RJon Robins’ superpower is clarification and survival. The founder of “How to Manage a Small Law Firm”...
Christopher T. Anderson has authored numerous articles and speaks on a wide range of topics, including law...
Published: | January 18, 2016 |
Podcast: | Un-Billable Hour |
Category: | Practice Management |
As a youngster, when someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, how did you respond? Did you tell them that you wanted to be the CFO of a mediocre law firm that does just enough to get by? With so many resources out there, it’s difficult to grasp why so many law firm owners are settling for only doing as much as is necessary to pay the bills. Lawyers should be using their businesses to help as many people as possible, including themselves.
In this episode of The Un-Billable Hour, Christopher Anderson interviews small law firm business expert RJon Robins about how to balance seven parts of a law firm business to make it work for you, and not the other way around. While many firms seem to be focused on doing just well enough to get by, RJon Robins is urging legal professionals to take a different approach. He believes that you should set up your law firm as a means to make you happy, and that doing so will create revenue as a byproduct. Christopher and RJon take an in-depth look at the seven parts of every law firm and the ways in which they should be synthesized in order to reach professional and personal goals. These parts consist of marketing, sales, production, people, the physical plant, financial controls, and you, the firm’s owner. Ultimately, RJon says, your business should be a manifestation of who you are. In closing, RJon tells listeners where they can find complimentary resources to help them implement these changes.
RJon Robins is the founder of How to Manage a Small Law Firm whose tagline is “Happy lawyers make more money. And broke lawyers don’t do anyone any good… least of all their clients, their families, or themselves.” He acts as an outside CEO for thousands of small and solo firms across the country, assisting them through all stages of growth and walking clients through his approach to the seven parts of their law firm business.
Un-Billable Hour: The Seven Parts of Your Law Firm Business – 1/21/2016
Advertiser: Managing your law practice can be challenging. Marketing, time management, attracting clients and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you’ll need from expert guests, and host Christopher Anderson. Here, on Legal Talk Network.
Christopher Anderson: Welcome to the Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast, helping attorneys achieve more success. We’re glad you can listen today on the Legal Talk Network. I’m your host, Christopher Anderson and I am an attorney with a singular passion for helping other lawyers be more successful with their law firm businesses. I work directly with lawyers across the country to help them achieve success as they define it. In the Un-Billable Hour, each month we explore an area important to growing revenues, giving you back more of your time and or improving your professional satisfaction in one of the key areas of your business. I am an attorney who has built and managed law firms in Georgia and New York City, created innovative software for lawyers at LexisNexis, and I work now with hundreds of lawyers to help them grow professionally and personally. Your law firm business should exist to provide for the financial, personal, and professional needs of you, its owner. In this program, I have a chance to speak to you as I do in presentations across the country about what it takes to build and operate your law firm like the business that it is. I have the chance to introduce you to a new guest each month to talk about how to make that business work for you instead of the other way around. Today’s episode of the Un-Billable Hour is the secen parts of your law firm business. The seven parts of your law firm business is a topic taught by RJon Robins to lawyers all across the country. And RJon and I actually work together to help lawyers achieve these levels of success for their business. And RJon’s going to walk us through how these seven parts of every law firm business work together and if you put them into balance, how they help a business work for you. RJon Robins founded How to Manage a Small Law Firm back in 2009 and has been working with small law firms across the country ever since helping them to achieve doubling, tripling, quadrupling their revenues. But all at the same time, giving them more control of their personal lives and helping them achieve the professional accomplishments that have evaded them up until then. Without further ado, let me bring RJon Robins; welcome to the show.
RJon Robins: Hi Chris, thanks so much for having me here.
Christopher Anderson: You’re very welcome, it’s very exciting to have you on the Un-Billable Hour and to talk to listeners about the seven parts of a law firm and how they work together. Before we get started on that, I gave you a very brief introduction. Can you just elaborate a little bit on your business and how it helps lawyers?
