or unable to do that job. And then we have to address where to go from there. So I am not trying to not answer your, I don’t know if that, your question can be answered directly, what makes a bad coach, a bad coach doesn’t get results? A bad coach is not someone you’d like to hang around with and then feel confident you’re getting good information from they’re just a BSer. Or there’s, there are some of those out there. And I, you know, again, it seems like there’s more and more people entering this business, which is fine, you know, the water is warm, come on in, you know, the way I kind of look at it, I want to work from a place of abundance, I hope they do well. But if they’re looking at Vista in comparison to someone else, you know, we’re going to say, we’re not going to come with a cookie cutter, every firm is different. We are a custom, you know, provider of services, and the only way that we can help you first is to understand what you’re doing, and what are your goals. So we do a lot of preliminary work, to try to define what outcomes are needed and wanted by a particular firm. And then we simply reverse engineer that and say, here are the things that need to happen, ba, and based on our experience here is the best practices and the innovative things that we’ve seen, that need to be implemented. And by the way, you need to have an accountability system on those best practices and implement that. So it gets somewhat formulaic. But every detail is different for every firm. Because, again, we have never, we’ve been in over 300 firms now in the last 15 years. And I’ve never walked in one and said this one is exactly like that. It just, it’s not there. So when a firm, when a practitioner or consultant comes to you with, we’ve got to do these things exactly like this. And here’s our cookie cutter. Quite honestly, I get a little nervous about that. Because it’s not a one size fits all world. So I don’t know if that answered your question, Jay.

Seth Price 18:13

No, I think that that’s great. I have sort of a follow up to that because look, we’ve talked over the years a lot about VISTA being not sizzle but substance that’s been your, you pride yourself on it to a fault, in a good way. Do you think that there’s a place out there? Because a lot of, of, does, is some people call it mindset? Is there a place I mean, you get to a lot of people that have built something meaningful before they get to you.

Tim McKey 18:40

Certainly I have.

Seth Price 18:41

But there are a lot of people who listen to our podcast, Jay’s always talking about this, that are in that one lawyer, two lawyer, two staffs, to five staff, you know, they’re building up. And when we always say like, you know, I talk about SEO, you can’t even start SEO till you hit 400,000 in gross revenue, you just won’t even, maybe 500 by today’s standards, you could do a website, you could do paid but to really go all in? Is there like, even though it’s, is there a mindset element that needs to be there before they can even start to really appreciate what you have to say?

Tim McKey 19:15

I’m gonna say yes, but it’s a very simple mindset. They want to grow and deliver high quality services to a bigger group of poten- of clients or potential clients, if they want that if they’re a three person firm now, or a 150 person firm, I’ll tell you Vista’s interested in helping them, now we would approach those two in different manners. You know, our, our point of entry is either an assessment of what’s going on now, and that’s with the larger firm, you know, hey, you know, they’ve done a lot right before they hire us. And what we love is the high performing firms that do hire us that are looking for what I call that crouton in the chop salad. They want the next little thing that’s going to help them get better. And that really excites us with those firms, because generally, we can help them find those croutons. But if it’s a three person firm that has been in business for a while, but they realize, hey, you know what to grow, I’ve got to get systems and processes, I’ve got to make a new hire. But I don’t know how to do that. Our other point of entry, and remember fir-, the first one, and the one we usually go into is this assessment of what’s going on. But if you got three people, there’s not much to assess. what they really need is a strategic plan of how to, what are my next steps? What’s my next hire? You know, that’s just as exciting to us, you know, and it helped them map out their plan. Now, we’re not going to go in and say, hey, you’ve got to handle intake this way, we’ve got to say, you got to get, you know, to a certain volume, to where intake systems make a difference, where, you know, in your, what is our next hire? What are we going to need to do? What kind of marketing should we employ? Those, that’s the strategic plan, smaller,firm. And we’ve been around long enough then now to have done strategic plans with firms that now need an assessment, because they’ve grown from 5 people to 18. I mean, I’m saying this for one that just we talked with last week, hey, you know, we started this. And now we’ve got all these people. And we really now need to assess, are we handling our systems and processes as efficiently as possible? So we’re on to the next phase. So again, I hope that helps. The mindset is not, the mindset is a mindset, not size, or number of people. In our opinion, I get just as excited for that small entrepreneur who wants to grow and realizes it, whether they’re young or old, the age doesn’t matter. It’s what they want to do that excites us. And then if the firm’s been around a while, and they’ve got people, and to help them reevaluate their systems, and you know, how their how their cases are working, and how they, are they ranking their cases. I mean, I can go into lots of detail. But that’s not what this is about. So, but I hope I’m helping you, Jay. Does that help a little?

