Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / 231 |The One Thing Keeping Most Law Firm Owners from Scaling (Hint: It’s Not Strategy)

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231 |The One Thing Keeping Most Law Firm Owners from Scaling (Hint: It’s Not Strategy) · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:01
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What
• 0:05
  Davina: if
• 0:05
  Intro: 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. Now here's Devina.
• 0:51
  Davina: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Devina Frederick, and today's topic was inspired by conversations I've been having over the last few weeks with women law firm owners who've told me they are disappointed and disillusioned with business coaching because they haven't been able to get the results they expected. When I run a campaign to enroll new members in the Wealthy Woman Lawyer League, as I did in December or into private coaching with me, it's not uncommon that I hear stories from women law firm owners who have previously hired other coaches. Some have enrolled in large coaching programs and they felt lost in a crowd and some have worked with coaches whose programs are not a good fit for them for where they are at the time. And some tell me that they didn't get the results they hoped to get and they felt disappointed.
• 1:40
  And a common theme throughout all their experiences is not a lack of strategy as you might imagine. Most feel they were provided with a strategy or an approach to growing their law firm, for some reason it did not work for them, even though it appeared to work for others. So let me let you in on a little secret of the coaching industry. The strategy is the easy part. Every coaching program has a signature strategy that they teach, a formula that works for most of their clients.
• 2:11
  In fact, strategy is so cheap, if you will, we all tend to share it freely. For example, I could tell you most law firm growth strategies are going to involve number one, getting good clients. Number two, having a team with automated systems and resources serve those clients to the client satisfaction. And three, creating an optimal experience for your clients by solving their legal problems. So you they will leave you a good review and they'll refer their friends and their neighbors to you.
• 2:38
  And of course, the difference though is in the details. Coaches have different viewpoints and opinions on the best way to get clients, for example, or we may have vastly different approaches to hiring, training, and retaining high performing employees, or we may believe there's a best practice for setting up systems or prefer some systems over others. Still not one coach out there is going to be able to help you get the results you desire regardless of how brilliant their strategy is if they cannot help you with the one thing that keeps most law firm owners from successfully scaling. And that one thing is implementation. And it's been a running theme of practically every conversation I've had with women law firm owners who've enrolled in coaching programs and experienced disappointment in their lack of results.
• 3:27
  So to put it bluntly, if you cannot, will not, or are unable to implement or execute on a strategy, it doesn't matter how fabulous that strategy is and how well it works for other people. It will never work for you. So let's look to the sports world for an example of what I mean so you can visualize what I'm talking about. Picture pick out your favorite team in your favorite sport, whether you like football, basketball, hockey, whatever it is. Now think of your favorite player and their coach.
• 3:59
  While the coach can teach the player certain techniques or mindset or guide the player and advise the player, the coach cannot do the work for the player. They can't go out on the court or the field and actually put in the work. The coach can demand the player show up for practice. But if the player refuses to show up to practice, what recourse does the coach have but to maybe reprimand or cut the player from the team? If the player ignores all the coach's advice when it's time to hit the field or the court, what recourse does the coach have?
• 4:31
  In the world of professional sports, either the player is gone or the coach is gone. If they can't work out, get it to get it together and work together to achieve the owner and the fan's desire results. Some might say it's a coach's job to motivate or inspire the player to perform. And certainly that can be an aspect of fundamental aspect of a coach's job is to motivate and inspire. However, if a player refuses to open their minds to what the coach is advising or to adapt their mindset, or at least try to follow the coach's program, then what?
• 5:07
  It's generally frowned upon and in the long run ineffective to use brute force to get a player to conform to performance requirements, right? In those professional sports world, they can't go beat them up and force them to do anything. When coaching law firm owners, law firm growth coaches are not working with just any player either. We are working with the leader of the team. If the leader does not put in the work required for the desired outcomes, what message does that send to the rest of the team and how is that going to affect the entire team's performance?
• 5:38
  In other words, we can lead a horse to water, but we cannot make it drink. And yes, you are the horse in this scenario that I'm talking about. And I have been in that position as well when I've had coaches. Still complaints about the inability to implement are often valid. So if you're saying you're struggling to implement, don't think that I'm dismissing that and putting it all on you.
