The #1 Way to Double Your Revenue in ONE YEAR!

If you want your law firm to generate more revenue where do you start? Many lawyers try to work harder to generate more leads in the hopes that generating more leads will turn into more clients, which will turn into more money. In today’s episode we’re going to talk about how that’s the worst approach to making more money and what the one approach you need to take to double your revenue in one year.

In this episode we discuss:

  • Four things you need to stop doing and one thing you need to start doing in order to grow your revenue.
  • Why working harder doesn’t necessarily produce more and better results.
  • How more leads won’t help if you don’t know how to sell.
  • That selling is not about you, but about the client.
  • How stepping and fetching for your client does not build respect.
  • Billing more work to make more money and how the math doesn’t work.
  • The importance of consistency in…

Allison Williams: [00:00:11] Hi everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:25] Allison Williams here. Your Law Firm Mentor, and today’s episode of the podcast is going to be another one of our features from the vault, if you will. We’re going to pull out an episode that I shared with our Facebook group community, the Law Firm Mentor Movement, all about one of my favorite topics, doubling your revenue in one year, and in particular, the number one way to double your revenue in one year. So we are approaching the end of twenty twenty. We are approaching the beginning of twenty twenty one. And I know a lot of law firm owners are at a place of either immense growth because they have seized upon opportunities that were presented as a result of the changes in our world due to the global pandemic, or they are in the state of retraction, meaning they have had some retraction in the marketplace, economic decline, recession, whatever you want to call it. And so a lot of us are trying to figure out right now how do we seize upon opportunities for growth? And if we are in a state where we have had some retraction, how do we turn that around? So we’re actually going to talk about the number one way to double your revenue. But in this particular episode of that show in the Facebook group, I talked about five strategies, actually, four things that you needed to stop doing in order to get to the one thing that you needed to start doing in order to grow your revenue and actually double your revenue in one year.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:52] So without further ado, this is going to be, again, a replay from the episode previously recorded in the closed Facebook group. Because it is a recording in the Facebook group, you will notice that there is a slight change in the audio quality. I don’t think that it will detract from your enjoyment of the podcast episode, but I did want to give you that head’s up. And the other thing I wanted to note is that during the course of this interview, I did acknowledge people as they were coming into the Facebook group community. So you are going to hear somewhat of little interruptions, as I know, as people are coming into the show, but very much par for the course of how I engage with the audience in the Facebook group. So if you’re not a member of the Facebook group, please do join us on Facebook at the Law Firm Mentor movement and enjoy this week’s episode of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast.

 

Allison Williams: [00:02:47] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor, and we are here for another one of our series about the different topics that matter to law firm owners. Allison Williams. The Law Firm Mentor and Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money. So today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, which is doubling your revenue in one year. All right. You guys heard me correctly. That is one year. So I know that there are some of you that are probably hearing that and thinking, how is that possible? Unless I made like a dollar fifty in my first year in business, I could probably stretch it to three dollars. How do I, how do I get to double my revenue? And I think we all know that when we talk about growing a business, we’re talking about being able to sell more of our service to more people. So that is about marketing and sales together.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:43] But there is a secret to being able to market successfully and in a way that gets you a consistent flow of increase in business. And in order to do that, I’m going to share with you some strategy as to how you can get there in leaps and bounds instead of moving forward in inches, because what most of us think to do when it’s time to progressively advance in any area is we go to our logic, we go to our conscious thought. And our conscious thought is, if I spent 10 hours doing something to get to a certain result and I want to double my result, I have to spend 20 hours doing something. And of course, there are times where that is true, but much more often than not, it is not true. And in fact, it can be a counterproductive thought if that is how you are approaching your business. So as you guys are coming in, please just say hi. Let me know that you are here.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:33] Hi, Karla, very nice to see you. I’m glad that you’re here. I’m glad that you’re saying hi also. Hi, Pamela. Great to see you as well. Always great to see you and glad that you’re here. So as you guys are coming in, please say hi. Let me know that you’re here. Happy to acknowledge you and happy to have you be a part of this conversation. So doubling revenue in one year is all about getting the right activity in front of us. But one of the things that’s really important for us to focus on is all of the things that we have to stop doing in order to get to that one thing. So we’re actually going to talk about five different things today, not just one. Five different things that you are going to do and not do.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:11] So, oh, I’m saying, we’ve got some more folks coming in. Theda is saying hi. We got Shawnna Weber. Shawnna was on our podcast recently. Shout out to you, Shawnna. Great to see you here. I see Kristy Stacikovich, and I also see Stacey Bradbury. Hi, guys.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:24] Great to see you guys. OK, so again, we’re going to be talking about the five things that are going to lead to or I should say, the four things that are going to lead to doubling your revenue in one year. The five things are four things that you have to stop doing in order to do the one thing that is going to double your revenue in one year. Hi Bertrand, very nice to see you as well. Thank you so much for stopping by. All right. So number five, number five is you have to stop working harder.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:56] Yeah, I said it, I know that’s like one of those deal breakers most, but most of all you think, what do you mean, I have to stop working hard? Isn’t that how we got here? We became lawyers in the first place because we are working hard in our lives. That’s how we accomplish things. Well, the answer is yes, you can absolutely accomplish things by working hard.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:16] But when you get to a point where you are in your business and you want your business to thrive and you want to create more, it is very, very, very important that you not approach it from the perspective of working harder. Because there is always going to be a ceiling on how hard you can work. There is always going to be that point where you can’t put in more hours, you can’t grind more, you can’t connect with more people. There’s only so much capacity. So you have to be strategic in what you’re doing rather than simply adding more to your plate. Hi, Jane. Jane Marie says thank you for this.

 

