Good Growth (And Bad Growth): Build Your Business Intentionally

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

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 Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host, Christopher Anderson. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about business and professional results. We’ve done a couple of episodes recently about production and those are good. Everybody wants to hear the marketing ones, but we’re going to talk a little bit about business and professional results because as you know, as we discuss, the core of every business is you are the solution, you are the problem. And we previously specifically discussed culture and the need for intentionality in building your firm’s culture. But we’re going to take a different kind of look at it today as a result to growth and growing your firm and really excited today to have Rick Watson on the show. He’s written a book to talk about good growth in your firm and all sorts of stuff. I’ll tell you about that in a second.

He’s going to talk about ways to implement techniques that make the growth that results in our firms make them easier, not harder to run. As a reminder in the main triangle of what it is that law firm business owners must do, we have to all acquire new clients. We call it acquisition. We have to produce whatever results we promised those clients that’s production. And first and foremost, really we have to achieve the business and professional results for the owners. Otherwise, why are you doing it? So in the center of that triangle, driving it all for better or worse is you. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about how you are going to grow your firm to make it easier and more fun for you to run. Once again, my guest today is Rick Watson.

He’s the author of a firm worth building and today’s episode of the Unbillable Hour is good Growth. Like I mentioned, Rick is the author of a firm worth building. This book helps professional businesses scale and thrive. Rick identifies a common problem that advice professionals, which we are all seem to share, and these are that the business owners focus more on performing the professional specialty, what we call working in the business rather than what it takes to run the business. Well, and Rick’s come by this experience the honest way, I guess I’ll say, I was going to say the hard way, but maybe not so hard, but the honest way, he grew his own firm with only 20 bucks in his pocket and then is now the CEO of the National Referral Network and several other businesses. And all of this has forced him to be a student of running his businesses in the best possible way.

And he shares that in his book, a Firm Worth Building, which covers about 30 lessons that every business owner should know from thinking through their branding to increasing referrals through professional networks. And additionally, he’s also built a few success concepts like compressing the time it takes to build client trust and why building up your staff and other professionals through a dedicated process of edification, which we’re going to be talking about is so helpful. He and his partners are forward thinkers. Their motto is, we build what should exist. And I love that Rick also manages to have a life. He lives with his family on a five acre horse ranch in Loomis, California where they also make some wine when he is not doing all of that and helping him manage and scale businesses, he likes to ride Arabian horses. Now Rick, we probably won’t have much time on the show to talk about that, but I know about Arabians and they’re crazy. They’re just crazy and you’re riding ’em for 30 to 100 mile races. So that’s fantastic. Rick, welcome to the show.

 Rick Watson:

Thank you. I am really excited to be here. That is the best opening introduction I think I’ve ever gotten. I think that’s great. I really appreciate that.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Not a problem. So what it doesn’t though is tell the listeners why. So I told them that you have this history. You started with 20 bucks in your pocket, you built this firm and you’re your firm and then these other firms, you wrote this book and you’ve also built the National Referral Network. But why, so you started with 20 bucks in your pocket and the first thing you did was build a firm. Why have you gotten into the business of talking about building a firm worth building?

 Rick Watson:

So it’s interesting, one of the firms that I run is a $500 million registered investment advisor and we work with accountants and attorneys a lot and it’s so frustrating to see those businesses run poorly and there’s a certain reputation, particularly in law firms of not always running them very well. And so what we saw was this little, these fiefdoms that were running where they would just bark out orders and they would expect everyone to follow them. And the theme that we saw is those folks were more interested in running a firm, I’m sorry, in more interested in their own production, in doing their specialty than they were in running the firm. And the problem is running the firm is part of what allows you to exercise that muscle of all your professional skills.

Christopher T. Anderson:

It’s what we get to do when we run the business. Well, and it’s what also provides, I don’t know if I want to call it outsized, but if you want to really benefit, really draw the rewards as a business owner from those expert skills that you’ve developed over time, running the business well gives you the ability to do so. Otherwise you really do struggle. Like you were saying, when you say the businesses are run poorly, what are the symptoms of that? What’s showing up in these firms that tell us that they’re being run poorly?

