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RJon Robins

Achieving 3 Key Milestones for Million-Dollar Law Firms

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3 Milestones Every Million Dollar Law Firm Experiences

Last week I had the pleasure of spending 4 days with 9 members and their significant others, out on the boat getting SCUBA certified. It was an absolute blast.

As is often the case, we began reminiscing on our respective journeys, what we had experienced, where we are now, etc.

We talked a lot about our families and how much we appreciate the lives we are able to provide for them. We also all remember a time when things weren’t so happy at home.

Before we discovered how to be successful, we spent our days, weeks, months, and years running on the hamster wheel to nowhere, like many of you.

As we were having these discussions and brainstorming what it took to get where we are, we all came to the realization that in our own personal way, we each took kind of the same path to get here.

It may have looked different for each of us or happened at a faster or slower pace, but we came to the conclusion that each one of us ticked three specific boxes at some point in our journey.

These are the 3 milestones that every successful million-dollar law firm experiences on their way to freedom.

  1. You Have to Operate Under a Written Business Plan

This step is so basic. You either are a real business and you have a business plan, or you don’t and you are not. It’s that simple.

And I’m not talking about something you slapped together in 2 hours just so you can say you have something.

I’m talking about a clear, organized, and functional business plan. Your business plan needs to describe each of the 7 Main Parts of your business clearly, so that each person on the team (including yourself) knows exactly what they are responsible for and is held accountable.

How to Manage a Small Law Firm provides some free resources including a Business Plan Workbook to help you create your own functioning business plan. Click here to receive your complimentary Business Plan Workbook dedicated to law firms.

  1. You need to let go of the bullshit and the excuses you constantly feed yourself.

During our discussion, we all agreed this was the step that people get stuck on the most, but it’s also the most important.

It’s easy to say you don’t have the money. It’s simple to tell yourself you don’t have the time. These are not original thought processes.

These excuses will keep you stuck in the same cycle you’ve been in for months or years, but you’ll tell yourself you’re okay with it because it’s “familiar”. And you’ll confuse familiarity with comfort and nothing will ever change.

Finally saying “to hell with these excuses” is a difficult step, but it’s the most freeing when you actually take it.

Bringing us to our last milestone…

  1. You begin to appreciate all the ways a healthy business with predictable growth impacts your family and personal life and you clarify your VISION.

This is clearly the most enjoyable of the three milestones to experience, but it would not be possible without meeting the first two.

It’s different for everyone, but listening to the members talk about this milestone to reach a high-earning law firm was very powerful and a bit emotional.

We began the conversation talking about the places we had come from, so those stories were still fresh in our minds. I don’t mind telling you that when I think about what I have now compared to when I was flat broke with 4 flat tires and no money for groceries, it does something to my heart.

I can only describe it as an intense gratitude, and the other members agreed with me.

We all have our own measure for success, but you could imagine a few things kept coming up…

  • Time spent with a husband or a wife
  • Ability to watch your kids grow
  • Vacations with your family
  • School functions
  • Date nights

These are the reasons why we do what we do. These are the things that make life worth living!

These people were able to take a week away from their firms and come down to Miami to get SCUBA certified and strategize for their business because they set themselves up with a PLAN that allows that kind of freedom.

It’s a plan they made up. Think about that. They didn’t win some lottery and get handed a plan. They chose it. They dreamed it up. And they wrote it, made it real and follow it.

And you can too.

If you want to know more about what How to Manage a Small Law Firm can do to help you hit these milestones, please schedule an appointment with a member of my team. They’ll be glad to answer all your questions and help you provide the life you’ve always envisioned!

DIVE into Massive Business Growth!

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4 Things SCUBA Diving Can Teach You About Business Success

I have really been looking forward to this week, partly because this week is a tangible representation of what can happen for you if you get serious about creating a plan for profit and freedom.

We are taking members out on the boat to do some SCUBA diving, and by the end of the week we’re all going to be SCUBA certified!

Many people don’t know this, but SCUBA is actually an acronym, it means:

S – Self

C – Contained

U – Underwater

B – Breathing

A – Apparatus

As I was preparing the boat for a busy week on the water, I got to thinking about SCUBA diving and realized there are a lot of similarities between SCUBA diving and running a business!

Here are 4 ways that learning to SCUBA dive can help you dive into profitable change.

  1. When you go SCUBA diving, you are carrying your own self-contained source of air to breath.

This is so you can move independently and freely, without worrying about constantly being tied down to an air source.

When you run your law firm like a successful small business, you gain an enthusiasm about your new life of complete personal responsibility that allows you the same freedom and independence.

You are no longer tethered to your business every day in order for it to run effectively (or at all), which allows you the freedom to step away from your business whenever you need or want to- as our members have done this week so they can hang out on the boat with me!

