In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price are joined by the remarkable Michael Mogill from Crisp. Together, they dive into the critical topic of coaching law firms. Michael brings a unique perspective from his extensive experience working with numerous law firms, shedding light on the importance of coaching in uncovering blind spots, fostering behavioral change, and ultimately driving growth. This insightful conversation explores how smart coaching can help law firm leaders navigate challenges, improve operations, and achieve their goals. In addition to the main discussion, Michael, Jay, and Seth touch on the upcoming Crisp Summit, featuring renowned speakers and offering a platform for legal professionals to learn and network. They highlight the importance of balancing mindset and actionable steps in coaching law fims, maintaining focus, and implementing strategic plans to ensure sustainable growth. In this episode, Michael Mogill shares his observations on the impact of coaching across various revenue stages in law firms. From solo practitioners to multi-million-dollar practices, Michael outlines the key challenges and solutions for law firms at different levels of growth. He emphasizes the importance of building a strong foundation, managing human resources effectively, and planning for long-term success. His analogies and examples provide valuable lessons for any legal professional looking to elevate their practice.
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Hello, hello and welcome to this edition of the Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts Jay Ruane, and with me, as always is my man Seth Price down there in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. But we are joined by somebody super special to the legal community, and just a super special guy all around, Michael Mogill from Crisp. Michael, thank you so much for being with us today on this series, ‘All About Coaching Lawyers’ because I think you bring a very unique perspective, having been a law firm adjacent and now “in it” with all these law firms really pushing them to grow; so thank you for being with us.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So Michael, a question I’ve asked a number of your colleagues out there, which is you’ve had the benefit of looking in several hundred, if not more law firms; what are some of the biggest takeaways from the perspective of what coaching can do for them?
Yeah, well, the idea of coaching in these days, like everybody’s a coach is what it feels like, right? Everybody’s coaching lawyers. It’s like it’s the new is the new trend, right. But I don’t think that discounts the importance of coaching. I mean, Tom Brady had a coach, right. And you know, he’s winning Super Bowls. And I think a lot of it is just the fact that smart people learn from, you know, their own mistakes, and wise people learn from the mistakes of others. So to me, I’ve always looked at coaching from the standpoint of like, ‘how do you help somebody uncover blind spots that they may not see’? So if you’re going about things on a day to day basis, you know, how do you even know that what you’re doing is the right thing or the wrong thing, and then simply doing more of it doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a there’s a learning process that’s taking place, right, like knowledge, you know, knowledge isn’t really power unless it also is accompanied by a change in behavior. And then generally behavioral change doesn’t take place unless, you know, someone has a level of like reflection and introspection and self awareness, to be able to determine, ‘okay, well, well, maybe I need to go about doing things differently’, and then if you don’t know what you don’t know, you know, I’ve always found that, you know, leadership is such an interesting thing in that, you know, we’re all trying to grow our businesses. But isn’t it so fascinating that we as leaders, if you’re trying to get to somewhere you’ve never been, so we’re trying to take an entire organization of people to a place that we ourselves have never been, and we’re dictating the course, right? It’s like, imagine you got in a car, and you had no GPS or any destination, you’re like, ‘Alright, guys, you know, who’s coming with me’? And it’s like growing the business in many respects, and that you know, you want to grow, but then how do you actually go about doing that? And how do you navigate that? And how do you solve problems you’ve never saw before? Or even anticipate challenges that, you know, you can’t see coming? Because you’ve never experienced them yet?
You know, one of the things that I think is interesting, too, that your business model and coaching is developed this way, very different challenges, less than a million, a million to three, three to 10, and 10 and above. And I think it’s one of those things that from a market, from a coaching marketing point of view, a lot of people just want to say, ‘Hey, this is the way it’s done’. But it seems that you’ve given some thought to the different things that are needed at different points in the journey.