RJon Robins: Sure, and thanks for giving me the opportunity to do so. The business is called How to Manage a Small Law Firm. Our tagline is happy lawyers make more money, and there’s a misconception among our fellow attorneys – I’m an attorney also – that you struggle and you suffer and you sacrifice and you go through all of this in order to achieve some sort of arbitrary financial goal that you set out for yourself at one time. You get to that goal and all of a sudden, you’re supposed to be happy. But that’s not the way it works in the real world. The way it works in the real world is you build a law firm as a business into something that can help you share your message with the world, that can help you help more people. That could help the clients have a better life by helping them solve their legal problems. By helping your staff have a better life by advancing their career and making their lives better by doing a great job for you in making a profit for your firm and that’s how they earn their income and get their raises. To give you and your family a better life. And when you build your business the right way and it works for you, a byproduct of it is it makes a profit. But it’s the business working the way it’s supposed to be working that empowers you to do the work you really enjoy most and do good in the world. That ultimately is really what makes us happy, the business of serving your financial and your personal and your professional goals. You get up and you keep going. And the byproduct of the whole thing is the profits. So How to Manage a Small Law firm was basically created with the idea of liberating my fellow attorneys by teaching the best practices when it comes to the business of running a law firm so the law firm can make us happy and profitable.
Christopher Anderson: Fantastic. So let’s roll right into understanding what each of those parts is to help the listeners just get a taste for what goes into making a successful law firm business that can lead them to be a more happy lawyer. So what’s the first part of a good law firm business?
RJon Robins: As you mentioned, the seven main parts of every successful law firm, and it’s important that everyone understands that these are the same seven main parts of every unsuccessful law firm, too. They’re the same seven main parts. The difference between what you find when you go into a successful solo or a small law firm versus a solo or a small law firm where the owner is struggling financially or working too many hours, unpredictable cash flow, unpredictable flow of prospective new clients where they feel pressured to take crazy clients who they know they shouldn’t be taking, and all those other kinds of problems that go with an unsuccessful law firm. The differences that greets with the seven main parts are understood, identified, planned out and kept in alignment. It’s the same with a successful law firm or unsuccessful law firm. Do you want me to cover what they are?
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, I think what you said was a great correction to what I said because I said what are the 7 parts of a good law firm. But it’s really important to understand they’re always there, they’re just not always in balance. So let’s lay them out and then let’s spend just a couple of minutes on what each one is and how they work together.
RJon Robins: Sure, I’d be happy to do that. But first I just want to mention that a lot of people think that these 7 main parts of a law firm are somehow prescribed by HowToManageASmallLawFirm.com. They’re not prescribed by us, they’ve been observed by us over the past 12 or 15 years with thousands upon thousands upon thousands of law firms that we’ve worked with. We’re reporting what we’re observing. We’re not telling you that this is the way it should be, we’re just telling you this is just the way we observe that it is. The 7 main parts are the marketing, number two is the sales, number three is the production – that’s where and how the process is, the systems, procedures, the templates, how the work gets done so that it doesn’t ruin your life. Number 4 is the people, the people you’ve got to have working with you to help you get the work done. The physical plan is number five. We’ll get into the specifics of what the physical plan is later. Number 6 is the financial controls of the law firm, and number 7 is really you, as the owner of the firm. You are the 7th main part. So it’s marketing, sales, production, people, physical plan, financial controls, and you as the owner. Those are the 7 main parts.
Christopher Anderson: Excellent, can we start with marketing?
RJon Robins: We can start anywhere you’d like.
Christopher Anderson: Okay, let’s do that. Let’s begin with marketing and why is marketing a part and how is it important to the operation of a successful law firm.
