[00:00:00] As the owner of a law firm, do you find yourself sick and tired of being sick and tired, missing your goals year after year? I can tell you there's a simple three step framework that I use to grow the law firm in Phoenix from zero to three and a half million dollars in grow sales in just a couple of years.

My promise to you is you're gonna be able to use this formula to knock your 2025 goals out of the park.

So the first step in this three step framework is set fewer goals. The number one reason law firms fail to achieve the goals that they've set for themselves is because they have too many goals. Two of the most successful people, bill Gates and Warren Buffett, or ask the same question. What is the one piece of advice you would give as to the secret of your success?

Now, honestly, asking a billionaire, one thing that they did to become a billionaire is. Silly because anybody who gets to be successful understands it takes many steps to get there. But interestingly enough, both gave the exact same answer, focus. [00:01:00] That was their singular answer to success. Law firm owners are usually stuck at having way too many goals, and they're not focused on any one particular thing.

The question is, where should you spend your focus? So if we were to view this through the lens of what I call your pipelines, there are four primary pipelines. So if we look at this through a simple grid and we look at it from a new client. Attraction pipeline. That's the first pipeline. That's the pipeline that attracts new clients into the law firm.

Marketing, sales, working, unconverted leads. That's that entire pipeline. The second pipeline is profit problem with a lot of law firms do well at growing top side revenue, but don't keep the bottom side income, the net income for sanity. They're not paying attention to something called. Profit. And so we have to determine, is that where we should focus?

The third pipeline [00:02:00] is what we call workflow. How we get the work done. Do we have more clients than we can handle? Are we profitable? But now we're trying to figure out how to manage all the work we have. Finally, we have this pipeline called talent and Talent comes into how we recruit, train, manage, lead.

And so the question is, where should we be focusing? The answer is it almost doesn't matter as long as you only pick one. So you should pick one that has the most chance of helping you succeed. So you just start with a simple question, do I need more clients? Is that the issue? I don't have enough clients.

Is the reason I don't have enough clients because I don't have enough leads and what I need is better marketing, or do I have plenty of leads and I just need to learn how to convert those leads into paying clients? Do I not have enough profit? So we've got a lot of top side revenue, but not a lot of bottom income.

I met with a firm the other day. They do $800,000 in top side revenue. For some of you, that's a lot. For some of you, that's. Pennies. The point is they made $0 for [00:03:00] themselves. It's so easy for a law firm to grow revenues and have $0 to the bottom line, whether they're not paying attention to expenses or not pricing properly, or they have a collections issue.

I'm not sure exactly what it could be one of those things. Just ask yourself, do I have plenty of clients? Do I have plenty of profit, but I can't get all the work done and I'm drowning? Or is it that I don't have a proper system for recruiting and the right talent, or maybe I have to become a better leader because all my staff keeps turning over on me?

Look, at the end of the day, really you just have to start with asking yourself, where should I start? And then once you start, don't leave it. Keep it there for until you reach your goal. Start by choosing the one pipeline and maybe the one inner sub pipeline that you should be focusing on, and stick all of your energy, all of your focus in that direction.

If you do, it's going to lead you naturally to this next step, which is step two, the second phase of this three phase plan. This is called reverse engineer, so you wanna reverse [00:04:00] engineer your goal. If we come back to that pipeline and we ask ourselves, let's suppose that new client attraction is the pipeline we need to pay attention to.

How many new clients do we want? And the answer is all we have to do is reverse engineer our goals. If your firm wants to do a hundred thousand dollars a month, and let's say that you have an average case value of $5,000 and the goal is a hundred thousand dollars a month, then we understand that what we have to do is we have to generate 20 clients times $5,000.

And we'll equal our a hundred thousand dollars simple arithmetic, right? I know lawyers don't love math, but this one's easy. So we know we need 20 clients. So now what do we do? Well, we have to ask ourselves, what is our close rate, right? So if we start to reverse engineer this. We ask, what is our closing percentage?

If you don't have the number, I need you to go back over the last month, [00:05:00] look at the people you met with and determine the number of clients that retained your firm so you determine your actual close rate. If you're confused about this, wondering how you're gonna do it, by all means go visit us at the law firm secret.com.

