Dan Kennedy and Ben Glass Talk Ruthless Time Management - From the Vault

In another "classic" episode, Ben Glass and his mentor, Dan Kennedy talk about the realities of being the leader of a law firm. When you run a law firm you demonstrate that you are different from 95% of all lawyers. As a law firm leader, your habits and practices about managing your time must be in the superior range as you cannot afford to have your time wasted. Ben and Dan talk about some of the strategies that have made them both very successful in their fields. To some this may sound "ruthless." To those of us who understand it this is pure gold.

Dan Kennedy is the founder of Magnetic Marketing and is a legend in the marketing industry. Dan's Magnetic Marketing System has helped millions of entrepreneurs across the world find success. He has written over 30 books, has delivered thousands of speeches, and has been featured in various magazines such as Forbes. For more about Dan visit https://magneticmarketing.com/

Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com

What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?

In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.

One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.

There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.

Transcript

Ben Glass: 0:00

For a former President Bush said, if you don't have an agenda, it turns out Washington is full of people happy to provide you with one. and if you don't have an agenda, your world is full of people who are happy to provide you with one

0:14

Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show where we ask the questions, why aren't more lawyers living flourishing lives and inspiring others? And can you really get wealthy while doing only the work you love with people you like? Many lawyers are. Get ready to hear from your host, Ben Glass, the founder of the law firm, Ben Glass Law in Fairfax, Virginia, and great legal marketing, an organization that helps good people succeed by coaching, inspiring, and supporting law firm owners. Join us for today's conversation. Hey everyone. This is Ben Glass and welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast. This is another episode where we dig deep into our archives to bring you a classic edition of a call or a live event that was of tremendous value to our members. Today's recording is from the fall of 2017 when my friend and mentor, Dan Kennedy, was launching the third edition of his book. No BS Time Management for Entre. One of the things Dan and I will talk about on the call is the mindset necessary to be an entrepreneur and to lead. The truth is that we are different from 95% of everyone else in the world, and because we are different, we need to adopt certain habits, disciplines, and activities that are just different. We need to set up barriers around our lives in order to be efficient so that we can provide jobs and opportunities for other people, and in the case of lawyers, serving our clients in the best way. So here we go. As always, if you like what you're hearing on this podcast, leave us a review, leave a comment, and share the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, which is a production of great legal marketing with your friends. Okay, now onto my interview with Dan. If you don't know me, I'm Ben Glass. I'm a practicing attorney here in Fairfax, Virginia, and I had a company called Great Legal Marketing where we teach solo and small firm lawyers how to grow great practices. I had a lunch a couple of weeks ago with a buddy of mine and we were sort of comparing notes. He's my age, similar practice. His kids are up and out of the house, and I was kind of shown, showed him all the things I was. Running two businesses, running three day marketing events, writing several newsletters, not staying late at night, any nights at the office, not working on any weekends. By the way, my teams don't do that either. I never give anyone, people around here don't get assignments at the last moment and have to come in and work on the weekend. And and, and he was kind of in a basement and wanted to know how. Get all of this stuff done and still able to travel, work for a charitable foundation, referee soccer games whenever I want. And I told him, I said, look, I'm, I'm pretty much in it with my time. I have managed without a shame or distress to cut out those things. And those people from my life who either don't want to be around, don't like to do and aren't directed towards my goals. And he asked me, how'd you learn all. and I said, well, there's this guy, Dan Kennedy, who I met almost 25 years ago. And I'll tell you a little bit about Dan. He's one of the people that have come into my life who profoundly changed the trajectory of my life. I found him at a time when I was struggling in my own practice. I was attracted to him because he had a product called Magnetic Marketing, just celebrated its 25th anniversary. That's what I was attracted to him as many are by the marketing and advertising lure. What I found out once I got on Planet Dan and what others have found out over the. Is that, that's an important part. But really what Dan teaches and has helped many of us is with the mindset side of running an entrepreneurial, an entrepreneurial business. Dan gets a lot of stuff done. He is known in the entrepreneurial world as a multimillionaire himself, but he has created lots and lots of, of millionaires and multimillionaires, mainly guys and gals running at, at the beginning, small