Law Firm Growth Is No Accident

Episode Notes

Transcript

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Intro: 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. 

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Welcome to this edition of the Un-Billable Hour. The law practice advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guest and host, Christopher Anderson, here on Legal Talk Network. 

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Christopher Anderson: Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson.

Today’s episode is about law firm growth with revenues, but also things that you need to take care within the growth because today my guest is a lawyer with tremendous amount of experience; over 30 years building his own, two of them, seven figure law firms, and now he also shares his knowledge and experience with attorneys across the country helping them experience exponential growth in their law firms including really importantly, because growth is kind of pointless without increased profits which he helps as well as ethical market preeminence. So, we’re going to hear what he has to say about all of that. The title of the show is, “Law Firm Growth Is No Accident.” And my guest, if you haven’t guessed already, is Ken Hardison. He’s the founder of PILMMA, which is, the Powerful Innovated Lawyers Marketing & Management Association which has dedicated itself to helping lawyers learn the critical strategies to success. But before we hear more from Ken, we have to do a little business, and hear a word from our sponsors.

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Scorpion is the leading provider of marketing solutions for the legal industry. With nearly 20 years of experience serving attorneys, Scorpion can help you grow your practice. Learn more at scorpionlegal.co.

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Christopher Anderson: And today’s episode of the Un-Billable Hour is, “Law Firm Growth Is No Accident.” And once again I am very pleased to introduce my guest, Ken Hardison. Ken is a trusted advisor, a coach, he’s a mastermind mentor, he’s been coaching lawyers to greater success time, and time again. He teaches lawyers on the latest legal management, and marketing strategies such as, leveraging SEO or search engine optimization, PPC or pay-per-click, PPL, I’ll ask him what that means. Social media, et cetera. Ken is also the host of his own podcast called the grow your law firm podcast, and author of the best-selling books, “Systematic Marketing” and “Under Promise, Over Deliver.” Ken, welcome to the program.

Ken Hardison: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here my friend.

Christopher Anderson: It is absolutely my pleasure to have you. So, my intros are notoriously short, and inadequate. So, if you wouldn’t mind Ken, just let’s start by understanding your background. What brought you to be helping other lawyers grow their business?

Ken Hardison: Yeah, that’s a long story, but I’ll try to make it short.  Bottom line is, first 14 years, I was just like every other lawyer just doing the best I could, getting by with no marketing, no management just people come in, referrals, whatever, and a couple of things happened, my business started going down, I went to Court one day, and saw this gentleman that I was representing on DWII with crutches and I said, “What happened, Joey?”  He said, “I got t-boned by an 18-wheeler.” I said, “Well, I do those cases.”  He said, “Yes.” But I hired this guy off tv because I figured he must be good, and very upsetting because I knew the lawyer, he never tried a case in his life.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: But really, a great marketer. And so, I went, and I tried this DWI. I want it, I went back to my office, talked to my two partners, and they told me that we had to change, that things were changing, and they wouldn’t agree with me. So, about six months, I went out and started my own law firm, and took one lawyer, and two staff, maybe three staff, and had to start from scratch.

Christopher Anderson: Wow, yeah.

Ken Hardison: Yeah, and so, that was in like, ’96-’97, and I studied went around the country, shadowing different successful lawyers going to different events and had nothing to do with law firms.  Reading every book, you could read, and we grew it from that in like six years, to like 13 lawyers, 47 staff. And even got it going better, and then one morning I just woke up to be honest with you, and I’m kind of entrepreneurial, and I said, “, I want to do something else. I’m not looking forward to going into office today.” And so, I sold out, and I moved down to the beach, and I thought, I was going to just take it easy, and lawyers were calling me all over the country, emailing me, asking for advice, and I said, “I need to start charging for this.” And plus, the deal was, I was getting bored. I can’t pay for so much golf plate and fees so much.  and so, I started PILMMA, and it just kind of took off. First, it was kind of like a hobby, but now, it’s got to be a big business. I mean, it’s a seven-figure business too, and then when I got down here, somebody said, “Well, you had a lot of money when you started your own firm,” and I didn’t have that much money but I did go out, and get a big line of credit.  So, I started another firm just with $6,000 a month that’s my budget for marketing, and grew it about 800 cases, 7 or 800.  And then, we sold it after about two years. I proved you don’t have to have loads of money. I mean, you can do it a lot quicker with loads of money, but you really need to do it smarter. So, that’s kind of my background, and now, I’ve got it. I’ve been in masterminds on my whole life either, or I’m into right now, and then, I facilitate five different ones, and I like coaching. I just like really helping lawyers grow their practices. I mean, because they don’t teach you that in law school, and believe me, I didn’t have anybody to teach me. I had to learn about trial and error that costs you a lot of money, a lot of money.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah, and I think I really love the story about the second firm, about the fact that, you started it on $6,000 a month in marketing.

