You Must DECIDE What you Want

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] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams, again, your Law Firm Mentor. And today we’re going to talk about a topic that I think is baked into assumption often when people are starting to evolve their law firms and starting to create something different for themselves. But it’s very easy to deviate from this, and it can often be something that we overlook because we are so busy and so overwhelmed, especially when we are just starting to grow, that we oftentimes assume that if I just put one foot in front of the other until it gets better, that ultimately it’s going to get me to my destination. So today we’re talking about the fact that you must decide what you want. Now, that does not mean you should be thinking about whether you want to practice law or not, or decide whether you want to own a business or not. Those are very critically important conversations. But that’s not the purpose of today’s conversation today. We’re talking about what you want from a perspective of what you want to create in your business. So for ease of reference, I’m going to talk about money. But you can apply this to anything in your business. You should be thinking about what you want to create in terms of who the people are that you work with, what you want to create in terms of what type of cases you want to handle, what you want to create in terms of how you want your adversary relationships to be.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:49] What you want to create in terms of how big a profile you want to have, what types of accomplishments you want for your career, all of those things are a matter of intentionality. And we don’t create those things in our lives without some level of intentionality. And the more intentional that you are, the easier time you’re going to have creating it and most importantly, sustaining it. So I want to use money as our litmus test, because whenever we think about what we want to create in business, what often stops us, whether it’s creating the law firm of our dreams in terms of the people that we employ or the law firm of our dreams in terms of how big a reputation you have. No matter what you’re creating, if you don’t have enough money in your business and you are at a place of feast or famine where you’re, today flush, the bank account is full. You go off and start serving the stew out of your clients and you’re happy there. And then all of a sudden you look up, all the funds are gone, all the clients are gone, cases are closing out and you don’t have new cases coming in. So then you go out and feverishly start marketing and you get more clients in and then you’re satiated again.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:02] And then you’re back on that rollercoaster next month or next quarter or next year when you don’t have enough clients anymore. Right? Because you haven’t systematized the process of your marketing. Now, to be clear, when we talk about systematizing, I recognize that for some people that seems like just brain dumping a to do list and telling someone what to do. But that is not at all what we mean by systematizing. There is a way to systematize a business in order to have it not just be less chaotic today or a little bit more predictable tomorrow, but instead, systematizing needs to be a cultural imperative so that people can do activity in your business without you and that they don’t require you for your day to day. Now, if you are struggling with that, we do have our Crushing Chaos Master Class coming up again on May 10th through May 17th. So I want you to sign up for the Master Class. This is going to be a nine day experience where we actually teach you the process absolutely free of charge, step by step of systematizing a law firm. OK, but back to the topic. So we’re talking about, we’re talking about getting what you want in terms of your business. And I said before, you’re going to apply this general principle to everything, but you’re oftentimes going to get most off track if you don’t have enough money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:04:24] So we know that not having enough money for growing what we want in our life can be a frustration. Right. If we want to build an addition on our house or we want to move into a house or buy our first house, those things obviously require money. But even more so if, it’s not even just about growing, it’s simply about sustaining. There’s some people who don’t have enough to even meet their basic expenses because their child got sick or because they have more need for activity in their home. Right. They might need help in their home or it could be any number of basic expenses. The cost of living does go up with or without our growing our revenue. We talked about this in the episode on the necessity of growth. So if you haven’t actually listened to that episode, you might want to go back and check it out. But I want you to really think about, globally what it is that you want to create in your, in your law firm in terms of money, because when you don’t have enough, you’re in distress. When you don’t have enough to do what you want to do in terms of growing the business, you’re not in the same type of distress. You’re not at that physiological need distress. Like, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to eat or pay my mortgage, but you’re at a certain type of distress, which is about your self-actualization.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:46] And if you’re not self-actualized in whatever it is that you are devoting the majority of your time to, that is where we get burnout. That is where we get malaise. That is where we get frustrated and we say, I don’t want to do this with my life anymore. And there are a whole lot of unhappy lawyers that are so much into the weeds that they can’t take a breath. And then start focusing on what they actually want to create instead, they’re just trying to survive. So we want to get out of survival mode and the systematizing process that we talked about earlier can really help you with that. But for today, I really want to talk about the creation process of how to get what you want in your law firm. And the way that you do that is essentially by deciding what it is that you want. The power of decision cannot be understated. It really is. Or rather, it can’t be overstated. It really is the most important part of the creation process if you don’t decide what you want. It is very easy to put one foot in front of the other. The problem is, you are stepping without direction. Now, you might say, well, I know I want to make more money, or I know I want to have more time, or I know I want to add more team because I don’t want to be doing certain activity.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:04] But more or better or less, those qualifiers are always relative to something, right? You can’t have more of something unless you know what that something is, quantity wise. So you have to think about it from the perspective of, if you just want something better than what you have and you’re not creating with an intentionality of how much better it needs to be, how much more you need to have, how much less you need to be working. If you don’t quantify that and get crystal clear on what it is that you want to create, you can very easily create a little more and still be measurable. Because what tends to happen is a little bit more today and a little bit more tomorrow and a little bit more next month and a little bit more next week and a little bit more next quarter and next year and next century. All of that. That stair stepping yourself into the next opportunity is tiring. It actually is easier to grow by leaps and bounds than it is to stairstep, Because all of that energy, that time, that intellect that you are putting into the decision to step a little bit ahead of where you are right now, it doesn’t take any more intellectual knowledge, skill time for you to be able to stairstep. Right. There’s only so many hours in a day. Now you have to do different activity in order to leapfrog ahead.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:34] And that often causes psychological triggers because as soon as we decide to do something dramatically different, we know that our subconscious mind is going to protest. We know that people around us, if we share that information with people around us, are going to protest. We know that we might have some discord at home. Our spouse may or may not agree. We’re going to have a whole bunch of stories that get into our head about why we can’t create what we want because of fill in the blank. But once we do decide that that is how we’re going to grow, it does not take more to grow in that way than it does for you to stay a step ahead. Sometimes it takes more money. I will add that little footnote. Sometimes it does take more money for you to grow faster, but the rate of return on that money is actually significantly greater than if you had just had a smaller investment and just stairsteps. So once you make that powerful decision, once you say, yeah, I want a lot more than I have right now, and that’s really important to me. The next thing you have to think about is how you’re going to get there. Right. So first is the what. The what becomes the decision. You’re going to decide upon a certain amount of money that you’re going to generate, and you want to have that that decision be time barred.

