Welcome to 2022! How To Double Revenue & Scale Your Law Firm

The beautiful thing is that with a new year, we get new opportunities to change the way that we’re looking at the world, change what we are doing to bring about new opportunities in the world. I wanted to share with you some of the things that we have coming up here at Law Firm Mentor that is going to help you to do just that. Actually, look at your business differently and create better results than you have already created for yourself.

So our first webinar of the year is going to be on Thursday, January 13th, and you’re going to find that webinar information in the show notes. You can click on the link to it in our show notes, but it is Seven strategies to Achieve Rapid Growth in your Law Firm in 2022.

You have heard me say before, more money, more free time, right? More money comes from marketing and sales, the more free time comes from people and systems. So here at Law Firm Mentor, we help lawyers with marketing, sales, people, and systems.

In this episode we discuss:

  • 3 Success principles we’ve learned from doubling our revenue in a year at Law Firm Mentor.
  • How the quality of the team correlates with the quality of the company.
  • The fact that not every client is your client.
  • Making decisions quickly to get to rapid growth.

Allison Williams: [00:00:05] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your host of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys. We help you to grow your revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.

Allison Williams: [00:00:31] Hi, everyone, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor, and welcome to another episode of the Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast. Welcome to two thousand and twenty-two. I love to say 2022, because whenever you say 2022, a lot of people hear twenty twenty-two, T-O-O, I know that that’s been kind of a negative meme that’s been going around social media. So I’m very intentional now about saying two thousand and twenty-two. But however you say it, this is a new year and I always love kicking off a new year with a little reflection about what the year ahead is going to look like. So last year was pretty awesome, at least in Law Firm Mentor. There were a lot of people that did not have a great twenty twenty-one. I’m aware of that. Obviously, a lot of people lost loved ones due to COVID. My prayers are with you, all that had that experience. And I know for a lot of businesses, business wasn’t what we expected or even what we designed for 2021.

Allison Williams: [00:01:33] But the beautiful thing is that with a new year, we get new opportunities to change the way that we’re looking at the world, change what we are doing to bring about new opportunities in the world. And I wanted to share with you some of the things that we have coming up here at Law Firm Mentor that are going to help you to do just that. Actually, look at your business differently and to create better results than you have already created for yourself.

Allison Williams: [00:01:55] So the first thing is that we are going to now kick off a resuming of our live weekly show. So for those of you that have been following Law Firm Mentor for any length of time, you know that we have had a Facebook show many moons ago, it was called The Mentor Moment and we used to host it in our Facebook group. Now, I still love our Facebook group community. We’re now almost 3000 lawyers strong in our Facebook group community. We have new requests to join the Facebook group every single day of the week. That includes the weekend. So we are continuing to grow that group and we will continue to deliver content in that group, including this show. But as I’ve talked about on this podcast, we know that there were a lot of changes to online marketing in 2021, and those continued changes will affect us in 2022. And that means that a lot of things that we would normally create and post on social media, particularly on Facebook, are now no longer going to be readily accessible the way that they were before.

Allison Williams: [00:02:58] Now, for those of you that are curious about why that is, there is a Facebook episode we recorded called Why Your Facebook mark, you know, Facebook Ads may not be working anymore. Check that out because there’s a lot of detailed information in there about online marketing, but we are still going to be presenting the show content when we resume. We’re going to be presenting the show content in our Facebook group, on our Facebook page and in LinkedIn. So for those various different opportunities, I want you guys to know that you’ll have access to that content in a variety of different places. I just want to let you know here to go get it because it’s not going to be the same as the podcast, right? One of the things I’m really, really excited about is that we have had such a burgeoning engagement with the legal community. I mean, the number of lawyers that are now aware of Law Firm Mentor that send people to us when they know that they need help, that seeks us out when they themselves are contemplating working with a business coach that asks us questions that learn from the information that we put out there. The speaking engagements now and the requests for speaking engagements are very consistent and regular. It really is just a gift. It’s a blessing. I’m very happy about the direction of the company and what we’ve been able to provide to the legal space.

Allison Williams: [00:04:14] But I know that there are times where you are getting your content here on the podcast, listening on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, etc. And there are other times where you might actually be on social media and want to catch it live. You might want to actually see me present instead of just hear me present. You might want to actually see the engagement between me and the guests that I have on the show. So we want you to have that opportunity not only in the form of the podcast but in the form of our weekly show. So for those of you that catch us here still know that we’re going to be here now that you’re still going to have the access to us that you had before, we are going to still do our show twice a week, but we are also adding a live weekly show, and I’m really excited about doing that. That show is going to be on video, so you’re going to be able to see us. And I say us right now, the show is going to be hosted by me, yours truly Allison Williams. But periodically I am going to have members of our coach team being able to do the show as well, because I want you guys to know that not only is Law Firm Mentor right now much bigger than me, it has, it has grown so far beyond me. It’s amazing. We’re actually in the process now of hiring a COO because there are so many moving parts of this company and I really want to make sure that we are always all staying in our zone of genius so that we can create from a place of Arizona genius and not everyone is doing everything all the time because there’s so much to do. So we are looking to add that COO, hopefully in quarter one of 2022. But the weekly show is going to be an opportunity for you to hear some of the brilliance that really comes from me and our coach team and the ways in which we help lawyers across the country to grow their law firms, crush chaos in business and make more money. So really excited about that.