• 6:03
  After all, women law firm owners are busy people. Women in business are busy people anyway. And add to that families and you really have got a lot going on. Many are still practicing full time as lawyers, plus trying to do the work on their business to grow it while like rainmaking and management and perhaps doing that while raising a family. So even if you do not have a spouse or children, you might have other obligations and commitments and responsibilities that soak up all your quote unquote free time.
• 6:31
  I know I certainly do. And yet I've known and worked with numerous women law firm owners who've had the same demands on their time and they still manage to execute on their law firm growth strategy and achieve their growth goals often while achieving some lofty personal goals as well. For example, one of my clients is a full time lawyer. She's a law firm owner. She's a married mother of five children, and she scaled her law firm to millions and has kept up that pace for several years, increasing her revenue and profits each year.
• 7:02
  In 2022, she spent ten days in Hawaii on a romantic vacation with her husband. And in 2023, she increased that to sixteen days in Hawaii, which is their favorite place in the world. This is in addition to several vacations that year with her family. So she's running this law firm that's making her more than $1,000,000 a year with a a team. She's a lawyer, and she also is has got time for her or five children and romantic vacations with her hubby.
• 7:30
  Another client, also a full time lawyer, runs a team of six lawyers and their staff while making multiple millions in annual revenue. And she travels at least four to six times a year with her husband and her two children. Her two children have probably already been to well over, 20 to 30 countries now, different countries as they're growing up because they travel so much. Still another busy mom with young kids has scaled her law firm to and through a million dollars in annual revenue and is on track for multiple millions while working as a lawyer and CEO of her law firm business. Recently, she has, secured some brand new office space that she loves.
• 8:07
  It's very upscale. She's hired a managing attorney and made some other power moves in her law firm. So what is the difference? How do they do what is seemingly such a struggle for other people to do? And how do you find the time to implement when you're so darn busy to begin with?
• 8:25
  So I'll tell you one thing, none of them started with a pot of gold and a full time staff. Each and every one of these women that I've just talked to you about and most of my clients I work with started out as a solo growing their families as their businesses grew. But the difference between law firm owners who stay stuck at six the six figure mark or even less in some cases and those who scale to seven figures and beyond is their willingness to transform their mindset, how they think about their business, and to stop trying to do everything themselves and to implement, implement, implement. So today I'm gonna share with you three implementation secrets to help you if you feel stuck. The first one is stop thinking that you personally are the one who needs to implement everything.
• 9:11
  Just this last week, one of my star clients said to me, well, I guess I need to train him. She was talking about her new green horn executive assistant. And it wasn't until I reminded her that while her new executive assistant needed to be trained on some things that she did not need to be the one to do the training, that the light bulb went off for her and she was able to move out of overwhelm and feeling like she needed to replace him and into action. So stop thinking that you are the one who has to be the doer. Number two is put implementation of law firm growth strategies and tactics on your calendar every week and schedule around them if you must.
• 9:53
  You need to make decisions about your law firm business, and you need to take action on those decisions. The only way that you could do that and do that successfully is to put it on your calendar and schedule around it. If you want to grow your law firm, you must make it a priority on your calendar. So it is written there today at this time, between this time and this time, I'm going to work on X that has to do with growing my law firm business, not working in the business. Number three is ask who, not how.
• 10:21
  This is obviously from Dan Sullivan's wonderful book of the same name, Who Not How. High achieving women love to ask, how can I do that? How can I implement this? How can I integrate this software? How can I hire people?
• 10:37
  How can I train people? When instead they should be asking who already knows how to do what I need done that can help me. If you like to know more about other implementation secrets and how my Woman Law Firm Owner clients achieve the results they do, then I invite you to book a call with me to discuss how we may be able to help you transform from a 6 figure scaler to a 7 figure CEO of profitable, sustainable, generating law firm business. The link to book a free practice growth assessment is in the show notes, so you could just click on that, fill out the practice growth assessment, and book a call with me. And I hope you've enjoyed today's podcast episode and that your January is off to a great start.
• 11:21
  I'll see you back here next week with more content created specifically for women law firm owners just like you. Thanks for listening.
• 11:28
  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.