Yeah, so we’ve used you know, and this isn’t, it doesn’t work necessarily, I wouldn’t say it’s perfect because revenues doesn’t always tell the full story, right. So for example, you know, the big difference between a $5 million criminal defense practice and a $5 million personal injury practice, right, like just just to be able to scale that is very, very different. But, you know, but the principles remain the same in that, you know, generally under a million, if you’re just, if it’s just you starting out, or maybe you and you know, a paralegal or an office manager like that, the big challenge at that point is just your capacity, it’s your time, it’s like you’re doing everything. And in order to make progress and even be able to work on the business, you got to find ways to free up your time to be able to expand capacity. So whether that involves delegation, or automation or hiring or something, but it’s basically you’re working 24/7, you’re doing everything and the business has hit some sort of limiting factor, just because you can’t put more hours in. So it doesn’t matter if you get the phone to ring more if you bring in more leads. But if you’re working 80 hours a week, it’s like, how does that help you in any way? If you’re doing all the work? So I think that’s, that’s really where it starts with getting that time back. And then, you know, once you get beyond a million, let’s say, a million to 5 million, in many cases, now, you’re just starting to, you know, to build a team, you’ve hired people, but you know, there’s a lot of complexity there, because now you’re dealing with human beings. And it’s like, how do you ensure you’re hiring the right ones? And then if you do hire the right ones, you know, how do you ensure you develop them properly, and you know, onboard them properly and ensure that you’re measuring them properly and they have you have metrics you because you want to ensure that the business remains profitable. And you know, in any investment you make in hiring someone, ultimately, you want that to grow your business. So then it becomes a dynamic of managing and leading people and the complexity that comes with, you know, with a growing culture, and then you know, above 5 million, let’s say you have, you know, a certain number of team members, you started to really develop out the culture; now, you want to make sure, like, how do you start to build you know, what can be considered more of like a self managing organization, and this will take a while, right. So, you know, in some cases, we see it go from 5 million to 20 million or even beyond, of how do you make yourself less essential in terms of like not necessarily having to be involved in the day to day. And I think this is important for a business in terms of, you know, maximizing the value of a law firm. But also, if anything, were to ever happen to you, right? If you were so essential, like what happens if you’re sick, what happens if you’re on vacation, what happens if you get, you know, run over, like, you know, just, and the less essential you can make yourself, probably the better the business that you have; doesn’t mean that you know, you don’t have to come in you, you can do the things that you enjoy, maybe you love going to trial, maybe you love working on the business, maybe you love marketing, you can do those things, now things get exciting. And then, you know, really beyond 20 million, you know, there’s conversations around like succession planning, legacy planning of what is the future of the law firm look like? Is there a plan in place? How do you really expand that impact? You know, because at that point, you know, obviously, the firm is growing 20 million, 40 million 80 million and beyond, but, you know, what does it look like, you know, even after you’re there, right, and that at the same time, it’s like, you know, you’ve clearly made a ton of money. But now you have an opportunity to make a much greater impact. And, you know, not just in your community, but the entire legal industry. So it’s just, it’s different, depending on where we’re at format in terms of like revenue, both the accountability structure looks like what the team looks like. But it’s a progression. And ultimately, all this is from the standpoint of why you start a business. In most cases, if you ask people enough, why questions, it’s usually because they want freedom, like the freedom to do things that they want to do with the people they want to do them with, you know, and they want to spend their time however they want to spend it. And the irony is, when you start a business, it’s like, usually, if you leave another law firm, and you start a firm, that’s why you’re doing it. And then you have the opposite of all those things, right? Because, yes, technically, you decide what time you wake up, and what time you start working and what type of clients in cases you accept, but if you don’t have any clients in cases, and if you don’t really have a business, then you don’t have a whole lot of freedom. So you’re constantly chasing it and that happens through, you know, developing freedom of time, adding team members, increasing capacity, you know, freedom of money, obviously, the firm becomes more and more successful and more profitable. Now, that allows you to not have to worry about, you know, payroll, you know, paying the bills, and so on. But then it’s ultimately the freedom of purpose to spend your time wherever you want, doing the things that you want with the people you want to do it with.
When you’re going through that process, like that’s the good side, right? You’re having people, they’re profitable, you move forward, it doesn’t include all the stuff we’ve always talked about offline, the losing a person, bad review, the ‘this’, the ‘that’ right? But what, when you look at it, right, that’s the, when you take it, you know, one of the things I find interesting, as you’ve seen so many places, what are some of the missteps, you think are avoidable? Because as you see this over and over again, while every firm is unique, the patterns start to emerge in mass, that must be clear from 10,000 feet.
Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that I see, if I had to say, across the board, right, we’re always talking about like, every, you know, pretty much unanimously across all the firms that we work with, it really comes down to when there’s a compromise in standards, right, or even like not having a defined standard. So there’s this expression that, you know, you know, ‘businesses are destroyed by paper cuts, not sledgehammers’, and usually find to some degree is that there’s a something that is tolerated, or someone that is tolerated for a long enough time. And it’s not really a problem at first, but then eventually, like you just either ignore it, because you hope this thing just goes away on its own, and then it becomes a massive issue. So either it’s some sort of like process issue, or a person there, that’s not super engaged, but they’ve been with the firm a long time, then they become a cancer, and then they you know, they poison the well, and then you don’t just have to let them go, And then you know, they’re having an affair with somebody else in your office, and you gotta let that person go. And then the entire departments got to go, and then you lose all that case inventory. And now you have an impact in terms of like, you know, your caseload and the revenue and the profit. And it just like it compounds, because you knew there was an issue a while ago, and you didn’t do anything about it. So I think a lot of it is just really knowing what’s going on under the hood, and being able to address those things early on. And then the other thing is, you know, that’s what happens when things get bad. But I think, what’s maybe even worse this in some respects, is that it, this is how things stay the same a long time, right? Like this, meaning that things are good, but they’re not great, and it’s like ‘Sally’s been with us a long time. And she’s okay, but she’s not phenomenal’. Right? But you know, let’s say she’s just doing the intake for the firm, she’s always done the intake for the firm, right? But is she the best, right? Like, what standard? Are you holding her to? You know, on day one, when the firm started, that was probably one standard 10 years from then, you know, it’s probably a different standard. But in some respects, and I don’t think it’s malicious, but sometimes, you know, good is the enemy of great, and it can hold back a lot of progress that firms can make. But, you know, you’ve got a lot going on, and, you know, it’s like, ‘do I really want to deal with what’s going on in the intake?’ And, you know, at the same time, ‘we got to figure out what’s happening in the marketing’ and then, ‘you know, I don’t really want to deal with this drama that’s happening, you know, with the, with the paralegals right now’ and then, you know, ‘we really need to figure out you know, kind of a new compensation structure for the lawyer’s’ and it’s like, ‘I don’t want to deal with the shit right now’. And then eventually it not just one problem compounds, but all those things, essentially. One day you come in, and everybody has a problem, and this person wants to quit and then another person wants to quit, and now you’re taking like five steps backwards.
Well, I gotta say that was one of the most insightful answers we’ve had in the history of doing this thing. Very, very powerful stuff. I’m gonna go back and re listen to that soundbite. One more question before I toss to Jay, one of the things, you know, coaching has come on, right? If 10 years ago, barely anybody who’s going through coaching in the legal space, now everybody’s going through it. One of the things that I think that I see out there is, how you divide up your resources, both coaching mentality wise, between mindset and actionable. And I see that there are people that sit there, and they work on the mindset for a very long time, but you know, great, your mind is in the right place, but you’re not getting the hard work of putting the people in place or making those hard decisions you just talked about; how do you balance that?
You know, I love this question because ironically, this week, I was doing kind of a blast in the past and said, you know this, you know, Jay as well, like, over the years, like, we’ve given so many presentations, and early on when you know, when I was a baby, and you know, I would speak at you know, some of these legal conferences, I was looking back at my, you know, kind of some of my earliest presentations that like when the ABA lawyernomics conference when that used to exist, and, you know, even like some of the smallest ABA conferences that had, you know, 25 people, and the presentations that I would give were so so tactical, it was like, ‘do this’, ‘here’s how you set up and run an ad’ here, you know, it was just literally like 10 tips, 20 tips, like do this specific thing. And, and, and I saw just over the years, they started to evolve to where like a lot of the presentations now are much more like principle focused, and more mindset heavy. And I was thinking, you know, ‘should I go back to some of the more tactical ones?’ and what I realized, and this will answer your question, is that, if you just tell somebody what to do, or ‘here’s a bunch of things that can help you’, right, ‘here’s a cool app to use’ and ‘here’s something that can improve your workflow’, ‘here’s some cool prompts for you know, for chat GPT’ and, you know, someone will see that immediately feel a hit of dopamine, because they’re like, ‘okay, you’ve just given me something valuable. That’s cool, right?’ But the problem is, like, what I’ve seen is that very few will execute on that, and very few will actually do anything with it, besides saying, ‘I got a lot of really cool ideas’, or will it make any meaningful impact in their firm? So I think where it really starts is like, if, you know. It’s kind of like AA, right, Alcoholics Anonymous, like, if you can’t do step one, admit that there’s a problem and be in the right, headspace, right? And the right mind frame, if you will, from the standpoint of how you think about your business. So like, to me mindset is really just the lens through which you see the world, right? It doesn’t mean, this has nothing to do with like, rah, rah, or motivation, or, you know, pumping anybody up, it’s just moreso if somebody views the world as saying that, ‘my firm can never be successful, and it will never be over a million dollars in revenue, and that just is not in the cards for me’, or ‘I’m not, you know, I’m not smart enough, or I just don’t have the skills to be able to do this’. Like, it does not matter how much information you empower them with, if they just do not believe it is possible for them. So in my experience, I find that you have to be able to, you know, bridge that gap of having someone actually have that belief in themselves, and then also look at it from the standpoint of, I mean, you gotta have a mindset of saying, well, ‘there’s not the there’s not that many cases out there anymore, right?’ or it’s, you know, ‘there’s so many lawyers out there, it’s impossible to compete’ or, you know, ‘it’s futile to even try to, you know, go on social media now, because there’s just so much competition’ right. But instead, if somebody looks at it from the standpoint of saying, ‘well, if another lawyer, in my market gets a case, that doesn’t necessarily mean, it’s one less case, for me, there’s, you know, there’s an abundance of cases, right? Like, there’s, there’s, you know, there’s plenty out there’. And someone may also look at it and say, ‘yeah, I’m in a super competitive market, but the reason I’m in a competitive market is because there’s obviously a lot of businesses and a lot of cases’ right? You know, in South Dakota, it’s probably not as competitive, but there’s probably not as many cases, right? So, you know, it just depends through which lens you look at it. So if somebody’s in the right mindset, then when you give them the tactical stuff, now they’re like, ‘okay, obviously, I now believe that success is possible for me. So now I’m going to execute’, because the execution is always the difficult thing, right? It’s like, I’m willing to share everything, and you know, anything and everything. And people sometimes wonder like, well, you know, are you giving away your secrets? Well, one, I don’t think there are any secrets. And two, most people aren’t going to do anything anyway. Right? They’re probably not going to execute.
