Center Stage
A podcast featuring interviews with small business owners and industry experts to help you solve the marketing and business development challenges that come with running your own firm.
Center Stage
Truth, Lies, Mistakes, or BS feat. RJon Robins
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💡 Is your law firm actually giving you the life you built it to create? RJon Robins, CEO of How to Manage a Small Law Firm and author of Truth, Lies, Mistakes, or Bullsht*, joins Danny Decker to challenge some of the beliefs that keep law firm owners stuck. They talk about separating your identity from your business, confronting the numbers you may be avoiding, building a firm around your strengths, and why your mindset influences everything from marketing and hiring to profitability. If your firm demands more from you than it gives back, this conversation may change the way you think about running it.
You can get in touch with RJon here:
https://www.instagram.com/rjonrobins?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet&igsh=ZDNlZDc0MzIxNw==
You can Pre-Order his book here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/truth-lies-mistakes-or-bullsh-t-rjon-robins/1149861923?ean=9798895741665
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Your business is not your baby. Analogizing your relationship with your business to that of a parent and a child is an unrealistic, unhealthy, and unprofitable analogy to use in business. All of the things that we as parents do for our children, we're willing to suffer, we're willing to sacrifice, we're willing to make investments in our children with no expectation of ever getting any ROI. Well, if you're running a business that way, that's a recipe for disaster.
SPEAKER_01Welcome back to Center Stage Podcast. My name is Danny Decker. Guest today is Arjon Robbins. R John is the CEO of How to Manage a Small Law Firm. He's also the author of a brand new book, Truth, Lies, Mistakes, and BS. Which one is driving your business? So, Arjon, welcome to the show. And for those who aren't familiar with how to manage a small law firm, can you just start by explaining kind of how that business works with small law firm owners?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks for having me on the show, Danny. And uh I guess everyone in the audience knows that we have a relationship that extends beyond the show. So, really a pleasure to be here on your show. So, how to manage a small law firm basically exists to help law firm owners understand what's really going on in their business. What's really going on with your marketing, what's really going on with your sales, with your production, with your staff's performance, with your financial performance of your business. What's really going on in your mindset that could be and probably is impacting the marketing, the sales, the production, people with physical plan, the financial controls, because it all revolves around our mindset. How we think about marketing has more to do with the efficacy of our marketing than whoever's pushing buttons and keywords and SEO and PPC and even AI. How we're thinking about intake and sales, how we're thinking about our relationship with staff, it really all revolves around the stories we tell ourselves and whether we're running our business based on truth, lies, mistakes, or bullshit.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, love it. So there's a statement, Arjon, on your homepage that says you behave according to what you believe. So can you unpack that? Just explain kind of what that means and specifically how HTM helps in that area?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So how to manage a small law firm, I mean, in the big picture, what we do is we step in and we level the playing field for small law firms. So the original thesis of how to manage a small law firm when I created the business back in 2009, you know, I had worked at the Florida Bar Law Office Management Assistance Service. I started at the Florida Bar as a small law firm management advisor in uh 1999. And I was there for four years, and I had the unique opportunity to work with literally, and this is documented in bar records, thousands and thousands and thousands. It was 9,000 law firms that we worked with during the four years that I was there. So I had the very unique opportunity to see the same problems over and over and over and over and over again. And I saw the same solutions over and over and over and over again. And I began to understand the law firms are very simple businesses. They're not complicated businesses to run. So I started to see why are big law firms big law firms, and why are mid-sized law firms mid-sized law firms, and why are small law firms small law firms, and why do some small law firms become very, very profitable and successful businesses that make the owners very, very happy, and other small law firms struggle and make the owners very, very