 

Allison Williams: [00:09:48] So you want to say over the next 12 months or over the next six months or over the next quarter, I want to make a certain amount of money and then you have to decide how to get there. Now, what most lawyers do when this part comes up, when it’s time to decide how to get there, they say, I’m going to work every day. I’m going to hustle as much as I can. I’m going to go network and I’m going to hope and pray that I get to the goal that I created. And that does not generally produce results. Sometimes it will produce results. If the power of your will and the consistency of your action and the actions that you’re taking happen to be the right action. And you put all of those together with intentionality, then, yes, you can absolutely accomplish a goal that way. But the problem is you’re not creating consistent, predictable, reliable, recurring results. If it’s not consistent and it’s not predictable and it’s not reliable and it’s not recurring, then you have put all of that effort and energy into an activity that you don’t know if you rinse and repeat the next quarter or the next year or the next, whatever time period there is, that you’re going to get the same result. And that is where a lot of lawyers get burned out on growing because they say, I did X, Y and Z and I got that rock star secretary and then I did X, Y and Z and my paralegal sucks.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:20] And then I did X, Y and Z and I got a so so associate and then I did X, Y and Z and I got a phenomenal paralegal. And then I did X, Y and Z and I got a so so file clerk. Right. So the question becomes, what was it about X, Y and Z that predicted the outcome that you were going to have a phenomenal employee at the other side of that first hiring process? There wasn’t any right. Typically, there is the idea that these are the things that correlate not necessarily cause, but correlate with you being able to be more successful in a certain area. So you decide on it. You say, OK, this could work and then you try and then ultimately it works. So you’re like, oh, that must be it. The problem is, if you don’t use accurate thinking, if you don’t actually know based on the law of cause and effect, whether or not what you did was the cause of whatever success you had, then you can’t rinse and repeat the process or what often happens. You do rinse and repeat the process, but you have a different outcome. So we want to give you a framework, and we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, we talked about having a funnel where essentially you start with what you want, which is at the bottom of the funnel, and you work your way up to what you need in order to create what you want.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:47] And I refer to this as engineering your funnel from the bottoms up. Right. Bottoms up. Think about it that way. Take a beautiful cup of water and bottoms up to that cup of water. So what do I mean by bottoms up? So the first thing that you always have to start with is the goal. What is it that you want to achieve in terms of the amount of money that you want to create? And by the way, for those of you that are listening now, it would be really helpful for you to grab a notepad and write these questions down, because these questions are really the creation process in the law firm in a nutshell. Now, there’s obviously a lot more meat on the bones that you’ll have to fill in in order to answer these questions. But having these questions will give you the roadmap to get you from where you want to be, back to where you need to start and every step along the way in order to create the amount of money that you desire for your law firm. OK, so we always want to start by asking ourselves, how much money do we want? OK, now we have had some pretty big, pretty weighty conversations on the podcast about that very question, like the fact that a lot of people have resistance around making money and the fact that a lot of people don’t own what they actually want because on some level they fear they won’t get it.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:05] So we’re not going there right now. But I just want you to pick a number, right. So even for now, it can be a number that you think is completely reasonable, right? That’s usually not how we get Law Firm Mentor to actually help our clients to create. We want them to create something that’s fantastic to them, something that will keep them up and excited all night, something that they’re going to write home to mom about. We don’t want them saying, I want to increase my income by five percent, OK, nobody gets out of bed for five percent. So what we want you to do is pick a number. But for this exercise, it can be that reasonable number. You just need to see how it works. OK. Once you have the amount that you’re actually going to make, you need to know how many clients it takes for you to be able to create that amount of money, which means you have to know how much your clients on average are paying you. Now, if you have a multiple practice area firm and you have three or four different practice areas and you say, well, I get about this much from my estate planning practice and about this much from my business litigation practice and about this much from my immigration practice, and it averages twenty thousand dollars a month.