Allison Williams: [00:06:04] Now, another attribute of 2022 that I want to let you guys know about is something that I decided to bring back. In 2019, I started delivering webinars to the legal space, and the webinars were substantively about various different parts of what we help lawyers with here at Law Firm Mentor. So as you guys have heard me say before, more money, more free time, right? More money comes from marketing and sales, more free time comes from people and systems. So here at Law Firm Mentor, we help lawyers with marketing, sales, people and systems.

Allison Williams: [00:06:38] Now I’m really excited about that, but I will be candid with you, even though those are the pillars of what we focus on. There’s a whole lot more that goes into running a business than just marketing salespeople and systems. You have to optimize yourself as the owner, right? So there’s personal and professional development that comes with that. You also have to understand your finances and not just where your money is coming from and where it’s going, but how to use money, right? How to use debt if you’re going to use debt, how to grow a credit profile for a business and the values of that. How to work with a fractional CFO or a management accountant. How to get strategic tax advice. What you should be thinking about in terms of your numbers for your 3-year plan, your 5-year plan, your 10-year plan. And a lot of us don’t ever get to that because we’re so busy living hand-to-mouth or when we start making money, being so afraid that we’re going to lose it, that we just say, OK, as long as I’m paying my taxes, paying my bills, taking home my salary and have money in the bank, I’m good. There’s so much more to Law Firm finance, particularly a growing, scaling, thriving law firm business to have your finances managed appropriately that we really do have to cover that, and we do cover that very thoroughly through one of my coaches here at Law Firm Mentor.

Allison Williams: [00:07:55] But one of the things that I know that people have asked me before. Certainly whenever I’ve been invited to speak and, you know, shout out to many of the great vendors and amazing organizers, friends of Law Firm Mentor that have invited me onto their platforms to share what we do here. When I have those opportunities, there’s oftentimes a missing link, right? People are like, Oh my God, I’d love to hear more of that, and I’m given very specific parameters. And this is certainly no shade to the people that invite me on. Like when I have people on my stages, I give them parameters as well. There oftentimes is information that I would like to share that I don’t get to share, right, because of time constraints or because of formatting or what have you. And a lot of times that information I bring on to my own platform and people will ask me for it and I want to give it to you in more of a, a teaching format, right? So, you know, I think always is a part of my heart will be teaching even though I am not a teacher. Both of my parents started off as teachers. My father ultimately ascended into education administration, but my mother was a teacher throughout her entire career. The ways that I was taught to learn as a child was to teach it to my parents, right? Whatever I had to do homework, I had to teach it to someone. And then my legal career. I very successfully grew my career through getting on stages to teach CLs and other legal programs to the marketplace. So teaching is something that I naturally feel I have a gift for. I’ve been told I have a gift for it and it’s something that I personally enjoy. So I want to fill my life, fill my business, fill my time with things that I enjoy, and I also want to be able to use the information that I have, the information that helps lawyers in my own community, my existing clients, as well as lawyers who find Law Firm Mentor and say, Yeah, I want some of that. I want you to have the ability to consume the content in a way that I think is going to be most powerful and effective for you to implement. So we are bringing back our webinar series. We have now eight webinars scheduled out for 2022. And every time we host a webinar, once the webinar ends, we’re going to tell you about the next one.

Allison Williams: [00:10:07] So our first webinar of the year is going to be on Thursday, January 13th, and you’re going to find that webinar information in the show notes. You can click on the link to it in our show notes, but it is Seven strategies to Achieve Rapid Growth in your Law Firm in 2022. Now, if that title sounds familiar, no, that is a presentation that I gave for the SMB team in the program that they had New You boot camp in December of this year or December of last year, I can’t believe you’re already in the last year, right? December of 2021, the program with Daymond John. So I had the opportunity to speak on rapid growth strategies, and that was a really great presentation. It was, it was very well received and several lawyers reached out to me afterward and said that there was something that I shared in that webinar about culture and corporate culture, law firm culture, business, culture, I think, is something that a lot of us overlook because we are either in the struggle of trying to get past that first virtual employee or we have what we consider to be a tight-knit team of two or three people, and we haven’t yet assembled enough people to be able to really focus on culture. But the reality is that if you don’t focus on culture before you have a lot of people, then you almost invariably have to reform your culture when you do have a lot of people. In other words, it’s a lot easier to build it the way it should be designed, rather than for you to try to ex post facto, you know, mold an existing culture into something different.