businesses, and he's helped them really with. Again, the way to think about being what he calls a renegade entrepreneur, how to be in that top 10% in the world. I could tell you about Dan's resume where he went to college in graduate school, but he didn't. He's a totally self-made, self-taught gentleman. Dan's schedule, and we'll talk to you a little bit to you about this, Dan, but I know personally that you read the 20 to 50 trade industry and professional journals a month and you get a dozen other magazines and high-end business and investment newsletters. And like me, you get through three or four new books a month. Dan works with about 30 private clients across really diverse businesses, and he runs the G K I C Titanium Group of Information Marketers. That's a very high end, a very smart mastermind group. He does other active consulting. He's an active investor. He writes five newsletters a month. And a weekly client group memo and Dan's drug of choice, I guess, is he races, I guess, harness racing up near his house in Cleveland. So he's engineered his life to be able to support his horses and to get out when he wants to go to race. So Dan, thanks for carving out some time and welcome to the call today. Thank you. Sorry, I had to do an interview that introduction twice, but That's all right. It was good enough to hear twice. Well, you know, it's an important point. So many times at lawyer events, they get up and they read the guy's resume and you're like, why are we here anyway? We're here today to talk really about, and by my stick count now more than. 20 books, but your very most recent book is now the third edition of No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs. I went back and looked, I think the first edition was 1996, so that must have been one of the very first books that I came across. After I joined planet Dan. And so I'm gonna ask you a marketing question first before we get into this time management mindset and stuff, which I think is still interesting. Talk to us just for a moment about the whole, why are you so well positioned in the industry? Why are you still producing so many books, particularly in the no BS series? I know you've, you've also co-authored and collaborated on a couple of very cool mystery novels and now this third edition of this, of this book. Why do you keep pumping so much stuff out into the universe? Well, some portion of the answer is probably, you know, mental illness, compulsion. I forget what I think it was James Thurber, who at one point said, I've decided I really don't like being a writer, but I'm too famous to stop. So there's some sort of, Hey, this, the, the convergence of what you do with who you are is certainly in play. You want the more pragmatic answer, I'm sure, which is that publisher parish is, is maybe. valid now than it was when the quote was first said some 50 years ago. If you aren't in media, you pretty much don't exist. And so there's that. Even more pragmatic is the customers that become members that find their way to what is now gkic.com and the clients that find their way. Have certain behavioral characteristics in common. The best customers and the best clients for me, they have study ethic, they have work ethic, they're searchers. So when presented with a opportunity or a problem, they, their natural behavior is to gather information and so by far and away of any source, Of business coming directly or indirectly? To me, the, the best of it comes from somebody who either bought of mine or was given a book of mine by a peer friend or associate, and. When somebody, so I, when they buy a book, there's certain things about them that we know behaviorally, if business people go to a physical bookstore to buy a book, they never buy one. They buy three. I'm not sure what the stat is on Amazon, but we know that this person will read, can read values, information, has a certain, what I call study ethic. They have a connection between, in their mind, between getting. And getting more capable and getting more of the results they want. And so there's hardly anything that can work to my advantage anywhere near as these books, and that's been consistently true now for some 40 years. Other changes in media have not changed this fact I have on the books for next year. For example, I have two new clients, total value totals, about$700,000, and they both origin. By buying a book of mine in a Barnes and Noble store and, and have through an evolutionary. And essentially process now arrived at my doorstep, open checkbook in hand. I suppose the last reason would be I keep getting invited. Yeah, so, so there's that and, and look, I have something to say and a book is a great way to say it. I mean, this time management book been thoroughly updated because since the second edition of the third edition, the challenges people face in, in managing their time, managing themselves, managing others, and managing their sanity have multiplied exponentially. And, and I think I, you know, my performance indicates I have a good grip on it. I'm often asked, it is a kind of a pet. Subject of mine. And so I write because I have something to say that I think can be really useful. You know, I, I would just add to that, that it works exactly the same way for me, the, the practice that I've engineered and I'm a personal injury attorney, and that we do a, a disability, a section of disability law. I had a lady in here yesterday, Dan, who, who, who bought one of my books on Amazon because they're on Amazon. She said 10 years. and