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:14] If that’s how you’re thinking about it. I want you to segregate out each of your practice areas first. Which means you’re going to have a little bit more math than somebody who just has a family law firm or just has a criminal defense law firm. OK. But it’s important that you look at each practice area, because if your revenue over the course of some period of time averages a certain amount of money and it’s heavily weighted toward a practice area that you don’t spend your time on anymore or is heavily weighted in a practice area that has, for whatever reason, less, generated fewer referrals for you recently, then you’re going to have less success with this process. All right. So you need to know what your clients actually pay you on average for the type of cases that you bring in. Once you know that, that should tell you how many cases are required in order for you to get to the revenue total that you desire. So simple math. If you need twenty thousand dollars a month and on average your clients pay you five thousand dollars for every case, then you need four cases every month in order to produce your goal. Pretty simple math, and I know the math isn’t that simple all the time because again, some people have different practice areas. Sometimes you don’t have a flat easy number, right.

 

Allison Williams: [00:16:40] You could have three thousand four hundred twelve dollars and eighty seven cents as the average amount that your clients pay you. But whatever that average amount is, you’re going to take that average amount that you are being paid by your clients and you’re going to divide the goal however much you want each month, each year, each quarter, etc. You’re going to divide the goal by the average case value. So you know how many cases you need. And little tool here, a little tip. It’s a little bit easier if you have a longer period of time. So if you’re looking at six months or a year, it’s easier to say, I need to generate this number of cases, because if you’re not at a place of consistently, predictably and on a recurring schedule, generating the same number of cases on average every month with slight variation, then typically what will happen is as soon as you make this plan, you have to start orchestrating the plan in your marketing. And that usually does require some lead time. So you might say I need to get 20 cases in the next 12 months, and with that, if you were to divide that number of cases equally over that 12 month time period, you’re going to have a different result than if you started a little bit lower and said, OK, if on average I need to get 20 cases over the next year, that’s a little less than two cases a month.

 

Allison Williams: [00:18:04] And I’m probably not going to start out the gate with a little more than two cases or a little bit less than two cases. So let’s just use two cases to make it easy, because you can’t generate less than a case, right? You can’t have two thirds of a case. But let’s say that on average, you need two cases a month. Well, you’re probably not going to start with two cases a month the month you start. So what you probably want to do then is say, well, for the first two or three months, we’re going to have one case a month as we’re ramping up our marketing and then we’ll have two cases a month. But either way, that one year goal should have a division and assignment of how many cases you need to generate in order to get to your revenue goal. Now, here’s where it gets a little dicey for a lot of lawyers, right? Most people can follow the math of X number of dollars divided by Y number of cases will tell me what my clients spend on average or X number of dollars divided by the amount of average case revenue gives me Y number of cases. Right. Pretty simple math there. The challenge becomes when you start getting into your sales funnel portion of your total funnel. So the next question that you want to ask, once you know how many cases you want to have, you next have to ask yourself. How many sales conversations do I need to have in order to produce the number of new clients that I require?

