[00:00:00]
Introduction and Year-End Wrap-Up
---
MPS: Hey, law firm owner. What better way to say thank you to you for the amazing year than to show you the best of everything we've got for you this year on the podcast.
Richard James: We really appreciate your attention and the time that you dedicate, with the fact that you're here, and you're coming back tells us that you're getting some value.
We hope to try to get better and provide you more. I think now, MPS, we're going to wrap up the year and give them some highlights as to what they can learn as we went through this year.
​Empowering Employees and Building Rockstar Teams
---
Mike Michalowicz: Make people believe in them. Great leaders make people believe in themselves. And that's what small organizations that are doing this are doing it right. They're learning what the dream, the vision is of the individual. They're learning what the potential talents are and allowing them to grow into that and express it through the organization.
Amazing people will stay because they can express themselves, because they can be the most of themselves. That's the key to rockstar talent. Interviews only reveal experiential ability, what I've done in the past. And now there's a next level is called innate ability. The question, of course, is how do you find people's potential?
[00:01:00] There's a way to do it, and there's a half trillion with a T dollar industry that only does potential analysis. The industry is sports. And if you ever are interested in playing sports, you don't go for an interview and say, Hey, do you bilingual? Speak Spanish? are you on the field?
Innovative Hiring and Talent Acquisition Strategies
---
Mike Michalowicz: Tell us, show us, set up an educational event.
You need a paralegal, set up a course saying, become a paralegal or learn paralegal skills. Or if you need someone more advanced, give him a specific skill, learn how to do defense litigation as a paralegal. And you have a prerequisite requirements in case you need a more advanced person. Do not say, we're looking to recruit.
Simply look to educate. The power here is you're no longer looking for people who are looking for a job, which is a minority people. Now, anyone who's looking to improve themselves will tend. The number one group looking to improve themselves, A players, rock stars, the great people want to get greater. The people with the most potential want to express it more.
MPS: Absolutely game changing. A players are the people wanting to grow. [00:02:00] And so, you're literally creating an opportunities to surround yourself with a bunch of A players.
Mike Michalowicz: They're not necessarily the people seeking a job, that's the best part. At any given time, during a very healthy economy, which we're in right now, 3% of the population is unemployed. Another 3 or 4% is in a churn looking for something new actively. This actually broadens the scope, because we're looking for people who are simply looking to improve on themselves.
Richard James: Are you leveraging social and paid and are you doing this through traditional Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter, or are you finding your new team members as your team continues to grow through more of this social advertising and workshops?
Mike Michalowicz: More than social, we do the Indeed Ads, but the primary source is our competition, which sounds crazy. We also represent an organization that competes with the organizations you work with. You here show the potential to be at this elevated level, if you're seeking that opportunity, we have some slots.
Please, speak to your current employer. Please, elevate yourself there. But if the opportunity is not [00:03:00] there, we want you to know, we're raising our hand. In that way, we fill the room with usually A players, people who want to learn, gainfully employed, typically an A player, top performer, but they're coming into my room.
John Fisher: I had to get busy.
Creating a Self-Managing Law Firm
---
John Fisher: And I started for the next two and a half years, I documented every system and policy I had for running a law firm. And I put it all together, management, marketing, the technical aspects into a book called The Power of a system. It wasn't intended to be a book, it was intended to be the sort of the road map for my firm.
I put it all out there. I gave everything I had and the goal of this would be simply so that, it's not enough for me to know what to do, because I'm not going to be here all the time. The goal of any law firm, in my opinion, is to have a self managing law firm that can function just fine when you're not there.
If you want to go away for 30 days or 2 months, your law firm is not only going to still be there, it will thrive in your absence. And people are not going to be [00:04:00] contacting you for advice on what to do every 5 minutes.
Enhancing Employee Experience
---
Joey Coleman: This topic of employee experience is not a once and done experience, it is an ever evolving, constantly in process journey. And every employee is at a different phase in the journey, what are you doing as the leader to be paying attention to what phase they're in and helping them transition to the next phase in the journey. I want to get it that new people coming on have a better experience than anyone who's already here.