had always kind of been thinking about this one problem she thinks she has, and finally decided to come in. And, you know, even in the personal injury world where at one time I thought, well, this is all sort of random and one personal injury client is just like the other. It just hasn't been true for me. And so the more, as you know, we, we pump out books. I, I write a newsletter that's got a lot of inside of me and my own philosophy about life inside of it. We publish a magazine. I have to get you the newest one that we just published. It's pretty cool. It attracts a certain kind of client. That is really congruent with the way I want to practice law. And so they tend to be, just, as you've described me, they're they're researching, they're looking for information When they read our book and get led down the path to other things we've written, they become emotionally magnetically attracted even before they come in here. And, and when you get somebody walking into your door who's like that, it's a far. Pleasant experience because they'll listen to you, they'll obey your rules, and we're gonna talk about some of the time management rules that we use here. And I learned from you and, and it becomes really win-win. So I don't want anybody to miss that. I saw yesterday the other day on a marketing list serve in the lawyer world, someone saying, well, everybody knows that print is dead and everything is digital. And my, and I, my response was, keep telling your competitors that print is dead. That's what we want them to learn and understand. So, so full in on that. All right, let me, let me start here because you, you say in the book, and there's a lot of really good practical tips and strategies for managing your time. As you know, Dan, the lawyer industry ranks pretty much top of the table in terms of things like job dissatisfaction, depression, alcohol, and other substance abuse. The so much that the American Bar Association recently put together a report on the lawyer wellbeing. You won't be surprised to know that in that report there is not a single suggestion about build a better business and control your life as a way to reduce the anxiety of the practice of law. But, but we rank high, you say in the book. An entrepreneur seeks financial rewards, independence, and autonomy, and other outcomes that are profoundly different and apart from and superior to those achieved by 95% of the people around them. And this requires that we think in a profoundly. different and superior ways. You say that success is conceit and if you are to have it, it'll be an at an intellectual, emotional, and behavioral distance from most others. And this is not a humble idea. And and my response is there are very few people in the world that I can have a conversation with, like what I'm having with you, where we talk really about having the world revolve around. Us for the purposes of running our lives and our businesses our way. So let's talk a little bit about just the mindset side of Okay, you, you don't have to do anything. We say anything you say in this, but you don't have to. But if you are to achieve, then really you must, you must think differently. Well, so like to your broad point about the legal profession doesn't have an exclusive on, on profound unhappiness that in all sorts of destructive ways, but they definitely have it, and it, it really, when you boil it all down, it, it is about lack of control and you know, you are, let's get home in time for dinner guy. And that's, and that is perfectly in keeping with everything in my time management book, but the subtitle, the book, the Ultimate Guy did Time, productivity, and sanity. And so it's not just getting home in time for dinner, it's the mood you're in when you get home in time for dinner. It's not just business success. I mean, I always say it's not just the money you make, it's how you make the money. So money's extremely useful, but it is not panacea. A successful practice is extremely useful, but it's not panacea. And the third line is actually a reality for a lot of people is I build up this business. It turns out to be a trap. If I knew what I know now, I, you know, I would've gone and worked at McDonald's, but it's too late, right? And first of all, it's never too late, but, so this is about whether or not. you are going to control affairs and, and, and the people who decide to set aside guilt, intimidation, others expectations, shall obligation, et cetera, and structure things to their liking obviously are a lot happi. Than the people who don't. And it's, there's a very pragmatic level to this chapter one. The time is Money chapter, the chapter 14, the Freedom from Addiction chapter. There's some very practical, pragmatic things to do, but. Overarchingly, there is this decision you make about your life and you described it in the introduction and different people talk about it different ways. The former President Bush said, if you don't have an agenda, it turns out Washington is full of people happy to provide you with one. And, and, and if you don't have an agenda, your world is full of people who are happy to provide you with one. And. The fundamental decision that drives time management, self-management, staff management, client management, strategies, tactics, protocols, tools, is this decision of whether or not you are going to be king of your domain, or you are going to be literally a surf working. And for it and have your life experience governed by circumstance and other people, and it's a, it's