 Rick Watson:

So first of all, their thinking tends to be very linear. That is, I’m trying to just get from here to there so whoever gets in their way, that’s their problem. And so we talk about that in the book a little bit, the idea of kind types of people and culture and how you treat your people. There’s also a limit to how far they’re trying to go. They’re not trying to expand a special thing that they do, a value that they provide indefinitely. They’re trying to do it to fit their lifestyle. So I have heard folks say, I’m going to have this many more clients, I’m going to fire 20% of my clients this year. That’s what they’re going to do. And the reason is because I want a personal life. Well you could hire another attorney. There’s an idea. You could hire two and build something that’s unique. And I think that that’s another problem that they struggle with is a unique value proposition. If you ask them what they do, they say, I’m an estate planning attorney. Okay, that’s partly what you do, but what’s unique about your estate planning firm or your personal injury firm? Explain that. So unless they can answer those questions, they can’t scale their firm.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. By saying I’m an estate planning lawyer, they’re commoditizing themselves. Exactly. Just like everybody else. Alright, so I said we were going to talk about culture. So let’s start there. First of all, in building a professional firm as you have done and as our listeners most of them have done or are doing, what does company culture mean in that context to you? And when you talk about it?

 Rick Watson:

So when I think of company culture, I might start earlier and think about family culture. Every family has a culture, how we treat each other. It’s when you take your kid and you sit down and you say, we don’t treat each other like that. We are this families without culture are a mess and they’re not very productive. Well, the same’s true for companies, if we don’t have a consistent design behind where we’re going and how we treat each other, the promises we make, the promises we don’t make, then we can’t make the move forward I guess is my point in a very successful way. So it is a major problem and a major important thing. If you don’t define culture, it defines itself.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I was just going to say that, so we’ve talked on the show before about every company’s got a culture and you may not even know what your company culture is, but it’s there and it may not be the one you wish you had. So we’ve talked about intentionality. Is that what you also see? I think you were just sort of getting there. It may not be what you

 Rick Watson:

Want. Yeah, I think for example, if you in a family, if the parents refuse, they abdicate their role to be parents, what’s going to happen is one of the kids is going to step up and be a parent. You may not like the decisions they make. Well the same’s true in a company, if the owner gets so busy that they go do something else, they’re abdicating their role as the boss, then what’s going to happen is an employee is going to step up and define a culture. And again, it may be something that’s very ugly to you and then you can’t figure out why you can’t grow. And the reason you can’t grow is because the promises you’re making aren’t very good ones.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And that makes total sense. So how then does, if you are intentional and you do inculcate the culture that you want in the business, how does that help growth? What makes it easier to run the firm? What about that makes it easier to run?

 Rick Watson:

Well, for one in the beginning you’re creating culture, you’re designing it and defining the kinds of people you hire because that’s part of it right now I’m not looking for everyone. I’m looking for someone who’s a cultural fit. So that defines, that makes you better able to grow. You’re not going to have to rehire people, it’s going to allow people to belong. So they’re not going to have to cycle employees as often. We have almost no turnover. Why? Because they love being here. We hired them specifically, we thought they’d love being here.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And I would also guess that if you’re intentional about your culture and you’re clear about your culture, you probably exhibit that in your recruiting ads. You probably exhibit that in your interview process. So those that don’t fit probably self-select out to some extent.

 Rick Watson:

Yeah, it’s true with clients as well. You want your clients to self-select out. It’s just a super important concept. And again, it’s not rocket science, it’s regular business lessons that so many professionals are running their firms and they’re not paying attention to the basics of how to run a firm, how to run a business in general.

Christopher T. Anderson:

One of the things I found most fascinating in what you’ve been talking about and what you’ve written about is how to, because a lot of these concepts, people listen to what we’re talking about. Oh, intentional culture and how you do that through interview process. That sounds like it takes a lot of time. You can come up with it pretty quick, but then actually pushing it out through the organization, you can’t just have a meeting go like, all right everybody, our culture starting now is fun. It takes for people to believe it, to trust it takes time and I think it could be a little daunting. So what you’ve written about though is compressing that time. So trust, compression, edification. So let’s start with trust compression. Can you talk about how that could play into how you build this with your, you mentioned it works with your clients, it works with the employees. How do you compress that time?

 Rick Watson:

Okay, so let’s break apart a little bit these ideas because culture is super important. If you do it right, what’s going to happen is your people will start to guide the other people, right? Because you hired a bunch. So they’ll start peer pressuring to create people in the right direction. And so in the beginning it’s a lot of work and then it’s not as much work because in fact they will drive you. They’ll say you’re violating the culture and you have to go, oh yeah, you’re right, I am. So

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s when you know you’ve got it, right? Yeah.