Now, that creates potentially some conflict of, nobody did this when I was getting hired. Yeah. Welcome to life, this is how it works, we also didn't have the internet when you were coming up, but we're still using the internet today. What I mean by that is what do our job descriptions look like? What does our interview hiring process look like? What do our job offers look like?
How do we celebrate the acceptance of a job offer, and reaffirm it in that affirm stage? And what are we doing to [00:05:00] make the first day on the job remarkable? So, now what we've done is we've taken this big amorphous thing. We've broken it down into much more manageable, tactical things.
The shift that I think we need to make as leaders is when it comes to employee experience or team member experience, it is not a task, it is a way of being. It is a philosophy. It is a framework. It is not something that's ever done, it's something that we're constantly paying attention to and evolving.
Now, as an aside, some of you were like, Joey, I don't like people that much. I don't really want to deal with this. Fine. It doesn't have to be you, but someone on your team in a senior role needs to wake up every morning and while they're looking in the mirror, brushing their teeth, getting ready for work, they're looking in that mirror thinking, how can I make this the best place to work?
There are a lot of law firms in the world that you could go work for, here's why you want to work at ours. Not only do we do amazing work in the courtroom, not only do we [00:06:00] have clients that love us, but we all actually like hanging out together. We have an annual summer creek. Now, some of this may be true, some of it may not be true.
Adjust it to fit your culture and your brand but what are the things that make working with you and your team, the kind of things that are going to keep me there long term? I promise you, it's not the billable hours. Oh, you should have learned this in law school. Folks, I went to law school. You don't learn a lot in law school, about how to actually do the law. You learn about the theory of the law and the philosophy, but you don't learn how to treat clients, how to handle situations, how to talk to judges.
These are not things that happen in most law school settings. And that comes through in our messaging to our team members. Now, I'm at a place where I'm like, gosh, I've worked at 10 other places in my career. This is the first place that seems to care about me as a human. It's acknowledging for them, you fill in the blank and whatever works for you, right? Moral of the story is we're only limited by our own bounds as to the creativity of ideas, and gifts, and rewards, and bonuses, and [00:07:00] benefits that we can bring to our team.
Richard James: Joey, I was going to uh, I was going to point out that, we have a room full of attorneys that are listening to this conversation and they tend to go to outliers. And I was wondering, how many of them were cynics and thought about all the bad ways that could go wrong, right? And what I want to admit, freely, is that, I was the first one to come up with a 10 different things that could go wrong.
Joey Coleman: I'm a recovering attorney as well. I under threat matrix of, let me decide all the ways this could go wrong. Here's the thing, if your biggest fear is that your people are gonna take advantage of you, we need to stop talking about tactics and have a really serious conversation about who's actually on your team. Part of this could be resolved by laying on a therapist couch as well. But the moral of the story here is, don't let your fear for what could go wrong limit your chance to do something remarkable.
Attorney Ben Glass: My point there for lawyers is, every so often, you have to pause and ask yourself, how does this look like? [00:08:00] And survey your client, ask them, what did you like about working with us? What did you find challenging? People who hired you or who didn't hire you. Try to get as much information as you can and try to fix it.
And here's the cool thing, owner does not need to know all the answers. Owner's team goes first, how do we make this better? Owner gets out of the way. Our job is to hire great people and get the heck out of the way. That's the secret. A players want to work with A players, and not want to work with C plus players.
So, you as owner keeping people around aren't a culture fit who want A players. You actually say to your other A players, I don't really care about you that much.
Marketing and Lead Management
---
Attorney Ben Glass: So, the key to marketing is identifying who you want to see walk into the door of the case. The key to talent acquisition is identifying and then putting in writing and then telling the whole world, this is who I need.
This is what I'm looking for. And rather than running these BS typical looking for multitasking, paralegal, with 5 years of experience, that tells you nothing, right? We write the long form, Hey, you'd be good for this, if this is your talent set. This won't be a good place for you, if you need someone to look [00:09:00] over your shoulder.