  1. Along with your self-contained air source, there is other equipment you’ll need in order to have a safe, efficient, and enjoyable dive.

SCUBA diving involves more than just a self-contained air source. In order to be certified as my members and I will be by the end of the week, you have to understand all of this equipment and the function it performs:

  • A mask– to improve underwater vision
  • Exposure protection– to protect you from the cold water below the surface
  • Buoyancy control equipment– to allow you to control your descent/ascent
  • Snorkel– for swimming on the surface

If any of this equipment is not present, then none of the rest matters or works efficiently.

This is similar to the policies, systems, and 7 Main Parts of your law firm which, when used correctly, are the tools you need to create a profitable, enjoyable, and efficient law firm.

When you have all the equipment for SCUBA diving, you can enjoy a safe, efficient, enjoyable dive. When you have all the policies, systems, and 7 Main Parts of your law firm in place and working together, you can enjoy the life you envisioned for you and your family.

  1. A diver must monitor the depth and duration of a dive to avoid decompression sickness.

Decompression sickness is no joke.

Unless the maximum depth of the dive is quite shallow, a diver must know exactly what depth he is at and must not surface too quickly.

Otherwise they may suffer decompression sickness, which is caused by the formation of nitrogen bubbles in the tissue of the body, due to a sudden reduction in pressure (decompression).

This can cause extreme pain in the muscles and joints, cramps, numbness, nausea, and even paralysis.

Similarly, in business you can guess and project accordingly, but without knowing the REAL numbers the results can be disastrous.

It’s always best to be monitoring these numbers continuously. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Know your numbers, HIT your numbers.

  1. All SCUBA dives are carefully planned to ensure divers do not exceed their comfort zone or equipment capacity.

The purpose of dive planning is to ensure divers stay within their skill level, and also includes scuba gas planning which ensures that the diver brings enough air not only to safely complete the dive as planned, but also to allow for any contingencies needed during the dive.

In the same way, your business plan ensures that each of the 7 Main Parts of your business is optimized and performing at full capacity.

When written and utilized correctly, a solid business plan ensures that your level and pace of growth is appropriate for your current stage of growth.

It’s vital that you plan and find appropriate guidance when creating your business plan, so that you are prepared for anything that might come.

If you want to know more about what How to Manage a Small Law Firm can do to help you with your business plan so that you can one day step away and get SCUBA certified (or anything else you want to do!), please schedule an appointment with a member of my team. They’ll be glad to answer all your questions and help get you on the road to success!

And if you want to get a jumpstart on your own business plan, you can download a FREE copy of the Business Plan Workbook right here.

You Are a Law Firm Owner AND a Human Being. Don’t forget the Human part.

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I’ve been reviewing the footage from the 90 Day Look Back from the last Live Quarterly Meeting, and I’m finding that it to be very humbling and inspiring stuff.

The things our members have accomplished in the last 90 days- weight loss, new offices, additions to their homes, etc– are making me really sit down and think about our members and how each of them is a HUMAN BEING.

Sure, you’re all lawyers, but each one of you is a human being first.

You’re a husband.

A wife.

A mother.

A father.

A sibling.

A member of the community.

A human being with goals and dreams!

Thinking about it makes me think of a really cool word that many people aren’t familiar with:

Sonder (n).- a word that means: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Think about that… sonder refers to the person in the car in front of you when you’re sitting in traffic. The person 4 rows down from you in the movie theater. The person you just walked passed in the grocery store.

Each one of them is the hero of their own quest. Each one is leading their own lives populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines and inherited craziness.

Each person is living their own epic story that continues invisibly around you like an ant colony sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives you’ll never even know existed.

Lives you might even appear in yourself, unbeknownst to yourself. You might appear just once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, or as a blur of traffic passing on the highway… or every day as a father, a mother, a spouse, a lawyer.

What kind of imprint do you want to leave?

There’s no time for excuses, and you can’t be too busy to make a plan.

The trap that so many fall into is worrying about keeping their “personal lives” and “professional lives” apart from each other, as if that’s even possible.

It’s not about whether you WANT your professional life to affect your personal life; it’s GOING to. That’s just the way it is.

How could it not be that way?

Back when you opened your law firm, you had some kind of vision for what you wanted it to be.

And that’s because you had some idea for what you wanted your life to be.

Your law firm is the bridge to fulfilling your family duty, the bridge to making the dreams you had a reality, the bridge to the freedom you originally envisioned for yourself.

Your law firm is what feeds your entire personal ecosystem, and when run correctly it can be the conduit to enhancing your entire human experience.

So making sure it’s running efficiently is an act of love to everyone around you who counts on you to be present and fulfilled.