Ken Hardison: Yeah.

Christopher Anderson: There’s a great book by Damon John the title is, escaping me at the moment it’s like, “The Power of Broke.” I think is what the title is, but anyway, Damon John doesn’t have that many books, and this one’s good. But I think, the fact that you did that was a great proving ground for the people who want to say that, “Yeah, Ken Hardison’s got a big firm because Ken Hardison has a big firm, and I have a little firm, so I can’t be Ken Hardison.” It’s bullshit. You don’t need the big resources, you don’t need a lot of money like you said, and in fact, I think sometimes when I’ve seen it happen, a lot of money is sometimes a recipe for making a lot of big mistakes, and losing a lot of money.

Ken Hardison: Yeah, especially when you just try to grab the next shiny thing, and that’s what I see.

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: And that’s what lawyers do, they’re looking for the “silver bullet”, and it doesn’t exist. If it does exist, I would have found it long ago, and sold it. I mean, there is no one thing. There’s a lot of things. When I was marketing my big firm, I was doing 32 different things to market the firm. Some costs zero, some cost, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah. Because the truth though is, we look out there, there’s hundreds of thousands of solo, small law firms, two to three lawyers, four lawyers, five lawyers, two lawyers, and most of them don’t figure it out, and they think there’s a big secret. But it’s really more about what’s keeping them back. So, what would you say like, the three biggest things are that are holding law firm owners back from growing or scaling their own law practices?

Ken Hardison: Well, one of the biggest things is your mindset because lawyers are trained to think about, and analyze, what can go wrong instead of, how you can do how you can get over the obstacle. They’re looking for land mines all the time, and well, “We can’t do this because of this, or we can’t do that.” You got to reverse that mindset. Mindset is, “What if, why can’t.” And then really, the other two big deals or three big deals is, you don’t have the right people. You cannot do it by yourself.  You’ve got to find people. Verne Harnish said, it really great in his book, “Scaling” No great company will ever build on the back of average employees.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And I’ve always let my ego go, and hire people that were a lot smarter than I am, and it didn’t bother me. Some lawyers can’t do that. If your ego is so big, you can’t do that then you’re never going to grow. I can tell you that. And then execution, and that’s where I see most lawyers, they want to do it, and then they say, “I’m just so busy. I can get to it.” And my deal is, we all do everything that we really, really, want to.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: When you really want to do it, you make time to do it. So, do you really want it bad enough? Here’s the bottom line, do you really want it bad enough?  And then you got to have cash flow. We can talk about that later, but I think, the big deal is, probably the top two is execution, and implementation, and mindset. I mean I think what really holds people back is, they’re looking ways for it not to work instead of ways for it to work.

Christopher Anderson: I got it, and to your point, I mean, I think actually one of the last points you made, kind of goes across of them because I don’t know about you but let me just do a quick test; how many hours are in each of your days? I have 24 in mine. How many do you have?

Ken Hardison: I have 24.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah. And you have seven days weeks like me?

Ken Hardison: Yep.

Christopher Anderson: And so, we each have 168 hours, as does every single lawyer listening, and every single lawyer out there. So, I think, the point that you made was like, being busy, like everybody’s busy. Everybody is fully booked every day, every minute of every day, people are doing something.  You might be playing, but I don’t know, Diamond Dash or crystal game or whatever or being on Facebook or watching television or like you said, playing golf. But you’re doing something, and so really, the question it sounds like, what you’re saying is basically like, it’s about choosing what you’re using that time to do, and making better choices.

Ken Hardison: I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve been coaching lawyers for over 10 years now, and I’ve seen in a lot of masterminds, and I can tell you, there’s seriously successful lawyers or any kind of business people, they got two big traits characteristics: they’re very focused, and they’re very disciplined. What I mean by that is, if you think about it, if you’re focused on something, your goal and you’re kind of driven, you’re not going to let anything get in the way, and that you’re not going to have that excuse, “Well, I didn’t have time.” And then if you got the discipline to get it done, and that you’re not going to let any obstacles get in your way. I mean, I still have this with appeal for somebody, say, “Ken, there’s no way we can do this.”  I said, “Oh, but there is my friend.” I said, “We are going to get it done, and we are going to get it done by this date, and here’s how we’re going to do it.” And I don’t if we got to hire some people, then we’ll hire some temps. But the deal is, you’ve got to have be very laser-focused and disciplined. And then the deal is, what I say to a lot of lawyers is, and I don’t like you call it management of time anymore, but the deal is, they don’t use their time properly. What I’m saying is, I call them “time vampires” and they let people suck the life out you. I’ve got several things I teach at PILMMA, and one of them is, about, the got some minutes.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: They’ll kill you. I mean, especially if you’re the head of the firm, and you’re walking down the hallway, you’ll get 20 of them, before you get to the end of the hall, and you got to stop that. I don’t want to get that all in the day-to-day, because that’s a whole 30 minutes, that’s criminal.