Allison Williams: [00:11:42] So we’re going to be talking a lot about culture throughout 2022 because as I’ve seen it, you know, we have clients here at Law Firm Mentor that are making their first six figures and we have clients at Law Firm Mentor that are in the multiple seven figures. So, you know, there’s a wide range of clients that we serve, but almost invariably people are the crux of culture, right? You don’t have a culture without at least one person, right? You alone are your law firm culture. And then when you add another person, you immediately have a culture that changes. And so I want to share a lot of what I see in that particular webinar. A lot of what I see are some of the pitfalls of culture and the ways in which if you understand it now, if you understand how to create, how to evolve and how to sustain a healthy law firm culture, then when you are adding people, you will have a greater likelihood of retaining them. You will have a greater likelihood that they will be able to scale quickly into helping you to create the revenue stream that you need, as well as the profit that you need. And you’ll have a much better time in the business of law. Right? Because dealing with the shit of people is one of the worst things. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t think of it as the worst thing. Like, literally, I mean, even the people, people like, you know, the we like to use the phrase like, Oh, this person is a people person like even those people don’t like the crap of dealing with people, right? And I don’t mean dealing with people like, you know, having to hold them accountable to their jobs. I’m talking about dealing with interpersonal dynamics or dealing with gossip, or challenging perspectives, or when you have people that are feeling entitled, like a lot of those idiosyncrasies of human beings in the way that human beings show up in a collective oftentimes are created from a lack of forward-thinking about culture. So this year, we are really going to spend some time on that. We’re going to be diving into that a lot on the podcast and the weekly show and our very first webinar. Seven strategies to Achieve Rapid Growth in your Law Firm in 2022 is going to give you not just an overview of the culture issue, right? There are going to be seven strategies. They relate to seven different areas of business. But when we talk about people in particular, we have a great resource that we’re going to provide you called, the Law Firm Mentor Culture Scorecard. So, you know, to be on the lookout for that. But the link to register for the webinar is in the show notes and again, it is on Thursday, January 13th. So if you’re not available that day, don’t worry, we do make replays available to our webinars, and so we want you to sign up for the webinar. It’s going to be a great forward casting, if you will, for your year ahead, right? So these strategies are rapid growth. If you start to learn them now and you start to implement them now, you’ll have a greater likelihood of achieving a higher level of financial success in 2022 than if you didn’t.

Allison Williams: [00:14:46] Ok, now a couple of other things I want to talk to you about on this episode. Since we’re talking about 2022 I shared with, with the legal community recently, a very short video called How I Doubled Law Firm Mentor, how we doubled our revenue in one year. And what’s interesting is that I didn’t think about this. Somebody said to me, well, is that the first time you doubled? Because didn’t you double the year before? And actually, we more than doubled last year, and we more than doubled the year before. And one of the things that, that comes up when we talk about this and you know, what’s interesting is I talk about it from the perspective of there’s, there’s two parts of my life in business that are happening right now, so I have a thriving law firm and my law firm at this point is out of rapid growth mode, not because I have stopped learning how to grow my law firm, but because I’ve decided right? At one point, I decided the law firm was of a size where I was happy with it, so I didn’t really feel the need to grow it. Even though, as I’ve talked about, you always have a need to grow because you will always have people who want more for themselves and thus more income, and you will always likely have inflation. So you have to minimally deal with those two factors in your revenue stream or else you’re going to be taking from yourself every time you increase income for your employees, which is self-defeating. So, you know, there’s a, there’s a pragmatism to growing a law firm, but beyond that very basic necessity of growth. I haven’t been leaping and bounding and growing my law firm because, frankly, I didn’t feel I needed to. And meanwhile, I was leaping and bounding and growing in my law firm coaching business, so I had two of those things going on. In one place, I am sustaining a multiple seven-figure business. And in another place, I am growing what is now a multiple seven-figure business. And I shared with everyone in that in that short video about success principles like what we learned from growing rapidly and growing into multiple seven figures and people ask me to expound upon it a little bit. So I am going to include the link to the video in the show notes, so that you can look at it. It’s literally like three minutes. So it’s a short video.

Allison Williams: [00:17:06] But one of the things that I thought was beneficial to actually talk about were the three keys, you know, to what we learned as a result of that year of rapid growth. So when we look at our 2021 year, three things came out of it. The first thing, the first omnipresent point that we learned from that rapid growth was that the quality of my team correlates to the quality of my company. And I’m sure you’ve heard that before. In other places, other spaces, I’m sure it’s not a new concept. I’m certainly not claiming it is my own, but wow, it is so true. I mean, and what’s interesting is that having had both the benefit of,of retrospectively without any business experience growing a law firm and now with about at the time that I started Law Firm Mentor, I had about five years, four and a half five years of law firm experience of business experience before I created Law Firm Mentor. So at that point, I was still newer in business, even though I had certainly learned business and other places. You know, I have a minor in business. I work at a law firm where I had it was a very much a business model, so I had to learn things like my effective rate and I had to always be looking at improving my collection rate and strategies around that.