Allison Williams: [00:06:50] Thank you for all of you for showing up and for participating in this conversation. So for those of you that have that working harder mentality, I want you to think back over the times over your law firm, over the life of your business, that you have worked harder into some success. Right. We have all seen that happen. Right. You study a little bit harder and you start learning more case law. You focus a little bit harder on a case and you come up with that right answer at just the right time in order to get the settlement that you want for your clients.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:19] Working hard does have its merits. But let me tell you about things that working hard also does. Working hard leads to physical exhaustion. Right. How many of us have fallen asleep at our desk? Right. Raise your hand. Actually, since you guys, we don’t have that raise hand feature, We’re not in Zoom. I forget sometimes that I’m not in Zoom because we’ve been Zooming so much in twenty twenty. Put a one in the comment section if you have fallen asleep at your desk because you’ve been so tired either at your desk or at the kitchen counter or you know, sitting around at a conference. I want you to seriously answer that question for me.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:56] I’m getting an hola senorita. OK, Stacey is in the Spanish today.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:00] Ok, number one, if you have ever fallen asleep somewhere other than your bed, OK, this is for purposes of your work. So that could be you falling asleep at your desk. You’ve fallen asleep at a conference. Right. I have had the difficulty of actually falling asleep with a client. Client was talking to me going on and on about some stuff. And I was like, OK, I’m not that interested, but you can’t just shut them up. So you have to listen. And I was listening and (snore). Like OK. We’ve all had that moment.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:30] Oh, my God, Carla fell asleep at a stoplight. I have to spotlight, that one, spotlight, that comment, because that’s pretty scary. Right. And speaking of stoplights, I’ve told the story many times for those of you that have followed me for any length of time. You know, that my aha moment in business was when I fell asleep driving 90 miles an hour and woke up this close to a guardrail.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:53] So working harder does have its limits, even for those of us that can put in 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week, there will be a cap to that. And the problem is we don’t often know where that cap is. So when you create a strategy that says I’m going to work harder in order to get myself to that next place, you are always going to have a question mark as to how far you can go because your body and your mind require rest and rejuvenation to work at your best. And if you deprive either your mind or your body or likely both, of that rest, you are going to see not only diminishing returns, but you’re going to hit a cap at some point. And let me tell you, the cap is not necessarily what we think it is, right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:35] The cap is not I am driving and fall asleep driving and damn near died in a car accident. Right. That that was my cap because I’m kind of a fatalist. But the cap can be something as interesting as you are thinking about your business and you’re making poor choices because your mind is not rested or it is time for you to evaluate someone or something that’s coming into your business, maybe evaluating a client. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:03] It could be that you’re evaluating whether to hire a certain paralegal or maybe it could be something even as simple as negotiating a contract for office supplies. Right. When your mind is not rested, you start to see things in the way of your patterns because you’re not being intentional. You’re on autopilot. And at some point when you’re on autopilot and you default to the way that you’re used to thinking about things, if you are somebody who thinks about things through the lens of negativity, which, by the way, most humans do. This is not a dig to people who think negatively.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:35] Most lawyers do, because frankly, that’s what makes us effective as lawyers. Right. We look for stuff going wrong and then we fix it, or we protect our clients from it. But when we’re having those thoughts about what’s going wrong, what do we do? We go into the thoughts of, OK, how do I normally handle this sort of situation? And we don’t get ourselves out of the thinking that led us to where we. Right? Now, so in order to get out of where you are right now, thinking about it from the perspective of what is wrong is much more likely to get you more of what’s wrong than what’s right. So that law of diminishing returns is not just fall asleep when I’m driving or in morning bumper to bumper traffic, Carla. Scary as that is also. It is that you hit a wall in your reasoning ability because your reasoning ability goes back to the default and the default got to where you were in the first place. All right. So again, strategy number one for those of you just coming in, because I’m seeing more people joining, I can see how many people are on the line right now.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:31] There’s forty of you watching with us right now. So as you are coming in, please do say hi. Let me know that you are here, happy to acknowledge you, and we’re going to just reorient you. Those are those of you that are just coming in that we’re going to get to the number one thing that you have to do to double your revenue. But we’re going to start with the five things that you have to do or the four things that are leading to that one thing that you have to stop doing in order to get to the number one thing that’s going to double your revenue in one year. All right. So the first one was stop working harder. All right. For those of you that are still with me, I want you to type into the comment section. Stop working harder. Happy Thursday Lisa. Very nice to see you. And hi there, Miss Ali. Always nice to see you as well. Thank you so much for stopping by. All right, guys, write into the comments section. Stop working harder, OK? We need to make this into a lifestyle. We have to get out of the mindset of working harder. And it is so ingrained in lawyers that we absolutely have to train ourselves for that. So I want this feed to be full of stop working harder. Stop working harder.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:34] When I start to see that we get that into our list of things to do, we will move on to strategy number two. The next thing that you have to stop doing to get to the number one thing that you absolutely must do in order to double your revenue in one year. All right. I’m starting to see it. Stop Working harder. Stop working harder. Stop working harder. All right. As you’re coming in. I see. Lovely. Tracy Dennis. Tracy, so nice to see you. Thank you so much for stopping in. Great, Stacey. All right. Stop working harder. That’s number one or rather number five. OK, next up. Ooh, Jay put it in all caps. All right. That got me really excited. Hi, Monica. Nice to see you as well. Stop working harder. OK, we’re going to be repeating that, by the way, throughout the refrain today, because I want you guys to really get that into your minds. All right. Number four, on our way to that number one thing that you have to do, you have to stop buying leads without knowing how to sell. Yep! I said it. I said it. I said it. I said it. I said it. And I see Seth Price is in here right now. He’s trying to hijack my feed. He’s trying to tell you guys what the answer is. By the way, that’s not the answer, but it is an important part of this equation.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:41] So I absolutely love Blue Shark Digital. Seth is the owner of Blue Shark Digital. So shout out to Yusef and I will tell you that stop buying leads isn’t stop buying leads. It’s stop buying leads without knowing how to sell. OK, so if I am a law firm owner. No, no need to apologize Seth. I’m just joshing you, ok. If I am a law firm owner and I want to scale my business and I am too busy to go out pounding the pavement at networking event after networking event or I don’t feel comfortable getting on stage and I don’t know how I can grow. The first thing I think nowadays is there’s all these online marketing companies and their company is kind of out the wazoo that are going to approach me and say to me, since you own a business, let me tell you my service of SEO pay per click marketing online, digital marketing. Right. And if you get a really good company like Blue Shark Digital again, shout out to your staff. You’re probably going to get a really good offer. And my company is going to say, here’s how we can strategize with you to grow your presence online and drive traffic to your website and hence to your business and your business will thrive.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:48] And even if that statement is true, even if they can drive more traffic to your law firm, if you don’t know what to do with that traffic when it gets here, you’re not going to convert it. So you’re probably going to have what I consider to be the frustration for all marketers, which is they get on the phone with you once a month and they say, hey, let’s talk about how you’re doing. We sent you thirty new people. And what’s the law firm owner going to say? Aww! Those leads were all for shit, right? Not a single one of them converted. They were all bad leads. Right. The bad lead fiction is something that we always default to when we don’t know how to get people who are not aware of us over that threshold. So what ends up happening? You’ve got a real sexy website you put out there, all those bells and whistles about how you’re going to keep people out of jail or keep kids out of foster care or keep people out of unhealthy marriages or get them out of unhealthy marriages, or how you’re going to litigate against corporations on behalf of people or how you’re going to help them out of their accidents, right. You start putting that out there and people start seeing the message. They get really excited about it. They call your office and they get law firm. Right?