miserable. And uh a lot of it has to do with simply that the like mid-sized law firms and large law firms, they all have a CEO. They all have a COO. They all have a CFO, they all have a CMO. No one in their right mind would ever even think about running a mid-sized law firm. And this is something over $10 million. No one would even think about running a mid-sized law firm without a full C-suite. I mean, that would just be pure, reckless insanity. That would be the height of naivety and stupidity to try to run a mid-sized law firm without a full C-suite. Okay, well, great. Well, what's the owner of a $500,000 law firm gonna do? What's the owner of a law firm gonna do when the firm just got started? And, you know, even a million-dollar law firm, you're not gonna go out and hire a $200,000 CEO and a $200,000 COO and a $200,000 CFO and a $200,000. I mean, you're not gonna spend a million dollars, million and a half dollars on a full C-suite when the law firm is only grossing half a million or a million dollars. So the original thesis that I created uh when I was at the Florida Bar's Law Office Management Assistance Service was what if we could level the playing field? What if we could give the owners of small law firms access to the same high-level, sophisticated, experienced, trained, qualified, supervised. We manage them, we prop them up, we hold them accountable and make them available to CEOs and COOs and CFOs and CMOs to small law firms that big law firms and mid-sized law firms take for granted. So that's really the thesis of how to manage a small law firm. But when you dig under it, back to your question, sorry for going off on a tangent, when you when you get really get down to it, if the owner of the law firm doesn't think of the business as being something separate from themselves, right? If their ego gets all wrapped up with the law firm, if they are getting their self-esteem from their law firm, if they're getting all their security, if their identity is too wrapped up with the law firm, it actually is bad for the law firm, it's bad for the staff, it's bad for the clients, it's bad for your family, it's bad for your mental health, it's bad for the business. And so how a person thinks about themselves as an entrepreneur versus a lawyer, I should say, versus makes it sound confrontational and adversarial. How a person thinks of themselves as an entrepreneur over here, this is me as an entrepreneur looking for all of the positives and opportunities and things that are going right. And here's me wearing my lawyer's hat, where I have to look for all the problems, the challenges when the lawyer brings their problem-finding skills and applies it to the business, and they just find nothing but problems in the business, and then the business struggles.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know that makes so much sense. So let's talk about the book, R John. So you guys gave uh provided an advanced copy. I read it this weekend, actually cover to cover, really liked it. It's written in a different style than your previous books. I'd say it's more of a parable. And main character is like a restaurant owner, not a law firm owner. So why'd you do it that way? Why'd you take this approach?
SPEAKER_00I thought more people would read it. I thought more people would read it. I thought more people would be open to it. I've been using restaurants as an analogy for law firms for 25 years. And so when John David Mann and I got together, he's my co-author. Uh, when we got together, we started off making a list of the lessons we wanted to teach. These are the takeaways we want the reader to get from reading this book. And then we said, all right, how do we package this up in a story with a character and a setting so that the reader will get all these lessons without just jamming it in your face? Because no one wants to read a textbook where it's just, let me jam it in your face and jam it in your face and jam it in your face. No one likes that. I don't like that. I don't think anyone likes that. So, you know, John had done research on me, I should say. He had done a bunch of research on me and he came to a bunch of our live quarterly meetings, and he came to some of our uh workshop Paloozas. He really invested a lot of time attending our live events and seeing how we communicate these concepts and ideas to the 500 plus law firms that we manage. And uh he said, You use the restaurant analogy a lot. That is a good chassis on which to deliver these messages that the audience will receive and not put up their defenses.
SPEAKER_01So, fairly early in the book, the main character, Harry, I believe his name is, who's like kind of a struggling restaurant owner, is talking to the stranger, right? Who's kind of like the guide or the sensei in the book. And the stranger tells him, Your business is not supposed to be your baby, it's supposed to be your mule. Can you kind of unpack like what exactly that means?
