Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 201: 3 Reasons You May Feel Stuck in Your Law Firm Growth

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201: 3 Reasons You May Feel Stuck in Your Law Firm Growth · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Davina: As business owners, our job is to take calculated risks and make educated guesses, educated decisions, sometimes based on incomplete information. In other words, we cannot predict the future because we are creators of our law firm business' future, right? We are creating the future. We can't predict consequences of some of our actions. We can predict some, but we must train ourselves to take imperfect action and then make whatever decisions we make the right decisions for us and for our business.
• 0:33
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from six to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
• 1:20
  Now here's Devina.
• 1:24
  Davina: Hi. This is Devina. And before we jump into today's show, I'd like first to introduce you to some of our sponsors. Over the last four years, Noble Marketing has tracked more than 250 law firms and discovered 60 to 80% of new client calls were generated through Google My Business and Google Ads. Basically, you need to be on Google.
• 1:47
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• 2:12
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• 2:52
  Optimize My Firm does SEO the right way, delivering meaningful results with geographic exclusivity and no contracts. Contact them today at optimizemyfirm.com or click the link in the show notes. Hi, everyone, and
• 3:08
  Davina: welcome back to another episode of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm Davina Frederick. And today, I wanna help you get really clear on what it is that's keeping you stuck at low or mid 6 figures in your law firm business and working all the time, doing all the things so you can address them and move forward. So let's dive in. But before we do, I just want to give you a little bit of personal update on me and my life.
• 3:33
  Today is my birthday. And as a present to myself, I'm taking the whole day off except that at 2PM Eastern Time today, I'm going to teach you all the four strategies I deployed in 2008 to recession proof my law firm business that still work today. Plus the one thing I do differently now. After that, we're headed to the beach for a few days and then the following week, we will be taking my sister and my beautiful nephews, which you always hear me talk about to see Yellowstone and Grand Tetons National Park. They're bucket list items of mine.
• 4:06
  And in case you missed the story, last year, we got all the way to the entrance of Yellowstone before we returned back. The park was closed for the first time in thirty seven years due to unprecedented melting snow and rain that washed out the roads and some of the facilities. So we didn't get to see Yellowstone last year. We're going back, trying to complete the journey, close the loop on that, and I'm super excited about it. But why am I choosing to teach on my birthday?
• 4:31
  Why not just take the whole day off? Well, for one thing, I absolutely love it. I love helping women law firm owners grow their businesses so you can create financial security and financial freedom in your lives. It is my passion because I remember what it was like to not feel financially secure, much less financially free. I didn't even understand that concept.
• 4:52
  I remember when I married my first husband and how we made pasta, broccoli, and butter for dinner several times because that's all we had in the house to eat until payday. I remember when we divorced and I had no place to live because I didn't make enough money in my job to afford an apartment on my own. So I moved into a one bedroom apartment with a girl that had just started working where I was working at the time. In effect, I was homeless and I depended on the kindness of a stranger to help me have a place to stay until I could save up enough money to move into my own place. And it took me getting another job and trying to get raises to be able to afford to do that.
• 5:31
  I remember working for years and years without taking a vacation. I mean, probably decades really because I couldn't afford to take a vacation. When I finally did have money for vacation, I didn't have the time because my husband John and I were working. We owned our own businesses and we were working so much in our businesses at that time that we didn't feel like we could leave them to go on vacation without worry that generating that income would stop and that things would fall apart. I share this with you because I want you to know, number one, that not everyone you see on social media is jetting off to Dubai or Italy or Paris or wherever every week.
• 6:09
  So if you aren't able to do that at this time, it doesn't mean that you won't be able to have that in your future, wherever it is you wanna go, whatever it is you wanna do with your family. It doesn't mean that you won't have that because you definitely can. And I'm happy to say that a lot of my clients have had that experience since we've started working together. And also number two, you have the power to change your future. If you're not fully satisfied with where you are now in your business and your life, you can choose something else.