RJon Robins: The most crucial part of the success of a law firm is actually the sales, because if you’re not converting prospective clients into paying clients, you’re going to go out of business. But marketing is what brings a prospective client to the door in the first pace. So what we see happening, if the marketing isn’t done in a systematic, organized, thoughtful, intelligent way, what happens is the clients come and they go and they come and they go and they come and they go and herky jerky, in and out, in and out, on and off, on and off. It’s like driving in a car with someone who keeps hitting the gas, hitting the brakes, hitting the gas, hitting the brakes; it drives you crazy. What happens is if the sales process is being fed a supply of prospective new clients in this way. The sales process starts to not have the opportunity to be selective about who to accept or not accept as a client. And what you end up with is oh my god, we’re desperate for business. So even though this person who’s come in the door is clearly a bad client, clearly an F client with an F case or matter and they’re just giving off all the bad vibes, we’ve got to take them anyway because we’ve got to make payroll at the end of the week or we’ve got to make the rent at the end of the month or whatever. And it’s all because the marketing is not being done in a smooth, consistent, predictable, reliable, methodical way. Marketing is everything that gets done to deliver prospective new clients to the door.
Christopher Anderson: It’s interesting, most people think about of marketing – like what you said – to bring clients to the door. But having it be consistent really impacts a sale’s ability to be successful.
RJon Robins: It gives you the freedom. It empowers you and it gives you the confidence to be able to confidently decline cases and matters when you know you ought to decline cases and matters. Marketing is everything that gets done to bring the right kind of prospective client to the door in the right quantity, at the right time, in the right frame of mind so that they’re pre qualified, prescreened, pre educated. And ultimately, if you do this right, either the prospective new client arrives already predisposed to hire to firm, which makes the whole sales process much more enjoyable for all concerns. Of course, to create a marketing plan, a coherent marketing plan that brings the right kind of prospective clients to the door, you have to first take the time to be thoughtful and identify and define in writing, what is the right type of client for this law firm. And just as importantly, what is the description of the wrong kind of prospective client for this law firm. Because if you can’t describe the right kind of clients and the wrong kind of clients, then you’re never going to be able to delegate any part of the process to anyone else and you’re always going to be stuck in the middle of it, yourself, as the owner of the firm. And that’s a recipe for not being a happy lawyer if you have to be stuck in the middle of the marketing all of the time.
Christopher Anderson: That really makes a lot of sense and it sounds like we could probably do an entire show or series of shows just on that one concept.
RJon Robins: You know, we do live quarterly meetings and all of our members, we function as the outside CEO for hundreds of law firms all over the country; solo lawyers in all the different stages of growth engage our services and function as the CEO of their law firm because they understand that every business needs to have a CEO and they didn’t teach us anything in law school about how to be the CEO of a business in our law firm. So once a quarter, we bring all of our members together and about once a year we devote the entire live quarterly meeting to the subject of nothing but marketing.
Christopher Anderson: Wow, and probably only getting still part of it.
RJon Robins: There’s a lot to this.
Christopher Anderson: So that we get all seven parts in the time that we’ve got, you mentioned that marketing at the end of the day is about getting the rights kinds of clients, the kinds that you want to work with to the doors in a consistent way so that sales can make the choices that they should make. Talk to us a little bit about what that is. What is sales?
RJon Robins: Sales is the process of converting a prospective client into a paying client. And I just want to say one last thing about marketing before we shift over to sales. One thing that marketing is supposed to do for the business is to keep the wrong kinds of prospective clients out of the sales process so that the sales process doesn’t get choked by meeting with the wrong kind of prospective new clients. If you’re the person on the front line meeting with prospective new clients at the marketing process and delivering and the marketing process is delivering unfiltered prospective new clients to you. It can be very, very not fun, let’s just say. It can be very demoralizing to get to the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of the month. You’re just burnt out because you’re meeting with the wrong kinds of people and the wrong kinds of cases and the wrong kinds of attitudes with wrong expectations. And they’re asking questions that would have and should have been answered and filtered out during the marketing process, And you are going dull; all of your brilliance, all of your energy, all of your enthusiasm. It’s like using a wonderful sword as a hammer and going at it with every single blow against the iron and that’s what it’s like.
Christopher Anderson: Probably at some point, after meeting with enough of the wrong types of clients, you tend to take some.