Christopher Anderson: You mentioned Verne Harnish, I wanted just to say if you remember this because I was like, that just triggered a memory, and that your thought about these got some minutes, but Verne Harnish in scaling up, talks about I think it’s Charles Schwab was having trouble in his early days, getting focused in getting things done in his business.  Do you remember that story?

Ken Hardison: I don’t.

Christopher Anderson: Well, I tell it, and you comment on it. But basically, he hired a consultant, and the consultant, the advice he got, and the consultant’s deal was, “I’ll give you the advice, and you use it for a little while, and then you write me check for whatever you think it was worth.”  And this is like 1971, 1972, and the consultant’s advice was simply, “Write a list in order of the most important things you need to get done tomorrow. So, do this at the end of the day.” And then tomorrow morning get to work, and don’t allow anything or anyone to talk to you or interrupt you until you get number one done. That was it, that was the whole advice. And he said, because if most people would just get the most important thing done each day, they’ll be way ahead of others.

Ken Hardison: Absolutely.

Christopher Anderson: Does that sound symbolical with what you’re talking about?

Ken Hardison: Yeah. What I do every day, and I still do it to this day, I’ve got a checklist of things to do, and I got one that I’m writing new things on, and I got one that I’m marking out the things, but if at the end of the day, I sit down, and I rank them, with a’s, b’s, and c’s. A’s I got to get done the next day, and then just something I want to get done the first thing it becomes a double A, and then, what you got to do is like, I tell these lawyers, “You got to make an appointment with yourself.”  The deal is, instead if you’ve got to do it before you get into office, and do it or you go in the office, you shut yourself up, and have an hour by yourself or whatever, and just tell people don’t bother me unless the building is on fire. I mean that’s the bottom line.

Christopher Anderson: That’s exactly right.

Ken Hardison: ?

Christopher Anderson: So, we’re going to take a moment here, and get this show paid for by having a word from our sponsors. When we come back, I’m going to try to shift a little bit with you, and start talking because you made a couple comments as we went about not being able to build a great business with average team, and so I want to talk to you about getting A players on your team, and on other lawyers’ teams, but first we’ll hear a word from our sponsors.

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Christopher Anderson: We’re back with the Un-Billable Hour. We’re talking to Ken Hardison. He’s the founder of PILMMA, which is, The Powerful Innovated Lawyers Marketing & Management Association. We’ve been talking about mindset first of all, just what some of the things that are holding lawyers back, and how to kind of get on top of your day, and not succumb, and I’ll just go out there and say the word, “excuse” that you’re too busy, because we’re all equally busy. Everybody’s day is fully booked. It’s just a matter of doing the things that are most important. But in the first segment, Ken talked about not being able to build a great business on average team players.  So, want to talk to you about that Ken.  So, what do you mean by that, and I think a lot of lawyers feel plagued by having a team that’s not the one they would want or not the one they hoped they’d have or just, they feel like it’s not supporting them, but they’re not able to do better? What do you mean by that, and how do you do better?

Ken Hardison: Yeah. I think what they do is they set mediocrity, and I think if you want to build a big business, whether it’s a law firm or anything, you cannot do that. Yeah, what I mean by this is you want people, you want as many A players as you can get because A players are going to do about one and a half to two times more than your B or your C players, and people say, I can’t afford these people, but you can’t afford not to get them because if you can get them to do twice as much work, you can pay them one, and a half times more, and still come out ahead, right?

Christopher Anderson: Right, right.