We talk about that a lot.
So, in the few that do, I’ll respect them for doing it. So I think it’s just if you get somebody in the right mindset first, which is really, it’s just a lot of work, right? It is a lot of work to work through. And sometimes it’s not just, you know, a mindset of like what it takes to get to a million in revenue, there’s firms that are, you know, 20 or 30 million in revenue that think that’s as far as they go, and, you know, you put them next to someone who’s doing 150 million in revenue, and they spend some time with them and now their whole mindset has expanded. They used to think, Man, I could never even consider, you know, you know, spending more than five or 10,000 a month in advertising, and they sit next to someone who’s spending a million a month, and they spend maybe the weekend with them, and by the time they come out of that weekend, they now have a completely different outlook of the world and the belief of what’s possible.
And then the question really becomes for them is ‘are they going to take the action’? Right, because, you know, you can, I could sit here and talk to anybody, but if I’m not willing to go back and actually, you know, put in the hard work. I would love to run a marathon. I’ll tell you that right now. I am never going to be the guy to go out there and train for a marathon. I know myself. Like, that’s like, that’s just, there’s other things, I love to lift, you know, and that’s where I can, I stay healthy. But it’s one of these things where people actually need to take the action. So I want to ask you this, since you’ve talked to so many people in law firms. Well, first of all, I want to take a step back on that, because Seth said something, ‘everybody’s getting coaching now’, but I really feel it’s probably only like 1% of lawyers, that I know, even understand the concept of coaching. It’s it’s a very unique group of people that are attracted to coaching, right? I mean, because I talked to lawyers that I’ve known, you know, for 25-30 years, and they’re like, ‘you have a coach?’, I’m like, ‘I have a coach, I am a coach’. And they’re, like, blown away by that. So there’s a, there’s a whole blue ocean of people out there who could really learn from this right?
Well, only the ones that want to be successful. Right? It’s, I find that the ones that have coaches tend to be the most successful ones, right? Whoever they have, I mean, just the concept and the idea of, of having the humility, to ask someone for help, right? And willing to embrace, you know, a new approach, that in itself, I think, requires just a level of, you know, perhaps maturity or evolution that’s necessary. But the ones that, you know, they have it all figured out, they obviously would never get a coach, why would they need a coach?
Yeah, they don’t. So my my big question for you is, as somebody who’s seen into a lot of firms, I am sure, at you know, at the Crisp Summit, which is coming up, we’ll definitely talk about that. I’m sure there are people who you have met who’ve come into your fold, and they’ve been this, ‘I want to do it all right now, this week, I want to do my marketing, I want to do my systems, I want to get my hiring right’. And they come in with such enthusiasm, but, you can’t do everything in the first 10 days of opening the door to the Emerald City, right? You just can’t. So do you, have you found either in growing crisp itself, or seeing inside all these law firms, what are some of the early steps that people should be like, ‘look, don’t even worry about that stuff that’s down the line. Let’s get the baby steps dialed in’. Where would you start somebody who is just starting on this journey, rather than somebody who’s got maybe a five or $10 million PI operation, has a bunch of employees, has money coming in doesn’t really see a lot of profit, but is, you know, is a lot more established? Where would you go with somebody who would say, Okay, here’s where you start?