Jay Ruane 22:16

No, that definitely helps. I got a follow up to that. And it comes from having seen inside 300 plus law firms. You know, I’m watching Shark Tank, and there’s one consistent refrain on Shark Tank. And it’s well tell us your numbers, tell us your numbers. Tell us your numbers. That’s what all the investors are looking for. Right? So I’m wondering, as somebody who’s seen so many law firms across so many industries across, you know, across the country, is there one thing that you see as the most common thing that the CEO needs to get better at knowing? Is it knowing his intake or her intake? Is it knowing her numbers? Is it knowing her marketing strategy and what their avatar of the ideal client is? And if you’ve talked to, you know, hundreds of people, what’s 50% of the of the thing that you say, first thing you got to do is this? Is there something that falls into that 20, 30, 40, 50%, that we can go to our audience and say, hey, if you’re thinking about coaching, make sure you have this dialed in, because it’s going to accelerate the benefits you get from it.

Tim McKey 23:22

I’m going to answer this, this way. You know, and its the ultimate consulting answer. It depends on the firm. Now you’re asking me- at 50%. Look, if it’s those larger firms, then I want to know their intake numbers, their conversion rates. And I also want to know, from case management standpoint, you know, what their, how their client contact and how they’re dealing with their clients. Because because there’s only, say there’s four ways to grow a law firm. But two of those ways are subsets. The first way is you got to get more cases. The second way is you have to increase the resolution value of those cases. The other two are subsets of those, you got to get clients to become raving fans and refer to you which if you can see that’s more cases, right. The fourth way is to make sure that each system and process within your business works as efficiently and effectively as possible, which is that best practices, which then leads to making sure that you’re asking the right questions, and you’re contacting your clients and that is what raises case value. So if you are a law firm owner, and you want to, to really look at what your firm is doing, let’s say you’re a larger firm that has been in existence for a while because there is some bifurcation on the smaller ones, but if they’re that larger firm, first of all, you have to ask yourself, are you really paying attention to getting more cases and increasing your, your average resolution value? And sometimes we find that people get so tied up in minutiae that they’ve lost sight of those two things. So, we go back to I mean, everything that we do, and we ask ourselves this a lot, is this going to increase our number of cases? Or is this going to increase our, our average case value, and if it doesn’t, we kind of have to reprioritize. But again, there’s so many things that fall under that. But going back to 50%, know your numbers, know your intake numbers, know your client, your, your client contact, which, again, that’s only one part, there’s, you know, how do you do that, and then, you know, I could go into, you know, in the marketing area, which Seth knows, probably much more than me, there’s so many different ways now that firms are marketing, 15 years ago, it was TV, TV, TV, TV, you know, now you got the all these different areas, where cases come from, but I’m gonna tell you, you know, this is not a secret. And I don’t think it’s even gonna be a surprise, without fail, the largest cases come in to our client firms, from a reference from someone who has come through their firm before, or some referral source that is a relationship source. And all everything else is what I call chum in the water, you’re putting, you’re putting the, you know, the TV out there, the SEO out there, the billboards out there, but I like to shoot with a rifle as well, going back to those clients and the referral sources that come through, making sure that you remember who you are, staying in front of them on a very consistent basis. Yes, that’s marketing. We don’t consider ourselves experts in marketing. But that function of marketing is truly an operational function. It is things you do within your firm, to reach back to those clients. That’s extremely important as well. And I don’t even know what the question was anymore. But that’s, you know, are there important things that we see that firms are not doing or should be doing, knowing your numbers, knowing how to, what growth means and what, I mean the two things you need to do, or, in my case, four things to grow your firm, and keeping laser focus and obsessive about best practices, and repetitiveness and accountability, so.