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:36] So if you require three clients in a month, do you need to speak to five people? Do you have a 40 percent conversion or 60 percent conversion rate? Do you need to speak to six people, i.e. you have a 50 percent conversion rate? Do you need to speak to 30 people because you have a 10 percent conversion rate? And I’m using numbers all over the map because there are different levels of skill at sales across every industry, but in particular across the legal industry. So when you when you ask yourself, what’s the conversion rate, that’s the percentage of people that you will speak with who will hire you. Now, for some of you, you are actually conducting sales conversations, some of you not so much. You’re actually conducting legal consultations where you meet with the person, you get the story, you get those facts, you apply the law to those facts. You tell them what the legal outcome is likely to be based on your analysis, and then you quote them a fee and for a whole host of reasons, unless the person was personally referred to you and you have a warm traffic relationship with them, meaning they are already primed, ready to buy, came from an authoritative source and are more than likely already sold on you when they come in.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:57] You don’t want to have that type of consultation. You want to have a true sales conversation where it is all about the person, the nature of their problem, how their problem impacts them, and what in their view will happen if they don’t solve the problem. That’s very much client focused and it’s very much about asking more than telling, which is challenging for lawyers, because we are trying to get legal answers. So I don’t suggest to you that this is easy, but this will transform the way that you ultimately get people into your wheelhouse. And the other benefit is it helps you to convert cold traffic, meaning people who don’t have a relationship with you, people that clicked on a Google ad, people that clicked on a Facebook ad, people that were surfing online, personal injury attorney near me or business lawyer near me or immigration lawyer near me or whatever. Whatever they search for, if they happened upon your website and decided to call and they don’t know you from Adam and haven’t read all your materials and haven’t been thinking about you for however many years they’ve been dealing with the problem, and they need a lawyer, they are much more likely to buy when they have a real sales conversation than when you data dump some law on them and quote, a price. But you need to know how many of those sales conversations you have to have.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:23] Do you have to have twice as many sales conversations as is necessary to generate clients because you have a 50 percent conversion rate? So you have to know the conversion rate and that will tell you how many sales conversations you have to have if you don’t currently know your conversion rate. The worst thing that you can do is say, well, any time I meet with someone, for the most part, they’re hiring me. If you are not tracking, you are doing yourself a disservice. The beauty of tracking every person that calls the office seeking representation is that it helps you to ensure that most people, most people who come through your funnel will be run through a conflict check system so they ultimately can ethically be represented by someone in your firm. It allows you the consistency, predictable, reliable result that you desire. And what tends to happen when you are tracking things is you have a number in an area to focus on. So, you know, do I need to focus on scheduling more people? Do I need to focus on converting more people? Do we have different people performing those roles so that we need to optimize performance of multiple people? You can ask better questions when you have data to support the answer that you ultimately are seeing so that you aren’t making assumptions. But if by chance you are not at a place where you have your data dialed in and you are tracking everything every week, I would highly recommend that you grossly underestimate how much you sell so that when you are creating these metrics, when you’re asking these questions, you can ask a question that presupposes the worst case scenario, not the best case scenario, so that even if you hit that worst case scenario, you will still meet your financial goal.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:13] If you plan based on the best case scenario and then stuff goes wrong as it always does, you will not meet the goal. OK, after we know how many sales conversations we have to have, that tells us how many schedule appointments we need to have, right, so we have to then look to the scheduling rate of whomever is scheduling appointments for us. So that could be an intake professional. You might not have a full time intake professional. So that could be your onsite reception company. If you have someone on site, it could be a shared role between secretary and intake or reception and intake. Always the worst combo, by the way. Don’t put reception and intake together. Reception needs to get on the phone with people as quickly as possible, putting an intake, potential client on hold so that you can answer the phone. Very, very, very, very unsatisfactory customer service experience. OK. So once you figure out I need to have let’s say, I need to have three conversations a week in order to get to one client, OK, I have a thirty three percent conversion rate.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:20] I’ve got to talk to three folks to get to one, which means you’ve got to have three people scheduled each week. Well, then the next question is how many calls are coming into your office or points of contact? Sometimes people will make contact on a website or a live chat or social media, but how many opportunities do you have to get people scheduled for consultations in your office if you need to talk to three people in a week? Or are five people calling the office? Are fifteen people calling the office? Are ten people calling the office? Right. You know how many people are calling the office or making some form of contact. That will tell you what percentage then are actually being scheduled. Because you know how many people are coming in and being put on your calendar. So you know how many prospects you actually are meeting with. And then you should be able to reverse engineer the scheduling rate by knowing how many people called your office that week. Again, something you should be tracking meticulously. If you’re not tracking it, most companies will now have some form of phone service, whether it’s actually the headset that you have that will keep a log of your calls or if you don’t have that, maybe you have a VoIP phone, your voice over Internet provider phone service that operates on wi-fi or or data online.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:47] If you have that, you might then be able to go in and look at the call roster to see how many of those are your actual clients versus your prospects. But the easiest thing to do is always to get a name and number when you are speaking to someone about potential representation so they can be segregated either in your CRM or if you don’t have a CRM, they can be segregated in your Excel spreadsheet, wherever you’re keeping the data. But you need to know how many scheduled appointments are required. And from there you need to know what your current scheduling rate is. The reason you need to know the scheduling rate is that you want to apply that percentage to the number of leads you are ultimately going to have. And that’s at the top of the funnel. How many leads are you ultimately going to have that call your office that are viable for representation, meaning they want to work with you and you want to work with them. So it needs to be somebody who has a case that you can actually handle. Right. If it’s a murder trial, going to, going to trial tomorrow, you’re probably not opting in for that. If it is a person who has a matter in another state and you’re not licensed in that state, you’re not opting in for that. Right. So you have to look at who are actually those who need the service that you offer and how many of those are viable, but those are essentially the areas that you’re going to evaluate.