RJon Robins: Well, you get desperate for cash flow and the next thing you know, you’re taking someone you know you shouldn’t be taking. What happens is you get so worn out from just meeting this deluge of the wrong kind of prospective new client that you stop and lose your edge. I don’t know how to say it. You lose your edge and you stop noticing the telltale signs of a crazy person. Or you start getting so jaded that you say, “Oh, everyone’s a crazy person,” and you’re not able to really, truly enjoy the rewards, the personal satisfaction and the joy of really connecting with a prospective client and helping them find a solution to their problem. If one of the most rewarding things to do in life is to help someone find a solution to a problem that’s really bothering them or help them find a way to take advantage of an opportunity that could really improve their lives. And this is one of the great joys of sales; the problem, of course is number one, they didn’t teach us anything in law school about sales. Everyone thinks that “sales” is like a dirty word because they think that selling is something you do to a client instead of something you do for a client or for another person. And number three, if the sales is coming at the end of a poorly designed, poorly managed, maybe nobody really took the time, maybe no one has ever even taken the time to pour it all out on a flow chart of a marketing process, then the sales can never be fun because it basically becomes a process of shifting through garbage to find the gold.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah. So let’s take just a couple of minutes to describe. You’ve described sales as the process of turning these prospectives into actual clients, and you described it as something we do for our clients. Can you talk about that a little more deeply? What do you mean by selling “for” our clients?
RJon Robins: Sadly, tragically – and I mean that, sincerely – there are hundreds of thousands of lawyers running around out there right now who have never taken a real class in their life on how to sell. And we have a whole workshop on the mindset of selling and then we have all kinds of programs on the technical skills of how to sell consistently, predictively, reliably, in a way that makes you feel good, it makes the client feel good. And sales is a very simple process. It’s very simply a process of helping people find clarity about where they are today in terms of their financial situation, in terms of their personal situation, in terms of their professional situation. Help them find clarity today in terms of their money, help them find clarity today in terms of where they are, in terms of their time, and in terms of their reputation. And every client who comes to see a lawyer is concerned about at least these three things – they might be concerned about more, but at the very least, their time, their money, and their reputation. And they’re not always equal and they’re not always in the same priority and they’re not always caring to say wait. But unless you help the prospective client to articulate to themselves and to you where they are in terms of their time, their money and their reputation. You’re not really in the position to help. And very often, if you can just help a person articulate and find clarity about where they are today so they’re not lost and confused, then you can help them weigh their options. Here are the different options that are available to you. Let’s think about the pros and the cons of each of these options. And that alone can give someone great relief and great joy. Chris, we’re renovating a building that we just acquired and we’re working with engineers and we’re working with general contractors. And the renovating process that the city has is tremendously confusing and intimidating to me, and I’m a pretty sophisticated person. But this is not my area of expertise, building permits. I find it very, very intimidating, I find it very, very uncomfortable; I’m like a fish out of water and we’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars that we’re dealing with in terms of renovation budgets. And it was such a joy to me and made my life feel better when I had a very simple consultation with a consultant who just helped me think through where I am today in terms of the project, because it was just out of control in my mind. And then helped me think through some options: we could take this option and it could take 6 months to a year and it would cost this much. We could take this option and it would take this much and cost that much. Or there was the third option that would be the highest expense, but it would be the fastest. And of course, to me, I value my time more than the money. When you know how to run a business, the money is easy to get. What you can’t get more of is time. And I’m beginning to start to suffer with my reputation with my team because I’ve got people sharing offices who ought not to be sharing offices and there’s going to be a mutiny pretty soon. So the point is, the engineer, the consultant, helped me think through my options and he helped me make my priorities so I could have confidence in making the decision. So when the time came for him to ask me to sign the engagement agreement, I was asking him when I could sign the engagement agreement because I was so eager to get started with the option that made the most sense to me because he educated me and he guided me through the process. He didn’t just jam it down my throat and tell me what I needed to do.