 Rick Watson:

That’s when you know you’ve got it right when feedback lubes to you. So trust compression is an interesting idea. And the way trust compression works, it identifies this concept that people trust you not based on the length of time that you are with them, but based on the number of interactions. So I can take somebody who in my business, typically it’s in the industry, it’s an hour and a half meeting with your financial advisor and they identify problems and then another hour and a half meeting to solve those problems. Okay, sure, I can take that appointment and break it into four 15 minute appointments, which sounds oh minute, I have to do four appointments now. Yeah, four 15 minute appointments and I will age that relationship and build more trust in a crazy way because we’ll do those appointments like three, four days apart. They don’t forget what I’m talking about.

People can’t hold that much information in their heads anyway. It’s sort of like if in this show, if you could break it up to a short 10 minute part of a show, but it plays every day, they can learn a lesson every day and it breaks up the pieces. So that’s the idea of trust compression is understand that the way people build trust is based on they do a little feedback loop in their head. Was that a good interaction? Did I get something out of it? It’s like that bar where everybody knows your name, they always see you, they’re like, Hey, it’s norm.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I guess it’s also building on because you probably make some promises that you then can deliver on in rapid succession. Like I promised these three things. Next meeting I delivered these three things, I’m going to promise two more things. Next meeting, I deliver those two things. And that’s building it rapidly too, right? It’s just like this consistency, this promise keeping, is that what’s working?

 Rick Watson:

A hundred percent. I think that you’ve really identified that and now how you could use that in a law firm. So I just think that we try to make things efficient for us and we’re not thinking about that. It’s not efficient for them to absorb information. And what happens is we tear apart trust in the process. And so if we can find ways to bind them to our firm through, you could even have somebody else do a portion of that appointment and that gets into edification, but have that preliminary person that you talk with that gets multiple interactions with your firm as well. So it doesn’t necessarily have to all be with you, but maybe we could boil out the really sharp point of the spear that you have to be involved in.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That makes a whole lot of sense. So I’m talking with Rick Watson, Rick is the author of a firm worth building and we’ve talked about company culture for a bit and we’ve really kind of started to drill down now into trust compression and how to get that trust factor going with your clients and with your team through repeated more frequent, maybe shorter duration meetings. And Rick has mentioned it a couple of times while talking about that, about edification, which we’re going to get to, but first we’re going to get edified by a word from our sponsors who make this show possible and we’ll be right back and we are back. Where we left off, we were teasing the concept of edification. So we talked about trust compression on these frequent meetings, building trust, keeping promises, and you mentioned that there was another piece of that called edification. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

 Rick Watson:

Edification is probably one of the most important concepts, particularly in networking. So the way it typically works is I get a referral from an attorney and they’ll say something like, well, the way we do it to each other, we undermine each other, we Dhir edify each other. We shouldn’t, but we do. And it’s sometimes so subtle it’ll be like, Hey, I’m going to refer this attorney and if he doesn’t get back to you right away, just keep trying him. He, he’s just really busy. Oh great, I’ve just cut his legs out from under him. I could have said, let me tell you about Christopher. First of all, he’s a fisherman and he just loves to fish and just don’t get him talking about fish. He’s just wonderful about that unless you want to know about it. He’s just a wonderful guy and I would trust him with my everything.

So I’ve just given you a little push and given you an interesting little antidote. So now you’re not a commodity, you’re this guy who fishes too or whatever. When we purchased our home, the realtor did a smart thing. He said, I want you to give every house a name, like a weird little name. So we called our house that we ended up buying the Mexican drug, Lord House, little stories like that bind something to things. So in any case, the idea of ed vacation is that when you introduce another professional, so let’s just start there, that’s outside edification. You be mindful that you’re going to not cut their legs out from under ’em. Don’t say anything negative. And also you’re going to give them a shove, a little momentum in the relationship. It is such a minor kind of thought and yet it has huge effects.

And the reason people Dhir edify is because they’re afraid of losing control of that client. If I make you un to God, then I’m now weaker. And I think that then the smart way this is supposed to work is the other professionals supposed to edify you. So when it comes, you get to them. Then you say, I have to tell you about Rick, by the way, he’s pretty humble, but he is. You just have one of the best financial advisors, blah, blah, blah, right? I mean now that person and we can work up a ladder between us.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I love it. I mean that’s an interesting new concept. I think we haven’t really talked about that before. We’ve talked about referrals and we’ve talked about respecting referrals. So what we’ve talked about is when receiving a referral about saying something nice and edifying the referral source with the idea that tends to get back to them. It cements the relationship between you and the referral source. But what you’re talking about here is actually taking that to the next level, which is I love the idea about naming. You’re looking for houses, you’ve got six houses going on, you’ve got the drug Lord House, you’ve got the cliff house, you’ve got whatever it is, the muddy bog house, whatever. You put some nicknames on them. And again, that’s how our brains work. We need little shorthands, not 27, 31 Colonial Road. That’s not the thing that sticks with us. So yeah, I don’t fish by the way, but I do ski. So tell stories about, hey, Chris is a skier or Chris collects wine and if you want to bring him a gift, brunes, Italian rats are good to bring. And then having that go back, yeah, that’s some serious glue. I love that. So that’s what you’re talking about with edification.