• 6:37
  And it may take a while for it to come together. It may not manifest overnight the way you want it to, but there will come a time that you'll look back and you will be amazed at how far you come in life and how much your life has changed. So believe me when I tell you, because I really have a lot of stories of along the way in my life where I've really been in the pit and I just persevered. I decided that I wanted to be a resilient person and that I would keep striving until I was thriving. And that is what I've been able to do.
• 7:11
  So have hope if you feel like you're in that place of struggle, that there is the life for you that is not fully struggled. So now let's talk about the three reasons why you may feel stuck in your law firm business growth. I've arrived at these three reasons because for the last decade, I've conversed with, coached, and guided hundreds of women law firm owners as they've scaled their law firm businesses up the 7 figure ladder to and through 7 figure and some into multi 7 figures. And I found these to be common issues that often are keeping people from achieving their goals as fast as they would like to. So one is you may have a knowledge gap.
• 7:51
  So you might not even know what you don't know, or maybe you're confused about next steps and it might not really be apparent to you that there's a knowledge gap, some information or something that you need to learn, whether that's a mindset shift or some tangible action that you need to take, right? So in law school, you learned how to think like a lawyer, but when you hung out your shingle, no one probably taught you how to think like a CEO or a law firm owner. And so you've been left feeling like you need to figure everything out on your own. This knowledge gap can be around how to attract better clients, how to set up systems in your business, how to hire, train, and lead a high performing team, or getting and keeping your financial house in order. These are just a number of the knowledge gaps that I have seen that women law firm owners have had, and that I had through the years in my business before I learned how to do these things.
• 8:48
  There are numerous aspects of running a business. We just think we'll pick up by osmosis or something until someone shares with us or reminds us that we're not all board leaders, just like we're not board lawyers. You're not a board lawyer. It's a lot of knowledge and education and transformative experience to get you to be the kind of lawyer you are today. It's the same thing with running a business.
• 9:12
  These are skills you need to continue to cultivate and develop. Most of my clients, when they start working with me and learning my Million Dollar Law Firm Growth Roadmap, they have their minds blown wide open and it completely changes the trajectory of their business, that little bit of extra knowledge. And I know from experience that one or two gold nuggets can completely transform the way you think about your business because it's happened for me and I've seen it happen for my client and other women law firm owners. So I want you to make a list right now. If you're driving, obviously save this for when you get home.
• 9:47
  But if you are aware, you can write it down, make a list right now of what you perceive to be your knowledge gaps. What information do you think you may be missing? Is it around how to actually implement systems? Is it around how to hire people, how to train people, how to lead people? Is it around working with better clients, raising your fees or managing your money?
• 10:07
  Maybe you're not doing the best job of managing your money. So if somebody asks you about your numbers, you don't know how to answer that question. Also be aware that there are probably many, many things that you will not even think to consider because I know that was the case for me on my journey to becoming a CEO and making 7 and multiple 7 figures is that, you know, there's a lot that you're not aware that you don't know. Number two, the second reason is that you may be moving too fast. The second reason why you may be struggling right now with your business growth, your law firm business growth is that you're trying to move too fast.
• 10:42
  So what do I mean by that? I mean, perhaps you're looking at other people in social media in your community, and you're wondering why they're doing this or that and thinking that maybe you should be doing it too. So let me give you an example. Let me give you a few examples.
• 10:56
  Davina: A woman law firm owner will call
• 10:58
  Davina: her Jill was worried about systematizing her law firm business because she kept reading about that in Facebook groups with other attorneys. So she started buying software other people recommended, even though she already had a case management system. She admittedly didn't fully understand or know how to use to its full capacity. And her law firm was different from some of the people providing this, the kind of anonymous people really, because although she knew them as Facebook friends, she didn't know them in real life, providing this advice to a general group. Here's the kicker though.
