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203: Not on Track with Your 2023 Goals? Do This Now. · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:00
  Davina: The true secret to success is not working harder. It is working smarter. So what does it mean to work smarter? Working smarter means learning to leverage your resources like capital, time, team, systems, and automation, and whatever else you could leverage. The people in your corner matter, and the people who are not supportive do not deserve your time and attention.
• 0:26
  Do not feel guilty about walking away from something that is sucking the life out of you.
• 0:34
  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 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
• 1:21
  Now here's Devina.
• 1:25
  Davina: Hi. This is Devina. And before we jump into today's show, I'd like first to introduce you to some
• 1:31
  Davina: of our
• 1:31
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• 2:29
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• 3:08
  Hi, everyone, and welcome back
• 3:09
  Davina: to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Davina Frederick. And today is June 29, the day that this is published, which means that we have almost reached the halfway mark of the calendar year. And if you, like many others I've spoken to lately, are feeling like you have jumped off track on achieving your 2023 goals in your law firm business, then this is the episode for you. First, if you have been looking around and thinking everyone has got it all together and beating yourself up because you feel like you don't, I want you to give yourself permission to let all of that go right now.
• 3:47
  The biggest thief of joy I believe is when we compare our journey ourselves to others. It's easy to look at what other people are posting on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook or LinkedIn and think that they are living these amazing perfect lives. As we get into summer, it could seem like everybody you know is traveling to the Amalfi Coast or Greece or Bali or some other exotic location. At least that's what it looks like on my feet. That can be especially painful if you are stuck in your office or in the courthouse every day grinding it out.
• 4:20
  I remember back in 02/2009 dressing in my lightweight wool lawyer suit, my lawyer uniform, dragging a big old case behind me from the courthouse parking garage to the courthouse actual in a 100 degree summer heat, wishing that I were anywhere else but there. If you have ever been to Florida, you know a 100 degrees feels like a 120 degrees here because the heat is the humidity as they say. That ought to be our state motto. I wanted to be anywhere but there. But I knew that if I wanted to be a successful law firm owner, I had to hustle, and that included spending my days in court, my evenings preparing for court, and some evenings and weekends working on my business.
• 5:05
  I must have attended hundreds of rubber chicken dinners during that time in my quest to network and get better referral sources, get better clients. It took me a long time to discover that hustling twenty four seven to become wealthy came at the cost of being unhealthy. Every night after work, get home and all I wanted to do was veg out in front of the TV with a glass of Cabernet or two, and the 15 pounds I gained in law school quickly became 30 pounds gained. Each day, I vacillated between extreme anxiety and hypervigilance to complete exhaustion and overwhelmed. I was so worried that something would fall through the cracks and I'd have to give my bar license back or something.
• 5:50
  And yet every day, I'd get up and I'd do it all over again. It really took a health and personal crisis for me to change the way I was living. I'm not a very religious person, but as the old saying goes, god whispers, and when you don't listen, he throws bricks. I believe that crisis was a message to me from the universe that something had to change in my life, and it needed to change immediately. And that's when I walked away from my first successful law firm business and started a fitness business with my husband.
• 6:21
  I would never wish the suffering I felt when I was leaving all that I had built on anyone. But at the time, I felt there was just simply too much at stake for me to continue going the way I was going. From the outside, my life looked great. If I had been posting about it on social media back then, you would have seen a beautiful home. You would have seen the luxury cars that we drove.
• 6:45
  My spouse, of course, plenty of money to spend. You would have seen me spending it mostly on English bulldogs because we've had many and they cost a lot. But on the inside, I felt really overwhelmed and frustrated and so tired. And I wondered what I had got wrong. Right?
• 7:05
  I did everything that everybody said you should do. Go get your education. Go to law school. Go to graduate school. Go to law school.
• 7:12
  Get your, you know, law degree. Take the bar. Become a lawyer. And it'll just be great. Right?
• 7:19
  And it didn't turn out that way. And of course, I really really wanted to know what had gone wrong and why it didn't work for me the way that I had expected it to work and how to fix it all, how to fix my life basically. Finally, I began to reach out and ask for help. And it took me way longer than it should have, but I'm thick, I guess. And although it took time, that one decision to reach out and ask for help changed everything for me.
• 7:47
  I reached out to mentors. I hired coaches, and that's is plural coaches. I've hired several coaches through the years to help me learn different things. I hired a therapist. I've hired energy workers.
• 8:01
  I even hired a hypnotist. Of course, I had personal trainer in there along the way. Fortunately, my husband's a personal trainer. I knew there had to be a better way for me to have the success I desired without sacrificing my health and well-being in the process. So as someone who entered the workforce in the eighties and nineties, all I ever heard was that the path to success, which means to me, success means financial safety and ultimately financial independence or financial freedom, but safety first because I grew up where we didn't have a lot of money.