Allison Williams: [00:18:32] So like a lot of the stuff that I actually share with people in Law Firm Mentor are things that I learned long before I even owned a law firm. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I didn’t know how to use what I didn’t know or what I did know, but I knew it right? You know what you know. So I was able to, like, take that in and carry it forward into some training and some guidance that I got when I became a business coach. But the thing of it is is that looking backward assembling team was the one thing that I never had to really learn because at every place that I had worked, I was either, either given a staff person or I may have participated in interviewing staff people. I certainly one of my secretaries, Pamela Doss, who I still adore Pamela, you know, interviewed at my the large law firm where I worked many years ago and I interviewed her. But you know, all of the substantive they, they knew that they needed to have substantive knowledge they needed to have they had before they brought me in. Same thing with my, my next secretary, Elaine Rodriguez, right? Elaine, phenomenal person. Phenomenal employee. She interviewed with my boss and I came in after he had gotten some basic information, so I was a part of the process, but I didn’t craft the process. I wasn’t involved in assessments or anything like that.

Allison Williams: [00:19:57] And the next thing you know, I’m on my own and I have to hire people and that shit was hard. There’s no other. There’s no other description for it. I was like, All right, you think you’re saying you can do this? What the heck? You know, I mean, I’m being somewhat flip, but only somewhat. I was like, really, really bad at hiring people like just awful. And now I’m really, really exceptional at hiring people. I mean, I have never hired anybody that was a cultural misfit for my company, Law Firm Mentor and every person that is here is exceptional and even the people that are not here anymore. There’s only been a couple. Nobody is not here because they couldn’t do the job at all or were harmful to the culture like, you know, they were, there were reasons why people aren’t here anymore, but none of them are reasons like I did a piss poor job of choosing in the first place. And so I get to look back and say, What did I create in my law firm and what did I create here? And part of the reason why Law Firm Mentor didn’t just grow quickly, but it grew. Well, right. I grew in a way that, you know, we just had in 2021 in December, we just had a program called Create Your Plan for 2022. And what’s amazing about that program is my two most senior coaches participated with me, Deb and Wolfgang, and I remember at some point in time Deb is teaching about people. And one of our clients says, You know, how do you, how do you bring people in and like, give them freedom and like, stay out of the way? Like, how does that work? And then, you know, Deb asked me to kind of extrapolate. And I said, Let me just give you the real like, you hire really good people and you stay the fuck out of their way. And when I say that, I say that with no hesitation, like, that’s not a punch line. That’s truth. Because when you are creating in a business, if you are creating and you are delegating to someone else to create, that is a very different experience. Then I create my lane, you create your lane, someone else creates their lane and we put our lanes together and we put the tracks in front of each other and we go that much faster and that much further, right? So when I think about that, like in that program, I told everybody I was like, Deb created her PowerPoint, Wolfgang created his PowerPoint. I didn’t see him. Like, we had a conceptual conversation about what we wanted to deliver, and we each went and created our thing and we put it together. And I was like, and I knew it was going to be great because I knew I hired great people, right? I’d already done enough analysis. I had worked with them enough. I had had enough of an experience and exposure to what they had the ability to produce, and I knew that they would produce consistent with what we said the outcome would be. So I engineered what I wanted it to look like, and I shared it with bright, bright minds. And those bright minds then said, OK, I got it. This is the way we’re going to do this right? And I didn’t have to worry. I didn’t have like the, Oh my god, like, you know, I need to look at their work to make sure that the work is quality.

Allison Williams: [00:23:11] Now, obviously, when we’re talking about a law firm, you have a duty of supervising and there are some ethical rules that you have to ensure are being followed. So I’m certainly not suggesting to you, you know, throw caution to the wind, throw people to the wolves and hope for the best. That’s not what we’re, what we’re getting at here. But what I am getting at here is that even when you are looking at, supervising, right? The way you supervised a 25-year attorney who’s tried 50 cases and has more experience than you. It’s very different than the way that you supervise a brand new attorney, and so many times that that need to supervise comes from not having the right people with the right levels of experience, the right ability to contribute, and we hold on so much and I’m just seeing that. Like, even though we grew fast in Law Firm Mentor, we grew revenue fast, we grew profit fast, all of those things. It was fun. Like, I love my clients, I love my team. Like, there’s very few items of stress in the business. You know, it’s just, it’s fun all the time, right? And it gets to be that because that’s when I say, you know, when we talk about the quality of the company, the quality of the company is that I get to pay people well and I get to enjoy seeing them succeed. And I get to give them opportunities to create an advance in their career. And all of those things happen instinctually and naturally because I decided that I was going to assemble a quality team. And that became a non-negotiable because I learned from not doing that the first time around when I built my law firm, it was let me get the cheapest person I can. All right, I have to spend more money on the next person because the last person was not that great. All right. Well, now I’m spending so much and now I feel resentful because this person is not that great either. Right? When I got over to my coaching business, I had worked out a lot of that stuff and I’d learned how to hire.

Allison Williams: [00:25:13] So when you start to assemble a quality team and then you start to add more quality team, everyone gets excited when we add a new person like we have a weekly team meeting. And every time I bring in a new person and say, All right, everybody, we’ve got our new person, everybody, let’s go around and introduce ourselves. Everybody goes through their little, you know, three-minute pitch of who they are and where they came from. And everybody is smiling and happy to meet the new person. It’s kind of like, Wow, welcome in. And that feeling is not something that you could create unless you had quality people around you creating the business. So that was definitely a success principle of 2021.