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:55] Someone answers the phone says law firm. We’ve all have had those answers, right? We all have called a business and got that law firm answer. And why don’t we think about that? Not too appealing. OK, fine. I’m not here to speak to the receptionist. I’m here to speak to whomever I’m calling. So I call and I get the intake department right. And by the way, those of you that are having any types of issues with your intake, I recently posted an interview I did with SMB Team of Lawyer Mastermind, all about optimizing intake. So if you need help optimizing intake, that video is only a couple of scrolls down here in the Law Firm Mentor Movement. So please feel free to check that out. We will also post that video on our YouTube channel at some point, but right now it’s on SMB’s YouTube channel. So please do check that out. But if you’ve got your intake dialed in and you get the people to schedule an appointment, what happens next? They show up. Now, when they show up, most of you are going to have a legal consultation with them, right? You’re going to gather some data, you’re going to tell them all about how their problem is one that you’re familiar with, and then you’re going to start giving them some legal answers.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:57] Aaw! We could file this. We can argue that. We can see this judge. If we see this judge, we’re going to likely get X, Y and Z result and you start auditioning for the prospect. Look at how smart I am. Look at how many degrees I have. Look at how many people I know. Look at how much law I know. And I know all the law. I can tell you all the law. And here’s the thing. This is the scary part. But it’s real. They don’t care. They really don’t care about how smart you are or how much law you know or how much you believe that you can help them. What they want to know is they want to know, can you help them? And do you have a solution to the problem that they presented? And oftentimes they’re going to come to that realization with or without you, whether you are telling them information about the law or not. It happens to be, however, that if you give people too much information about the law and you don’t know how to engage them in the conversation that matters to them, i.e., what is the nature of your problem? How is it impacting your life? What’s going to happen if you don’t solve that problem? And what’s your life going to look like without this problem so that I can offer you a solution that matters to you? You’re not going to get very far with them.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:07] So a lot of those people that you would refer to the marketing company as bad leads are really not bad leads. They’re just the subject of bad selling because you don’t know how to sell, OK? And if you don’t know how to sell and if you think of yourself as just a professional and not a salesperson, I hate to break it to you. If you own a business, you are in the business of sales. If you don’t sell anything in your business, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. You have to sell people on the idea of working with you. And that does not mean convincing them or tricking them or persuading them. That means getting in touch with what their problem is and offering them a solution and doing it in a way that it’s all about the client.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:47] OK, if it’s not all about the client, then the client is going to perceive it’s all about you, in which case they have to like you. They have to feel that you’re going to solve their problem and you may be able to convince them of that. Right. You might be a very likable person, but if you’re not a very likable person, you’re not going to sell them on anything. Right. Because this is completely out of your control and it’s all about that. All right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:08] So I’m seeing Bertrand say that perhaps if your main target is business entities, general counsels and the like. So, Bertran, that’s a very good point. There is a distinction between selling B2C, meaning selling direct to consumer versus selling B2B. If you are selling to a business, the structure of that business could be B2C like meaning I’m selling to a small business and I’m talking to the owner of that business and the owner alone is making that decision versus selling to a corporation that has a general counsel and or that has a board that’s going to decide. Multiple people are going to decide, there is a decision making process. There is a distinction for how you sell to those people, but ultimately you are still selling to them. Now, the sales cycle tends to be longer. There tends to be more involved in that process, but there still is a process. So getting those people to the table still is not going to be effective for you unless you know how to engage them in a sales conversation. Now, if sales is a dirty word for a lot of people, right? If sales is that word that you say, uuh, I feel squeezy. I feel dirty because I am selling. I want to assure you that if you learn how to do it the right way, you’re going to feel better having a sales conversation than a legal consultation, because if you’re having a legal consultation at the end of the day, you are auditioning. And when you audition and somebody says no, you feel like they have rejected you versus when you have a sales conversation and the person has told you what their problem is and you have connected them with the solution, if they still say no, they weren’t ready.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:37] And that’s not that they weren’t ready because you weren’t good enough, that was all about them. OK, so if it’s all about them, it feels much better than if it’s all about you, Bertrand says I’m terrible at selling. There’s a lot of us that are, by the way, and I don’t want you to feel that you’re alone in that. In fact, let’s ask the question right now. I want everybody who’s in the comment section right now, those of you there’s now forty two of you that are watching with us. If you feel that you are not good at selling, put a two in the comment section, OK, not good at selling, OK, selling and whatever conception you believe it to be, not just what I told you it is, right. You’re not good at that. You can put that there if that’s your conception of it. But if your conception of selling is something that you’re not good at, I want you to put a two in the comment section, OK? All the twos for the people that feel that they are not good at selling. And I’m seeing silence. It might be some of you will have to get a little warmed up to the idea of being confessional about that. If you feel that you’re not good at selling, put it out there. All right, starting to see some tweets coming in, Bertrand, thank you for volunteering that because you already did.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:39] Pamela, thank you for volunteering that. I will say, Pamela, knowing you as I do, I know that you are getting better at that skill, right? You are working on that skill. That is a skill that you are acquiring. So there’s nothing wrong with actually owning the fact that you’re bad at something as long as you don’t stay in the energy of I’m bad at it. And there’s the period. You can say I’m bad at it, semicolon, however, I’m going to get better. But you can’t just say I’m bad at it if you want to be successful in business. All right. Jane Marie, Stacey, Darrian, Gwen, lots of you. Right. Lots of us and I’m sure to no matter what I might think, Christie, I don’t know that that’s true. OK. That sounds like a little self defeatism. We don’t want to say self defeatism, OK? We don’t want to own those statements, OK? We want to release those statements. i.e. I’m bad but. I’m bad, however. I’m bad at the moment and I’m working on getting better, OK. Because owning it is the first step on getting it better. All right. Ali is saying seven year sales experience here. Love the transition to legal services. Yes, yes, yes, yes. When you learn how to sell, you are learning how to help people. You’re learning how to make it about them, not about you. 

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:45] And yes Pamela, you are trying, but you are also succeeding. You might not see that you’re succeeding, but your coaches see that you are succeeding. OK, so for all of us, number four, OK, we’re headed to number one. Number one is the number one thing you have to do to double your revenue in one year. However, we are starting with the things that we’re going to stop doing, OK? And what you’re going to stop doing right now is you’re going to stop working harder. OK, we put that all over the comment section, by the way. Let’s get another one out there. Let’s get some more. Stop working harder. I want some more. Stop working harder in the comments to this feed. Put some more. Stop working harder out there. We have got to get that into our brains. We have got to stop working harder. OK, put it in the comments section for me and then we’re going to go on to number four. So again, number five on our journey to that. Number one thing you have to do to draw in more revenue is to stop working harder. Carla says. Oh, that’s a good word. Learning how to make it about them and not about you. Wow. Yes, it is about them. That’s what we’re in.

 

