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RJon Robins

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.

Is the Compound Effect Helping or Hurting Your Business?

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“New or more information is *not* what you need—a new plan of *action* is. It’s time to create new behaviors and habits that are oriented away from sabotage and toward success. It’s that simple.”
– Darren Hardy, Author of The Compound Effect

So I’ve been reading this book lately, The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy.

In it, he talks about how consistent, small actions are going to have a much more profound effect on your life than any large, radical change.

Let me ask you a question- would you rather have:

  1. A) $3 Million right now

or

  1. B) One penny that doubles every day for 31 days?

You might feel silly choosing to start with a penny instead of $3 Million, and you might not feel any better about it on the 20th day when you are looking at just under $5,300.

In fact, it’s not until the 29th day that you just about break even, but then by the 31st day you’ve better than tripled option A.

In order to maximize your gains, you must have the planning and foresight to know how things will turn out in the future, and most of all you need to be consistent with your little decisions that add up huge over time.

And it makes sense, right? If I go to the gym and pound away for 15 hours tomorrow after not going for years, I’m not going to walk out of there in any better shape. But if I instead went every day for a year, the results would be unmistakable.

Then I got to thinking about the opposite- what if I didn’t go to the gym every day for a year, but instead went to a fast food restaurant for lunch every day?

I think we all know I’d need a new wardrobe by the end of the year!

Small, smart choices + consistency + time = Radical Difference

“A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.”

Look at the above formula and quote. They both have to do with the power of routines, but they only show you the good part.

What if instead of “small, smart choices”, we made “small, bad choices” consistently over time? The Compound Effect would still occur, and it would still yield a “radical difference”, except it would be negative.

Switch the word “good” for “bad” in the quote and the same point is illustrated.

And that’s the thing about achieving success with Compound Effect- it’s happening right now, today, whether you mean for it to happen or not.

You’re either getting better or getting worse, a little bit every day.

So which are you going to choose today?

It’s a no-brainer. Law firm owners fall victim to this all the time. They are so busy, so bogged down by the day to day managing of things that they don’t even realize the tiny, damaging decisions that are piling up and ready to blow.

Sometimes it takes an objective set of eyes. That’s what happened to me. I was lucky enough to meet a mentor who took one look at how I was doing things and set me straight. My only regret was not meeting him five years prior. He was able to see how I had stacked bad decision on top of bad decision. (FYI, NOT making any decisions at all and being in denial is a form of decision. And a bad one.)

Awareness is powerful tool for profit. And if you need that second set of eyes, you can schedule an appointment with my team anytime by clicking here. Prepare to be asked some tough but vital questions if you do talk to them. My guess is, like me, you’ll wish you had done it sooner.

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