Allison Williams: [00:25:51] Another major success principle of 2021 this is the second one is that not every client is your client. And I’ve said this before, I’m always somewhat chagrined to talk about this because I don’t ever want someone who’s no longer in my company as a client to feel that I’m talking about them. I guess in theory, I am talking about them because I had to learn the experience through them. But I’ve always found that even when you have a really good person, right? So this is not a knock to people, but when you have a really good person, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are your kind of person. Right? A good example would be that one of our clients had some financial issues, and when we ultimately have that, that problem you know we have to have a conversation with the client about what we’re going to do to pay the bill. But it is a coaching conversation because we’re coaching companies. So the goal is to not just help you pay our bills is to help you pay all of your bills. And one person, this person was incredulous, was like, Well, I’ve got, I’ve got other things and those other things are more important, and they will always be more important than your bill.

Allison Williams: [00:26:57] And I remember when I had this conversation, you know, there were various different emotions that came up. But ultimately, what, what kind of sat with me is this person is not my person. And it’s not because I was annoyed that this person didn’t pay my bill right? It was that this person’s attitude was not one that was consistent with my values, right? The kind of a, well, you know, you know, I have something that’s more important than you. So we don’t have to really figure out how to take care of you. I will always have to figure out how to take care of my X, my Y, my Z, you know, like, that’s not a value that I espoused. My value is once I make a commitment, once I sign a contract, you’re my obligation. Whatever, whatever the contract is, whether it’s my mortgage or my rent or my phone or my, my FedEx or whatever. I made a commitment. I have to honor it. And that’s what, that’s what I stand for in the world, and that’s what I want people around me to stand for. So we’ve had these types of moments where I realized, OK, this person is not a bad person, but this person is not my person. Right?

Allison Williams: [00:28:12] Same thing with people who really don’t have motivation to build, right? Motivation to build is one of the key tenets of what is required for a coaching client. Because the reality is, if you’re not motivated, if you say, Yeah, you know, I’d love to grow a business, but you know, I’m independently wealthy and my spouse makes a very high, multiple six-figure income. And we’ve been living off of my spouse’s income for however long. And if I get around to growing the business great and if I don’t whatever, I don’t know that person is ever going to be my person. And again, nothing wrong with that person, right? I’m sure there are a lot of people that would love to have a wealthy spouse and would love to have the freedom to know that whether they make money or not, their spouse has already created so much money for themselves, and they are, you know, they’re going to receive it by virtue of being legally married, that they don’t have to worry about it, but the fact that they don’t have an inner drive to create makes it very challenging when it’s hard for the person in whatever way in business, right? Because we all know entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It’s not easy. It’s not going to simply be easy because you’ve hired a business coach, right? It’s going to be easier, but it’s not going to be easy. And so when we talk about how to make it easy, part of making it easy is about your mindset. Part of making the is easy, making it easy is about your follow through. And a person who says, I don’t want to get out of bed today, I’m not in the mood today, I don’t want to spend my energy on my clients today and I don’t have to. Is the kind of person that you know, that this is a luxury for them, right? It’s not. It’s not something that they are committing themselves to. Commitment is a big part of being successful in business if you’re not committed. And I don’t mean that if you have a wavering commitment because you get scared or because you’re uncertain like we all have those moments, right? But I’m talking about like as a life premise if your way of being in the world is to not be committed to what you sign on for. And I don’t mean financially committed, but like not being committed with your time, your energy, your heart, then ultimately there’s only so much we can ever do for you, right? Because if you’re not committed, you’re not going to show up and ask questions when you’re challenged, you’re not going to put in the extra effort to strategically engineer your marketing plan with the assistance of our marketing coach, you’re not going to show up for our weekly Coach’s Corner where we have substantive trainings on different areas of business. You’re not going to show up to your accountability calls every single week where someone can be there to hold your hand and walk you through or simply have you commit to what it is you’re going to get done this week between now and next week so that you can move your business forward, right? Like, we have to have someone invested in being coached in order to assist you with coaching. You know, it’s like, you know, and we all know this, right? We all have had law clients where let’s say you’re a criminal defense attorney and you say to your client, Listen, you know, I can get you probation, but don’t go committing any more crimes in the next year or else this probation is going to be revoked, right? Or don’t go, you know, hanging out with the person that you were alleged to have violated in some way. Because even though you know that that’s a story and you’re saying that, that’s a story and they’re saying it’s a story today, they might change their mind tomorrow, and then they’ve got you over a barrel. So these are the rules to keep you out of jail, right? You tell them that and they’re not committed to staying out of jail. They’re committed to solving today’s problem because they’re in the mood. And then the mood leaves them as soon as they get the positive result of today. And they’re like, What the heck? And then they go out and commit a crime next month and you’re like, didn’t I tell you that you can’t go committing more crimes in the next year? And they’re like, Yeah, I know, but fix it.