Yeah, yeah. It’s like the, the, you know, the old tale like the tortoise and the hare, right? And I find that if you can get the foundation, right early, like this is, you know, every entrepreneur that I speak with that’s built, you know, any great business, you ask him, like, ‘what do you wish you would have done earlier?’, and they’re like, ‘I really wish I would have documented things from the very beginning, I really wish I would have put those processes in place from the very beginning’. Because they now know that had they done those things, it would have been much easier and probably much faster to scale, because as they started to grow, now, they have a lot of people. Now they have a lot of cases, now they got a lot going on, but then they don’t have the processes, and they haven’t documented anything. So as soon as one person leaves, it’s like, how do we even find another person? And how do we train them? And how do we ramp them up, and it just becomes a massive stress, and then they lose institutional knowledge the minute anybody, you know, anybody leaves, and then you have a lot to lose at that point, because now you know, you’re accountable to a lot of team members and a lot of clients. So, you know, Jay, to answer your question, I think, you know, early on, it’s, you know, we look at, okay, let’s get the foundation right, and it actually starts with clarity of like, what do you want, right? Like, meaning that what, you know, where are you trying to go? What, you know, it’s not just like, What do you know, someone will say, ‘Okay, I want X amount of, you know, revenue’, right? And it’s just kind of an ambiguous number. So it’s important that, well, why is that meaningful to you? You can want what you want, but is this to enable you to do something you can’t do now? Or is it you want to just buy something, or this is let you hire another associate, or does this let you expand, you know, into, you know, a new market area, for example? But getting clarity around, okay, what what we visualize this law firm to look like, let’s say, five years from now and 10 years from now. And it’s important to have that long term outlook because, you know, it’s you ask them, it’s like, ‘okay, do you know, do you want to be able to do this for a year?’ or do you anticipate doing this for multiple years in terms of, you know, obviously, growing a business, so you’ve started the right way. So one is just clarity on setting all those metrics, making them quantifiable, like knowing, like putting a number around it, not just saying, ‘we want to grow’ like, what does that look like for you working it backwards and saying, ‘okay, well, how many cases did I represent? What does the average case value need to look like? Like even specifics, okay, then what does headcount need to look like? What is the, you know, what would the support team need to be like, how many lawyers we talkin’? How many paralegals? You know, how many cases are they managing?’. Like, you know, just all of that, and just having that, just having a blueprint upfront, saying, we at least have a game plan. Now that can change over time, right? Things will change, like it can evolve, but at least now you have a plan. And then it’s you know, and then it’s looking at the standpoint of what what what could stand in the way of this? Right? What are all the reasons why this could not work? Like what are any potential barriers that need to be overcome? And then addressing those one by one, so I really would start there. I know most people want to jump to and say let’s go to the marketing though, like right out of the gate, they’re like, ‘let’s just start marketing’. And you say, ‘okay, well, what’s, you know, who are you for now? Like, well, we’re for everyone, everyone gets injured, right? And you say, Okay, well, how are you going to differentiate and like, we haven’t really thought about that. So we’ll usually what happens is if you jump straight to the marketing, and you don’t have clear positioning, or you don’t have a clear message, or even if you let’s say intake isn’t dialed in, or the operations aren’t right, it’s like all of that can affect the performance of the marketing. So then you just start throwing things against the wall. And then you start getting dissatisfied saying, ‘Okay, well, Google doesn’t work, or Facebook doesn’t work, or whatever radio doesn’t work’, you know, but all these things can work. And it’s just, it’s important to know who you’re for who you’re not for. And when you have those things figured out, like your messaging, your positioning your value proposition, you have a plan in mind of what you’re trying to do. Now you can start to break things down and say, okay, you’re one, here’s what we’re going to focus on. Let’s break this down by quarter. Okay, here’s what we’re gonna focus on Q1, Q2, Q3 Q4, you break that down monthly, you make that into a plan of what has to happen every single week, and then you just execute it on the plan, because it’s just like anything, like I see this with like health and fitness and weight loss, when everybody starts, they start losing a ton of weight. And that’s really motivating. It’s exciting because they, you know, they’ve started, maybe they’re drinking a ton of water, they’re getting a lot of steps of their exercising. But then something happens after the first 30 days, because usually in the first month, they lose like 10 pounds, and they’re like, Man, I’m well on my way. But then the second month hits, and now they’re not losing as many pounds week to week, so they start to get discouraged. And when people get discouraged, they say, ‘well, maybe I should just stop what I’m doing and try something else’ and they’ll jump from like the one diet they were doing to a different type of diet, you know, and it’s just realizing that, you know, the first 30 days, or the first few months of anything are always going to be exciting, right? Because it’s new, it’s like the novelty of it. But then where I think the real strides are made, are in doing the, you know, perhaps sometimes the boring stuff that has to get done, and doing it consistently over time, because those things start to compound. And if you can, you know, you can focus on ‘Hey, what do we need to do to win this week?’, and you do that every single week. Sometimes it’s not, you know, something new or exciting. It’s just, it’s really just getting the fundamentals down. But your ability to stick to those things, I think can dictate a lot of progress. Because where I see a lot of firms make a lot of mistakes is that they abandon things, or they jump from one thing to the next. And they don’t give it enough time. Right, no matter what it is, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s people, whether it’s with hiring, like they’ll start hiring people, and they say there’s no good people out there, right? Or it’s impossible to hire a lawyer. I don’t know, if it’s impossible to hire a lawyer. I mean, there’s a lot of things that are impossible. You know, I mean, we’ve managed to, like, send rockets into space, and then reuse them and land them back on Earth. Right. So I think it’s possible. But perhaps that, you know, it’s, it is more challenging to do so in a competitive market than it is at a time where, you know, there’s much less competition and perhaps, you know, everybody’s out of work right.