SPEAKER_00So sometime in around the year 2000, I was working at the Florida Bar as a small law firm management advisor. And my parents were going through their second multi-million dollar family bankruptcy. I've lived through three multi-million dollar family bankruptcies, ups and downs, and ups and downs and ups and downs, which by the way, is exactly why I'm so militant with all of the law firms that we manage that we've got to put processes and systems and procedures in place to prevent the thing from falling apart. And why mindset is so critical to the process because I saw firsthand since I was a kid what happened with my parents who had very successful businesses that cratered. Anyway, there I am in my late 20s, maybe early 30s. So I'm not gonna do the math, but I was around 2000. And I was talking to my mom, and she was very, very upset and very, very discouraged because her business had just failed. And I was just grasping like, how do I help her understand you are not your business, right? And people always think of their business as their baby. Your business is not your baby. Analogizing your relationship with your business to that of a parent and a child is a unrealistic and unhealthy and unprofitable analogy to use in business. Your business doesn't love you, it doesn't, is not going to take care of you if you don't take care of it. All of the all of the things that we as parents do and take pride in doing for our children, we're willing to suffer for our children. We're willing to sacrifice for our children, we're willing to make investments in our children with no expectation of ever getting any ROI. I mean, think about what a shitty parent it is who says, I'm only gonna love you and I'm only gonna educate you and I'm only gonna feed you and take care of you because I expect a return on investment. I'm sure there are parents like that out there, but those are called shitty parents, right? As parents, we make these investments out of love because of biology, right? With no expectation of an ROI. Well, if you're running a business that way, that's a recipe for disaster. The only reason that I'm investing my time into a business is because I expect an ROI. And the only reason that you should be investing your money into your law firm is because you expect an ROI. And the only reason you should be asking your family to make any sacrifices for your law firm is because your family is expecting an ROI. It's a completely different relationship. So I started thinking when in that moment that I was talking to my mom back in 2000, like, your business isn't your baby. Your business is your mule. It's there to serve you. Now that doesn't mean you can neglect it, that doesn't mean you can abuse it. That doesn't mean you don't have to take care of it. It doesn't mean you don't have to train it. It doesn't mean you don't have to feed it, but you're making these investments. You launched the law firm to give your family a better life. You invested the time to think through your policies and your procedures and your systems so the law firm would work better for you. You you sat down and created a marketing plan and put a marketing budget with key performance indicators and metrics behind the marketing budget because you wanted to put a dollar in and get $10. You hired the staff, you documented the job description, and you invested the time for training and training and training and onboarding the staff because you expected the staff to make your life better. This is a rational, mature relationship to have between a lawyer and their law firm. It is a completely self-destructive, irrational, and wildly inappropriate relationship for a lawyer to have with their law firm where they say, I'm just going to give and give and give and sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice and care and care and care. And magically the law firm will just suddenly work for me. It doesn't work like that. That's delusion. It's so like undeniably true. Like everything you just laid out is no, it's very deniable. People deny it all the time. I can give you a list of thousands of lawyers that I've met over the past 25 years who deny it. I mean, it's irrational. You're right. The evidence clearly shows their denial is wrong. You're right.
SPEAKER_01You're right. It it is objectively, it's objectively a true statement. But it's fascinating to me because speaking for myself, and also we work with, you know, hundreds of law firm owners who just don't ever have that paradigm shift. And you go from you start a business, you start a law firm, you know, you graduated from college or law school or whatever, and you do feel this like deep sense of personal attachment to your business. It does feel like your identity. So everything that you laid out is, again, it just makes a ton of objective sense. But what's the first step for somebody who wants to sort of change their identity and kind of break that connection in their business? Like, what's the first step?
SPEAKER_00Well, you've been to a number of our live quarterly meetings, you've attended a couple of our workshop Paloozas, you've you've been around our community of entrepreneurs whose businesses happen to be law firms, right? I would say the first step is change your company, change the people you hang around with. If you're hanging around with a bunch of lawyers who are taking pride in how much they suffer and taking pride in how much they sacrifice and bragging about how much they can endure and competing for who's got bigger problems and getting their ego gratified by who can take more shit and put up with more problems, you're hanging around the wrong people. You know, you want to get into a room full of happy lawyers who have businesses that work for them, who take pride in how much value their business provides for their clients, how much value their business provides for their family, how much value their business provides for themselves. You get around a few hundred people who take pride in what I would say are the right things to take pride in as an entrepreneur, your mind starts to shift. You start to think differently about your relationship with your law firm. If you hang around with a bunch of help-rejecting complainers who are actually taking pride in how much they suffer, wearing it like the red badge of courage, you know, that book, versus hanging around with a bunch of happy, successful law firm owners who are taking pride in how much their business can function without them being there for days, weeks, even months at a time, you're gonna start to see a lot of opportunities that you might be missing right now in your relationship with your law firm.