a profound decision. And, and, and people get to it by different ways at different times. The vast majority of the people never get to it. I've had friends say to me, I don't know why they'll, they'll say to me, look, it looks as though you have three moats and an iron gate and around you. It's impossible to get ahold of you. I don't know how you could ever practice that way. I like to give my clients good customer service, which is a version of. You don't understand, this won't really work in my business. So talk to us a little bit about sort of the, the breadth, I guess, of businesses and types of practices that you have seen where, where people said to you at the beginning. Yeah, but Dan, this isn't gonna work here. I mean, I'm a surgeon. I'm a lawyer, I'm running a retail store and, and, and sort of what they have done, I guess, to, to make it work so that they are king and not surf well. So first of all, very few businesses actually require instant, immediate 24 7 access, let alone connectivity in order to be successful at meeting the needs of their customers, clients, patients, or donors. and at making fortunes for their owners. You can argue, for example, that a bail bondsman needs some pretty good level of access and responsiveness because a client stuck in a cell may well just move on and call the next if he can't get to you. However, there's ways to deal even with that without it having to be you, but most other business. If you are gonna lose a customer, you're gonna lose a deal because you were not instantly and always accessible. You have much bigger problems than accessibility and equating access with customer service is far. I mean, so you and I, we can go right now and walk into any number of retail stores. The doors are open, there's people there. We have immediate access. We can walk up to the counter and ask a question, but the service is beyond shitty. I mean, there is there, the people don't care. They're incompetent. They don't know anything. Their answer to every question is a shrug of the shoulders. So exactly how is that good customer service, right? It's. I mean, I, for example, as you know, and I have high net worth individuals as clients who people think are demanding. I have people who I'm intensely involved in doing work for them. They cannot pick up the phone and call me. They can't leave a voice message and I call'em back. They have to schedule a phone appointment through my office. 90% of'em are all clumped into one day a month. So you might wait two weeks. But the flip side, Which I always explain to a client is he, he, clearly, this is designed to be beneficial to me, but here's the benefit to you. When we are on the phone discussing your business, I will not be talking to you on a smartphone while I run through an airport, walk the dog, wash the car, and at a urinal in a restroom and pee, et cetera. I will be at my. Your material will be in front of me. Nothing else will be in front of me. You will have my absolute undivided, safeguarded, undisrupted as if I was locked in a vault inside a, inside a mountain, attention and focus. Therefore, 20 minutes with me is like four hours with every other network you deal with and it's worth waiting for. And you know what? People get it now. Does everybody get it? probably once a every year. There's one person who otherwise might be a good client for me and I might be a good provider for them. And we can't be together because of things like this cheapest bargain ever to occur in life because everything else now is arranged to suit me. So people who think. A, they're well, that you're Dan Kennedy and I'm not. Well, yeah, but I wasn't always the Dan Kennedy I am now. And this stuff contributed to it. It didn't detract from it. So look, people could have all sorts of excuses why they're their, why their business has to own and control. And why Their life has to be a mess and they're welcome to'em. But, but that doesn't, that that's the least productive thing on earth is thinking up, voicing and defending an excuse for why your life has to be messed up or you have to be frustrated and miserable, or you have to wish you had never become a lawyer in the first place. Thinking up the excuses for why that is, how does that benefit? Only finding a way to alter it benefits you and, and, and we can find in every business, in every profession, I don't care which one we can find top earners, some of the most successful and wealthiest individuals. Owning them for whom people wait. And what customers want is not always what customers need to. and even what they want once they understand alternatives. I mean, I tell people all the time, there's nobody that's ever filled out a Disney customer survey and said, could you make the lines? Could you make the humidity worse? Could you please arrange the restaurants like you arrange the attractions? So we can't leave without walking through a store designed like a casino maze dragging. what would you be dragging now? Five or teenagers? Yeah, I'd be dragging teenagers, dragging our kids through the store in the maze. Could you please make sure even the men's room works that way? Because we really like the fact we can't get off an attraction without, no, of course. Nobody ever says that. However, Disney has a 98.7 return customer. And keep in mind this includes people that come from all around the world to come to Disney World, 98.7% come back again despite the humidity and the long line, all the stuff they say they don't like. So the answers to this are