Allison Williams: [00:23:41] We’re in a service industry. If you don’t serve people, you are only going to give them a solution to today’s problem. You are not going to create lifelong customers. You are not going to create clients that are your raving fans. Stop working harder is in all caps. I love it. Thank you, Pamela. Thank you. Darian, stop working harder. OK, number five, the first thing we got to get drilled into our heads. We got to stop working harder. Yes. Ali, for the love of God. Stop working harder. Stop working harder. Stacy, thank you. Stop working harder. And now. Thank you, Brian. Stop working harder. Get it out there, OK? Now that we have stopped working harder, the next thing we have to do is we have to stop buying leads without learning how to sell. OK, you have to know how to sell. You have to make the most of your opportunities. If I get twenty people to sell to and I only have a fifty percent conversion rate, I got ten new clients. If I increase that to a twelve percent conversion rate, I’m already growing. Fifteen percent conversion rate. Fifty percent conversion rate. Sixty percent, 70 percent. 80 percent. The more I can sell to the people I have, the fewer people I have to have in order to grow. Right. So that’s nothing more than changing what you’re saying and making it about somebody besides yourself.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:55] All right, number three. Number three on our journey to the number one thing you have to do to double your revenue in one year. And this is a biggie. You have got to stop stepping and fetching for your clients. OK, what does that mean? That means you have to stop putting yourself in the mode of service to the point where you devalue yourself in the eyes of your clients. OK, you are a professional.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:21] Ok, I know. I just said if you’re in business, you are selling and that is true. But we are still professionals. We are licensed professionals. I want to give you a scenario and I want you to think about it from your perspective as a consumer, OK? Take yourself out of lawyer mode for just a moment. Put yourself in the mind of a consumer. You are sick. You wake up one day, you have a pain in your stomach. You don’t know what is wrong with you. You just know that your stomach feels awful. So you sit with that pain for a day or so and say, I hope it’s going to go away. Maybe it takes some times, maybe you take something else, but you sit with that pain and ultimately you move yourself from that pain and the pain gets a little bit better. OK, thank you, Carla, for putting that summary in there. That’s very good. All right. So you put yourself out of pain because you focus your attention on something else. Maybe you take some Tums, maybe take some Tylenol. Right. And the pain goes away. But then a few days later, that pain seeps back in there. You wake up in the middle of the night and your stomach is just killing you. And you do what you do. You go to the bathroom. Pain’s still there, right? Next day, you wake up, pain still there. You’re starting to have problems eating. You’re starting to see that every time you put something into your body, your body is starting to reject it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:33] You’re starting to feel very uncomfortable. You’re starting to always sense that if you drink something, you’re going to have to run to the bathroom and if you eat something, you’re going to throw it up. You don’t know what’s wrong with you. So after you tried some Tums and you tried some Tylenol, maybe try some Mylanta, right? Well, the good old grandma drug of Mylanta. Right. You pull out your next medication and you put it in and you say hmmm. Is this going to make me feel any better? I hope so. And you try that and it doesn’t work. So what do you do next? The next thing you do is maybe start asking some friends. Hey, you know, I got this pain. I don’t know what’s wrong. My stomach’s been bothering me for a few days. What do you suggest? People throw out ideas, people throw out Mylanta, people throw out Tums, people throw out Tylenol. You tried them all. You say, I tried all those things. Those things aren’t working for me. So then they start giving you concoctions for your drugs. OK, it’s not just that you try Mylanta. You’ve got to try it late at night right before you go to bed. You’ve got to have some warm tea with your Mylanta and you’ve got to let it sit for a couple of hours before you go to the bathroom.

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:34] So you tried that version of Mylanta treatments and that version doesn’t solve the problem. So then you say, well, that didn’t work, but I did try Tylenol. Let me go back to Tylenol and see if that works. So you go back to Tylenol and you say, hmmm, I only took two pills, but technically I could take two pills and I could have another two within a twelve hour time period as long as I take it with food in my stomach. So I’m going to eat a little something and then I’m going to try to take my Tylenol as prescribed. So you take the Tylenol as prescribed and the stomach pain goes away. Dull ache. And then as soon as the medication wears off, the pain comes back. So now it’s been two and a half, maybe three weeks, and you’re starting to get really worried. You’re like, well, you know, this doesn’t feel right. This feels off. I think I’m going to go ahead and bite the bullet and go to the doctor. So you make the appointment. You get all nervous about the fact that the doctor could be telling you something. He could tell you it’s an aneurysm in your stomach. He could tell you it’s cancer. Right. It could be something very serious because you haven’t been able to treat that that pain on your own. But the pain is still there. You take yourself with that pain into the doctor’s office, greet the nurse, fill out the paperwork, sit down in your hopefully well quarantined space. And then at some point in time when that pain is right there, gripping you, the nurse comes out and says, Doctor So-And-So, we’ll see you now.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:04] OK, Doctor So-And-So. Is not going to see you now, Dr. So-And-So is actually going to do nothing other than have his nurse tell you to take your clothes off, sit on a little tray, and of course, all of your anxiety is building up as you are waiting to see the doctor, but the doctor does finally come in. OK, Dr. So-And-So is actually Dr. Susie Smith. Dr. Susan Smith walks in and says hi. I hear that you’ve been having some stomach pain and you say, yeah, doctor, it’s really bad. And you describe the pain, right. And you’re no holds barred. You talk about that pain like it’s nobody’s business. You say, you know, it started about three weeks ago. I woke up in the middle of the night with a little bit of ache in my stomach, and I figured it would go like it didn’t go away. So then I tried Tylenol. Tylenol did not make it go away. Then I tried Tums. Tums did not make it go. Then I tried my Mylanta. Mylanta did not make it go away. I added some tea to my Mylanta. And what happened? It still didn’t go away. And now I am in excruciating pain. And the doctor says to you, right. This is what you’ve been waiting for. You finally are at someone who can help you. The doctor says to you, I want you to think about your options. We can give you a medication that may or may not work or you could have surgery because you have an aneurysm in your stomach. Which would you like to do?

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:26] And I’m sure if you were given that type of suggestion by your doctor, you’d say this person don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. Right? Susie is just smoking something like I got to go find somebody who can tell me exactly what I need to do. You’re telling me I might want to take medication or I might want to have surgery? Like who would ever opt for surgery? Right. Unless surgery is like medically necessary and clearly it’s not medically necessary if you’re telling me I have an option of having surgery or having medication. So I want you to think about that and I want you to think about how you interact with your clients. OK, client has come to you with a problem. Client has fucked up their life. Let’s just be honest. That’s what most of our clients are. That’s the state that they’re in when most of us find them. They are in distress. Somebody has done them wrong. They have done somebody else wrong. There’s a reasonable dispute as to who done what to whom. But ultimately there’s a problem and you are there to solve the problem. And then your client says, lawyer, you’ve got to help me. I have this major problem. What is it that you can do? And you say, well, here are your options. You can do this option over here that will cost you a couple of hundred bucks, or you can do this option over here that’s going to cost you ten or fifteen thousand dollars. Which one would you like to do? And if you do that to your clients, your clients are going to be thinking about you, the same thing you thought about Dr. Suzie. This person didn’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:58] I’ve got to question now everything that they say to me, I have to ask myself, does this person have any authority whatsoever? Because they’ve given me the option between something that is a relatively low value, a few hundred bucks or something that is of relatively high value, a few thousand bucks or tens of thousands of dollars. Why would I ever choose the more expensive thing if the cheaper thing is an option? But why would they ever give me the option of the cheaper thing and throw out the more expensive thing if I really needed the more expensive thing. And I want you to think about that from the prospects perspective. OK, this is a person who didn’t even have a relationship with you yet. They’re coming to your law firm and they’re saying, lawyer, I’ve got a problem. Right. You’ve got to help me. I want you to give me some solutions here. This is what I’d like to do. I went to Google. Google tells me that I can get this done for three thousand dollars or less. And you know damn well that it’s going to cost a lot more than three thousand dollars to fix whatever has been broken that lead that person into your office. But what do you do? You give them the option. You say here are your choices. You say you can do this thing or you can do that thing as if you have no idea.