Allison Williams: [00:32:25] And the person who looks at their business coach as the cleanup woman supposed to come along and fix it, you know, that’s not how this works, right? You have to have the momentum. You have to have the carry through, right? I can give you a lot of things. I can’t give you a motivation that you don’t have, right? I can certainly give you extrinsic motivation, right? I can inspire you. I can enlighten you. I can help you see all of the opportunities that’s part of this process. But if there wasn’t a drive in the first place, I can’t tap into your intrinsic motivation because you don’t have any. So that person is also not our person, right? And that’s OK, right? You can see that a person has a different view of the world, a different outlook, a different perspective without feeling the person is a bad person. Right, you can say this is not what I want in my world, but I wish you well, right?

Allison Williams: [00:33:23] And so there’s times where you have to be very clear about that and part of the work that a lot of us have to do. I think all business owners have to do it, myself included. Sometimes you’re excited about the opportunity to do what you love to do, right? To deliver your service, to make the sale, whatever it is, right? You’re excited about that and you get more excited about that than thinking about the tail end result of if this person is the wrong person, what is that going to do to my community? Right? What is it going to do to the inspiration and the motivation of the remaining clients? What’s it going to do when other people want something that is incompatible with this person? How are they going to influence each other, right? So you have to be, you have to have a bigger picture and have an eye toward again, the end result. The success, not just today’s problem-solving. So that was the second success principle.

Allison Williams: [00:34:19] And the third and final success principle is that in order to grow rapidly, you have to get into the habit and stay in the habit of making quick decisions. Ok, now when I say make quick decisions, the lawyers immediately like the hair rises on the back of their neck and they’re like, Wait a minute, I need time to think about it and overthink about it and evaluate and pull out the spreadsheet and tell all my mom and like. And there’s like all of this story that kind of circles around the idea that you have to like a decision isn’t valid until you make the decision. And in fact, I remember I had a meeting with someone. This was like over a year ago now. Very, very nice woman. And she had attended a clubhouse room where I had spoken and we then had a sales conversation. And she said to me, she was like, This sounds like exactly what I want to do, like it has everything that I need. I just need to think about it, OK? And typically, when people say I need to think about it, that means they need to go home and talk themselves out of it. That’s usually, that’s usually what happens, by the way, from a whole host of psychological reasons that we need not get into. And this is true for any I need to think about it. Objection. Right. So, you know, I talked her through what she needed to think about, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And ultimately, she would not relent off. I have to think about it. I don’t make fast decisions. I’m a very deliberative person, you know, blah blah blah.

Allison Williams: [00:35:53] So we got back on the phone like the next week. And, you know, when I came to the to the meeting, you know, I asked her, I said, Well, did you have a chance to think about it? She said, Yes, I did. I said, Well, what did you think about? And she told me a host of things that we had already discussed in the first meeting and I said, OK, well, the answers to those questions haven’t changed. So based on that? Are you ready to move forward? And she said, You know, I really want to. But you’re the first person that I’ve spoken to. And I feel like I have to as a lawyer, I have to do my due diligence. I said, OK, well, what exactly is the diligence that you feel you need to do? Because if you if, if, if what you’re looking for is, I need someone else to validate my decision, i.e. I need some testimonials, I need to talk to some clients like that would be diligence on me. Like, she’s like, No, no, I feel like I have to talk to other coaches. And I said, Well, why do you feel you have to talk to the coaches if, if what you’ve identified is that everything that you said you needed is here. And her answer was, Well, I feel like I can’t say that I made the right decision unless I take time and go, look for other alternatives.

Allison Williams: [00:37:11] And by the way, this is part of the reason why not just this lawyer, but any lawyer that thinks this way, and there are a whole lot of them to think this way. This is why a whole lot of people are having problems in the hiring market because it’s like a the mindset is let me, let me caught someone and get them to, Oh my god, this person is perfect. Their resume is perfect. Their interviews were perfect. Their references were perfect. Oh, but there could be someone else out there. So let me go. Look for someone else, even though I have the perfect person here. Right? It’s part of the reason why people lose the love of their life, right? They meet the person. All the bells and whistles are there, right? This is the most attractive person in the world. I have everything in common with them. We have the same family values. We want the same things out of life. We share the same financial values and we have a great personality. We have a great sex life. We have all of these friends in common. But there could be someone out there better. Let me go, keep looking just in case, right? And, and I remember I took it very personally initially because I was like, Well, this person is rejecting me. That doesn’t feel good. And then I realized that, no, this person is not rejecting me. This person has bought into the idea that overthinking is the only thing that validates an opinion or a decision. And I realize that there is a whole lot of us that have that belief system like it isn’t just this lawyer, it isn’t just lawyers in general. There are a whole lot of people that believe a decision isn’t valid unless a whole lot of people agree with it. So I have to go ask friends, family and get testimonials, and a decision isn’t valid unless I persevere over. It’s been a whole lot of time back and forth trying to talk myself into it unless I pull out the spreadsheets, do the analysis back and forth, left and right crunched the numbers.