about, first of all, being Disney, being somebody that people want to do business with so badly. It gets to be on your terms, not their terms. So this is all about positioning and marketing and media and authority and all those things. Secondly, having enough deal flow that the ones you miss, you don't care, right? A third really having an understanding that you are. So the whole first part of this book is really about you're an investor and, and you need to start. About your life as an investor, not as slave or worker or or anything else. And so with regard to your law practice, I've said it for years, I just saw Sam Zel talk about it in his new, which is great book by the way. Am I being too subtle that every morning that you get up and decide to stay in your business, you are investing in it all over again. You're buying it and so it ought to be something you would. it ought to be something you would be happy about investing in. Yeah. Your time is money. You invest it or you let people come and compel you to invest it in ways they think it should be invested. And so when you make these fundamental decisions, I mean, I say nobody would be dumb enough. The dumbest person on earth, the dumbest attorney you've ever met, is not gonna drain all his bank account. Take all the money out of his 401k, bring it into the office, put it in a big box in the center of the floor, put a sign on it that says, take whatever you think you need, whenever you think you need it, and go back to his office. A he'll have no money left quick no matter how much he started with, cuz the size of the fistfuls taken will be proportionate to the size of the pile. And secondly, hardly any of it will yield any return on in. Yet, everybody does this with their time. They bring it in, they dump it in a big box. They put a sign on it that says, take, take whatever you think you need, whenever you think you need it. And they let people do that. And people do that by texting them without any controls, emailing them without any controls, knocking on the door, their office, calling them on the phone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They would never do it with their. But they cheerfully do it with their time and they can't see that it is the same thing. And because of it, they're sort of perplexed that they're reaching their 40th year in practice or their 50th birthday party and are kind of depressed about it and they can't figure out, you know, that, that this is why they're. And if, if nothing else, at least you know, the position that we take in the market is E. Every time you, you do that and you let somebody in, you're really stealing on the other end and you're stealing from your family because it's you the owner who ends up staying in the office till eight o'clock at night or showing up on weekends when you know there's a lot better things to be doing. And, and I would also say to folks who are listening to. Because Dan, you said, you know, it's good to have deal flow. It, it makes it easier. But you, you start, I started to do this stuff before I had the deal flow as I entered the Dan Kennedy world. Dan, I can remember the sort of, the very, very first thing I did besides making information widget was institute the, from now on, we don't do any unplanned inbound phone calls. Everybody has to make an appointment. I'm Ben Glass, I'm, you know, I'm in charge of this deal. And the whole, the whole thing is, you know, you can be view. As, as a commodity or you can be viewed as somebody special, the public has really no good way of, of judging and evaluating who's good and who's not. So why not at least. Even if we don't have the deal flow yet, let's at least put up the appearance of importance, deal flow, hard to get. And when I started this, you know, my team told me this will never work. No, but no other lawyers are doing it this way and, and today, literally we have thousands of lawyers around the country, Dan cuz I see their newsletters, they have the same information communication policy that I stole from you, which says this is how we work. I'll tell you a really quick, funny story. Couple of weeks. One of my rules is you can't schedule an appointment with me before one o'clock in the afternoon. Why? Because mainly in the morning I'm off someplace else thinking and you know, and working by myself, totally uninterrupted. And my assistant came and she said, look, this sounds like a pretty good case, but he's insisting that he'd come in next Tuesday at 10 30. And I said, Sharon, okay, you can tell him two things. You can tell him, fine, come in next week at 10 30, but then tell him that. Are fired and she goes, she smiles, she goes, oh, okay. I get it. And walked in. Of course, next week he came in at one o'clock, so this absolutely can be done, but until you decide that you want to be the king, then it's really hard, I think, to convince team that this is good. And it's really hard to say no, you can't come in the door. Even if that would be a really good case. You can't come in the door except on on my terms. I wanna talk a little bit about technology and then we will save some time for questions. I sent you an article a few months ago and you talked about it in one of your weekly faxes, and it was big law and big law dealing with their depressed hoards of young associate lawyers who work eight days a week. And some of whom never leave the office. And so big law brings in very high, high cost, expensive psychologists to kind of diagnose the problem and help the team. And the