 

Allison Williams: [00:33:08] Now, you might say, well, I really would recommend you do the more expensive thing. But I’m fearful that if I tell the person you need the more expensive thing, they’re going to run away. They’re going to not buy. Right. They’re not going to sign up to become my client, so I want to give them the options and then they’ll choose the lesser of the two. Now, when you are in a relationship with a client, at some point that relationship builds upon itself. So as you’ve been giving that person consistent advice and they’ve been seeing that advice work out, you might have more confidence in giving that person an option and say, yeah, there’s this thing over here you could do, but I really recommend you do something over here, right. Something that costs more, something that takes more time, but something that’s going to get you a better result. And when you say that to a client and they have more confidence in you, they’re more likely to go with that. But when you say that to a client and they have a high level of confidence in you, you are not stepping in fetching. Stepping and fetching means that you are acclimating yourself to your client, right? The client says jump and you say how high. Client calls you at eight o’clock at night on your cell phone, even though you told them it’s only for emergencies.

 

Allison Williams: [00:34:12] They say, hey, I’m distressed, that’s an emergency. I’m calling you at eight o’clock. Client wants to see you on Sunday at 6:00 in the morning because they’re traveling Sunday afternoon and want to have time to process your meeting, get back to their family, go about their day. And you think that’s absurd, right? You say, I don’t have time for that. I have a life. I have a family. I need sleep, whatever it is. But you give in to the client. Why? Because you’re afraid of losing the client. And when you operate from a state of fear with your clients and you give them the option of following your advice or doing some cheaper and less than knock off version of what they think is going to solve their problem, they recognize that you’re not in integrity with your advice. They recognize that you recommended something over here. And then when they said no to that, you said, ehh, all right, well, what about this cheaper thing over here? You can have surgery, you can have a Band-Aid. You choose. Right. When you do that, you lose authority with your clients. Now, how does this relate to the number one thing you have to do to double your revenue? You have to stop stepping and fetching for your clients, because when you do that, your clients respect you as the leader, when you are the leader, your clients will naturally refer more people.

 

Allison Williams: [00:35:27] OK, you have got to get into the habit of standing in your authority as an attorney, you cannot stand in a place of wanting the most dollars. If you are chasing checks, you are not going to get the most checks. It doesn’t work that way. When people feel that they are nothing more than a paycheck to you, that’s how they will behave. All right. I’m paying this person. I’ve got to goose them for everything I got. They’ve got to be returning my phone calls within 15 minutes. They got to be returning my emails within the hour. They have to be available at my beck and call all the time. And when you give out that energy and you attract and ultimately receive from your clients that type of energy in return, those are the people they send to your door. So you get more of those people. And by the way, those people, the demanding people, are the people that are most likely to challenge your bill. Those are the people that are most likely to have you being owed tens of thousands of dollars and having accounts receivable, because those are the people that say this person works at my discretion. Right. I own you. OK, that’s the energy that you’re giving off. And the more you do that, the harder it will be to do the number one thing that you have to do to double your revenue in one year.

 

Allison Williams: [00:36:36] All right. So we started this conversation off with the four things that are going to lead to the one thing that you have to do, the four things you have to stop doing that’s going to lead to the one thing that you absolutely must do if you want to double your revenue in one year. And number five on that hit parade is stop working harder. Number four, by the way, for you to put that into the job section any moment now, I’m going to start seeing the timeline fill up again. Let’s stop working harder, stop working harder, stop working harder, because we have to get that drilled into our heads. As lawyers, we have got to believe and I have got to stop working harder. The more we stop working harder, the more we can get to number one, that number one way of doubling our revenue in one year. That’s right, Darrian. Yes, let me see. Stop working harder when I see you. Stop working harder. When I see that you guys have got that, we are going to move on to the next item. But only once I start to see stop working harder, stop working harder, has to fill up this time line. Yes, it does. It has to be on every comment section.

 

Allison Williams: [00:37:33] When I see it filling up the comment section, I will know that you guys got it and I will move on. Number three, that’s right. Number three, I’m glad that it was compelling for you, Carla. I’m glad that number three, which is stop stepping and fetching for your clients, was powerful for you. But we have got to stop working harder. Let’s get that into the comment section. Thank you for putting that into the comment section in all caps, Stephanie. Nice to see you. So glad that you were able to stop by. That’s right. Carla, stop working harder. Pamela, stop working harder. We’ve got to get that message in there. Yes, we do. Jane Marie, stop working harder. All right. We have it. We’re going to stop working harder. We’re also going to stop buying leads without knowing how to sell. And we’re going to stop stepping and fetching for our clients. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for putting that into the comment section. And now we’re going to move on to number two. OK, again, we are working our way down to the number one thing that you have to do in order to double your revenue in one year.

 

Allison Williams: [00:38:28] Number two, you have got to stop billing more to make more money. OK, for those of you that are in a billable hour firm, you will understand what it is to bill more, to make more. If you have a flat fee based practice, it is the same concept. You might not be billing more, but you’ve got to stop doing more of the work on your flat fees in order to make more. Now, you might say, I don’t understand that conceptually. If I am doing something that costs five thousand dollars and I want ten thousand dollars, I can just double my efforts and do twice as much and make twice as much money. Right. That’s an easy way to double the revenue, right. Intellectually, logically, your mind would say that. But here’s how the math works. I’m going to break the math down for you so we get it. OK, we’re going to start with the idea that we want to make twenty thousand dollars, OK? How can I make twenty thousand dollars? Well, I can sell one service for twenty thousand dollars or I can sell two services for ten thousand dollars each. Or I can sell five services for four thousand dollars each.

 

Allison Williams: [00:39:36] Or I can sell twenty services for one thousand dollars each. Right. Lots of different ways I can do the math to get to twenty thousand dollars, whether it’s one thing for twenty thousand or twenty things for one thousand, lots of different ways for me to get to that twenty thousand dollar figure. That’s not too hard for us to figure out. Some of us that don’t like math, we could still follow that math pretty easy. Doesn’t make a whole lot of confusion in the mind for us to go there. But think about that. If you are selling 20 of the one thousand dollar service, you are not making the same amount of money as if you sell one of the 20 thousand dollar service, right. It’s 20 thousand dollars in each of those hands. Right. My 20 thousand once or my one thousand twenty times. They’re not the same. OK, they’re not the same. Because when you have 20 of something to deliver versus one of something to deliver, I want you to think about those as discrete cases. OK, if I have 20 cases to deliver, I have 20 clients. I have 20 people calling my office. I have 20 adversaries. I have 20 judges.

 

Allison Williams: [00:40:49] I have 20 court reporters. I have 20 depositions to take. I have 20 experts to hire. I have 20 trips to the courthouse vs. selling one of my twenty thousand dollar case. I have one client, one adversary, one judge, one court reporter, one expert, one trip to the courthouse. OK, all of that extra service requirement for selling more to get yourself to that higher figure means that you are taking more time, more energy, more effort, more money, more fatigue going into the delivery of that service. So it is always, always, always easier to service one at a higher price than it is to service 20 at a lower price. Now, before we get into Lawyer brain, because I know how you guys think, because I’m one of you. OK, before you get into lawyer brain, we know that there’s a wide chasm between that statement. When I say it’s always there’s, of course, the mind that says, well, here’s the exception. What about if you’re serving a real asshole who happens to be a multimillionaire and you can have one case and he can give you as much work as you want, but he’s always calling and demanding and he’s difficult to work with. Right? You could say that.