I hear from so many people that make excuses and say they are “too busy” to take the time to plan, and yet these same people are the ones who are always worried about what’s going to happen to their firms, themselves, and their families!

Creating a plan now is a form of love and self-respect. A plan to grow your law firm is a healthcare plan for your family, a relationship plan for your spouse, and a retirement plan for yourself.

So remember- you’re not just a lawyer. You’re a human being first. A human being who owns a law firm, and has a responsibility to their family to help it grow so you can ALL be inspired, fulfilled, and happy.

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5 Reasons Your Law Firm Suffers When Ran Like a Hobby

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Are you running your law firm like a business or like a hobby?

The gut-response is to of course say “a business.”

Yet, those same people are working nights and weekends, away from their families, not making the money they want to be making and have no systems or procedures in place to automate their growth.

Can you take a day off without everything falling apart? Can you take a week off? How about a month? If you can take time off and have no worries about the firm continuing to run without you, congratulations, you’re running a business.

If, however, the workflow and revenue of your law firm depend 100% on you being physically present, you have no business plan, no systems or effective law firm policies or procedures to keep things running smoothly and hit up against cash crunch after cash crunch?

You have a hobby.

When you run your law firm like a BUSINESS, you have order and consistency in the 7 Main Parts of your law firm.

You know what’s going on with your marketing, sales, production, people, physical plant, and money and metrics.

These things are running properly whether you are present or not, and there is accountability at every level.

What happens when you run your law firm like a hobby?

You see systematic failures in each of the 7 Main Parts of your law firm, which ultimately can lead to burnout, lost revenue and even bar grievances.

That’s what you’re risking when you don’t take your law firm seriously and treat it like a business.

Here are 5 reasons your law firm suffers when you treat it like a hobby.

  1. A hobby has no marketing strategy.

Not that you don’t spend money on marketing. You do plenty of that.

I said there’s no marketing strategy.

You spend money in various avenues, hoping something sticks.

You don’t track it. You have no idea what’s working and what’s not.

That’s what a hobby is; something you spend money on with no tangible return.

  1. A hobby has no sales plan.

There’s no sales plan because you’ve never created any documented processes, systems, or procedures.

“If people show up- great!- try to close them.”

Does that sound like someone running a business to you?

When you run your business like a hobby, every day might as well be the first day at work.

Everyone is constantly figuring out how to do things that should have been standardized a long time ago, until one day something goes really wrong that was totally avoidable had there been systems in place to catch it.

  1. A hobby has no plan for its people.

When you run your law firm without a system for managing your people, it seems like you can never get caught up in your staffing.

You wait too long to fill one position, while another needs to be eliminated.

When you do finally hire someone, it turns out to be the wrong person. Or maybe it wasn’t, but there’s no real training protocols so they were set up for failure from the start.

In short, your law firm is a clown show, not a stellar team you can trust with your vision and the security of your family.

This is what it looks like to run your law firm like a hobby.

  1. A hobby isn’t concerned with its physical plant.

When you have a hobby and something breaks, you deal with it when you get around to it. Need a new putter? You’ll get one whenever you can, but it’s not a priority.

When things break in your law firm, this translates to a staff that’s constantly at each other’s necks, getting more and more frustrated as resources break and there’s no system in place to get them fixed.

And hobbies don’t generate revenue, so there are no cash reserves to replace the equipment anyway!

So everyone keeps slogging away on their antiquated computers, software and other junk for 6 months or a year before you even know what’s happening.

  1. A hobby does not concern itself with money and metrics.

One day you wake up and you realize you’ve been running your law firm like a hobby for years, and you have no financial controls over it.

YOU work for your FIRM, instead of the other way around.

It’s been years of apologies and excuses.

To your kids, your spouse, and your friends.

Apologies for missing school activities, excuses for missing weddings and other social events.

All because you were busy working- often for FREE!

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Running your law firm like a business means that you have control over it. You are choosing which essential marketing strategies for a law firm to use based on testing and analyzing data.

Your sales team knows what conversion rate they must hit in order to reach goals, and they know how to get it done.

All the people in your law firm know what is expected of them, because they have been properly trained and understand all of the procedures and systems that have been put in place for them.

Growth is a part of your plan and you are executing that plan, so hiring is occurring BEFORE a need arises.

Space, equipment, and software are all adequate and up-to-date, because there are systems and procedures for noting potential problems and handling them before they become actual problems. And there’s money available to do so.

THAT’S what a profitable business looks like. And it’s possible for anyone who wants it.

If you’d like us to show you how we’ve helped hundreds of law firms turn their hobby into multiple six and seven figure businesses, go here now, schedule a complimentary call with our team and get your questions answered.

Are You Measuring The Wrong Thing?

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What is your measure of success? Is it the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that you put into your business?

Does “hard work” define success for you?