brilliant, brilliant advice by the high price doctors was that these young lawyers. Should turn off their cell phones between the hours of two o'clock in the morning and six o'clock in the morning, and then this is how they're gonna improve their lives. And, and it's, it's, to me, it's unbelievable that people actually live this way. But I hear that it's true. So let's talk a little bit, you alluded to it already about this. You know, my customers demand or expect, I, I guess expect is the better word. They expect to be able to email me, get an instant response, to text me, to send me a message on Facebook to do whatever, and therefore I, I have to be there. What, what do you, what are your, what do your top performers, what are they doing with technology? Well, so first of all, of course, customers or clients', expectations are your fault, not theirs. They're your, it's all your responsibility. It's not theirs. And so management of expectations, selling the mutual benefit of modus opera, operandi, that all falls on you specific to tech. Tech is like medical marijuana, opioids, and dynamite. It's all very useful and it is all very dangerous. and people grossly underestimate the danger in their adoption and acceptance of a lot of stupid behavior. And the other category is addiction driven behavior. And there's an entire chapter about it in a book. There's a test in there to take to see if you're an addict and to determine whether or not you have a staff person who's an addict. And if you. It's the same as having a cocaine addict in the office. You need to get'em out of there. If you are a generous soul, like I know you are, you can go get'em. Help if they'll have it, but you gotta get'em out of there. And we would all agree with about that with cocaine addicts. But we think about social media and smartphone addicts differently. They're not. Addiction is. Addiction is addiction. And all the same bad things that happen from one kind of addiction happen from. So my top performers, my richest clients, simply do everything the opposite of what everybody else is doing about everything, including tech. If they have cell phones, I do not, but if they have them, they have their use of them and others access to them through them very strictly, very rigidly controlled. And if they have staff, they are strictly and rigidly control. this stuff with the staff. So let's talk about a couple of stupid examples first quickly and then a couple addiction examples. So stupid example, you call a Uber driver and you are being driven to the airport and the Uber driver whips out a fifth of bourbon that he is swelling from As he drives, you will probably object, most people will probably object. However, if you get in the same car with the same Uber driver, No booze bottle, but he jumps on his smartphone before he is even got the car in gear, stays on it the entire time. He's texting, he's tweeting, he's checking inbound texts. He's arguing with his girlfriend. He's placing his bet on the game. He's talking to his stockbroker. He's, it, it it, getting a dispatch from the home office, et cetera. Most people will say nothing. However, all of the empirical evidence. That behavior is more dangerous to you than him swelling the booze out of the body, right? You would be much better off if he was drunk than if he was doing this, and the correct response is, excuse me, sir, but I'd appreciate it if you set your phone aside. Put both hands on the wheel where there's supposed to be one at 10 o'clock, one at two o'clock, and focused on the road for the duration of the trip. Thank you very much. and, and if you don't do that and he drives you into a gasoline tanker and you spend the next six months of your life as a burn victim in a hospital, you have no sympathy from me. It's your fault. Second dumb behavior example. Your employee comes, let's say, to work in your law office at your front desk. She brings with her in the morning her big screen tv, which she sets up. Counter so she can watch movies she brings with her, her, her Scrabble game board so she can play Scrabble with the other employees and three or four times during the day, not on her breaks, she says, I'm going to the mall. I wanna look for some shoes. I'll be back. So how long would she work? not very long, but if you let her have her phone, she has Amazon, so she's going to the mall four times. As a matter of fact, if it weren't for people buying from Amazon at work during work hours, there would be no Amazon. That's their, that's the secret advantage they have over brick and mortar re retail is you won't let her go to the mall four times during the day. But she'll let her go to Amazon four times during the day and, and she has her games and she has her movie. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. She checks Facebook 16 times during the workday and, and posts things to it. You would not let her sit there and write out notes to all of her friends and all of her aunts and uncles on your time and mail them with your stamps, but you will let her do it. So one of the ways to help yourself think about all these things is to take the online item behavior. transfer. Transfer it offline and see what you think about it When it is done physically, because it's the same, it's not different now that's just stupid stuff. Addicted stuff is even worse, and there, there is addiction. This stuff is engineered to be addictive. Much of the technology is the same technology that is in slot machines, and one of my fearless predictions. Which will be good for your profession in, in some way within 15 years and quite possibly within 10. Facebook, Instagram, snap, apple, they're all tobacco, so right, so it, we had the tobacco scandal. We ha we have the opioid scandal in progress and next will be this. They will all be sitting in Congress testifying about what they knew and whether they. and it being proved that they knew that this stuff was incredibly addictive and that they abstained. They had their families abstained, but they pushed it on Everybody else absent any disclosures, at least the opioid drug makers have a warning label. They pushed it on people. Lawyers will be running TV ads. If your marriage is dissolved, if your family has been ruined, if your business has failed, if you can't hold a job, if you can't get an erection, if you are in some way impaired or disabled because of your social media and internet addiction, call us cuz we're rounded up class action. Victims. And when it's all said and done, we're gonna make a few mil and you may wind up with eight bucks. Sorry, we're, we're buying the URLs now. There you go. And mark my words. It's coming because it is the same and just because it's digital makes it no difference from cigarettes. None whatsoever. All everything is the same and the evolutionary path it is on towards this inevitable place. Is the same. And so you need to be aware of it as an individual cuz you can't have a business that's got its act together if you don't have your act together as an individual. So you gotta have your act together. And so let's, then you gotta help your business have it act together. And so I want to talk to you one, one more thing, and, and Dan's got about eight more minutes here. If you've got a question, you can hit star two. And once Dan leaves, if you want to hang on, I'll, I'll try to answer as many questions as I can as well to hit star two. And you can get in line to ask a question. The book is No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs, the third edition, assume it's available on Amazon now. I remember reading something. It is about there being some slight delay, but that's awesome. The book also has a cool list of other books, so if you're interested in this subject as I am, Dan has included an additional reading list. I'm one of the guys, Dan, when you mention a book I, I do go on Amazon and order it. I do think I buy more books when I'm wandering around a bookstore than I. When I'm just picking one book on Amazon, so that's interesting. Let, let me ask you this. So we've talked a little bit about dealing with the outside world, with clients, customers, and patients. Let's talk about the inside world just for a minute. And it's the, the, the interruptions within the office. So, so lawyers who are managing productive firms. There's a lot of stuff going on, right? And there's people that want to knock your door down. There's people that want to have meetings. Talk to us a little bit about, cause you have a great section in the book about sort of managing the interruptions and taming the meeting, meeting monster and things like that. Yeah, there's a whole chapter on time. VA vampires, I mean, look, the person who comes and slouches against your doorway until you look up and acknowledge them, and I, I just need a. which really is not a minute, and they do that six times a day. Good one is too many, but six is unconscionable. Again, it's your fault. Nothing is that urgent. Not in law, not in medicine, not in it's not. And so you need a new protocol. And look, times a week, Tuesday and Thursday from two to three, I'm accessible to you. Cobble together all your stuff, rank it by priority and we'll talk then we're not gonna talk now. Goodbye. Now, if you succeed at. then he's gonna email you six times a day. So you gotta go through the same nonsense with email. And then he's going to, he's gonna tweet you, text you six times a day. So these things have to be controlled with procedures and protocols, and there will be some resistance. One of the talks I teach clients to give is what I call my racehorse talk. And so I own racehorses as you. and we don't ask the racehorse to clean its own stall, make its own food, draw its own blood for the veterinarian medical checks, shoe itself, a brush itself. We don't ask it to do anything but be in a good mood, be rested and feel like winning and go out there and race. If the horse is antisocial, we put'em in the back of the barn. If he's social, we put'em in the front of the barn. We do everything we can to facilitate the racehorses performance, and we try to do nothing to diminish its perform. Okay. In your practice, you're the racehorse. In my business, I'm the racehorse. Everybody's paycheck is made by me racing and performing well and, and everybody's paycheck is diminished if I don't. So everybody's job. One is to facilitate this racehorses top performance and not to do anything that diminishes this racehorses top perform. All right. When I get my weekly box every week from Vicky, from my office, with all the weeks inbounds in it, the envelope of inbound money that came in is always on top cuz it motivates me to do the box if no money came in, but only bills came in. She is smart enough to put that at the bottom of the box. so is not to dissuade me from getting into the box. This is, this is like putting the antisocial resource at the back of the box, so everybody has to. That all of their preferences needs seeming crises questions. All of it is secondary to I'll use you. What