 Rick Watson:

So it’s just super important that you do that. And they do it back, and you’d mentioned it, we’ll talk about it later, but National Referral Network, that’s part of what we built as part of that. So that pre edification concept. So that’s important thing to do is edify. And then the second part of edification is internal edification.

So if you want to scale, and let’s say I want to pass you over to another attorney or another staff person who’s going to do the first part of that appointment, people want to deal with the badass. They don’t want to deal with the lower lackey. So you need to edify the people on your staff if you want to grow. If you are God, then who’s ever going to want to talk to one of the angels? You’ve got to make them into something important. So we do that with our staff. And let me tell you a little story about Shannon, or let me tell you a little story about Mark. I think that’s super important. And what that allows me to do is that 90% of my interactions with our firm’s interactions are not with me. That is what that allows to happen.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So as an example in a law firm, so one of the things I think we do in our firms is if you’re passing a client to a Paralegal to get some work done, you say, listen, you’re going to talk to Angie because let me tell you something, you don’t want me doing the dotting the i’s and crossing the T’s on these financial disclosures. That’s what Angie’s amazing at. That’s who I do mine and we’ll pass you over to her. I’m still in charge of strategy, but you want these done right? She’s going to do them for you. Then when they’re done, we’ll talk again. Is that kind of the idea you’re talking about?

 Rick Watson:

True. I think the more you humble yourself, you’re really laying yourself bare to them, to this person that you refer to them to. And so we have a guy who says, look, I’m good a lot of things, but I’m going to introduce you. What I’m best at is introducing you to people who can help you. So he’s really laid himself bare and then they say, oh no, Patrick is wonderful, right? I mean he’s just such the nicest guy and I think that your staff needs to edify you back the other way in some way. Just a minor Rick’s brings ice cream for everybody on Thursdays, right? I mean whatever they go, anyway, I love working here. All of that stuff is super.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So it doesn’t have to always be credentialed. It could just be a anecdotal, like you said, the ice cream thing that doesn’t build me up as a professional just makes me a person,

 Rick Watson:

Right? Well, and the trick here is to get them to you. People want to deal with people they like and trust, right? That’s the first thing. Then they’ll look at your credentials and if you screw up advice that’s on you separately. But yeah, no, they’ll give you a chance if they trust you and like you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So let’s pivot a little bit here and talk about growth because one of the concepts that you build on is good growth versus bad growth. You started off the show talking about professionals that try to carve away a portion of their client base so that they’re not so darn busy, I guess, or so that because they don’t want the firm to become unmanageable. So before we talk about good growth versus bad growth, what I’d like to do is just touch on what you see. I think this is what will resonate with the listeners is what do you see as challenges that professionals face when it comes to growth? How are they challenged and what gets in the way?

 Rick Watson:

There’s so many challenges. I mean that’s the whole reason for the book. There’s 29 lessons or something like that. I think. Look, I mean there’s branding, there’s culture, there’s value proposition, right? Do you have a really solid value proposition? Can you scale your firm? Is your idea? Is your concept dependent upon you? Because if it is, you can’t scale it, right? There’s only so much of you and then you’re going to run out of time. So all of those ideas are important. Good growth and bad growth. The distinction there is do they lead you to where you want to go or they pull you away from where you want to go? Well, if you don’t even know where you want to go, then it all seems really, it’s just a warm body. But small firms are ones that don’t know that lesson. And firms that can scale are ones that figure out, Hey, I’m really good with, I dunno, pick anything, right? Any subgroup, any that’s where the sharp point of where I’m good then great deal with that all day. And anything that leads you away from that is not where you should be going. And it could be that those clients are too big for you and that’s what doesn’t really work for you. Or it could be those clients are too small for you and you’re wasting time with clients who don’t have any money

Christopher T. Anderson:

Or they take you outside your zone of genius like you. You’re accepting clients that take you the wrong direction for what you’re trying to achieve.