Ken Hardison: And the deal is, you want these as many as you can get. It’s going to be hard to get all A players, but you definitely don’t want any C’s, and B’s, you want those coachable where you can see some possibilities of growth into an A player. And so, Patrick Lencioni wrote a book or several books, one of them “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” and the other one is, “The Ideal Team Player.” And he said there’s three characteristics you want to look for in an A player:  they got to be hungry, and that don’t mean just hungry for money, but hungry for advancement, knowledge, growth, individual growth. And they got to be humble. I mean, they got to be confident, but they can’t think they know it all. What I’m saying is, they can’t have an ego so big that you can’t get a word in edgewise. And then they got to be smart, but not the kind of smart you think about not an IQ smart, but people smart. I call it being able to deal with people, and intertwine, and have interpersonal relationships with your co-workers. I’ve seen this. I’ve had to fire somebody who was brilliant, but he was an asshole to deal with. He was just rude to people, and I said, “You just don’t talk to people like that. I don’t care how smart you are.” Really when it comes down to, I don’t care who you are or how much, if you don’t fall in those three categories, you’re not going to work for my business whether, it’s a law firm or PILMMA or whatever it is.

Christopher Anderson: Sure.

Ken Hardison: And because I would suggest everybody go out and read that book, and then if you want to read the five dysfunctions, but Patrick Lencioni, he writes the book, and its very easy read, it’s almost like the e-myth, and it’s like a story.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah, yeah, he writes in parable.

Ken Hardison: A parable, so to speak. So, it’s very easy read. Part of our deal your deal as a leader is, you should be training and coaching your people. And so, I make my people read a book. They can read it on my time, and we have a discussion about it at the end of the month, at our monthly meetings. And we’ve read both of those books, and so, then they get an idea of what I’m looking for, and when we’re hiring other people, what we’re looking for. Well, I think the big deal is, if you lose somebody, you think you got to replace them overnight, and the deal is, don’t do that.

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: I call it the knee jerk reaction. They will say, “it is hire slow, and fire fast.” Well, that really is true.

Christopher Anderson: Let me ask you about  the flip side of that because I often see this other question about, sometimes a lawyer will say, “This perfect person has come along but I don’t  have room for them right now.” What about, if you come across an A team player, what do you do?

Ken Hardison: You hire him.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: If I ever come across somebody like that, I make room for them because they’re so hard to find, Chris. And they’re so hard to keep, and that’s the other thing, you got to keep them. Once you get them, and to do that, you’ve got to give them opportunity for growth, and you’ve got to give them good feedback, and appreciate them. I see so many people say, “Well, I pay them a good salary.”  Well, that people want a lot more than that. They want to feel like they’re part of something bigger, which most lawyers are. They’re seeking justice.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And they’re trying to right wrongs, and things like that. So, lawyers have got that pretty much covered, but they also want to feel appreciated man. Money is not the number one reason people quit jobs. It’s number one is, there immediate supervisor being a butt, and number two is, not feeling appreciated. Monies like third or fourth down the road. 

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: People think it’s all about money, but it’s not. They say, it’s all about the Y Generation, or whatever, this generation. It does not matter who you are. Baby boomers feel that way. We all want them to feel. We all want to feel appreciated. Maybe some more than others, but it’s hard to put that team together. I mean I’m not going to lie about it, but if you do that, and then when you do like, you say, “If I come across somebody, even if you’re not looking, bring them in.” If you got to get rid of somebody, get rid of a B player or a C player.”

Christopher Anderson: Right, right.

Ken Hardison: I mean the deal is, they’re so hard to find. Grab them. I hired a girl one time that was working at a hotel, and I just knew that she was the one to be at my receptionist because she was just the best.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And I told her, I said, “I want to hire you.”  And I said, “whatever you’re making here, I’ll offer you more. I don’t know what it is.” I said, “but here’s my card, call me next week.” And I hired her.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah, absolutely. Perfect, and you also mentioned like, while you were talking about that, you should bring them on, and I totally agree with you on that. But you were also talking about as a leader, as an owner of a business. One of your biggest jobs is to continually train, and mentor your team, and I’ve heard some people say, “If I keep training them, they’re just going to find a better job. They’re going to leave. I think, one of the most common retorts is that, your alternative is to not train them, and have them stay.  But what are some of your  retention strategies? So, once you do get these A players, what’s a great way to keep them with you, and keep them engaged, and keep them being A players?

Ken Hardison: Yeah. Well, I think let them be involved.  I use the Rockefeller Habit/scaling up, and I teach that now. I actually got certified as a scaling up coach by Verne Harnish last year, and we’re real big on daily huddles, weekly meetings, monthly meetings. And he said, “I used to hate meetings, but I love the way they got them structured.” A lot of like, the dailies lasts seven minutes.” 

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: ”The weeklies lasts 45 minutes, the monthlies last about three hours.” But the deal is, you keep people involved, and then, like I was just saying, you let them know you appreciate what they’re doing. You do call outs. I call them call outs.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: If somebody does something that’s pushing our core values, which is another thing we could talk about for two or three days, but I used to think that was a bunch of crap too, but really core values are essential because we have them it’s just like we have a culture. It might not be the one you want, but you’ve got it in your law firm, and you can either mold it, or you can accept what you’ve got.