Attorney Miriam Airington-Fisher: I'm very open about being a mom. I'm remarried, I have kids, are all still in school. Other people on our team are working moms. So, that's part of our culture. And so, I think we attract other people looking for that type of culture, which is how we ended up, yes, with a currently all women team. In 2019, I started to educate myself, be more strategic, learn things I didn't know.
And that's when I started to see an opportunity. Could we build a firm, scale it? Be a family, women, mom, friendly, parent, friendly firm?
Richard James: I just want to make sure, when we talk about family friendly, we say that. If your kid's gotta get to school and you're late to work, it's acceptable. Or if your kid is home sick, and there's nobody else to help you, you're gonna figure out how to get your work done remotely.
When you say that, is that what you mean?
Attorney Miriam Airington-Fisher: Thank you for asking that, because I think a lot of times, some language has become cliche. Work-life balance, I think it means different things to different people. To me is, we're not going to sacrifice our personal lives, our family responsibilities. But I also believe that we don't need to, [00:10:00] because I'm not willing to sacrifice the health of the business, the welfare of our clients.
That's why I started my own practice because I wanted to figure out how to do both. More people are interested in it now than they were 8, 9 years ago. On the sort of professional side of our firm, we are in office, we're full time, we are very much interacting with the public. Most of our clients come into the office about 85 to 90% of request in person meetings.
So, although we certainly have and utilize technology and we have the capabilities to be virtual, at the end of the day, we're still a very brick and mortar law firm. All of our team is full time salaried. We have KPIs, revenue goals. It's not loosey goosey. That being said, we have really invested in areas both on the employment side, the technology side where we can have that be consistent.
So, yes, there's flexibility if people have childcare needs. People have different schedules. We prioritize PTO, so everybody at the firm has at least 5 weeks of PTO. I wanted to have enough [00:11:00] so that could accommodate like, winter break, spring break. We have snow day policies. We try to sync up our holidays so that if schools are closed, we either are closed or we have work from home.
Those are the main benefits that we try to have for our employees. On the technology side, and on the staffing side, we also have a second team in another time zone. And so, that means our phones are being answered for an extended day.
Our international team has different holidays. A lot of the technology that I'm sure many listeners are already familiar with, the case management system, client portals, things like that. There's so much these days that even a small law firm or even a solo can start to utilize. You can balance those things and we can really move away from that traditional concept of lawyers working around the clock, needing to take every call that comes in. There's more options these days.
MPS: Hey, you know law school didn't teach you all this. So, head over to TheLawFirmSecret.com and let's start the conversation to fill in that business gap.
How important do you feel [00:12:00] speed to lead is in the legal field?
Pooya Abka: How important do you think breathing air is to life? That's how important this thing is. I haven't seen many successful law firms, frankly, that are nailing their business without having this, without nailing the time to lead part of things. I wouldn't even call it important, it's a pillar, and you just have to have it, without having it as no way. If you are in a practice area that requires new clients, every week, every month, every year.
And then if you stop advertising, marketing, stop bringing in new leads, your business is going to die maybe a few months later, it's air to your life. It's that important.
Richard James: I absolutely agree. There are so many law firm owners who their leads still go to their cell phone, and the cell phone goes to voicemail, and the voicemail box is full. They don't even have a [00:13:00] way to get back to them, even though they missed the call. And what happens is, the lawyer will do his or her lawyer work all day long, be in court, work with clients, whatever. And then at night after dinner or shoving a piece of pizza down their throat, they will then pick up the phone and try to call those people back on the calls that they missed, some 8 to 10 hours earlier.
And that is what a very normal new law firm looks like. I wish, if we could stop here, and everybody who was listening could just go back to their office and fix focus highly on shrinking the amount of time it takes for their firm to connect with a brand new lead that comes in, they will immediately see an impact in their business. Would you agree with that statement, Pooya?