Now, I mean, look at you one sense, the first part of that answered, totally spoke to me because, you know, as a 10, on Quickstart, it took a long time before I listened to Jay Ruane and put the systems in place and had trainers and documented. But one of the things you just talked about, which was the the sort of like, have a plan and stick with it. One of the things we see a lot from the people we speak to on the show and beyond, is that the shiny object very often brings people and fears them off, and so on good intentions of ‘I’m gonna do this as far as hiring and marketing would have you’, there are voices out there, some coaches, some other other forces, books, there’s an app that gives you things, how do you balance all these amazing ideas, we were just talking offline about the book on hospitality and unreasonable hospitality. And there’s so many things in there. And granted, you know, there are things in there, most of them are fundamentals. But some of these concepts are ones that like would theoretically pull you off of what you have is that direction, how do you balance staying the course versus incorporating these amazing things you pick up along the way?
Yeah, so I think that’s where, you know, having a plan and having clarity really shines. Because if you don’t have a plan, and you get some cool idea, then you’re like, let’s do this everybody, but it’s like squirrel. But if you do have a plan, and you do have things laid out and saying, ‘Here’s what we’re focusing on for the quarter, here’s what we’re doing this month’, then it means that you have to take whatever new thing you want to do through some filter of looking at from the standpoint of saying, if we’re going to do this, this means that something else may not get done. And if I look at it through the lens of this plan, is it of higher impact and higher priority than something else. So for in order for something to get prioritized, something else has to get de-prioritized. So you know, that’s how you weigh it. And you may look at it and say, ‘Hey, this is actually a great idea. I like it. But is it more impactful than what we’ve got going on this quarter?’, probably not. So then maybe we’ve gotten in the second quarter. Right?
And that’s the academic answer. But we both know the three of us here have likely walked back into the office after doing something like ‘we’re doing it ,we’re all in’ and I find it to be challenging. I see other people who don’t just don’t aren’t tethered to don’t have any plan that it really hurts their ability to build and grow because there are so many different directions.
So I’ll give you I’ll give you two other two other options for this. So one is is that let’s say you have a great idea, it is before you share it with anybody you simply like I keep a notes doc, nothing fancy of just like great ideas when I have them. And then I’ll make a note that I’m going to sleep on this, or I’m going to give this a day or two, and I’m going to look back at it again. And if I’m still excited about it, okay, then I’m going to share it with someone. And then also, before sharing it with someone, I’ll map out, essentially, like, what is a great look like? What are the success criteria? What’s the upside of doing it? What’s the potential downside, and then if I work through that for about 20 minutes, and I still feel it’s important, then I share it with people. Because the problem is, is that if I just bring somebody in, like I have an idea, and I bring a bunch of people into the office, and i’m like ‘guys, we got to do this’, then they immediately get into action mode, right. And they feel like this is the highest priority thing that we have to do, which, you know, most of the time pretty much all the time is not, but at least then, you know, it’s funny, it’s like, as I keep this ideas, Doc, I always review it at the end of the year here. And I’ll look at it. I’m like, man, some of these ideas I thought were great. And they were actually absolutely horrible. And then you know, there’s a few in there that we ended up executing on. So just add some buffer between the time at which you are excited. And then just to make sure that that’s not an emotion you feel in that particular moment. And you can actually make a business case for it.
We had the rule about got over charity, there was a 10 second rule, where before he could speak, he had to reflect for 10 seconds, it was a good idea. I think this is the professional version of that.
Exactly.
So Matt Holman who runs Filament out of St. Louis used to have a blog called the ‘Non-Billable Hour’ and he’s, he’s, uh, you know, he’s a former lawyer, and he had this thing that shiny object quarantine. And I downloaded his forum. And I have them taped to the back of my office door. And so it’s 45 days, here’s the idea, here’s how we’ll use it, tape it to the back of the door, and I’ll look 45 days later, if it’s still good, we then start to implement it. But I’m not, I would, I can tell you about all of the failed swag and and things I have bought for my firm that are sitting in a storeroom right now that I can say, God, if I get that money in that time back, there’s so many other things I could do with it. Because I’m just I was quick to throw down the credit card. Okay, I’m gonna do this today, I’m gonna sign up for this service, I’m gonna do that. And that’s honestly, to be honest with you, I think it brings a full circle, because that’s one of the things that a coach can hold you accountable for is keeping you on track, making sure that you’re focusing on the stuff that matters, rather than the stuff that doesn’t matter, right?