• 8:35
  And so I've always felt that that was important to be able to help contribute to my family. And I was taught that that requires lots of hard work to get there. What does hard work even mean? You ever stop to read those words and think to yourself, what does that mean? I mean, if we're professionals in white collar jobs, we aren't exactly digging ditches here.
• 8:56
  I mean, I came from a family of where my grandparents were farmers and builders, handymen. So trust me when I tell you that that's really hard work. K? Working on a farm, building a house, those things are hard work. Hard work in the context of a professional white collar job like in marketing or IT or in the law or something else means something entirely different.
• 9:20
  And it can be just as taxing on the body, but just in a different way than hard physical labor. So sitting hunched over a desk for hours on end, staring into the blue light of a computer screen, meeting with stressed out and upset people, being verbally assaulted, reading reams of emails, and trying to remain calm when every ounce in your body wants to get up and run screaming from the room, These are all long term consequences on both our physical and mental health. Secondary trauma, the trauma that comes with dealing with other people's serious problems day in and day out likely contribute to the reason that so many lawyers become addicts or even commit suicide. My point is how much harder can we be expected to work if we're already doing all the things? When someone says, if you want to be more financially secure, wanna be successful, you have to work harder.
• 10:13
  I think to myself, what else can we sacrifice? More sleep? More rest? More time? More relationships?
• 10:21
  Because if you want to see people, a population that divorces frequently, look at lawyers. Here's the secret. People who say this to you either number one, don't know any better, or number two, know better, but they're lying to you. So let's take for example the typical white collar professional who is a white male over the age of 60. He's a millionaire who's worked hard all of his career grinding it out, perhaps billing 2,000 plus or twenty five hundred hours a year in his law firm.
• 10:55
  I have questions for you. Who raised his kids? Who ran his household? Who served as an emotional conduit for him in relationships with his other family members like perhaps his parents? If you peek behind the scenes, you'll probably find a whole wife there, A whole wife and likely really an ex wife and at least one.
• 11:17
  And he also probably has at least one secretary, a paralegal, and a team of associates working for him. Right?
• 11:26
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• 11:59
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• 12:13
  Davina: I watched this reel on Instagram. It's a channel that I was following for a while, And the young man was interviewing millionaires. Everybody on his channel is an older white man who has become a millionaire over the course of his career, and he's asking them for advice. And so this is what comes to mind when I think about only works if there are other people in the picture to keep all the other facets of his life running. Right?
• 12:42
  And people don't talk about that. Now I don't fault men who've achieved great success in their careers. I really don't. I admire them for being able to do that. I know that they've worked for it.
• 12:54
  I also know that it is a different standard for women even in 2023. Where I take issue is when they say you just need to work harder without ever telling you the truth that they had a whole team of people that facilitated and shored up their success. And now without those people, they would never have been able to do what they did to become financially successful.
• 13:20
  Davina: And I think a lot
• 13:21
  Davina: of times the reason they don't tell people that is because it doesn't occur to them. Right? It's something that comes with power and privilege. This expectation that other people will support them. Other people meeting a lot of women.
• 13:36
  And not only did they have a whole silent workforce underneath them or by their side, They also had help from above like older, wiser mentors who helped guide them, make way for them, and connect with them connect them to others throughout their career. Nobody ever tells you that, do they? You can look at the report women walking out the door, and you can see it's one of the big complaints that women lawyers in their fifties have with big law is that there is no mentorship for women in the way that there is for men. I remember when I opened my first law firm, I immediately joined a bunch of professional associations thinking this would be a great way for me to develop referral sources. And just as quickly, these organizations began to promote me to leadership positions.
• 14:23
  You think, hey, that's a great thing. Right? I became the VP of the National Association for Women Business Owners, for example, and I became the program chair for our inner court. And there were some others, but I don't recall off the top of my head. Of course, my ego was loving that.
• 14:39
  In my mind, they want me. How exciting is that? I'm a brand new lawyer, and I'm being welcomed into these groups and given responsibilities. What I did not realize until it was too late is that every volunteer organization is like that when they see fresh meat. Right?
• 14:54
  It means they can finally pass the reins to somebody else, and they can rest while you do the work. On the end of court, as the program chair, I had a full committee to quote unquote help me. Except this committee was made up of older, more experienced people, men and women, mainly judges, and they only wanted to help with the idea. So they would sit with me in
• 15:17
  Davina: a meeting and they would say, hey.