Pooya Abka: Yes, I do. Most people, they focus on marketing services, which is great. It's also another pillar. However, nailing the funnel, making sure [00:14:00] that, I always say it, Hey, keep it simple. You don't need 10 ways for future clients to contact you. That's great. If you want 10 ways, it's great, but you need to be way down the line in terms of your growth to be able to handle 10 ways.
If you are just starting, or if you are just thinking about growth, my business, that's how I do things. I keep things simple and manageable.
Financial Management and Profitability
---
MPS: What do you feel is the number one mistake law firms make when it comes to their profitability from a marketing perspective?
Elliot Alicea: I'll start with the easiest one. And that is, we need more leads when we have inefficiencies in the acquisition cycle and mainly around that sales tracking component. I can't tell you how many firms I've come into where the data was so messy. And I don't mean that to be insulting, but so much waste is happening. Most common response is, I need more leads.
But if we truly tracked every lead in a [00:15:00] CRM, we would see that you actually have more than enough leads. In fact, you might have too many leads, which is why not closing at the rates you need to close at. And so, that's a conversation that doesn't happen enough, a lot in a lot of sales organizations, it's always, we need more leads.
And if we can be efficient with that, I've told clients you could spend less and make more. It's truly so fun to manipulate those numbers on the sales side of things. That's a big one. The other one is, we have to do all the things when it comes to marketing. And it's very easy to hit seven or even multiple seven figures with a single source of leads.
And what I like about that is predictability. I know that when this lead comes in, it's going to set at this rate. It's going to show at this rate. It's going to close at this rate. I don't need TikTok yet. I don't need Facebook yet. I don't need SEO in some cases yet. If you don't have the time to wait for that slow burn, maybe it's not the right time for that smaller law firm.
And I can't tell you how many people I've told that to. And they look at me like I'm crazy. So, those are two big areas where we put out a lot of cash [00:16:00] on marketing. When that cash could be sitting in our pockets, honestly. And if we focus on closing, we could have more cash in our pockets and still get away with the marketing we're doing.
I think a lot of waste happens there where we try and keep up with the joneses or the people on social media. I got to have this awesome office and I got to have a really cool custom logo that cost me 10,000 bucks. And we did that.
Richard James: The first one under, giving you more leads would be a sin. We'll put the second one under, I'm going to actually go to the third one. You should save your way to solvency and sell your way to success. Save your way to solvency. Make sure you control your expenses. And we'll put the third one under, which is the second one that you said, which is stop chasing the bright and shiny object.
Let's master one discipline and do it over and over again and keep getting more and more results and keep investing in going deep on that particular source.
MPS: If we're being honest, if a firm is working with a marketing agency, I think the reason that becomes the go [00:17:00] to is because that's easy. It's easy to do.
It's easy to go to your marketing agency and say, Hey, we need more leads. And if you've got the funds to do it, it's real easy to just allocate the money there. It's not as easy in some cases to fix the conversion metrics. So, we look for the easy path. And I think that's what a lot of law firms do good, bad, or indifferent.
It's what a lot of them do. And so, they think the easy path to growth is get more leads.
Maria Strauch: I know, the importance of delivering a consistent message, hitting all the high points, but it's capturing the data you need for that particular potential new client, but you're also building a relationship in that.
Sales starts at that phone call. When somebody calls your firm, it's such an important role, I would think, because you're the first exposure, that potential new client has to your business. And again, even though, like in this particular case, your agent may be in Guadalajara, but client doesn't know that.
And we make it so that, the appearance that they're answering the phone in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Like, they're a part of your team and our agents are very trained [00:18:00] in the fact that this role is not just picking up the phone and answering it. Your job is being a face of that law firm to help this person during their time of need. Bringing that empathy into this phone call, which gets to their problem that they're experiencing and helping them find the light at the end of that tunnel.
But doing it consistently in the same manner, in that, we can achieve for our client the desired outcome with predictability, so they can prepare for what they need to prepare for in their business for revenue and different things. But it all starts with that phone call. So, when you just say anybody can answer the phone, I think they're different with that. Somebody needs to know how to answer the phone because they are the extension and first line of your law firm.