Jay Ruane 27:21

I mean, I think at the end of the day, you know, it is a business, and if you’re not paying attention to business, and I often talk to people and I say, look, your full time job, may be 40 hours a week as a lawyer, but you’ve got this side hustle as a business owner, and at some point, you need to flip it. And you need to have a full time job as a business owner. And maybe, just maybe, you keep it, a foot in the law, and you’re still doing the stuff that you love to do in law. But at some point, you need to have that inflection point where your focus is on your business, if that’s what you want to do.

Tim McKey 27:53

When I say I can’t tell you how many times we go in firms that there’s, a there’s an owner, who is handling a, fairly a substantial caseload, and trying to manage a law firm. Now, there are there are few that can do that. But I still propose to you that you almost have to pick a side. Now you may, can cut a caseload and cherry pick cases. But I ask, I come right out and ask what do you want to do? Do you want to manage a business that runs a law firm? Or do you want to practice law? And a lot of times they, there’s a hedge in that, you know, I kind of want to do both? Well, where do you want to play because, again, what we’re trying to do is get that information to build them the roadmap to give them exactly what they say they want. And first of all, it’s like, that’s a strategy type thing. You know, if you don’t want to, if you want to practice law, then you’re going to have to hire a COO that can run your firm. If you want to run your firm, then you’re going to need to have lawyers that can practice law. And, you know, to know that and to be able to define the situation and the problem, then you can attack it. But if you don’t even think about the problem, and know what the questions are, then that’s that’s an issue. And again, this is how we run our operation. We ask those questions we try to gather what is it that you want, and then build a roadmap to get you there? And that, I mean, it sounds very trite, but that’s what we do.

Jay Ruane 29:25

No I think it’s true. I think the reality is, is that a lot of people look outside and see what somebody else has and says, oh, I want that, then they see somebody else, they’ll say, oh, I want that. But it takes a lot of self reflection to actually come to what it is that you want. And this is a conversation that I’ve been having with Seth for years, what I want versus what he wants, versus what other people want. And his ideal is different from mine. And we’ve been honest with each other about that. And I think there’s a requirement that you’re honest with yourself about what you really want.

Tim McKey 29:52

Absolutely and not being judgmental. What Seth may want is maybe something that I could care less about, but I’m not going to judge him, if that’s what he wants, then heaven forbid, lets build- help build him a roadmap to get there. And, but without, you know, that’s what, again, going back to the law firms and saying, we’re going to just come with a cookie cutter and help you this, this and this without even talking to the owner about what they want, and what they need. And, again, that’s where if there’s a frustration is the cookie cutter approach to things, and I just do not believe that is in the best interest of the law firms that we work with. That’s all I can say.

Jay Ruane 30:35

And you know, just and, to wrap this up, I mean, the reality is, is, you know, we may be in certain niches, personal injury, criminal defense, trust and estates, you may approach cases the same way. But each client has individual needs.

Tim McKey 30:46

Amen.

Jay Ruane 30:47

And it’s the same thing when it comes to, when it comes to coaching, you need to know what the needs of that that person is. But Tim, thank you so much for being with us. Here the Law Firm Blueprint, this has been just another fantastic session, I’m really jazzed about the summer of Seth, and how we’re really approaching this because I think, you know, speaking to you, speaking to other people in this space is really sort of opening up the eyes of our audience to what’s out there. So folks, if you want to keep up with us, be sure to follow us. And make sure you subscribe to The Law Firm Blueprint podcast, which you can get wherever podcasts are available, be sure to give us a five star review. And of course, every Thursday at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, you can catch us live on LinkedIn and live in our Facebook group, The Law Firm Blueprint, but that’s going to do it for me, Seth, any parting words?