SPEAKER_01So the book is Truth, Lies, Mistakes, and Bullshit. I'm here with R John Robbins. Say that again truth, lies, mistakes, or bullshit. Truth, lies, mistakes, or bullshit. I'm here with R John Robbins. The book is available now for pre-order on Barnesandnoble.com. So, R John, there's a point in the book where Harry is talking to some other business owners, and one of them makes the point that most entrepreneurs have a fear of talking about numbers. I'm quoting here. They don't want to face facts, they're lying to themselves. So, how does that show up for law firm owners?
SPEAKER_00Well, they don't look at the numbers. They they just won't sit down and look, most of the people listening to this podcast, this is all for law firm owners, right? I would I would say almost everyone in this audience, you can probably increase your profits by 5%, which doesn't sound like much until you put 5% more profit in your pocket, 10% maybe, just by doing one thing and one thing only. If you'll just every morning open up your online bank account and look at how much is in the operating account and how much is in the trust account. Just look at that number. You don't have to write it down, you don't have to log it, you don't have to do anything about it. Just look at how much is in the operating account every morning, how much is in the trust account every morning. Look at that same thing every afternoon. How much is in the operating account in the afternoon, how much is in the trust account in the afternoon? That's like putting your finger on the pulse of your business. You will start to feel the heartbeat of your business just by looking at the balance in the operating account and balance in the trust account every morning and every afternoon. You'll just do that, you'll probably put an extra $10,000, $20,000 a year in your pocket just by doing that one simple thing. The problem is, number one, most of us went to law school because we aren't good with blood and we don't like numbers, right? Two, probably most people in your audience never studied finance, never studied bookkeeping, never studied accounting, never studied financial controls, right? Three, probably in law school, no one ever taught them how to read a set of financial statements. Probably in their first job, their second job, their third job at a law school before they started their own law firm, probably no one ever sat them down and taught them how to read a set of financial statements in a way that wasn't intimidating or overwhelming or confusing. And if anyone did try to teach them, they probably spoke in accounting ease, which you know there's legal ease and there's accounting ease. And accountants had their own, you know, code language. No one ever probably sat down and explained in plain English how to interpret a set of financial statements, right? So I think you've actually been to one of our live quarterly meetings where in our teenage entrepreneur club, we teach the teenagers how to read financial statements. Like we take a group of teenagers, and in a day and a half, we get them to read, interpret, understand, and make sense of a set of financial statements. And then we put them on stage and they and they teach their parents how to read a set of financial statements. And it doesn't have to be so scary and overwhelming and intimidating. But that's only half the problem. The other half the problem, which you alluded to, Danny, is the fear of the implications, right? The financial statements are clearly telling me that this marketing vendor isn't performing and that it's going to require me to have an uncomfortable conversation with the marketing vendor. I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with the marketing vendor, so I'll just, you know, avert my eyes and not look at the financial statements. The financial statements clearly demonstrate that this employee is not performing up to standards. I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with this employee. So I just won't look at the numbers, I won't look at the metrics, I won't look at the financial statements. The financial statements are clearly demonstrating to me which of my clients I've got problems with and which of my clients I don't have problems with in terms of the financial relationship. I don't want to have an uncomfortable conversation with the client. I just want to keep doing great work and keep and the cloud and the client just keeps giving me compliments, and I eat up those compliments because it feeds my ego. And never mind the fact that I'm undercharging, forgetting to bill on time, the client's got accounts receivably that are growing and growing and growing and growing. I don't want to have to have an entrepreneurially mature conversation with the client or hold anyone on my staff accountable for doing their job to prevent this from happening in the first place. And I don't want to stop doing this really intellectually stimulating, interesting legal work to sit down and just work with a chief operating officer to put some systems and procedures in place to protect my firm from having accounts for Stevables problems. And so what I'll do is I just won't look, I just won't look. I won't see it. And it's not just law firm owners, it's all entrepreneurs, but law firm owners in particular, because lawyers are particularly susceptible