Allison Williams: [00:38:58] And once upon a time, even though I certainly wasn’t, I wasn’t an overthinker in business because thankfully for the time I started in business, my business grew so quickly. I didn’t really have the luxury of that, but I still was somebody that said, Let me think about it, let me, let me make sure I make the right decision. And then I realized that not making a quick decision had cost me so much money, so much money, so much time, so much heartache, so much upheaval. Like once the decision is made, you speak it, you act on it, it’s done. You move on to the next thing when you persevering all that time and energy is going into you, spinning your wheels. And then what happens? Oftentimes you make the decision that you would have made 30 days, 60 days, 90 days before. Now you’ve lost all that time. You’re never going to get back. Or if you make a different decision, that decision isn’t any more better than the decision you would have made. It’s just different.

Allison Williams: [00:39:54] In fact, I tell people this all the time, like for the most part. When your intuition is drawing you to something, when you’re called to listen to something, when you are called to pay attention to something, when it captures your attention, not just on the fascination level, but also on the intellectual level and you start seeing yourself in the solution that’s being offered. Oftentimes, the decision to run away is because there’s a reverberation in your subconscious that says This is going to get me what I want and your subconscious mind doesn’t want you to change. It wants you to stay the same. It wants you to stay in what you are currently familiar with and comfortable with. So I’ve heard a lot of people say, Oh my God, I know you can help me, but this person over here will let me do it slower. This person over here is only going to charge me x dollars and is only going to give me 15 minutes a month, and it’s only going to give me one template to look at every quarter. But that feels like it’s more consistent with my, my pace.

Allison Williams: [00:40:55] Right? And you know, and people will, people will come up with a whole host of things, and at one point I was like, I would, I would like substance substantively respond to people. I’d say, Well, that’s not true. You know, we don’t force you to grow fast. We allow you to grow fast. I don’t know why you’d want to go slow, but if you want to grow slow, if you only want to increase your income by twenty-five percent this year instead of one hundred and twenty-five percent, like several of our clients this year, that’s fine. I mean, we’re not going to, we’re not going to make you grow fast. But is it really true that that’s what you are protesting? And when you really start talking to people, you realize it’s not right? What they are really running away from is the opportunity to dramatically improve their business. It’s the oh my god, a massive change like being able to triple my revenue or double my income or work half as many hours. That kind of change is going to change my friend circle. It’s going to endanger my marriage. It’s going to cause a ripple effect with my kids. Like, I don’t know if I could do that. Like, I don’t know who I am without the struggle.

Allison Williams: [00:42:03] And a lot of times when people have that, that belief system deeply embedded in themselves, they will find a reason to say no. And when they’re finding a reason to say no. Almost invariably, that reason is something that has been contrived by the subconscious mind to comport with their greatest fear, right? Whatever the greatest fear is, that’s the thing that’s going to come up in their mind when they say no to an opportunity.

Allison Williams: [00:42:32] Now, that’s a little bit of sales psychology, but it really goes to the topic of making quick decisions because it occurred to me last year that I really had made remarkable progress in that area of my life. In fact, I bought a house quarter of a million dollars on a whim. Sight unseen. And I tell people that. And when I say it, I’m almost, I’m almost chagrined to say it because I know there’s people out there like, Oh my god, what a fucking stupid thing to do. I can’t believe she did that. And then I’m like, I don’t really care why people think that. But you know, here’s the thing it’s like, it’s not that I when I say on a whim, I didn’t like, wake up one day and said, Hey, I think I’d like to buy a house and like, literally go online and click add to cart. It wasn’t that right. There was a process, but the process was what I outlined in our podcast episode about being decisive. It was what is the information that I need in order to determine what I can afford, determine where I want to be, determine the right investment for myself with the greatest rate of return.