Seth 31:30

No, excited, I- like every time I speak to Tim, I’m thinking about, hey, you know, just the snapshots in time, from the first time he saw our firm, and realizing that as much as we’ve built and grown, and have amazing stuff by comparison, it’s never too soon to have Tim back in.

Tim McKey 31:57

That’s the crew time. That’s the crew time.

Seth Price 32:00

You know what, and I don’t want to I want to go down the rabbit hole. But I think it’s more than a crew time. You’re being kind to the law firms. But it’s really, I think finding, which you know, element of the salad is, are the things wilted more than you really think, that was so great, and a piece of crew time. It’s not like going to a conference in one nugget. Because it’s generally when you find something, you’re going to pull out all the arugula, and you want to replace it with something else, hopefully not kale. But, you know, but something that is, that is, that is more more sustainable, and healthier.

Tim McKey 32:38

Look, I think it’s, it’s constant. It’s a look for constant improvement. And I think that you know, and, it’s not, I also want to say one last thing because, the client is still the leader. I mean, I’ve gone into firms where the guy’s, the owner, would say, hey, I need to make more money. Well, great, but you have to deliver a high quality service to more people to be able to do that. If you just focus on the money. Money is, and the profit is a byproduct of high quality systems, processes services. And you can’t leapfrog that, and those who try to leapfrog it. It’s crashed and burned, it did just crash and burn. And I’ve seen it. And again, I don’t think there’s a lot out there like that. But there are some. And we have to- I take it as a personal mission to try to change that mindset. And again, not that I’m altruistic or anything like that, because look, I’m might like money and toys as much as anyone else. But if we’re not moving the needle, if we’re not providing that service, it’s just not and yeah, you may still be paying me. But that’s not any fun. That’s not what we want. We want, we want it to be a joint raising of the tide and the ships. And anyway, I really appreciate you guys letting me come on. And I don’t want any of this to be taken that I’m accusing other consultants of not being good or even, that’s not it. I want them to have the best success that they have in what they do.

Jay Ruane 34:12

Absolutely, absolutely. And I love your answer. And I think we may need to rename this show. It depends with Seth Price.

Seth Price 34:21

I always use that, and he thinks that we should be sponsored by an adult undergarment. And then the last three guests have leveraged that as their catchphrase.

Jay Ruane 34:29

Yeah, yeah. So I really think, Seth, you need to get the editors to go through and give me a compilation of all the times you’ve said it depends in the last five years of this, of the show, because

Seth Price 34:41

AI has got to be good for something, Jay, I’m sure AI can-

Tim McKey 34:44

Hey, I want to know if you believe that though. Because you have to believe that that is a truism.

Seth Price 34:49

Oh, I do I mean, all that’s I mean, it’s the core of I mean,

Tim McKey 34:52

It’s the core.

Seth Price 34:53

It’s the core. So when it comes for strategy on marketing, on SEO, like okay, well you have no other offices and you don’t know anybody in town. You don’t want any more offices? Okay, we gotta go one strategy, versus you, you’re Jay, and you’re buddies with everybody in town, and you should have offices across the frickin state.

Tim McKey 35:07

Well, that goes back to my whole thing about being, having a cookie cutter.

Seth Price 35:10

Exactly.

Tim McKey 35:11

You try to be one thing to everybody. And I see that as a recipe. Maybe not for failure for you, because you can sell that to a lot of people. But I don’t think

Seth Price 35:22

And there’s probably some benefit, but you know, is it the optimal benefit?

Tim McKey 35:26

Yeah. Agree. Agree.

Seth Price 35:28

Thanks so much for your time.

Jay Ruane 35:29

Alright guys. This has been great. Thank you so much for being with us. Folks you got a little something extra there at the tail end. I hope you enjoyed it. That’s going to do it for us here at The Law Firm Blueprint. Bye for now.

Tim McKey 35:39

Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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