Absolutely. It’s just one of the best things that you could ever do. You know, if I’m ever struggling with a decision, I always think about, well, what advice would I give myself If I were the one asking for advice, like you kind of make yourself, like, you know, take yourself out of it be like third person, right? And and coaches do a really great job with this, because they are not as emotionally tied to, you know, you know, what you’ve got going on, they have greater clarity, right, they can offer a more unbiased perspective in terms of what’s going on. So absolutely, I think having that feedback, and then, you know, I think the best coaches, it’s not really there for to motivate your pump you up, right? Like one of the things we always say is like, we don’t coach effort, right? If you’re one of these people that needs to be like, coached to like, not be lazy or to actually want to get up and go. It’s probably like, I don’t know, if what you need as a coach, I think what you need is probably introspection, and basically, really figuring out what it is that you want, right?
Whereas more than a coach.
Yeah, because I mean, if you had clarity on what you wanted, and you knew why you were doing it, then you know, you wouldn’t have to drag yourself out of bed every single day. But I think a great coach is there to be, you know, a great execution partner of providing you with the, you know, the resources that you need to like, basically take an idea from vision to reality of like, you know, someone wants to hire someone to say, how are they want to put KPIs around a role, and you’re saying, ‘Well, what KPI’s should they be right?’ Like, can you provide me some resources of like, how do I actually define key performance indicators of success criteria for this specific role in my firm, right? That you don’t just tell someone like, Okay, you need to hire these three people. And then you need to, like, you know, train them and onboard them, and then you just leave, right? Because someone doesn’t know how to hire them, how to fire them, or how to source them, how to ramp them, how to train them, and how to measure them. Right. So you have to help them with that. And then there’s the accountability piece of okay, well, you know, when we last met, this is what you committed to, and the simple act of like, you know, committing to somebody else. I think that in itself, it’s like, you know, and then also being willing to be held accountable. Right. I think that a lot of times I think people don’t like, you know, sometimes I think people are, you know, they’ll they’ll dabble, right, like, they’ll put like one toe in the water, and they don’t want to come out and say something like JD your example. Like, if you’d ever really wanted to run a marathon, you 100% could do it, like 100%. All you would have to do believe it or not, all you’d have to do is sign up for the race, and then posted publicly on social media, and then say that, you know, for every dollar they went donates, it’s gonna go to like child sex trafficking, right? And we’re going to support this cause. And what are you not going to do it now? Like, right, you’re gonna start training like the very next day. Right? But I think a lot of times when you know, let’s say, if we’re talking about like a law firm, if someone is like half hearted, right, this is where we can usually tell they’ll say that they don’t want that accountability, right? Or they don’t want to make that commitment, because maybe it’s not what they really want. And that’s okay, right. You can say like your goals or your goals, right? Not like a price is right competition where, you know, one lawyer has to one up another lawyer. It’s just figuring out like, again, what is important to you. And then once you make that commitment, that’s where I think the coach can really help ensure that there’s continuous progress.
In our limited time remaining want to give you a chance to tell us about the Crisp Summit coming up. It looks like you got some insane speakers.
We got Will Guevara talking about unreasonable hospitality. That’s, that’s amazing. That’s a hell of a get.
Thank you. Yeah. So you know, we’ve, we’ve aimed, this will be our seventh event. It’s actually kind of crazy to think about. But yeah, this one, we’ve always positioned it as a law firm growth conference, you know, that in, you know, nowadays, it seems like everything’s a law firm growth conference. But the whole idea here is that we want to bring together speakers that you’re generally not going to see anywhere else, or at least at any other legal conference. And I hear things like, hey, what’s Nick Saban going to teach me about growing my law firm? Or what’s Will Guevara going to teach me about growing my law firm, Morgan Housel, you know, Ludicrous. And we’ll look at it through a different perspective, right? Number one, if you bring people together from other industries that offers unique perspectives, like Will Guevara who wrote ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’, you know, running a Michelin star restaurant in New York City, like I think he knows a thing or two about providing great customer service and great client experience, right, that can you know, if you can bring that innovative perspective to a law firm, I think that gives them a competitive advantage. And if we’re going to talk about leadership, I mean, who better than Nick Saban, right, I mean, this guy knows a thing or two about creating a great culture and winning, because he’s able, you know, he was able, for many years, to take a bunch of 18 year olds, right? Who came from all sorts of various backgrounds and get them to work together as a team to win a national title, like consistently, year over year, right? There’s something to be said for that. So, you know, there’s there’s that portion in terms of like just putting together okay, great speakers, great content, because you want people to learn. And then you know, I said to your point, just like, open up new perspectives of what is possible, right? Sometimes, like, if you hear from people from different backgrounds, you start to really