Christopher Anderson: Exactly.

Ken Hardison: But the deal is, you want to hire people that’s going to align with your core values, and it’s going to be a lot easier to deal with, but I think, the deal how you keep them is; you pay them good, you show them you appreciate them, you keep give them, and like to do what I call, gamification, and that’s kind of something that’s new out there.  We have quarterly little goals, and we do it. We have celebrations when we hit them, and it’s not all about money. I mean, it’s like I’ve told them, we got a membership drive. If we get this, and we come up with little things for it. We have a quarterly thing, and if we make it, then I’m going to take them all out whatever, to dinner or I’m going to send them some food baskets or whatever with this COVID going on. We got an annual goal where I told them, “If we meet it, we’re closing down. We’re going to the Caribbean for about four or five days.” So, the deal is, they got something to aspire to. They know you appreciate them; they see room that they can grow in your business, and you make it fun. I mean, and you keep them informed of what’s going on. It’s not to just show up, do your job, shut up.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: I like to get feedback. We do a monthly survey of our employees. I mean this is another thing you can do. If you’ve never heard about it, I’ve been doing surveys, but now I’m going to go to what they call the employee promoter net score. You can have the net promoter score for our customers, we’re getting ready to implement the net promoter score for employees.

Christopher Anderson: Oh, that’s cool.

Ken Hardison: But the deal is, you want to know, if you can find out, like one of the things we have like, on a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with your job? What is it that you want to learn or be better at? What is it that you feel like you’re not getting enough access to? You get feedback, so that you can keep these people, and make them happy because if they’re happy, they’re not going anywhere. 

Christopher Anderson: Yep.

Ken Hardison: And I know some of the lawyers, right, they’re going to say, “Hey, listen, I’m going write a check, they do what I say they do.” That’s fine, but you’re not going to get A players to stay with you if you got that attitude. It’s like a meal house, it’s not going to work. You’re not going to get A plus players that are professionals to stay with you because they’re looking something for more than just a job. I can promise you.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah, that makes total sense. All right.  We’re talking with Ken Hardison, he’s the founder of PILMMA, and we’ve been talking about the importance of mindset, and the importance of team in growing your law firm business, and having a business that works for you. We’re going to hear one more word from our sponsors, and Ken, when we come back, I want to shift gears again, and talk a little bit about execution. How the individual lawyer can get more things done in a year, and move their business forward. And if we’ve got a little bit of time, we’ll talked about cash flow as well. But first, we’ll hear from our sponsors.

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Christopher Anderson: We’re back with the Un-Billable Hour. Ken Hardison is the founder of PILMMA, the Powerful Innovated Lawyers Marketing & Management Association. We’ve been talking about all things to do with growing your law firm business, and doing so successfully without having necessarily having a whole ton of money to do it. We’ve talked about mindset, we’ve talked about the importance of an A team, and how to get them, when to get them, and how to keep them there. So, let’s circle a little bit back to, I don’t want to go back to the discussion of “I’m too busy” But rather, how can  lawyers do more with the time they’ve got? How can lawyers get more things done each year so they can stay on top of it in front of their law firm and get it moving?

Ken Hardison: Yeah, I think the big deal is, you’ve got to figure out.  This is what I think, and this is just my viewpoint. I think you got to figure out what you’re really good at, and kind of focus on that, and then hire people to do stuff you’re not good at, but that’s just the beginning because here’s what I used to fall into the trap. I’ve had these great ideas, I said, “Okay, we’re going to do this, this, and this, this year or maybe five things I wanted to do or eight things.” And then, I just trust my people to get it done, and then about in October or November, I think about, “Where are we at on this?” And everybody’s scurrying around. The deal is, the key to execution of course is, being clear with what you want, but I think, it’s all about accountability. As I often say, “People respect what you inspect.” And I don’t mean you got to be a micromanager by any means of imagination. You can do it with a weekly meeting about five to seven minutes.

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: That’s what we do. What I preach now is, I read this book, called, I think it’s a 12-week year, and I don’t really follow it a whole deal, but I got so many good nuggets set up. So, what we do now is, we figure out what our big annual goals are, but then we break it down, and “Okay, what are we going to do quarterly?”