will get maximum performance out of Ben, and that's priority one. Anybody that can't get that after like three or four repeat. they gotta go and you gotta replace'em with somebody who's teachable, coachable, not defiant, compliant, and, and gets that this mission. And most people get it. I mean, it doesn't take long before everybody understands the game and how it ought to be played for everybody to do well. But if there are people who won't and are resistant as you make these changes, if somebody gets this book, it actually implement. in many ways as you did, the resistance has to be fixed or the resistance has to be removed. The resistance cannot be allowed to exist because it will poison the entire process for everybody involved. Yeah. And, and, and the way I've learned to is, is I have that exact speech to them. I, we, we don't Vince words. I say, I'm the Rey of source and I'm responsible for all of you and all of your families in two businesses. And it's best that I not get cranky. And so this is how it, it operates. And, you know, I didn't, as I started to learn this, I wasn't always not blunt. What we have found and, and the folks in my highest level of mastermind group have found is being really open with a team about where the money comes from, how we actually make money around here, and why it's so important that the horses be allowed to have optimal environment and optimal rules for operation is critical to the success because frankly, Dan, if they've worked someplace else, they've never ever been exposed to this. I mean, we are operating in a different environment. A a well run entrepreneurial machine is, as you say in the book, really operating at that top 10, 15% of all sort of businesses and people and ruthlessness in the world. And we use ruthless. as as a word, just to me, we're, we're very objective and we're goal oriented, and we know by watching others, you know, sort of what rules and what behaviors and what mindset to put in place to achieve this high level of success. Well, I don't, I don't have anybody raising their hands for questions. That's cool. That's okay. And I know you've, you've gotta go here in just a minute. I'll say real quick, this sort of the second or third thing I implemented was this whole time blocking exercise, which I mean, I'll describe the way it works here and you can pitch in is, is, you know, I'm first of the calendar and I, I know what I need to get done. I, I, I block out time. No one can interfere without time. I have deadlines. Stuff gets done when you have deadlines, and I do know what my time is worth. And that's an exercise right up at the beginning of the book that everyone should go. And if you've ever done it without reading Dan's book, you probably have done the exercise wrong actually. But just talk, and I know you gotta go here in a sec just about knowing the value of your time and, and like budgeting your time to what needs to get done. Yeah. So everything gets a time budget. So say the writing of this book. Is predetermined to be allowed to consume only X number of hours and using predictive based on what it's worth. And then using predictive indicators, you make adjustments as you go along. So I know, for example, how many pages have to be done every 15 minutes in order to stay at pace. And if I'm behind, I need to make adjustments today, not at the end of the week. And so the financial worth of the book determines the amount of hours that it can be gifted in its time, budget, and then predictive indicators have to make sure. that I stay a pace, because if you get very far behind, you can never, and that's really true of every activity, every project, every task, every aspect of a business. And if you aren't running these things by time budget with predictive indicators, you are very unlikely to hit marks. What you really wind up doing is constantly moving the goal posts. We fell a little short. We'll move the goalpost down the field. Another month we'll move the goalpost. Another quarter we'll move the goalpost, et cetera. And so we talk a lot about time budget in here. And again, most people understand money budget. They just don't think about time in the same way. And we talk about predictive in indicators. All righty. Well look, thank you. I know you've gotta go the second book if you haven't read this one. Also get, if you're gonna go on Amazon now by Dan's ruthless Management of People and Profits. I think it's the perfect two, the no BS time management book. Dan, I'm gonna let you go if folks want to hang on and ask me questions, that's cool cuz I know you've probably got another call wind up and I wanna thank you for taking time out to be on the call today and folks go on over to. Or to your local bookstore and get Dan's no BS time management for entrepreneurs. Make sure you get the third edition because it's the one that has the new research in a and a really UpToDate cool section on technology. Thanks, Ben. All right, Dan. Talk to you later. Thank you, sir. Bye-bye. If you like what you just heard on the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, you may be a perfect fit for the great legal marketing community. Law firm owners across the country are becoming heroes to their families and icons in their communities. They've gone renegade by rejecting the status quo of the legal profession so they can deliver high quality legal services coupled with top-notch customer service to clients who pay. And refer, learn more@greatlegalmarketing.com. That's great. Legal marketing.com.