Christopher Anderson: Yeah, it totally makes sense to what you’re saying is the way that he was able to convert you into a client by simply helping you understand how working with him was going to make your life better.
RJon Robins: More specifically, he was able to convert me into an eager, enthusiastic client who I was really itching to pay him to get started with the process by helping me understand my own situation better and to help me understand my options and by demonstrating to me by the way he took me through the process that he was obviously the guy. By the time we were done, there was no doubt in my mind that he was the guy to help me because he was the guy that brought me clarity.
Christopher Anderson: So we’re talking about the 7 main parts of every law firm business and we’ve covered marketing and sales. And RJon, I’d like to take us right in to talk about the third part, and I think you told us that was the production.
RJon Robins: Yes, the productions are the processes, the checklist, the policies, the procedures that actually produces the work product that the law firm has sold to help the client. So the prospective new client comes through the marketing, they get converted from a prospective client into a paying client through the sales process, and now it’s time to actually produce the work product. And what you want to do with that is identify the menu items. Identify the sales keeping units. Identify the product that your business sells. And the more narrow you can define that, especially in the beginning stages as you’re growing a law firm, the easier – the more simple, I should say – the business is going to be. And for each of those processes, for each of those menu items, what you want to have is the list of ingredients and a recipe, and instructions. So step one, you crack the egg. Step two, you mix up the batter. Step three, you add a cup of sugar. Step four, you stick it into the oven at 350° for 45 minutes. And step five, cake comes out the other end. As difficult as this is to believe for other attorneys, you literally can make 80% of the work product in your business this systematic, organized and reliable. And the 80% requires total custom creativity. The good news is when you do this – what I’m describing with the 80% – it frees up so much time and so much energy to be really creative with the stuff that can’t be a system that ties that way. That’s what we mean by production.
Christopher Anderson: It allows the lawyer, the specialist, to really focus their creative time on that 20%.
RJon Robins: Exactly, instead of wasting their time and brilliance being the best stamp licker in the office.
Christopher Anderson: Indeed. So basically, what we’re talking about here is the third part that’s delivering the services that marketing promises and that sales converted the prospective client to receive.
RJon Robins: You got it.
Christopher Anderson: Excellent. So that’s production, what brings us the fourth part of the law firm? What is that?
RJon Robins: The fourth part of the law firm is the people. Every law firm has the following positions on staff, even a solo lawyer. Every law firm has a receptionist, a secretary, a paralegal, an associated, a rainmaker, a manager, a CEO, a COO, a CFO, a bookkeeper and an owner. Every law firm has these eleven positions on staff. The problem is that struggling law firms, what you find when you look back and look at what’s wrong and what’s going on is you discover that many of these positions are calling in sick a lot. And some of the people, when they come into work, they don’t have any documented processes and they don’t have any clear job descriptions, they don’t have any benefits of checklists. And all the things that we just talked about in the production, they don’t have. So when they come to work, they’re inefficient and they end up having to work late hours and work on the weekend and go home grouchy because they had to go to work somewhere where nobody really laid out or engineered for them how the job was supposed to get done. And just because you’re a solo lawyer sitting in your office by yourself, maybe still in the first stage of growth, does not excuse you from the responsibility to take the time to think through a document from different positions. And if you ever want to extricate yourself from the job of receptionist, then the first thing you better do is pretend like you’re really a separate person doing the job as a receptionist and then document that job so that when it comes time to hire the receptionist, you’ve got a package of a job description, a package you can plug that person into. And the same thing with the receptionist, and the secretary, and the paralegal and the associate and so on and so forth.
Christopher Anderson: Great. I was just going to ask you, because a lot of our listeners are going to be saying, “Hey, it’s just me here, it’s just me and my assistant. I don’t have 11 people working here.” What you’re saying is you’ve got the jobs.