 

Allison Williams: [00:42:10] But it still takes one person to service that one person or however many people, right, it could be a multimillionaire’s case, right. We’ve had, I’ve handled the multimillion dollar divorces where the people and the issues and the volume of work that there is to go through…

 

Allison Williams: [00:42:25] The discovery alone takes several dozens of people just because of the volume, right. But the leader of that file is spending one activity. One interaction. One relationship with that one person. OK, when you have 20 people, those 20 people, even if they are spending less money, don’t need less relationship with you, OK? They might expect less relationship with you, because if you have learned how to market and learn how to communicate effectively to your clients, if you follow any of my trainings, you know, we tell you this all the time, don’t give people an expectation that you’re going to be available around the clock as if that’s some type of beatific attitude and then get pissed off with them when they call you all the time around the clock. Right. Don’t offer me something and then get pissed off at me when I use it. And most of us that have client control problems, we are causing them. OK. But when you have all these people that you have to service, there’s a lot of energy that goes into that. Now, before the equal access to justice, people come at me and come for my neck. I want to tell you, I am not a proponent of charging the highest price you can ever possibly charge for any service whatsoever and never doing lower cost work. OK. If you have a calling on your heart to do lower cost work because you want to serve the legal profession, there is still a way to do that and to do that profitably. You can serve communities that could not afford more and will never get themselves to a psychological place of being able to afford more. You can absolutely serve that populace and do it more profitably than you’re doing it now. But stacking bodies in order to make more money is not the way to do it. OK, the other thing I want you to think about here is whether it’s about being busy. OK.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:07] How many of you, during the course of running a law firm, have felt that you have been too busy? OK, I want you to stick a number four in the comment section. If you have ever experienced the feeling in your life of being too busy, OK. Stick a four in the comment section. If you’ve been too busy, does it matter why you were too busy? You could be too busy with admin, you could be too busy with court, you could be too busy with new consults, whatever you’re too busy with.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:27] Have you ever had the experience of being too busy in your law firm, OK. Four in the comment section if you have been too busy in your law firm. I’m going to wait for you guys to catch up. I know there’s a slight delay in my projection here.

 

Allison Williams: [00:44:42] ahh! I’m starting to see, oooh! Stephanie, put four, four, four. That means Stephanie is like rocking and rolling. She’s, like, growing like gangbusters. All right. Hi, Kristin. Great to see you. This is first time I think I’ve seen your name up there. So let’s have lots of love out to you. Yes. Busy, busy, busy. Four four four four four. Right. We have all had that experience. When we have that experience of being too busy, the first thing, the inclination that we have is to work harder. But, you know, we’re not going to do that. Right. Right. Number five, we started with number five. We’re going to stop working harder, OK? Stop working harder. That’s not the way that we solve things. You physically don’t work harder. When we are busy, we work smarter. So how do you work smarter when you are too busy?

 

Allison Williams: [00:45:21] Ok, I love seeing fours with a super high number of exclamation points. OK, love those exclamation points. Thank you for that. When you are too busy and you have the inclination of, oh my God, I have too much to do, I have to work harder, I want you to stop yourself and think about the math that we just went through, OK. Adding people, adding activity, adding cases adds busy. OK. So when you are in a state of busy, there are lots of ways to solve that. Right. You can solve that by taking less work. OK, nobody in business does that, by the way. We don’t, we don’t say I think I’m going to turn off the spigot, there are some people, I shouldn’t say we don’t do it because there are some people that do it. Most of us that are here, we want to grow our businesses. Most of you are here in the Law Firm Mentor Movement because you have a desire to grow your business. But if you are in the habit of saying, I’m too busy right now, I’m just going to turn off that spigot, I’m going to say no to the clients, that typically means you have a referral based clientele, meaning you get your clients from people referring to you. Right. And a lot of us have that fear of if I turn off the spigot, if I tell people, stop referring people, they’re going to stop referring people forever. I’ll never get another client again.

 

Allison Williams: [00:46:34] So most people don’t default to saying, all right, no new clients, but you might default to saying, OK, I might not take no new clients, but maybe I will span things out a bit. I’ll take in a client, say, hey, I can’t reach this for six weeks, but we’ll start working on it very slowly. Right. Or you will take in work and you will spread it out. So you’ll say instead of promising something in 30 days, I’ll promise it in forty five days or maybe sixty days so I can get to that place where I have more time. You can also think about it from the perspective of raising your prices, right. If you have twenty thousand dollars that you need to make in the course of a month and you have forty thousand dollars worth of work, it might be really tempting for you to say, well, I’ve got twenty thousand and let’s say I’ve got that twenty thousand coming under five cases. So I’ve got five clients. They’re each going to pay me four thousand dollars to deliver the widget and therefore I’m going to make twenty thousand dollars. And if that is the goal, then great. As soon as you get six clients you think six clients and they’re four thousand dollars apiece, then that could be twenty four thousand instead of twenty. I’m growing. And that feels good until you get thirteen clients.

 

Allison Williams: [00:47:45] Right, so you have five clients times four. Now, all of a sudden you’ve got 13 clients times four. Wow. That’s a lot more money, right. That’s fifty two thousand dollars relative to twenty thousand dollars. That feels good until all of a sudden you’re not sleeping, you’re not eating and you are working harder. Violating our first premise number five, stop working harder.

 

Allison Williams: [00:48:04] So how even if you are in the state of going and going and going and growing, how do you do that without working harder? Well, if you raise your prices, several things happen, right? You get more people in at the same price point or at the higher price point and you start making more money or you have people that fall away, people that say, hey, I hired you at three hundred bucks an hour. I’m not paying three twenty five an hour. I’m not paying three fifty an hour. And your answer to that should be great. That just lightened my load. Right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:48:36] I can keep my goal at twenty thousand dollars because I can make that on fewer people at a higher price point. The people who are willing to stay at the higher price point, the people that come in at the higher price point and I can make more money without having to do more work. So I reduce that total number that twenty one thousand dollars each instead of one at twenty thousand dollars. I’m somewhere in between those two and I’m working my way toward that twenty thousand. And I’m starting to see that I’m making more money even though I’m doing it in less time.

 

Allison Williams: [00:49:04] Sounds really good until you consider that even as you raise your prices at some point you are going to hit a ceiling. Right. You could say tomorrow I want to make twenty thousand dollars, so I’m going to charge twenty thousand dollars an hour for my services. And the great likelihood is that there’s someone out there willing to pay that. But you’re probably gonna have to work a lot harder to find that person and offer a lot more value than you’re currently offering. So you’re probably not going to jump yourself from three hundred dollars an hour to twenty thousand dollars an hour to get to that twenty thousand dollars goal.