Richard James: Hey, law school didn't teach you how to run a business, but we will. Hand over TheLawFirmSecret.com and book a 10 minute call with us. We'll get to start to know one another and raise your business acumen.
Business Acumen and Law Firm Ownership
---
MPS: So many law firms have a hard time making that transition from being a practitioner of law to viewing their law firm as a business. So, did you always have that mindset [00:19:00] that it was a business, or did you go in with a different mindset and where did that change?
Jeff Baldassari: I did look at laws of business from day one. I have been a business undergrad. I was trained that way. My father was a very successful businessman in his career. And so, I approached law that way, you have to separate the craft from the operation of the craft. And you need both, obviously, you had to provide some kind of a service, no matter what your business model is.
And in this case, it happens to be the practice of law. But which you have to understand and go beyond the craft is like, how does that work? How does it fit in? And how do I grow and expand that? And also make it more fulfilling, more satisfying and then also creating that connection to your clients, to your support staff, to your colleagues.
Because that's where the magic happens. And also, the ease of, it makes your job fun. And that's what does make it more fulfilling when you connect better with people. One of the quotes I put into actually at the beginning of my book, my father had shared with me, probably when I was in my 30s, early 30s.
And he said, everything in life is easy until people get involved. And I didn't appreciate the importance of that statement until living it, you know, for 30 years after hearing it. And that [00:20:00] is, you can put everything, anything you want down on paper, that's not how life works. When people start to get involved, it complicates things.
And again, that's where your ability to connect with people is so critical. How to manage them, and how to motivate them, inspire them, we know how to influence them. And you also have to separate yourself from as an attorney, whether you're a solo practitioner or a small firm, pull yourself apart for a second from the craft of law and look at is the operating this business.
How am I going to make myself more significant? More relevant to my clients, within the community to attract more clients, and to make a difference. And also again, to be fulfilled in what be more profitable in this process. That's where you have to stand back and observe it from a different perspective.
Richard James: Not a lot of law firm owners have the entrepreneurial spirit. What's your advice? Where do they go? What should they do? You made an interesting statement. At that size, I didn't need systems. I needed business. I needed clients. I needed cash. That was a great mindset. Walk me through, how you thought about that?
Adam Rossen: I know a lot of lawyers who have the high attention to detail, the perfectionist, they're going to, [00:21:00] maybe they're at 300 grand revenue and they're focused on building all the systems and that's not me. And I disagree with that because of that revenue, you just need cases. It's nice to have systems, but systems can't do anything if you don't have cases.
And of course, now, I love systems and I know the need for it, but the systems that you need at 300,000 at 750, at 1. 5Million, at 2Million, at 3Million, 5Million are all going to be different.
Attorney Yandy Reyes: There was one particular moment, probably like, in high school or college that I was like, should I learn some business? I was like, ah, how hard could it be? If I know how to be a lawyer, I'm going to be able to sell things and get clients. I had no idea that this was a huge mechanism. It's a factory with people, and product, and intake, and administration. It's a big thing. When I was a young kid, everybody told me, you're going to be a great lawyer.
So, after a while, I just started to notice that fits my mold, right? It's interesting because my life, almost to the end of law school was focused on being a great lawyer, knowing what to do with the rules, the laws, and all that stuff. The reason why I bring this up is because there is [00:22:00] zero sense of business as you continue along.
My journey involved knowing everything, being exceptional, I knew this was going to be a soul draining work. I really want to be able to know, to get judicial relief and create legal leverage through the products I create in order to be able to have the clients experience a journey that they feel empowered.
I want to crush this. I want to see how far I can go. I want to see how far I can create. So, I started to learn, if you're negotiating with somebody, your client, your person, your adversary, whatever, you need to be comfortable talking about money, hundreds of thousands of dollars. As soon as you talk to somebody and you give that little stutter talking about money, the deal is done.