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: But on top of everything else that we’re doing just to keep our daily tasks, and I’m really thinking quarterly, and chopping things up into quarterly, and in having, what I like to do, I’ll just tell you how I do it with PILMMA, and I think law firms ought to do; we have a workshop, we have quarterly meetings, and we have a workshop and we decide. Of course, I’m the dictator, benevolent dictator, I get to say what we are going to do, but I let them participate because I want to hear maybe they got an idea that I had not thought about. But we’ll pick three to five projects depending on how big they are that has nothing to do with our regular duties, —

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: — things that we want to try to accomplish, and sometimes we have to get outside people to come in to do it, but we still have somebody to hold them accountable.

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: And we figure out, “Okay, this is what we want to do, and we workshop it back and forth.” Everybody makes a list, I’ll put it on the board, we go through it, duh, duh, duh, but then, we come out, “Okay, this is our first project. Now everybody writes down, what individual tasks are going to be done, then we agree on that, then we agree on who’s going to do it, and then we agree on a date.” Okay, we just agreed on the whole quarter of what we’re going to do to get this project done, and everybody, and I always ask them, “Don’t tell me what you want me to hear, tell me what you can promise me you can get done on this date.” 

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: Because we can’t do the next thing till you get done with this, and I’ve built several houses, and I don’t know if you have Chris, but that’s the thing that are key on the house is a subcontractor promising to be there one day, 

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: but he’s there two weeks late, and then everybody else gets put off and, then they’ve got to go to other jobs, and then, a six-month job ends up being 14 months because people don’t do what they’re supposed to. They don’t show up at the time, they don’t get their tasks done, they don’t get the work done. So, what we do is a weekly scorecard where everybody, and we got a project management software that we use loosely. 

Christopher Anderson: Which one do you use?

Ken Hardison: Basecamp.

Christopher Anderson: Basecamp. Okay, got it. Okay.

Ken Hardison: Yeah. I don’t use it a lot. That’s one of my weakness to be honest with you, I’ve never been a technology guy. As we figured out when we were getting ready for this thing today, but I’ve always just hired people to do stuff like that. I mean, I don’t even know how to type.

Christopher Anderson: So, I mean, that goes back to what you were saying before about, “know what you’re good, and know what you like doing.”

Ken Hardison: Yeah, yeah.

Christopher Anderson: And then, you know what, you have a project. You don’t have to be a technologist, and I think this is really important for the lawyers to hear. You don’t have to be a technologist to implement project management software or case management software or anything because maybe that’s something for your team to do.

Ken Hardison: Yeah. I mean listen, I don’t even like managing. I mean you know, I got someone else who manages. I mean, I like leading, and I like being the visionary I like, believe it or not, I like writing a copy, which is probably not the best use of my time, but I enjoy it for ads and stuff, and so, I do it.  I write a lot of commercials for TV for a lot of lawyers on TV all the time. I enjoyed that. I think, I’m good at it. I enjoy it, and that’s part of having a unique strength that’s something that you have a desire to do, a passion that you enjoy, it gives you joy. Usually, those things you’re usually damn good at them.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: Because you’re not going to be passionate about something that you’re terrible at. I mean, but yeah, and I think, when you do it that way and break it down quarterly, and do it, you can see, you can have the little themes, you can have the celebrations. And what we’ve done since we started that about three or four years ago Chris, we’re getting like, three times as much done every year at PILMMA,

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And the lawyers that I’ve got to doing it, they’re just saying, “Wow, successes.” Now, the problem is, you got to have somebody, a gatekeeper to make sure that because usually, the lawyer’s not going to be the one. So, he’s got to be office manager, somebody that’s going to hold your feet to the fire too.

Christopher Anderson: Yes, yes.

Ken Hardison: And I think, I’ve always hired somebody that was strong enough that wasn’t scared of me because a lot of people, the lawyer everybody’s scared of the head partner. I said, “If you’re scared of me, you can’t do your job here.” Because sometimes you got to call me out because I’m like everybody else.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah. We all get full of our own stuff sometimes.

Ken Hardison: Yeah. I mean, we’ll kind of put stuff that I don’t really enjoy doing to the backburner, right?

Christopher Anderson: Yep.

Ken Hardison: I’m not unique. I’m like everybody else. So, sometimes somebody’s got to call me out on it, and say, “Okay, you promise you’d have this done.” So, I think, that’s the deal, and that goes back if you think about it to my focus, and discipline. If you think about everything, I just talked about those two words, run through everything I was just talking about

Christopher Anderson: Indeed.