 

Allison Williams: [00:49:35] So you’re always going to be playing with the math, but if you just produce more, you’re going to be producing not just more revenue, but you’re going to be producing more activity and the more activity leads to working harder and you have to stop working harder. So how if you are stopping the working harder, you’re stopping buying leads when you don’t know how to sell, you are stopping, stepping and fetching for your clients, meaning being available to them twenty four hours a day, seven days a week at their command and you are stopping billing and producing more work. How are you ever going to double your revenue in one year? Because all of the things that you know instinctually to do in order to double your revenue, I’ve just told you, you have to stop doing. OK.

 

Allison Williams: [00:50:22] Scarcity is underrated in this area. True. Very true. Very true. Yes, it is very true. All right. So now we are at number one. OK, this is what you guys came here for. I know you’re excited to hear it. Drum roll, please. The number one activity that you must do in order to double your revenue in one year, it’s going to sound completely out of the ballpark. But I assure you, it is the number one thing that you can do that you have to do in order to double your revenue in one year. And it is the consistency of your marketing. I’m going to let that sit there for a moment, because I know that wasn’t what you were expecting, it wasn’t going out and getting the best damn company in the world. It wasn’t hiring the best marketing agency. It wasn’t having the snazziest website or the best business cards or putting up the best landing pages. It wasn’t click funnels, it wasn’t billboards. It wasn’t any of the stuff… The stuff of marketing. It is solely about being consistent in your marketing. So what do I mean and how is that going to correlate to you doubling your revenue in one year? Well, one of the things that we talk about a lot in Law Firm Mentor is about marketing. Marketing is what drives people to the door. It’s what lets people know that you are here. It’s what gets you to the finish line. Right. You don’t get to make a sale unless somebody is attracted to you and comes in and is willing to engage with you, OK? And as you are working on getting people to engage with you, you have to be educating them consistently of why their problem needs a solution, not why you’re the one to solve it, but why their problem needs a solution.

 

Allison Williams: [00:52:08] OK, so that means there are a lot of times that people will circle the drain. They will follow around. Right. They’ll come to the well and then they’ll fall back. They’ll think about solving their problem and then they won’t do anything. They’ll say it’s time for me to buy that house. Oh, no, I can’t do that now. That’s COVID. Oh, wait. It’s time for me to get out of that rocky relationship. But wait, let me let me get the kids out of college. It’s time for me to grow that business. Oh, no. Can’t do that now. I want to have more money in the bank first. It’s time for me to hire that marketing company. I can’t do that now. I don’t have time to work on my content. OK. Everyone has done that. OK, all of us. All of us have at some point in time realized that we had a problem and said, that solution can wait. OK, the problem is that because we are in a marketplace of people who are gutted and glutted with information all the time, our attention spans are for shit, right? So we come to the well, we have our problem and we see the solution in front of us as clear as day.

 

Allison Williams: [00:53:12] And we get really excited about solving the problem. And then what happens? All right. Oh, shiny objects. You know, our mind, our attention goes everywhere except to the problem. And we don’t think about the solution to the problem because we are so focused on what is before us right now. So I want you to think about that. When you were thinking about the people to whom you are selling your legal services, if you are selling a service that requires a solution in the moment, even something that is urgent, someone is in jail, right? If somebody is in jail and their significant other, their spouse, their mom, their friend, whomever comes to see you and says, hey, you got to get my son, brother, girlfriend, next door neighbor, lover out of jail, that seems pretty urgent. So you might be thinking, well, I don’t have to work to sell myself to that person. That person comes in. They know they, they know they got to get out of jail. Right. They know that they’ve got to get their loved one out of jail. And it’s true that they know that, but they don’t know that they have to solve the problem in the way that you are offering. And oftentimes when a person is afraid to solve the problem in the way that you are offering it is because you have not communicated the value through the conversation you’ve had, which goes back to point number four, which is stop buying leads without learning how to sell.

 

Allison Williams: [00:54:27] But when you are putting marketing messages out there, your marketing messages are supposed to be designed to put people in touch with the nature of their problem. Right. If you’ve seen the problem over and over and over again, you know what a construction lane case looks like. You know what a products liability case looks like. You know, when a business is about to go into very unchartered territory, what the risk is associated with that that the business owner might not know. But you, as a business lawyer know, right. You know what it is for somebody to get out of a dysfunctional relationship and get right into another one that you’ve got to go save them from. And you know how to help them. They don’t know what they don’t know. Your job is to help them, to see what they don’t know and to do that consistently. Now, you might be saying that sounds really good. Consistency. OK, Punch. I got it. That’s on my little that’s on my hit parade. Right. You gave me four things. That’s number five consistency. How does that get me to double the revenue, especially if I’m a busy lawyer? And here’s the answer. So in being consistent in marketing, I am not saying that you need to spend two hours a day every day over three hundred and sixty five days to create your marketing machine.

 

Allison Williams: [00:55:38] You have to create a marketing machine. But your marketing machine does not come from more hours because again, the very first thing you have to stop doing, and that’s why I put it as number five so we can associate that with stopping you have to stop working hard. So how do you create more content? More marketing for your law firm without working harder? And the answer is simply this. You multiply your marketing reach, OK, nothing you do in marketing should ever be a one and done nothing. It should always be that you create one thing that creates five more things, and each of those five things creates five more things. And each of those next five things creates five more things. And next thing you know, you have a complete plethora of information about you in the marketplace so that people seeing you on Facebook get it, so that people seeing you on LinkedIn get it, so that people receiving your newsletter get it, so that people go in to your website, get it so that people that are seeing you and searching on Google get it and they get those messages over and over and over again. And the way that you do that is very simple, but it’s not easy. OK, now here is where there is a real problem. OK, when I say simple, I don’t mean easy.

 

Allison Williams: [00:56:57] Simple means there is a very strategic tactical planned out way to do this. You do not have to create content by sitting down and laboriously thinking through everything that you know about the law and how you can data dump that into the messaging for people to consume.

 

Allison Williams: [00:57:12] You don’t have to stop your life and stop your lawyering, and add one more thing to your plate when you’re already busy and overwhelmed to get a different type of person in your office, to get more people in your office and to get more of a better type of client better for you, whether that’s better because you like the cases or better because the client pays better, or better because the type of work comes in, in your practice area of choice. Right. You don’t get that through simply asking for it, except you have to ask for it in order to get it. So how do you do that? Right. There is a process. There is a planned way of doing this. I’m going to tell you about how to do that right now. So one of the things, that for those of you who have been following this for any length of time, know about Law Firm Mentor, is you know, that we are a business coaching service, for solo and small law firm attorneys, that we help you to grow your revenues, we help you to crush chaos in business, and we help you to make more money. And for most of you that have had any type of contact with me, you know that I am not inexpensive. And I am proud about the fact that I’m not inexpensive because I offer transformation for people. Transformation is not you sit down, you copy and paste out of a workbook and poof, you have a business.