to this because of the lack of formal training or education or exposure to financial literacy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that makes so much sense. And you know, we see a related challenge in the marketing side of things, which is your average law firm owner is incredibly skilled and studied and experienced in the practice of law and doesn't necessarily understand that a potential client isn't actually looking to hire them because of a specific legal problem, right? It's a problem in their life, right? A marriage that isn't working for them, a customer that's suing their business. And so, you know, one of the conversations we're always having is it's key for a lawyer to get out of their own head in their marketing and not talk about how the sausage is made, but talk about how they're going to make life better for their clients and their customers. And that is a theme that comes up in the book in a few different places. But is that something you see lawyers struggle with? And how do you help them get over that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I thought you were gonna go in a different direction with this question. Can I talk about the thing I thought you were gonna say first? Yeah, sure. And the reason I thought you were gonna go in this direction is because we've had conversations about this so many times over meals, over beers, hanging out, where I know one of the big challenges you have in your marketing agency is trying to show some of the law firms you do marketing for proof that what you're doing is actually working. Right? Here's the data, here's the numbers, here's the metrics, here are the facts. It's working. You should keep doing this. But emotionally, they don't feel that it's all working. And so, like, oh, I'm gonna turn off the marketing. No, don't turn off the marketing, because they turn off the marketing and they start to set up this cascade of feast and famine and feast and famine and feast and famine because they won't look at the data, they won't look at the numbers, and they won't make their marketing decisions based on a set of financial projections. I thought that's where you were going with the question. But that's not where you went. You went somewhere else.
SPEAKER_01Well, let's have that conversation. It's obviously something we deal with all the time. And I'll say the marketing industry has created a lot of challenges for themselves, right? And one of the ways I think that that's happened, and I'm sure I've played a role at times, is. Is almost painting unrealistic expectations. So I think that your average law firm owner out there is really looking for a magic bullet solution. And to be honest, they don't really want to spend their time thinking about marketing. They just want the clients to come in. Can we stop for one second?
SPEAKER_00Can we stop for one second? Please. Because I think the audience needs to know that you and I actually co-authored a book called The Automatic Marketing Machine for Lawyers. And the fact of the matter is, most people who are running around calling themselves marketers, quote unquote, air quotes, they're not marketers. They're traffic buyers, they're ad placers, they're button pushers, they're technicians. They don't know shit about real marketing. You are one of the few people out there who actually knows what marketing actually is. And the problem is that you get wrapped up and mixed together with this group of button-pushing, ad-buying technicians who don't really know what marketing is because they go around calling themselves a marketing agency. Marketing is messaging. Marketing is values driven. The number one job of marketing is obviously to bring the right perspective clients to your door in the right place, in the right frame of mind, ready to want to hire your firm before they get there. But the number two job of marketing, real close, is to protect you from the wrong people wasting your time and eroding your energy. And by the way, let's be a little bit respectful to the prospect who your marketing could help them understand that they shouldn't come see you, right? So the problem we've got is that there's all these people out there who call themselves marketers who aren't really marketers. You know, they took a course on how to run a digital marketing agency. And basically what they know how to do is buy ads. They know how to buy ads and place ads, and all of a sudden they call themselves a marketing agency, but they don't stop and do the right thing. They don't stop and say to the owner of the law firm, what are your financial goals? Why do your financial goals matter to you? What are your margins? How much business do we actually have to bring you to achieve your financial goal? Because if you want to make a million dollars a year of income and your margins are 25%, then we better bring in $4 million worth of business. If you want to make $250,000 of income and your margins are 25%, then we need to bring in $1 million of business. If you want to make $100,000, you get what I'm saying. But most marketers, they never ask that question. They never say, how much do you actually want to earn? And then they don't ask, what are your margins? And then they don't bother to say, by the way, if we do bring you $4 million worth of business, can you handle it? Right. And so the