Allison Williams: [00:43:33] And you know, all the, all the factors that I need, who are the people, what is the information and when the people in the information lined up in the right house came along, it was literally a matter of clicks and offer to my realtor. And the next day, I had a signed offer. Right? And you know that that process was fast. And the beautiful thing about it being fast is that I got a beautiful piece of real estate. I still am in love with this house. And, you know, I’m so grateful that I have it, but I’m not grateful that I have it because I can afford it. Like, that’s nice, but I’m grateful that I have it because it’s a constant reminder of the fact that once you decide what you want, everything is conspiring. The universe is conspiring to give you what you want, but you have to be open to receive it. And I know that even just two years ago, I would not have been. I would have been like, I need to think about it. I need to drive down to Charlotte, North Carolina, or fly down. I’m housed in New Jersey, so it’s an eight-hour drive or a two-hour flight. You know, I got to fly down there, I got to get a hotel. I got to like, I got to have somebody drive me around to the different places and like all that stuff, and I remember starting the process that way, starting the process from the old frame of thinking of Wow, the deliberative smart lawyer does all of these forty-five things on this checklist? And then I was like, What the heck am I doing? What am I doing? We don’t need to do that. We need to see the house right. You can see the house electronically. We need to experience the house, right? So I had a trusted member of my family go and make sure that the things that really matter to me would be taken care of. But outside of that, it was, yeah, I want this, and I don’t want to miss the opportunity. And the real estate market there is exploding and the investment opportunity there is exploding. And I already have made about seventy-five thousand dollars on my investment that I made two and a half months ago as a result of making a fast decision, right? Because when you make fast decisions, opportunities become omnipresent to you. Now I’m not telling you that every time you make a fast decision, you’re going to get that result. Sometimes you make a fast decision and the market, the market tanks, right? Or you make a fast decision, and it turns out to be the wrong one. You hire someone quickly, having assembled all your information, gotten every piece of data that you needed, you know, assemble the right people. You go through the right process and you get the wrong result. And the wrong result is not because the process was flawed or you did it too quickly or you would have avoided it had you not. Let’s assume that the person that you terminated yesterday has been with your company for a year and you think, Oh, if I had just hired that other guy, we wouldn’t be here. You don’t know that. You don’t know that if you had not made another choice that you wouldn’t have had a worse outcome. The reality is we are always, always making decisions based on the best information available, and the beautiful thing is that when you grow and evolve into the type of business owner that has a true grounded faith in yourself and an understanding that you are resourceful, that you have the ability to figure things out, that you have a solution contemporaneously in the same place as your problem. When you see that and you see that instinctually, you know that whatever decision you make, especially if it is one that is grounded in factual analysis and deep intuition when both of those things are lining up and conspiring for your greater good and you say yes, if it doesn’t work out, you pivot and then you get another great outcome, and another great outcome, and another great outcome.cAnd what ends up happening is you don’t just refine your intuition over time. You also refine your ability to get to what you desire that much faster.

Allison Williams: [00:47:36] Ok, so I know that that was a lot to kick off 2022, but I wanted to share that with you guys. Ok, the three success principles that we learned from doubling our revenue in a year from Law Firm Mentor, the quality of team correlates with the quality of company. Not every client is your client and make your decisions quickly to get to rapid growth when you integrate those into your world. You will have success beyond belief. And if you want help with that, we here at Law Firm Mentor are here to help you. You can always click on the link in our show notes to speak to a growth strategist about how we can help you to create amazing growth in your 2022. I’m Allison Williams your Law Firm Mentor, everyone. I’ll see you next week.

Allison Williams: [00:48:32] Thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast to learn more about today’s show and take advantage of the resources mentioned, check out our show notes. And if you enjoy today’s episode, take a moment to follow the podcast wherever you get your podcast and leave us a rating and review. This helps us to reach even more law firm owners from around the country who want to crush chaos in business and make more money. I’m Allison Williams your Law Firm Mentor everyone. Have a great day!

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Allison Bio:

Allison C. Williams, Esq., is Founder and Owner of the Williams Law Group, LLC, with offices in Short Hills and Freehold, New Jersey. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is Certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney and is the first attorney in New Jersey to become Board-Certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in the field of Family Law. 

Ms. Williams is an accomplished businesswoman. In 2017, the Williams Law Group won the LawFirm500 award, ranking 14th of the fastest growing law firms in the nation, as Ms. Williams grew the firm 581% in three years. Ms. Williams won the Silver Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.  In 2018, Ms. Williams was voted as NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business and was designated one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. In 2019, Ms. Williams won the Seminole 100 Award for founding one of the fastest growing companies among graduates of Florida State University.

 

In 2018, Ms. Williams created Law Firm Mentor, a business coaching service for lawyers.  She helps solo and small law firm attorneys grow their business revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.  Through multi-day intensive business retreats, group and one-to-one coaching, and strategic planning sessions, Ms. Williams advises lawyers on all aspects of creating, sustaining and scaling a law firm business – and specifically, she teaches them the core foundational principles of marketing, sales, personnel management, communications and money management in law firms. 

 

Contact Info:

The Crushing Chaos Podcast: Why your Facebook Ads may not be working.

https://www.lawfirmmentor.net/podcast/2021/08/13/why-your-facebook-ads-may-not-be-working

 

The Crushing Chaos Podcast: How to Be Decisive. https://www.lawfirmmentor.net/podcast/2021/08/20/how-to-be-decisive

Video: How Law Firm Mentor DOUBLED in One Year.

https://youtu.be/GQ52LiDuxt4

Webinar on January 27th – Seven Strategies to Achieve Rapid Growth in Your Law Firm in 2022: https://bit.ly/LFM-7Strategies

Text Us at 908 292 3524
Book a Session with our Growth Strategists

https://lawfirmmentor.net/speak-with-a-growth-strategist/ 

Scheduler: https://meetme.so/LawFirmMentor  

 

Snippets

00: 09: 21 (33 Seconds)

So teaching is something that I naturally feel I have a gift for. I’ve been told I have a gift for it and it’s something that I personally enjoy. So I want to fill my life, fill my business, fill my time with things that I enjoy, and I also want to be able to use the information that I have, the information that helps lawyers in my own community, my existing clients, as well as lawyers who find Law Firm Mentor and say, Yeah, I want some of that. I want you to have the ability to consume the content in a way that I think is going to be most powerful and effective for you to implement.