You're lost. That was my first introduction into business. And as I continued and I actually opened up shop, I noticed the lack of knowledge that I had. I was confronted with the understanding that if I did it alone, I would not go far. I wouldn't be unable to scale and to be [00:23:00] effective as I want. I noticed, there's more to this than just being a great lawyer.
Emery Wager: To my experience as a client of all of these law firms where I reviewed and paid millions of dollars worth of bills, I've never seen an industry that seems so far removed from these best practices. And so, got really interested in the business of law and dug in and learned about all these crazy things like a trust account, you know, what an IOLTA account was, and how money needed to be handled and why law firm can't, in many cases, use a lot of the best in class tools out there?
The average law firm has like a collection rate. What they actually put in the bank divided by what they invoice of low 80s. So, a lot from sending out a million dollars of invoices is only, they're leaving basically, 180, $200,000 on the table every year. Basically, pure profit, because you've already done the work to earn that money.
So, that money just drops to the bottom line. So, [00:24:00] it seemed like a major problem that we could help solve, not fully, but we can make a big impact by bringing best in class, integrated E-commerce experience to the legal world in a way that complied with the rules of professional conduct.
MPS: Collection starts at sales, right? That's where collection starts, because sales very much controls what the next step looks like. And sales has the opportunity to collect as much as they can during the initial consultation. And so, it starts there. And what I find is that, and I'm curious to hear Emery's thoughts on this, but what I find is that, many firms think in many cases it ends there too.
And they don't really have any process in place for collections or at the very least, some version of, yeah, we'll send you out an invoice at some point and if we get to a great, we don't get paid. And so, I find that there's really no process at all or if [00:25:00] there is, it's not really a process. It's just like a little simple task that they go and do.
Emery Wager: There's relying on, like you said, they're going to send out an invoice after the work has been done, and I think that's the first mistake. The best firms that we work with are implementing what we've called a collect early billing model. So, you're either doing flat fee work where you can take that payment up front and drop it right in your operating account, or you're running kind of an evergreen retainer model where you're always work, working against money that you already have in the trust account.
We had one firm that transitioned to that model. It's a big firm, but they all of a sudden just found a million dollars in the bank by making sure they had a key performance indicator that was, what percentage of our revenue this month came from the trust account? And they were trying to maximize, they're trying to get that as close to a hundred percent as possible.
Another method is just putting a payment method on file. Basically, it's the evergreen model without having to deal with all the trust account stuff. Hey, we're going to [00:26:00] send out an invoice on the second. And if we don't hear from you by the 10th, we're going to charge this payment method on file that you're taking in the sales process.
MPS: Walk us through that journey in the firm to purchasing the firm, at least from the high level.
Attorney Ed Bartholomew: We started the conversation and about two months later, after we did due diligence, after I did all the money looking at it, I really should have hired somebody to value that, cause that was dumb. Doing it by myself, when I really don't know what I'm looking at, I would advise any person that is buying any business to hire a independent third person to look at that because you're thinking emotionally, you're not thinking logically.
The person can bring you back to ground and say, that amount of money that you're trying to pay is too damn much. Or, Hey, you should offer some more because the business actually has really good capital inside the area and people know the business.
Richard James: When I bought my first business, I was 25 years old. I bought it from my uncle. We came up with a price. I'm not sure exactly how we came up with that price. The logic made sense at the time. And of course, he held all of the paper. I didn't have to really put any money down. And the moment I bought the business, my income went up. And so, all good things happen, but [00:27:00] at some point, I rebelled as young people do, I accused him of selling the business to me at too high a price because I learned about business valuation.
But by making that leap and purchasing that business, I learned a whole bunch, I made a whole bunch of money, and it gave me the opportunity to do what I do today. When MPS bought 50% of our business last year, we went and had the business appraised. Having lived that story, I didn't want him to feel like, he was getting the wool pulled over his eyes. I assumed that valuation process was important.