RJon Robins: Do you want it to always be you? Do you want to never have anyone working for you? Do you want to always be in a position where you say you’re not getting ready to hire someone? If you want to extricate yourself from the job, then do the job as if it was someone else doing the job. Document how the job’s getting done and write down your instructions for how the job’s getting done. Make your checklist and then when you interview someone, you can understand, this is exactly the job that I’m going to plug this person into and this is how the job is supposed to make a profit for the law firm, and this is how the job is supposed to make a profit for the clients and this is how the job is supposed to make a profit for the owner of the firm.
Christopher Anderson: Fantastic. So the people work to make the production happen for the stuff that sales converted the clients to receive that marketing brought to the door. So marketing, sales, production and people. That’s four. What’s the fifth part?
RJon Robins: The fifth part is a physical plan. This is all the stuff that the people need to do the job that you’ve engineered for them to do. The obvious part of the physical plan is obviously the location, the chairs, the computers, the software. One of the parts of the physical plan that’s most important – and when the day comes that you’re going to get ready to sell your law firm, and everyone should be running their law firm as if they’re going to sell it some day. When that day comes, the most valuable part of the physical plan is actually going to be the processes, the policies, the systems, the procedures, the checklists, the written instructions for how things are supposed to get done. That’s got real market value in that part of the physical plan.That’s the intellectual property of the business, that’s why we put that in the category of physical plan. Physical plan also includes your marketing lists, your prospective new clients, your potential referral sources, your list of former clients who are your very best marketing source for your business, by the way.
Christopher Anderson: So at the end of the day, the physical plan is the tools that get used by the people to make the production happen.
RJon Robins: Which thus, production is necessary for delivering the work product that the sales has sold, that the marketing has brought in the prospective clients for.
Christopher Anderson: Excellent, alright. And then the sixth part up front when you described all seven parts had to do with the money and the metrics.
RJon Robins: Correct, financial controls and metrics. Every law firm ought to be operating with a written, twelve month, forward-looking budget. We go all over the country, we speak to thousands of lawyers who are struggling and having challenges, and we ask them, “Do you have a budget?” And some of them will just admit, “No, I don’t have a budget at all.” And some of them will say, “Yeah, yeah, I have a budget.” And then you start to look at what they have, and what they have is really a log. An historically record of what they’ve earned and what they spent. That is not what a budget is. A budget is a forward-looking tool. It projects your revenue from each month of the next 12 months. It projects your expenses in each category’s expense, each month to the next month. And people say, “Well how can I project my revenue?” And the answer is we go back to talking about the marketing plan. People who don’t understand how to predict and project their revenue are basically giving off a sign. It’s like a tell that they don’t have a marketing plan, that they don’t have a real sales system. If you have a marketing plan and a sales system, you are able to predict your revenues for the future.
Christopher Anderson: Excellent.
RJon Robins: Sixth is budget variance report. That’s the comparison between what you projected on the budget against what actually ended up happening with a percentage difference, and an understanding of why there was there a difference between what you projected versus what actually happened and understand the reasons why. That’s a budget variance report. And then you want to have a cash flow projection, an accounts receivable report, a cash position report, and a work in process report so you can value and put a number, evaluation, on the work that is in process now that’s not yet ready to be billed.
Christopher Anderson: And I know I’m going to have you back to go through all of those more in depth. Or maybe at the end, you could also give a way that some of our listeners can get some resources regarding this from your website, I see you have some of those out there. But let’s get to the couple of minutes we have left. The seventh main part you said is you, is the person, is the owner of the law firm. What do you mean by that? How is that part of the business?