 

Allison Williams: [00:58:20] It is that you take what is already within you. You learn how to optimize it. You learn how to magnify it. You learn how to produce it, multiplying over and over and over again so that you become more of yourself and you sell yourself naturally instinctually without work, to the marketplace. And then poof, you have a multi-million dollar business in three and a half years, just like I did. So in order to help you to do that, most people that have had a conversation with me have learned about our annual programs, and you’ve learned about how involved they are and how much value you get. You get a business plan and you get retreats, you get group coaching, and private coaching. You get a lot of different things right, because we want people to learn in the way that makes the most sense for them. But we also want people to learn in the way that’s going to grow them the most. But for those of you that are not ready for that step, not ready to take your business to the next level, not ready to reach for the stars, you still can do something today to get yourself into the consistency that’s necessary. And it is with our newest program called the Law Firm Mentor GYST. OK. The GYST stands for G=Y-S-T – Get Your Shit Together. OK, very simple. We want to help you get your shit together. And we have two ways to help you do that.

 

Allison Williams: [00:59:31] We can help you get your shit together with marketing or you can get your shit together with us with systems. In either of those areas, we are going to give you an opportunity to have weekly contact with a coach so that you are working on everything that you need to do in order to move your business forward. And because I firmly believe that the way that you move yourself forward is by creating a plan, knowing where you’re going and committing to that plan every single day and every single week, and also putting yourself in the mindset of that plan. We’re going to offer that to you for a six month commitment. And that commitment is less than half of what it costs to work with us for all of your business needs over the course of a year. So if you’re interested in the Law Firm Mentor program, I am going to drop my scheduler in the comments to this video and we can have a call to talk about it. OK, it is a much lower investment because it is not all about building your business. It is all about getting your shit together in marketing or getting your shit together in systems. And frankly, those are the two areas that I have seen consistently over doing this work, that if law firm owners were to optimize their performance with this area of their business, they will see their profits grow, they will see their revenue grow, and they will see that their time grows. You need to grow your time in order to have space to think about your business. So you’re not just out there shooting ducks in a barrel or working harder because as we said before, you need to stop working harder and you just start working smarter. So we’re going to help you do just that again.

 

Allison Williams: [01:00:59] I’m going to drop my scheduler in the, in the comments to this video. Now, for those of you that are at the place where you are, starting to get the notion that you should not be working harder. I want to just give you a reminder, OK, first, you have got to stop working harder, OK? I want you to know that. I want you to realize that that was the number one thing that I had to do to get my mind right to be able to work on my business. Next, you have got to stop buying leads without knowing how to sell. OK, I’m a big fan of buying leads, but if you have a low budget going and spending it on somebody giving you trickles when you don’t know how to take that little bit of trickling over to the world of conversion, does not help you. OK, we have a free sales mini course that’s all about selling. Its five videos. It’s absolutely free. You can download it if you’d like to. I’m going to put that in the comment section as well for those of you that want to learn more about selling. And again, this is completely free, but beyond not knowing how to sell, if you are buying leads and that being a dangerous proposition, you’ve got to stop stepping and fetching for your clients. You’ve got to stop being everybody’s everything. OK? You are not your clients’ bitch. You have got to stop treating yourself that way. When you reduce your value that way, you reduce the ability for you to take a client, take them through a process, give them a great result and see you as the authority that you are. Then you’re going to stop billing more to make more.

 

Allison Williams: [01:02:28] That means you’re going to stop this idea of I’ve got to produce more in order to make more, because producing more produces more of everything. It produces more money, But it also produces more time. It produces more energy, it produces more revenue, it produces more activity it produces more anxiety and produces more stress. All of that more that you are creating without a system and without a structure is not going to help you. And then finally, the one thing that you have got to do is learn how to be consistent in your marketing. And that is something that we can help you do here at Law Firm Mentor. So, again, I’m going to drop my scheduler in the comments to this video. For those of you that are interested in getting your shit together in your marketing or in your systems in your law firm, we can help you with that. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Everyone have a wonderful day!

 

Allison Williams: [01:03:23] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. To learn more about today’s guest and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you own a solo or small law firm and are looking for guidance, advice or simply support on your journey to create a law firm that runs without you, join us in the Law Firm Mentor Movement free Facebook group. There you can access our free trainings on improving collections in law firms, meeting billable hours, enjoying the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firms and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day!

Snip-its:

00:08:53 – 42 Seconds

So working harder does have its limits, even for those of us that can put in 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 hours a week, there will be a cap to that. And the problem is we don’t often know where that cap is. So when you create a strategy that says I’m going to work harder in order to get myself to that next place, you are always going to have a question mark as to how far you can go because your body and your mind require rest and rejuvenation to work at your best. And if you deprive either your mind or your body or likely both, of that rest, you are going to see not only diminishing returns, but you’re going to hit a cap at some point. And let me tell you, the cap is not necessarily what we think it is, right.

 

00:18:07 – 40 Seconds

So a lot of those people that you would refer to the marketing company as bad leads are really not bad leads. They’re just the subject of bad selling because you don’t know how to sell, OK? And if you don’t know how to sell and if you think of yourself as just a professional and not a salesperson, I hate to break it to you. If you own a business, you are in the business of sales. If you don’t sell anything in your business, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. You have to sell people on the idea of working with you. And that does not mean convincing them or tricking them or persuading them. That means getting in touch with what their problem is and offering them a solution and doing it in a way that it’s all about the client.

Contact Info:

Scheduler:  https://meetme.so/LawFirmMentor 

 

Allison Williams

Allison C. Williams, Esq., is Founder and Owner of the Williams Law Group, LLC, with offices in Short Hills and Wall Township, New Jersey.  She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is Certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney, and is the first attorney in New Jersey to become Board-Certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in the field of Family Law. Ms. Williams is a member of the New Jersey Board on Attorney Certification (NJBAC) – Matrimonial Committee, a New Jersey Supreme Court committee that determines eligibility of candidates to be certified as a recognized practitioner in the field of matrimonial law.

Ms. Williams has been named a Rising Star Attorney by the New Jersey Super Lawyers franchise continuously from 2008 – 2013, and has been named a Super Lawyer by that organization for 2014 – 2019. In 2016, she was featured in the Super Lawyers publication (Williams v. The Rubber Stamp), she has been named one of the Top 50 Women Super Lawyers in New Jersey from 2017-2019 and in 2019, was voted in the Top 100 Super Lawyers in the State of New Jersey.

Ms. Williams is an accomplished businesswoman. In 2017, the Williams Law Group won the LawFirm500 award, ranking 14th of the fastest growing law firms in the nation, as Ms. Williams grew the firm 581% in three years. Ms. Williams won the Silver Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.  In 2018, Ms. Williams was voted as NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business and was designated one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. In 2019, Ms. Williams won the Seminole 100 Award for founding one of the fastest growing companies among graduates of Florida State University.

In 2018, Ms. Williams created Law Firm Mentor, a business coaching service for lawyers.  She helps solo and small law firm attorneys grow their business revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.  Through multi-day intensive business retreats, group and one-to-one coaching, and strategic planning sessions, Ms. Williams advises lawyers on all aspects of creating, sustaining and scaling a law firm business – and specifically, she teaches them the core foundational principles of marketing, sales, personnel management, communications and money management in law firms. 

She received her B.S., magna cum laude, and her M.S., summa cum laude, from Florida State University. She received her J.D., cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law.