Or is it actually the result of all that sweat equity that matters?

Yes, of course any successful business requires hard work, but that hard work should be channeled appropriately, and should be to some desired end.

It’s not just sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake.

Law school and society at large advocates (implicitly and explicitly) the notion that sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice is a noble and worthwhile pursuit.  I reject this idea, flat-out.

Because what exactly are we talking about “sacrificing”?

Our health?

Our mental well-being?

Time out of our lives?

Time that could be spent with our spouse and our kids?

Frankly, this is time that belongs to your family.

After all, they are the shareholders in your business, and they deserve a return on THEIR sacrifices.

But still, there’s this weird thing where we value “working hard”, regardless of profitability.

This is valuing input over output, and it’s the fast track to burnout.

Instead of defining success by how hard you work, why not measure success by how many people you can help? Or by how much free time away from the office you are enjoying each month?

You can’t help anybody stuck in your office 60 hours or more per week. You run out of steam. You lose focus. Quality of work suffers.

So you have to find a way to make your business run effectively without you, and that’s done through three things:

  • Systems
  • Automation
  • Delegation

This past week at our Discovery Day, we asked our guests and future members a question:

Why did you go into business for yourself?

Here are some of the answers we got:

  • Time
  • Freedom
  • Purpose
  • Authenticity
  • More Control
  • Less Stress
  • To Help People
  • Consistency with values
  • Control my own destiny
  • Make my own schedule
  • Entrepreneurial spirit
  • Wanted to have my own identity/ideology
  • Didn’t want to be stuck working in an office

Believe it or not, not one single person raised their hand and said they went into business for themselves to work long hours and never see their families.

Yet this is what we settle for when we value input over output.

A successful law firm isn’t one that makes you work the hardest, it’s one that helps you meet your personal, financial, and professional goals.

But in order to get what you’ve never had, you have to be willing to do what you’ve never done.

You have to be willing to build systems and surround yourself with a stellar team.

“But RJon, that sounds like MORE work, not less…”

That’s where you’re wrong!

The building of your foundation, when performed correctly, will free up time to do the things that fulfill you. To spend time with your family. To take a vacation. To do the pro bono works that means so much to you.

You will be able to live the life you want to live while your team and the systems you built run the business without you.

This is exactly what our members implement when they make the decision to work with us.

They learn the step by step approach to total freedom.

If you’re ready to stop valuing input over output, and start running a business that works for YOU, schedule an appointment with a member of our team to see what How to Manage a Small Law Firm can do to help you.

Stop Trading Your Time for Money!

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I wanted to share an interesting conversation a member of my staff recently had.

Someone called to ask about our Discovery Day and to schedule an appointment, and spoke to Eric from my team.

According to Eric, the first thing out of this prospect’s mouth was that he had to know how much he gets to work with me directly.

Basically, he’s asking Eric, “How many of RJon’s hours do I buy with my membership?”

This comes up from time to time, and it’s a fundamental misunderstanding that lots of struggling law firm owners have, and it holds them back greatly.

They’re stuck in the time for money trap.

You see, I stopped selling hours a long time ago.

They say that “time is money”, but isn’t the opposite true?

Why would you trade your precious finite time- once it’s gone it’s gone!- for money, which you can essentially make again and again?

In reality, we want to make enough money so that we can have more of the one thing we can never get back- our time.

When you trade your time for money, you are inherently putting a limit on how much money you can make, because there’s only so much of your time you can sell.

There are only 24 hours in a day, and you have to sleep for 8 of them. Of the 16 that are left, figure 4-6 of them are devoted to things like commuting, cooking, eating, taking care of yourself, relaxing, and spending time with the people who are important to you.

So that’s it. 10-12 hours is all you have to sell per day.

So whatever your time is worth- $20, $50, $200, $500 per hour- it will always be limited by your finite amount of time.

Want more money? It’ll cost you that which you have the least of- your time!

It comes down to implementing systems.

Systems run your business, and people manage systems.

So in order to implement effective systems, you need to build a TEAM.

THIS is what we teach you. The stuff you NEED.

Listen, don’t feel bad.

They never taught you any of this in law school.

You learned how to be an effective lawyer, you didn’t learn how to be an effective business owner.

You learned the process of adjudication in the United States as it pertains to civil matters, you didn’t learn sales and lead generation.

You learned the nature of enforceable promises and rules for determining appropriate remedies pertaining to contract law, you didn’t learn how to set up an infrastructure that runs without you so that you can maybe take a vacation with your family or unexpectedly get the flu.

THAT’S what we consider to be success at How to Manage a Small Law Firm.

The ability to step away for any amount of time and have your business not keep making money for you.

That’s a grown-up firm. That’s the foundation of a legacy.

And that’s what freedom looks like.

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