Ken Hardison: And the deal is, you just can’t get sidetracked. I mean you got to have that focus and have those, and do those things. that’s how you get stuff done. In my opinion, if you try to do it all yourself, I mean I had a lawyer that called me last week, he’d been in the mastermind, he quit, he just never got nothing done then came back, and he called me, he said, “Kid, I just don’t know what to do.” I said, “Well, here’s what we do know, you’re not going to do it.” I said, “So, here’s the deal, you’re going to pay an x-amount amount of dollars, I’m going to go hire you a marketing assistant that’s going to implement everything that you ought to be doing, and you’re going to pay her, and we’re going to hold her accountable.” We’re going to set up benchmarks, and he said, “Well, what if she doesn’t work out?” I said,” What have you got to lose? What are you doing now?”

Christopher Anderson: Right.

Ken Hardison: What you’re doing now is not working. So, sometimes a nice lawyer, a good lawyer, right intentions, but he just won’t get it done.  And that’s okay, I don’t get a lot of stuff done that’s why I hire people,

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: but they don’t want to spend the money. So, sometimes either if you can’t get to it, or you don’t like it, or you’re lazy or whatever the reason is, just hire people, just hire the A players.  Don’t hire these.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah. So, let me take that thought though about hiring because we’ve already said, in the show, like when an A player shows up, go ahead and hire them. We’ve now talked about getting people to help, and I know with some people listening to this they’re thinking, “Oh, yeah that’s great.” I am like on a razor’s edge for profitability as it is, how can I increase my cash flow? Do I need to go out there in order to implement what you’re talking about, do I need to borrow a lot of money? Can we just talk for a few minutes about cashflow, and how to do these things without borrowing?

Ken Hardison: Yeah. There’s a thing called, the seven levers of cashflow, and it’s in the “Scaling” book of Verne Harnish. And I won’t get into all of it, but there’s like three big deals you can do. There’s seven, but I’m going to talk about three or four very quickly.

Christopher Anderson: All right.

Ken Hardison: It is number one is, there are these certain things that you can just increase or decrease by one to two ten %, it can make a big, big, difference in your bottom line. I mean big. And when you do them all together, it compounds. It’s just amazing. So, one thing is price, and if you bill hourly, you got you need to go look up, and I’m not going to explain it because we don’t have time. Look up price elasticity.

Christopher Anderson: Yes.

Ken Hardison: But the bottom line is, you’re scared to charge enough what you’re worth, and if you’ll raise your prices, and watch it, and see what your conversions are, you’ll reach a sweet spot. If you’re doing a contingency work, I just did this with several lawyers, and a lawyer has been charging the same thing, 25 % for the last 10 years. I said, “You need to go up 38 %.” He said, “I can’t do that.” I said, “Well, nice and they won’t hire me.” I said, “I promise you, if somebody balks about it, go down on the price.” After six months, I said, “How many people balked about it?” He said, “One.”

Christopher Anderson: Yep.

Ken Hardison: I said, “Okay, how much that extra 13% of 3 million dollars is how much?” Do you see what I’m saying?

Christopher Anderson: Yes.

Ken Hardison: That’s a lot of money. I mean, that’s bottom line.

Christopher Anderson: Without doing any more work, or hiring any more team, or anything else. That’s just boom, $400,000.

Ken Hardison: Yep. Just that one thing. And people are scared to do it because they’re afraid people won’t hire, but I’m telling you, 99.9% of them are not going to care if you’re a good lawyer. They just want you; they came to you because of what you do. They’re not buying when it comes to legal and doctors, they’re not buying based on price, I can promise you.

Christopher Anderson: Yep.

Ken Hardison: Especially, the more serious it is. And then the second thing is, cutting your expenses, and that everybody talks about that. But what I like to do, and I’ve seen lawyers do it especially with this pandemic around, go through your P&L, and look at everything line item, and ask this question, “Will this make me money?” Directly or indirectly, and then if that’s not enough, then go back, “Will this make me money directly?”

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: You know, and knock out the indirectly, but the deal is, you could come through, and shroud it out. But don’t do like, everybody wants to cut their marketing first thing.

Christopher Anderson: I know.

Ken Hardison: That’s like that’s cutting off the umbilical cord to break it.

Christopher Anderson: Yes, opposite to what you just said. Yeah, if you go through there, “Is this going to make me money directly, or maybe indirectly?”

Ken Hardison: Yeah.

Christopher Anderson: And then don’t cut that. Go cut the other stuff.

Ken Hardison: Yeah. The other stuff; the stuff that you’ve been doing for 20 years like the country club does or these meals or I don’t know, whatever it might be. But that, and just working out a deal. “Okay, if you’re doing a contingency firm, a time on desk.”

Christopher Anderson: Yeah, that’s a huge killer.