• 15:19
  Davina: We should have this person come on and speak or that person come on and speak. But when it came to actually reaching out, booking people, getting them set up, and all of that as the committee chair, I was the one who was putting in the work. I was the one who was spending my time, which is already limited to do that. I was the worker bee. So here I was.
• 15:40
  I was a baby lawyer. I was trying to learn how to be a good lawyer. I was a brand new business owner with no employees, and I was running at least these two volunteer programs that I can recall. And what could be more normal than that? Right?
• 15:55
  It was like having,
• 15:56
  Davina: you know, two full time jobs and a
• 15:58
  Davina: couple of part time jobs. It was crazy. And a kind mentor finally pulled me aside one day. So it was a female mentor of mine, and she's a few years older than me. She pulled me aside because I was exhausted and in tears, and I just felt like I was failing.
• 16:15
  And she pointed out to me that the president of the organization, the end of court that I was a member of, which I had been made a program chair for, he had his secretary that did everything that he volunteered to do. So everything that the president of the court volunteered to do, his secretary actually did it. And she says, you need someone like that as well. And I'm like, what? That never even occurred to me.
• 16:44
  Like, how dense am I? But I'm not alone. I hear this all the time. Do you know how many women law firm owners I know who have never hired an executive assistant just to be their personal gatekeeper and assistant? I think most all of them have never done that.
• 17:02
  And how many men have executive assistants right when they go out on their own? Most of them. Women will hire a ton of virtual assistants and maybe some paralegals, but it takes a really long time for us to hire lawyers. And most never hire a personal assistant for themselves in the office much less at home. What is up with that, ladies?
• 17:24
  Why is it that we are all so reluctant to hire lawyers? And I say this with all the kindness in my heart, but I've been speaking to women law firm owners for the last decade now about growing their businesses, and there is so much fear around hiring other lawyers. But you will never be able to leave your law firm without worry that it's going to fall apart while you're gone unless you hire other lawyers. And forget about hiring executive assistants. I talked one of my clients into hiring executive assistant after she already had a fully staffed office.
• 18:00
  She was like, oh, maybe I could use that. And you just don't find that when you talk to male lawyers for the most part. Now there are exceptions to all of these. Right? So here's the second thought that I wanna leave you with today before we end.
• 18:13
  And that is if you are halfway through the year and you are not on track to achieve your goals, I want you to look around you and ask yourself, who is on my team? Do I have lawyers to cover for me in court or in meetings or in hearings so I can free up my time to think strategically about my business? Do I have a personal assistant to help me out at home and kind of help be a household manager? Do I have an executive assistant to run my schedule and be my gatekeeper and protect my time while I'm in the office? Do I have a coach?
• 18:48
  Do I have someone who is there to guide me and support me and really create a shortcut for me on my path to success? Do I have a network of people who actually support me instead of adding to my plate? Am I being asked to give my time as though I didn't have a full day job and a family at home? Now I'm not against volunteering. Don't walk away thinking that, but I do think that we have to consider the time and place we are in in our lives.
• 19:20
  And if you don't have a team of people supporting you, you simply cannot do it all. You must pick and choose. And if you are busy trying to become the CEO of your law firm business and raise your family at the same time, then write a check to your favorite organization instead of donating time you do not have. Because the true secret to success is not working harder. It is working smarter.
• 19:45
  So what does it mean to work smarter? Working smarter means learning to leverage your resources like capital, time, team, systems, and automation, and whatever else you could leverage. The people in your corner matter, and the people who are not supportive do not deserve your time and attention. Do not feel guilty about walking away from something that is sucking the life out of you and rethinking the way you were showing up in the world. The one thing I regret about walking away from my law firm business is I did not reach out for help soon enough.
• 20:24
  It wasn't until I started my second law firm business that I began to hire coaches to help me figure it out and hire people. I did hire people my first let me be clear. I did hire people in my first law firm business, but I didn't have the training skills and support to be the best leader and manager that I could be because I didn't know I needed to be. And so that caused problems. If you're looking for a coach to help you think more strategically about the growth of your law firm and guide you through the leverage process, then I invite you to schedule a one to one appointment with me.
• 21:00
  You can just click on the link in the show notes and complete my practice growth assessment form to book a time on my calendar to discuss whether or not I may be able to help you in your journey to grow your law firm business. Not everyone is a good fit for this offer, but for some of you, this really will be exactly what you need right now. I hope you've enjoyed today's topic. If you'd like the type of content I'm providing here, please be sure to leave me a
• 21:27
  Davina: review on Apple. The more five star reviews, the higher Apple will rank our podcast, and the more women law firm owners we will be able to get in front of and help. So thanks again for listening, and I'll see you back here next week.
• 21:40
  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 our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.