 Rick Watson:

Yeah, it’s interesting. We hire and train other financial advisors. We came across a firm that had a hundred million dollars. Sounds pretty good. There was three of them, and they were working seven days a week, 10 hours a day. I said, look, my advice to you is the first thing you should do is fire 80% of your clients. And they were horrified. And I go, well, it’s really only going to cost you a little bit. It’s like 20% of your revenue.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s right, yeah.

 Rick Watson:

But you’re killing yourself and you think your firm is really big when it turns out it really isn’t very big. And I said, so the more you can be honest about that and separate good growth from bad growth, the more successful you’ll be.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Absolutely. So I want to dive a little bit more into good growth versus bad growth. And I make sure that we leave some time to talk about the National Referral Network, but first we got to hear one more word from our sponsors because without them we don’t get to talk to each other or at least nobody will listen to us. So word from our sponsors, and we’ll be back in just a second, we are back with Rick Watson. We have been talking about, well, we talked about so many different things. We talked about culture, we’ve talked about growth for the past little while, and we’re getting started on the good growth versus bad growth concept. Rick talks about all this stuff in his book, A Firm Worth Building, and we’ve referred to that a few times. And like you said, there’s 39 lessons that we don’t have time for 39 lessons here.

What I’d like to do though is touch base a little bit more on this good growth versus bad growth. Because I think Rick, quite honestly, in the ecosphere of law firms in particular, when they go to trade shows, when they go to their bar events and when vendors talk to them, what’s pushed is growth. When they talk to marketing vendors, it’s like more leads, more leads, more leads. When they talk to consultants, a lot of the consultants out there are like, do you want to double your law firm as if that’s the goal? And you talked at the beginning about if you don’t know where you’re going, then you’re really in trouble talking about growth. And we talked about good growth taking you towards that goal. So I was wondering if maybe you could just elaborate on that. What have you seen as examples, maybe one or two more examples of bad growth so that people can see it in themselves, and then good growth where you’ve seen your clients kind of turn it around and grow much smarter.

 Rick Watson:

So I would say I see law firms routinely, in fact more often than not, who just grab any warm body. And that’s just so unproductive. You have this idea of firms with specialties, so multiple specialties within firms, and that’s great, but that doesn’t mean that you get to grab everybody and try to wedge them into one of those pieces. I think ideally they say if you’re selling dog food, you want to sell dog food to people with big dogs. So that’s always better. Or I shouldn’t say always better, often better. I’ve seen law firms is curious that deal with professional athletes and decide that’s just not for them, big players but big dogs, but they’re a pain in the butt. And they found that garbage collectors as a group turned out to be a much better group to deal with. So it’s defining who your ideal client is and then moving in that direction.

And again, if you start to realize what’s pulling you towards where you want to go or away from where you want to go. And if you don’t have any time, then a really simple thing to do is to look and go, Hey, separate all your clients out by revenue. Do a little profile on them in a year and figure out where your best place, where the most revenue was for the least amount of time. Rank your clients in a sense and figure out, well, these are the ones that if, I don’t know whether it could be that single women are your best area, or it could be that single women are your worst area. Well, it seems like you might want to know that because if we see that you’re like, you know what? I’m going to refer this case over to Bob and it’ll drown Bob’s firm. You should give it to your competition.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And I would guess that a part of that too is also asking yourself not just on a revenue perspective, you mentioned that with professional athletes for instance, might be the most revenue, but also ask yourself, I’m thinking Marie Kondo, which ones give you joy? Which because it may be some high revenue cases that just drive you bat crazy. And quite honestly that Joe or John or Amy or whoever, they like those kinds of clients and everybody’s got a different personality fit, but maybe revenue, yes, but also quality of work, quality of practice. Yeah,

 Rick Watson:

I agree with you. I also think that if, let’s say those, I love your example because that’s a good client either way. It just isn’t a good client for that person. So by doing that, what you accomplish is the person you refer that case to. If you do it right, edify and properly, all that stuff, then they think you walk on water. I mean they love you sending ’em business. Wonderful.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s the best thing you can do. Alright, I said I promised that before we got to the end of the show, we would talk about the National Referral Network. So I want to do that because obviously the stuff you’ve talked about here is great and really hard to implement based on half hour podcast. Your book is probably even more helpful, a firm worth building with the lessons that you’ve talked about there. But you’ve also built this thing called the National Referral Network. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into what you’re teaching?