Ken Hardison: Do you know what I’m saying? Because if you can compress it, and get the same results, then it’s like Dell computers, that’s how they got so rich. They figured out that the less inventory you’ve got, the work haul is, you can keep pushing it out without, you got to give good quality services now, believe me. I mean, I’m not saying it, but there’s a lot of things I see that lawyers do, they just let stuff lay around like wine, and think it’s going to get more valuable, and it don’t.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah. So, price, expenses. You said there’s a third one?

Ken Hardison: That would be your accounts payables, and your accounts receivables.

Christopher Anderson: Nice, yeah.

Ken Hardison: Yeah, because you want to kind of work out a deal with your vendors that you say, “Listen, I heard everybody pays 30 days, but I’m going pay 60 days. That’s just the way it’s going to be.” I mean, I got a guy that does TV now, he pays his TV stations 90 days after he runs the ads.

Christopher Anderson: Wow.

Ken Hardison: He’s been doing it for five years, and I thought he was crazy. How did you do for the due date? He said, “I won’t buy it, if they didn’t do it.” He said, “that way, I get 90 days free loan.”

Christopher Anderson: Oh, what it means is that, he probably because we shouldn’t do any marketing unless it returns us more than we spend, right?

Ken Hardison: Right.

Christopher Anderson: So, he’s getting back a lot of what he spent before he has to pay it.

Ken Hardison: Yeah, and then accounts receivables, make sure you get these bills out, and make sure you make them put in retainers to where it gets below a thousand dollars, they got to feed it again like feeding it like with these automatic dog feeders.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: I mean, you just want to keep filling it up because we’ll stay. If you don’t, you think about it, and I’ve seen lawyers like this, and that’s one reason I quit doing that billable hours because I was terrible at this, Chris. I hated going after people for money.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: Because I always felt like two things happening; if I didn’t do it the right way, but what I’m telling people to do now is that, I’m going to make a man with me, never come back. And then the deal is, if I sue them or whatever, they’re going to come back, and make some bar complaint. There’s always something. Do you know what I’m saying? I felt like, I was in a no-win situation.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And so, to deal with this, I didn’t, I wasn’t smart enough back then. I didn’t have enough experience. What I should have done is say, “Listen, put me up $5,000, when it gets below two thousand you got to refill it, or I’m going to start making my motions to get out of the case.”  And you know, just be firm with it.

Christopher Anderson: And when they know the rules, they respect it.

Ken Hardison: Yeah, just think about those three or four things right there you could do, and really, the two biggest expenses, and I think, price increase is number one.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: It’s like PILMMA, I just increased the prices in PILMMA. I hadn’t done it in two or three years. I should have done it last year, but the pandemic, I was going to do it the first quarter last year, and what happened.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: So, I just didn’t feel right about doing it with everybody. But I decided to go ahead, and I’m going to do it anyway.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: And so, we lost maybe two or three members, but look how much more we got, then we got more operating capital. Now, I can go out, and hire another person.

Christopher Anderson: And you can actually give your members a better experience.

Ken Hardison: Absolutely.

Christopher Anderson: Yeah.

Ken Hardison: I’m going to hire me another marketing person to help get some of this stuff implemented. 

Christopher Anderson: And that’s what lawyers also need to hear that too, when you raised your prices, not only can that improve your bottom line, but you can do more for your clients. You can afford to take a little bit longer, take a little bit deeper look, get A team players on their cases instead of B team players on their cases. There’s a lot you can do. Ken, we are out of time, I want to thank you so much for being on the show. Could you tell our listeners, I’m sure there’s stuff they want to learn about you or about PILMMA or about some of the stuff we talked about. What’s the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Ken Hardison: [email protected],just go to PILMMA.org. We’ve got a lot of free resources there, Chris. I’ve actually got a calculator that’s free on the non-member resources that you can punch in numbers and say, if I increase my fees, to this.

Christopher Anderson: Oh, nice. Yeah.

Ken Hardison: You can take your P&L, and do that or if I cut my expenses by 10%, it’ll actually generate, and show you how much money you’ll make, and it’s free, absolutely free.

Christopher Anderson: That’ll be great, and I’ll just repeat that real quick. That’s [email protected],or the website is PILMMA.org. PILMMA dot org for the website. Ken, thank you so much. 

Ken Hardison: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Christopher Anderson: My pleasure, and that wraps up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour,. Thank you all for listening. My guest today once again, has been Ken Hardison. He’s the founder of PILMMA, which is Powerful Innovated Lawyers Marketing & Management Association. And of course, I am Christopher Anderson, and I look forward to seeing you next month with another great guest, as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you.

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