understand there’s not as many limitations as you might think. And then, you know, beyond that, of course, there’s bringing together like this year’s event, we made it by invitation only, which is, you know, really like, you know, we’ve always aimed to have great speakers, we all need to have, you know, great entertainment. Like last week, we had Flo Rida the year before Boys to Men, this year, it’s Ludicrous. So we want people to have a great time because we believe, right? I know, sometimes people see this stuff, and they see like, DJs, and, you know, entertainers and like big screens, and they’re like, oh, that sounds ridiculous. There’s nothing substantive there. But I believe personally, and again, like, you know, it’s, I guess the people who attend the event, I think you learn a lot better if you’re engaged while you’re doing it, right? If like, if you are excited, and if you are in an environment that brings out you know, an emotional channel, a visceral impact, and you, you might come home and say, ‘Okay, now I’m ready to make this change’, or ‘I’m ready to do, you know, take this next step, or take this next action’, and then bringing together like, you know, committed, engaged law firm owners, so part of the invitation aspect of it is that, you know, when you just let anybody buy a ticket, you’re gonna be in the bathroom, and you’re gonna be at the urinal, and someone leans over and says, you want to talk about legal funding, right. And that doesn’t make for a great experience. So I think vetting people and ensuring that everybody is, let’s say, growth minded, or everybody believes in, you know, running their practice, like a business, right? Not everybody does, right, some people would just, you know, think that it’s an abomination that the events, not for them, and that they’re open to sharing. And, you know, because you’re gonna be around a lot of other lawyers, you’re gonna be able to network and learn from one another and gain referral partnerships. So I think that’s really our vision for the event. If anyone’s interested, then they can apply at crispsummit.com. The event is November 13 and 14th, which is an interesting time, you know, what happens the week before?
Yeah, we’re, we’re gonna I mean, at some point, there’s gonna be some lawsuits going on November 13 and 14th?
Well, I don’t think it’s gonna have the results yet.
Right. I still don’t think I don’t know that we’ll know who’s going to be the president.
It could come to it could get come down to Fulton County.
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that was actually one of the reasons why. I know, you guys saw like, Will Guevara But we also got Morgan Housel. So Morgan Housel, wrote the ‘Psychology of Money’, and ‘Same As Ever’, and he’s, like, just an economist and financial historian. So he basically talked about that, you know, he looks back through history of, you know, yes, things change. But how do you prepare for the things you cannot predict, and the things you can’t anticipate, like, just, you know, black swan events, like the, you know, the pandemic that we had in 2020. Here, like, there’s things you just don’t see coming? Like, you know, we’re big on preparing, and you want to have predictability, but how do you prepare for the things that you can never see coming? So that’s like, one of the things he’s going to be talking about? And I mentioned to him, I’m like, ‘Hey, you know, what, the week after the election’, he’s like, ‘It’s perfect’, right? Just because who knows what’s going to happen? But yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s really been our vision for the event. And yes, you know, we give away cars. And yes, there’s, you know, there’s DJ and yes, there’s a performance, but I think we take those things out. It’s just not a whole lot of fun, or it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, right? And if you want to get somebody to leave their physical office, right and fly to Atlanta and spend a couple of days there, I think you got to make it worth it for people.
I agree, I think I think that’s awesome. I think it’s gonna be a hell of an event. And I mean, just the speakers that you announced already are phenomenal. And I know you’re gonna have more things coming for your attendees. And I think that’s really cool what you’re doing because there’s only so many ballrooms of big hotels, you can sit in and see the same people try it over and over again, selling the same message. And it just gets boring. And you guys are far from boring. So thanks for sharing that because I think it’s something that this community definitely needs.
Thank you.
Alright, Seth, any final question?
No, I think that this is this has been awesome. I appreciate Michael making the time. And, you know, I feel like this, I gotta go back and listen, because a number of those answers were ones that really that really spoke to me. So I appreciate your your time here.
Yeah, there’s never any downtime, when you’re hanging out with Michael Mogill. That’s for sure that you’re always going to leave a better person than you were before. So Michael, thank you so much for being with us. I love how you worked in the Law Firm Blueprint into one of your answers to promote the group that we have. And of course, we’ll put it we’ll put a link in the show notes and in the episode when we put it up there so people can apply to get access to the Crisp Summit. So that if they want to attend and see all these fabulous speakers, they have a really easy way to do it. So folks, that’s going to do it for us. Thank you again to Michael Mogill for being with us. If you want to take us on the go, you can subscribe wherever you get podcast be sure to give us a five star review. And you can catch this episode and all of our episodes live in our Facebook group and on LinkedIn 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific every Thursday in the Law Firm Blueprint so that’s gonna do it for now. I’m Jay Ruane, he Seth Price that’s the man Michael Mogill. Bye for now!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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