marketing agencies, they're not agencies. They're just selling you button-pushing ad placement. They're not really partnering with you in a relationship that helps you build your firm. And so what ends up happening is sorry for stealing your thunder and shoving you off the soapbox, but here I go. Right. And so what ends up happening is the lawyer doesn't know, first of all, how much income they really want to take out of the firm. Number two, they don't know why that number really matters enough to them that they're willing to stick with it long enough to let it work. Number three, they don't know how much the firm needs to gross in order for them to take that money out of the firm as income. Number four, they don't know what their sales conversion rate is. So if I got to get a million dollars of gross revenue to take $250,000 out of my firm, and my average case is let's call it $5,000, that's I got to get 200 cases. Great. Well, if I got to get 200 cases, if the marketing agency doesn't know what the conversion rate is from prospect to paying client, well, then the marketing agency doesn't know how many prospects it needs to bring to the door of the lawyer. And when the unsophisticated law firm owner falls into the clutches of one of these button-pushing ad selling technicians, and they say what every button-pushing ad-sell technician loves to hear, which is just get me more. Great. Give me your credit card, and I'll just spend and spend and spend and spend. But they don't actually get strategic with the owner of the law firm. And so then what inevitably happens is, you know, they spend enough money to drive traffic to a to a non-existent, non-strategic intake system. The lawyer gets flooded and overwhelmed with prospects and leads, can't handle the work, turns off the marketing, and then of course says to the marketing agency, turn it off. And six months later, the lawyer is desperate, turn it back on again, and they got to spend all that to ramp it up again. Instead of partnering with a market to a instead of partnering with a real marketer who actually takes the time to understand their business. I mean, that's why I co-authored the book with you and not so many other people who I could have co-authored a book with.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I know I appreciate that. And you're right, those are the conversations that we're trying to have, and those are the conversations that need to have, whether it's with our or with others. You know, if you if you don't understand the why and you don't understand the financial realities and the goals of the business owner, how can you possibly put together an intelligent marketing strategy? I really don't think you can. So I appreciate you saying that. So, Arjon, you talk a lot about how important it is for entrepreneurs to manage their mindset. And I've heard you say that how you think about what you think about is the most important thing. And I don't actually want you to unpack that because you do a great job of unpacking that in multiple podcasts, which we will link to in the show notes. But what I would like to ask you is what do you personally do? Like what does your management of your mindset look like? Do you wake up first thing in the morning just automatically in Arjon mode? Or what do you do to keep your mindset where it is? Because, you know, as anybody who has spent time with you can say, it's it's it's one of a kind. Well, thank you.
SPEAKER_00I assume that's a compliment. Very much a compliment. So there's a really great book called The Power of Full Engagement. And I can summarize the whole book for you in 30 seconds. It's worth reading, but this is basically the gist of the book. Everyone has their own natural energetic cycle, right? Some people are steady eddy. Boom, boom, boom. They're they're straight and steady, and every day they have kind of the same energetic space. These are people who do really well with showing up at the same time every day and following the same routine. And they're great. It's great for them, right? Obviously, them. That's not me. There's other people whose energy fluctuates throughout the day. There's other people whose energy fluctuates throughout the week. There's other people whose energy fluctuates throughout the month or the quarter. I was fortunate enough to read this book in my late 20s, early 30s, and very quickly recognized that my energetic cycle runs in about a 90-day pace. About every 90 days, I have a low and then I have a peak and a high, and then I go back down to a low and I hibernate for a while. And I'm not saying that anyone else should have my pace. I'm just telling you, everyone's got their own cycle, right? And the key is to recognize what your cycle is. And if you're 40 years old or above, you definitely have figured out that you got a cycle. You might be fighting it, you might be denying it, you might be ashamed of it, you might be apologizing for it, you might have been convinced that there's something wrong with you because your energetic cycle doesn't match the energetic cycle of whoever is trying to, you know, criticize you for it, right? You might wish your energetic cycle was different, but instead, my advice is embrace it, right? And so I build a business around my natural energetic cycle, right? We reinvent my business every 90 days. Uh every 90 days, I kind of have a peak at the top, and then I kind of cool down. And then I've got a couple weeks in the middle, two, three weeks in the middle, where I'm just like basically unproductive and kind of useless. And then I kind of come back and build back up again. And there's nothing wrong with that, right? If anyone is listening to this or watching this and your energetic cycle is like mine, and people have called you lazy or anything like that, you're not lazy. You, like me, probably get more done in a month than most people get done in a year. And then I need to just hibernate and I go to art museums and I read poetry and I go to the theater and I go and feed my mind. I just keep feeding my mind with creative ideas that come together in that month where I'm super, super productive. Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach, who I used to coach with, he talks about you got your performance days, you got your preparation days, and you got your recovery days. So you ask me, how do I, how do I protect and manage my mindset? First is you get real with what your natural energetic cycle is, and you don't let people shame you for it, and you don't let people embarrass you for it. And if you've been shamed and you've been embarrassed and you've been trying to work against your energetic cycle, maybe try not doing that for a while. Try embracing it, go with that flow, right? And then two is work with a CEO, a COO, CFO who understands this stuff and can help you build a business model that leverages. See, a lot of people think I have to build a business model to protect myself from my natural energetic cycle as if there's something wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with it. You can build a business, you can build a law firm, you can build a personal injury law firm, you can build a bankruptcy law firm, an immigration law firm, the family law firm, an intellectual property law firm, you can build a real estate law firm, you can build a transaction law firm, you can build any kind of practice area law firm, any kind of practice area law firm can be built around anyone's energetic cycle and leverages that cycle and gives the business a really terrific strategic advantage. Now, here's the thing because my energetic cycle tends to go up and down every quarter. I have to surround myself with a leadership team who are much more steady eddy. If my energetic cycle was more steady eddy, I would surround myself with a leadership team that was more up and down, up and down, because you got to have some yin and some yang to it. I'm very, very careful not to hang around with people who have a shitty mindset. People start complaining about the economy. I'm I'm gonna remove myself from that situation. People who just want to talk about politics all day long. I mean, I'm not gonna get political on your podcast, Danny. I don't get political with people. But I mean, yes, there's a lot that I would change in this world were right to have the power to do so. But the only thing I do have the power to change is what's going on in my little world that I live in. And so I don't just bombard my mind with all of the garbage out there on social media and in the media today. Go back and read books from that were written by people before there was a 24-hour news cycle and podcasts and social media and all that kind of stuff, and trying to like connect with that pace.
SPEAKER_01Love that. That's awesome. All right, so Arjun, we've got like 90 seconds or so left here, and I I've got three sort of quick take questions for you. We'll see if we can get through all three of them. But here we go. So Sopranos Ending. Love it or hate it.
SPEAKER_00Didn't see it. What? I watched the whole series, and then in the last season, it just got to be too drama, and I just went off of it and got busy and just stopped watching it.
SPEAKER_01I'm like flabbergasted by the answer. You gotta see it. Like, you're the person that got me to watch Sopranos. I've been waiting for like three years to ask you this question. So I'm disappointed.
SPEAKER_00I know what happened. I'm not gonna give it away for anyone who didn't, but I didn't watch it. I'll say that from what I've heard about the ending, it was the perfect ending. It was the only way to end that series. All right. Number two, react to the statement life is mostly luck. Anyone who has built a very successful business who doesn't acknowledge that luck plays a part in our success is very, very naive. I would say dangerously naive.
SPEAKER_01All right. If you could go back to your 2009 self, I think you said 2009 is when you started your business, and and give your 2009 self one piece of advice. What would that be?
SPEAKER_00Defend higher standards, defend higher standards, defend higher standards, especially in my case, defend higher standards when it comes to hiring and when it comes to documenting standard operating procedures and file naming conventions. I'm still looking for some shit from 2008 that some person that used to work for me filed under who the hell knows what. All right, love it.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so the book is Truth, Lies, Mistakes, or Bullshit. He is R John Robbins. The book is available for pre order at barnesandnoble.com. RJon, thanks for joining us today. Thank you so much, Danny. Nice to see you.