• 11:31
  Jill didn't have other attorneys or staff to help her apply these systems or even set up these systems that she was creating. She felt like she had to set up systems before she could hire people, which is the backwards way of doing it. She made no effort to hire, even though she was at a point in her business where she should have already hired. Essentially, Jill was moving fast on one thing and not moving on the right thing. So another Woman Law Firm owner, we'll call her Alice, was ready to go all in on systems and hiring, but she hadn't yet mastered how to get consistent prospects coming in the door and converting them into clients.
• 12:07
  Her gross revenue was too low for her to hire other attorneys, but she wanted to put the cart before the horse and get those attorneys and get those systems. She was so hell bent on being a mogul and having all the trappings and success that made it look outwardly as though she were successful without first mastering how to sell her services. So she was afraid of marketing. She didn't really like it and she didn't do a great job at consultations, but she thought if I do these other things, then this will help solve the problem. So that's someone who's moved very quickly in an area that she should not.
• 12:45
  And instead she should have chosen something else and done the work there first.
• 12:51
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• 13:25
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• 13:38
  Davina: There are many ways that fast rapid growth we're trying to achieve that we can cause us to move too fast. So for instance, we may not be making as much revenue as somebody else, and yet we're going out, we're hiring a bunch of vendors to help us do things. And so that's keeping our profits low or non existent because we're trying to keep up with the online Joneses, right? And we think, well, everybody must be doing this, but what you're not seeing is maybe the years that it took somebody to get their firm to a point where they could then make bigger investments like running ads or that kind of thing, right? So there's a lot of the unknowns when we're watching other people and we're thinking, well, we need to be moving faster because I'm way behind.
• 14:20
  You're not behind. You're on your own journey. And both of these attorneys that I share with you, they need to slow down and be more strategic in their law firm growth. And you may need to as well. You may need to consider a proper order of growing a business.
• 14:33
  And while laying the foundation properly first, instead of trying to throw money at a problem that doesn't need solving yet is really probably hurting you. I'll give you one last example. I was speaking with someone recently who knows she wants to catapult her firm into kind of mid multiple millions. And she knows the next steps in doing that because we've discussed it several times, but she will bring up other ideas that are really distractions, keeping her instead of pulling the trigger and taking action on the thing that she knows will really move her to the next step. And usually what that is, is that's either a mindset issue or that may be something where no one's pointed it out.
• 15:14
  So I pointed it out and we discussed it and she immediately began to take action on the very thing that she needed to do because you can't solve problems that haven't reared their heads yet. If you're saying, I'm going go solve this problem. Well, you don't have that problem yet because you haven't done the other things that are going to get you to that next level to then handle that problem, which brings me to the next one, which is intellectualizing and not taking action. This is worrying, overthinking kind of thing. You may be thinking into the future about all the things.
• 15:43
  So this is the opposite end of the spectrum. The third reason your law firm business may not be growing as fast as you like it to be. And it could be that you're devoting way too much time to try to figure everything out in your head before you take action. So what you do is you project into the future and it's always the worst case scenario. It's never the best case scenario because this is how our brains are wired, right?
• 16:06
  You're projecting, if I do this, then this terrible thing will happen. If I do that, what if this terrible thing happens? And we don't ever spend enough time thinking, well, if I do that, what if this awesome thing happens, right? So we talk ourselves out of taking action and making decisions because we say, oh, well, what if I invest this money and then it doesn't produce what I expect it to produce? This is a very common issue.
• 16:30
  And I see this with lawyers more than other types of business owners because I have coached other types of business owners because we're trained that way. As attorneys, our job is to anticipate all that can go wrong. So we help our clients avoid different paths that they may go down that might be the wrong path. However, as business owners, our job is to take calculated risks and make educated guesses, educated decisions sometimes based on incomplete information. In other words, we cannot predict the future because we are creators of our law firm business' future, right?
• 17:07
  We are creating the future. We can't predict consequences of some of our actions. We can predict some, but we must train ourselves to take imperfect action and then make whatever decisions we make the right decisions for us and for our business. So it's really resiliency. As I mentioned before, it's this idea that I'm going to make decisions and some of them are going to turn out and some of them aren't.