RJon Robins: The business is ultimately going to be a manifestation of who you are and the business ultimately is never going to be able to grow bigger than your aspirations and your goals and your dreams and your willingness to actually make real plans. So it really all revolves around you as the owner and it exists to give you a better life. So it’s incumbent upon you therefore to take the time to think about what that better life really has to be for you to be happy. So we go around the country and we speak to thousands of lawyers every year. We’ve been doing this for many years so we’re talking to many tens of thousands of lawyers that we ask this question. It’s a very simple question, and very predictably, we get the wrong answer. Which is to say that people answer a different question than the question which we asked. And the question – which is a very simple question – is how do you want to live. How do you want to be living? What house do you want to be living in? What car do you want to be driving? What kind of vacations do you want to take? What kind of education do you want to be able to provide to your children? What kind of insurance do you want to provide to protect your family? What kind of savings do you want to enjoy? What kind of philanthropic activities do you want to be able to fund? How do you want to live? And the answer that we get is, “I can get by on this. I can make do with that. This is all I really need.” And there’s this whole mindset of doing without and sacrificing as if building a smaller, less successful law firm somehow is a safer bet. But in fact, a larger law firm, a million dollar law firm, does a lot more good for a lot more people than a struggling $200,000 law firm. And a million dollar solo law firm is actually easier to run than a $200,000 law firm, which nobody with a $200,000 law firm believes, but it’s still true.
Christopher Anderson: It seems counterintuitive, right? It sounds like a lot more work.
RJon Robins: It’s a lot less work for the owner of a million dollar solo law firm because the owner of a million dollar solo law firm has about $500,000 of operating capital with which to buy leverage. The owner of a million dollar solo law firm have associates to handle the hearings. The owner of a million dollar solo law firm has a paralegal to do a whole bunch of preliminary work. The owner of a million dollar solo law firm has an executive assistant to take a lot of the routine stuff off of his or her back. The owner of a million dollar law firm has a marketing budget and someone to help them execute the marketing budget to bring a steady stream of prospective clients into the door. And so therefore, the owner of a million dollar law firm has a lot more energy and a lot more time and a lot more enthusiasm to do the things that only the owner of a million dollar law firm can do; to live in your unique brilliance. Which ultimately is what’s going to make you the most happy and it’s also what’s going to make you the most money. So it’s actually easier to run a million dollar law firm than it is to run a $200,000 law firm. And you can get from $500,000 to a million faster than you can get from $250,000 to $500,000. Just like you can get from $250,000 to $500,000 in gross revenues faster than you can get from 0 to $250,000 a revenue. Because as you go, the whole business starts to gain momentum and you start to gain more resources with which you can grow the firm faster and buy leverage.
Christopher Anderson: Well clearly, I’m going to have to figure out a way to get you to come back on and talk about some of this stuff more deeply because those are amazing concepts that you can actually grow a law firm from 0 to $250,000 to $500,000 more quickly and then do a million from there or even more quickly. And I’m sure the listeners would love to hear more about that. However, we’re at the end of our time. RJon, what I’d like to ask you to do is to give – until the time we can get you to give more of this information on this show – where can users find out more information about growing their law firm and about how to manage a small law firm?
RJon Robins: We have some complimentary resources available for listeners of your show available on our website, and they’re organized based on the stage of growth that their law firm is in. So if any of your listeners want, go to HowToManageASmallLawFirm.com. If your revenues are still in the first stage of growth, 0 to $250,000. There are some resources specifically to help you address those challenges of growing a firm for that stage of growth. And the second stage of growth, $250,000 to $500,000 and $500,000 to a million and over a million, there are some very specific resources to address those specific things at the website, HowToManageASmallLawFirm.com.
Christopher Anderson: Fantastic. And that wraps up this edition of the Un-Billable Hour, the law business advisory podcast. Our guest today, again, has been RJon Robins of How To Manage A Small Law Firm. And as he said, more information for our listeners and some complimentary materials are available at HowToManageASmallLawFirm.com. This is Christopher Anderson and I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest as we learn more about great topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. Remember that you can subscribe to all the editions of this podcast at LegalTalkNetwork.com or on iTunes. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you again soon.
Advertiser: The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own, and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by, Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer. Thanks for listening to the Un-Billable Hour, the law practice advisory podcast. Join us again for the next edition, right here with Legal Talk Network.
[End of Transcript]
Notify me when there’s a new episode!
Un-Billable Hour |
Best practices regarding your marketing, time management, and all the things outside of your client responsibilities.