We're happy to walk alongside you and, and help you unpack this for your firm. Whenever I ask an attorney, what is your close rate? Almost every single time they tell me, oh, if I meet with them, I close the deal. It's like 80%. But then when we find out the truth, the average law firm is closing at 34.7%. So I want you to get the real number for me here.

And so for the sake of argument, let's just go with a 50% close rate. If I've got a 50% close rate and I need 20 clients, again, simple math, 40 appointments, that show will give us our 20 clients, right? But if you have a 50% show rate, you need 80 appointments set. In order to get 40 appointments that show in order to get 20 clients.

So now the question is [00:06:00] how do you get 80 appointments? Well, those 80 appointments are a percentage of how many qualified leads you get. So let's use a 50% set rate. Again, your set rate should be closer to seven 80%, but let's use 50%, which means we're gonna need 160. Qualified leads. We're gonna get 80 appointments that set, 40 appointments that show we're gonna get our 20 clients at $5,000 a client and we're gonna do our a hundred thousand dollars.

The question is, what is your cost per lead? Right? So now we're reverse engineering it. What is your cost per lead to get 160 leads if you spend 50 a lead, which is not unusual depending on practice area. If I have $50 per lead and 160 leads, that means $8,000 in ad spend. Does that make sense? So I wanna accomplish a hundred thousand dollars a month in sales, 1.2 million in gross [00:07:00] sales in an annual basis.

And in order to get the HUN 1.2 million in gross sales, I needed to do a hundred thousand dollars a month. I basically needed to do 20 clients every month at $5,000 a client, because I had a 50% close rate, I needed to get 40 prospects to meet with me or my team so that I could get those 20 clients. But in order to get 40 people to show up, I needed to book 80 appointments.

Because I had a 50% show rate, which means I needed 160 qualified leads. In order to get my 80 appointments to show, in order to get 80 appointments on the books and 160 leads, I needed to spend about $8,000 in marketing because I spend approximately $50 a lead. So now that I've reverse engineered and laser focus, I know exactly what steps to take in order to achieve my goal.

And then the third step is pay attention to this daily. In the example that I gave you, we broke this down by a monthly goal. They hit an annual sales goal. Well, if I was [00:08:00] running this on my team and I wanted to build this goal out, I would reverse engineer it so that I know exactly how many leads I need every single month and how much I have to spend.

I would boil it all down by day. If I have 20 working days in a month and I was supposed to spend $8,000 a month, I basically needed to spend $400 in ad spend. So now I'm gonna look every single day and say, okay, if I was gonna get, uh, 160 leads a month, qualified leads, that means that 20 days a month, I need eight a day.

I'm gonna pay attention daily. Did I get my eight leads? Did I spend my $400? Did we schedule the number of appointments that we want to schedule? Which was four? Did two of them show up and did one of them buy? This is the question I'm gonna ask every single day. Now, I'm either gonna ask myself or my team every single day.

Once I have that cadence, all other goals are put to the side and we just laser focusing on hitting this one goal. And when [00:09:00] you do, good things start to happen. Now before you go to the outlier. On me. If you made your goal this zero to a hundred thousand dollars and had the $8,000 to spend and you could convert at 50% and you get $5,000 a client, and all those things were able to happen, you might have a problem serving all of those clients and managing all that matter.

Of course, when you get successful in one pipeline, it shows up as a bottleneck in another pipeline. Welcome to business, my friend. This is why I tell law firm owners, while I respect, you're a great attorney and practitioner, if you want to become a great business owner, you're gonna have to get somebody else to handle the legal work.

At some point. Leave space for the legal work that fulfills you, fills your inner heart. I love that because that's your passion project. But if you're gonna own a law firm, don't lie to yourself. You own a business and you wanna crush your goals, you need fewer goals. You need to reverse engineer them so you know what to break it down and look at those goals every single day.

In order to do that, you need time. In order to gain [00:10:00] time, you're gonna have to replace yourself as the lawyer. If you're in a practice area that turns over cash pretty quickly, like criminal or family law, even bankruptcy and immigration, you should be able to create a cash flow that's gonna allow you to go out and hire that attorney just like that.

If you're confused about this, wondering how you're gonna do it, by all means go visit us at the law firm secret.com. We're happy to walk alongside you and, and help you unpack this for your firm.