• 17:30
  And that's okay because I know I need to make decisions and I'm going to either win or learn, right? That's how we grow as leaders and CEOs. The longer we intellectualize, sit around reconsidering, considering, pondering, ruminating, the further behind we fall in achieving our law firm growth goals. I'll give you an example of this. I've known some women law firm owners who have hired a couple of times and it hasn't worked out.
• 17:57
  So then they sit around and they just keep staying in their feelings about that bad decision they made. I made this bad decision. I hired this person. I've got to think about whether I wanna hire again. I've got to think about all this because I spent this money and I hired them and I started training them and they weren't a right fit.
• 18:13
  And then they just halt their business growth for months because they can't get over the feeling of personal failure of doing something that didn't work out perfectly the way it's supposed to. Instead of just saying, hey, this happens to every entrepreneur. If I have a business for twenty, thirty years, it is not likely I'm going to hire a core team and they're going to stay with me for twenty, thirty years. It's just not how the work is anymore. People are going to come and people are going to go, you're going to hire people.
• 18:39
  They will have deceived you during the interview about who they were and what they were about, or they may not have been aware that they weren't up to the task. And we don't find this out till we hire them. You have to let go of those intellectualizing and ruminating over those so quote unquote failures. Right? At the core of all of this is this feeling that we have to be perfect and that we're inadequate.
• 19:03
  And if we don't make the perfect decision and the decision turns out to be wrong, then we are failures as business owners and as human beings. And that is simply not true. Hear me when I say that. It is not true. If something happens, you make a decision in your business, it doesn't work out.
• 19:20
  It could be hiring a coach. It could be hiring an employee. It could be investing in a technology tool. There are all kinds of things like that that could happen. And at the moment it seems like a good idea.
• 19:32
  And then you find out later that things have changed for you. And I have so many examples of that in my business and with my clients that I see every day. Entrepreneurship is like one big experiment. Okay? You will never get it done because your business is something that you're creating.
• 19:49
  Right? And you cannot get it wrong because you are the creator of this project. So even when you make decisions that don't pan out the way you expect, there's something that you take away from that. Even if it's contrast, I know I don't want that now. Right?
• 20:03
  I thought I wanted it, but now I don't. Failure is inevitable and bad decisions are inevitable. And regardless of it all, you will be okay. And you have to know that you will still be there running your business, hiring new people, meeting new people, learning new technologies that comes down the pipeline, maybe AI, maybe some other tools that you've never even considered before and you will be okay. You'll be living your life even with the mistakes.
• 20:31
  And so letting go of that need to make a perfect decision and spending too much time intellectualizing and ruminating in our brains about things before we decide is something that really keeps people stuck a lot. The more you practice taking a perfect action, the more successful you will be at business. Okay. That's all for today. If after listening to this episode, you would love to get more help with growing your law firm business.
• 20:56
  Then I invite you to join me live today at 2PM Eastern time and listen to my brand new training. Again, it is called four strategies I deployed in 2008 to recession proof my law firm that still work today. These are things I still teach my clients. Plus the one thing I would do differently now in today's world and economy. And I've made it super easy for you to join us.
• 21:20
  Davina: You could just click the link in
• 21:21
  Davina: the show notes to register, put it on your calendar, plan to be there live this afternoon with me. There will not be a replay of this to try to be there live. I might do it live one other day coming up next week. So if you miss this, you want to be sure to get on my email list. So you'll get notice of the next one.
• 21:41
  If I decided to do the second one live one, it depends on how this one goes. So I hope to see you then. Otherwise, I'll be back here next week with more ideas on how you can scale your law firm business to multiple 7 figures, dramatically increase your personal income, and reprioritize your time so you could spend more of your time doing what it is you love to do. I thank you so much for being here and for liking, subscribing, following my content. I put a lot of work into it, and I'm so glad to hear feedback from you, what you like, what you don't like, what we can improve on.
• 22:12
  So be sure to reach out to me as well with that, and I'll see you soon.
• 22:18
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.