MPS: Yeah, it's important. And it also gives you a party to offer different perspective on different sides of the business and things to consider. How much did you get paid? Deal structure. I think an independent third party is an of the business acquisition or buying process, for sure. I'm happy we did it. What was the first year of owning the firm?
Attorney Ed Bartholomew: The first year was extremely stressful. I met my wife around the time I purchased the business. I said, look, I'm going to purchase a law firm. And she looked at me like, nuts. And that would be the appropriate response if you [00:28:00] didn't know any better about the person. But I've always been a person that's not risk averse, willing to jump in and figure it out. And that's essentially what I did.
I wish I had done more due diligence on the front end like you guys did in your deal. If I had a third party tell me, Hey, you're paying too much, or you're not paying enough. That would have been good information. That's like the old adage we have in the law where, you as a lawyer have yourself as a client and you have a fool for a client. The same is true in business, if you're trying to buy or sell a business, you shouldn't be the one that is buying or selling it alone.
Have somebody else appraise it. I think any person that either purchases or starts a law firm is going to realize that there's going to be things that were really good about that business. And there are going to be things that are really bad about that business.
Richard James: So, if anything, you've became a better business owner because of it.
Attorney Ed Bartholomew: I had no experience in business of my own before I bought this firm. I don't think a lot of lawyers have business experience before they get into the business. You are not only a lawyer, you are a business owner, and you have to remember that both of those things have different hats that you're wearing.
MPS: What is maybe the biggest mistake you see law firms do [00:29:00] on the financial side of things?
Annette Sonnenburg: You need someone to do your books that knows what they're doing. I have actually received books even from other firms that do what I do that are hundreds of thousands of dollars off, because they didn't catch things that were not categorized correctly or whatever. So, it's really important to have somebody that knows what they're doing, take a look, clean it up. And if you're not sure, just go out and find somebody that will take a second look at your books.
You can't make important decisions if the data isn't accurate. How do you know what to do if it's all incorrect, right? So, that's the first thing. The second thing is, everybody's pulling their money out. And look, we all need to get paid. I get it. But when you're looking at your revenue versus your net profit versus your cash, leftover, the cash is the most important.
And so, if you haven't left yourself any cash to go and get advice, pay a professional or [00:30:00] put it toward effective marketing. Sometimes, you can't even really look at making a change to the things that are the problem if you haven't left yourself any cash to work with. So, that's one of the things I also see a lot of. And then I would say, on the CFO side, it's hard for people to make that leap.
I hear from everybody, I really need that. And then, getting them to give the information. Look, if you're going to make a decision and fix things on your financial side, you need to get with the program. You need to send me information. You need to work with that person. So, those are the top three.
Richard James: I see so many law firms don't take that step. Now, to your point, some of them don't even have the cash to be able to make that step. And that's where we come in. And there's lots of reasons for why they don't have the cash. It could be, they're not charging enough. It could be, they're not converting enough.
It could be, they're not collecting the right amount. It could be, there's money stuck in trust and the workflows issues. There's all sorts of issues as [00:31:00] to why that could be the case. And that's our job. That's what we do to help them. But for your perspective, you're the one who can give them the clear looking glass and just go, look, there's not enough money left for you to do anything.
And that's the really important team member you need to have on your team. Michael, you tell me, when we talk to attorneys, when we talked to them about arithmetic, what's the first thing we hear attorneys tell us?
MPS: I went to law school, so I didn't have to do arithmetic.
Annette Sonnenburg: I feel like is important is, you guys can read your financials. And this is something that I think is really lacking for a lot of law firm owners.
MPS: Hey, you know law school didn't teach you all this. So, head over to TheLawFirmSecret.com and let's start the conversation to fill in that business gap.
Conclusion and Holiday Wishes
---
MPS: If you haven't already throughout the year, make sure you hit that subscribe or follow button depending on where you're listening or watching. Please use this as an episode from us to you to thank you for this last year of an amazing 2024.
Richard James: Happy holidays and happy new year from MPS and myself and the Your Practice Mastered family. We appreciate [00:32:00] you.