 Rick Watson:

So the national referral, so I said earlier, we build what should exist. And so what we wanted was a referral network that really worked and we just didn’t have it. I mean, it didn’t exist out there to what we want to do. People build networks locally, they’ll have someone down the street, I don’t know their friend who’s this and that, and there are a lot of energy to put into ’em and you might have someone to refer to ’em. What we wanted to do that was on a national scale and we wanted to enforce it so that everybody played nice in the sandbox. They were edifying each other and kick them out if they’re not. So we could maintain quality better in the National Referral Network. And it’s simple Google search. And so it is essentially a club where what’s neat about it is I can touch somebody anywhere in the country if I need a injury attorney in Idaho, Bing. There you go. Right? Who knows,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right? And it’s more than just law firms. This is multiple professionals. So

 Rick Watson:

What we say, yeah, it’s not just law firms. So what I think of it as is, if I could back your firm into a Costco and surround it with a Costco, and if you don’t need this thing that I do, I can walk you down the road and there’s this and there’s this. People all start coming through your door. That’s the idea. You are more valuable to your clients and your clients will give you more referrals. When you’re a problem solver, you’re not just a commodity a thing, right?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, yeah. You’re the lobby and some of the work will come to you. But yeah, you become more and more trusted. And quite honestly, if you can do that and all those referrals you send out will generate more referrals back coming into you. Yeah.

 Rick Watson:

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny, I was thinking we are in the financial side, but about 10% of my conversations are about finance. It’s always about telling me what’s going on in their lives. And a guy called me the day excited. He has a new girlfriend. The idea is that’s when you know you’re in the driver’s seat because passing through you. Absolutely. And that is a great place to be. And then I have a huge team behind me. So if they’re edifying me properly, then what I’m doing is I’m not weakening myself. I’ve got this huge back office that can now help me also, and this varies by state and there’s disclosures and all that stuff, but it also is a potential revenue source because there is some revenue sharing that can occur, not required, but can occur inside of the National Fraud Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And this is where we’ll now state the disclaimer, all lawyers listening, please check with your local state bar rules to make sure whether you can do that and that we’re not giving Barr advice or legal advice. But yeah, no, there certainly can be, but I think it would be folly to say that that’s the reason, right? The reason is to become the lobby. The reason is to become, as Malcolm Gladwell called it, the connector. And then also by edifying those to whom you send the referrals, you also then run a much better chance of having those come back as good referrals for exactly what you want from people who will edify you back because you say you teach that how to do the edification in the network as part of the teaching that you guys do.

 Rick Watson:

I would say that to say, to just add onto what you said, I would say you’re strengthening your value proposition at the end of the day, right? I’m not one thing, I’m a bunch of things. And that’s what we teach our people to do is to say, yeah, I’m an estate planning attorney and we do a great job with that. But just so you know, we have this whole back office of other things. There’s a Costco behind me, and people are like, wow, that’s kind of cool. And so that makes their clients stickier and generates more referrals.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Perfect. And I think that’s a perfect place to leave this because we are at time. So we’re going to wrap up this edition of The Unbillable Hour. I want to thank our listeners for being with us. Our guest today, as a reminder, has been Rick Watson and he’s the author of a firm Worth Building, also the CEO of the National Referral Network. Rick, people are going to be interested, so if they want to learn more about you or about the book or about the National Referral Network, how can they get in touch?

 Rick Watson:

If you go to the National Referral Network, nr n america.com, it’s going to pop up the book right there. There’s a little popup for the book, so that’s great. It’s also on Amazon, a firm worth building, or Rick Watson, all those work. Yeah, that’s what we do. So that’d be great. We’ve also got Facebook. You can go there.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Well, thanks so much for being on the show.

 Rick Watson:

Alright, thanks guys.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Appreciate it. You bet. You bet. And so of course, listeners remember me, I’m Christopher Anderson, and I look forward to seeing you or you hearing me, because we don’t actually see each other next month with another great guest as we learn more about the topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. And as a reminder, the show is no longer just about you listening. You can be part of the show. So remember, on the third Thursday of every month at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 12 o’clock Pacific time, one o’clock Mountain, two o’clock central, and in Arizona, you guys figure it out. But on the third Thursdays at three o’clock Eastern is the community table where you can call in and be part of the show and get advice on any topic you want from me and from wonderful guests that join me on the community table. So hopefully we will see you there. And of course, remember that you can subscribe to all the additions of this podcast and the community [email protected] or on iTunes. Thanks for joining us. We will speak again soon.

Speaker 1:

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, it’s 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 Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory Podcast. Join us again for the next edition right here with Legal Talk Network.

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