 

Allison Williams: [00:28:08] And only after you have gotten a handle on those numbers should you be looking to go out and buy more leads. Because when you say I want to make X dollars, buying more leads is the most expensive route to go about the process of getting to X dollars. The easiest way, the least expensive way is to alter something in your funnel that is already within the purview and control of the people running the funnel to make sure that you get to that result. So it could be that the person conducting sales, typically the lawyer, but not always. That the person conducting sales is actually improving the rate at which they convert people. So if you start off with needing three people and you met with six. Fifty fifty is your current conversion rate. Let’s say you increase that. Let’s say instead of closing three out of six, you closed four out of six. If you closed four out of six, you now have a higher conversion rate. That conversion rate carries over on average. So you want to be thinking about it from that perspective and you want to be thinking about do I need to improve my sales conversion rate? Do I need to improve my scheduling rate? Right. Some of you don’t have an intake professional trained and skilled in the area of getting people to schedule consultations.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:35] And if you don’t, that can often create its own nightmare because you spent all this money on all these leads to come in and the people get on the phone and have a limp noodle kind of handshake feeling when they speak to your intake professional. And that leads to only a very small fraction being scheduled when they otherwise might have been inclined to schedule had they had the right person, with the right training, having the right conversation, saying the right things, overcoming objections. So this is how we make a plan for what we want to create. We start with the actual dollar amount that we want to create and we walk ourselves backward. Now, if you are somebody who needs help with this, if this is something that isn’t intuitive to you, it doesn’t just come to mind. I want X dollars. I need to know how many sales conversations I have to have in order to accomplish that. Based on my average face value, I need to know what is my current conversion rate? Do I need to improve it? I need to know how many lives I’m scheduling. What is the current scheduling rate? Do I need to improve it? What is the likelihood of actually improving those things? What are the resources needed to improve those things? And ultimately, how much do I need to acquire in Leeds in order to accomplish my financial goal? If that doesn’t make intuitive sense to you, that’s OK.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:56] You’re in the majority there, but we’re here to help you so you can always reach out to us here at Law Firm Mentor. You can join us in the Law Firm Mentor Facebook group and you can always schedule a free consultation where we can talk to you about what is the actual need that you have to accomplish your financial goal and how do we consistently and repeatedly increase that goal. But the goal is always going to be tied to what it is that you actually want. All right. I am Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor everyone. And I will see you on the next episode of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:43] Thank you for tuning in to the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. To learn more about today’s guests 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, and join the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firm and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day.