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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
The Power of Transparency and Shared Vision in a Law Firm's Success
Have you ever wondered how to protect your law firm from potential client loss when a partner leaves? We've got an episode packed with crucial advice on hiring the right team and maintaining transparency. We'll also share tips on how to approach those difficult conversations early on, and the importance of a shared vision for your firm's future.
Navigating the complex dynamics of money and relationships in business can be a daunting task. But fear not - we're here to shed light on conducting tough conversations during peaceful times and understanding the weight of money on decision-making. We'll also guide you on deciding the right level of financial disclosure to your employees, and how it can affect your firm's overall performance.
And it doesn't end there. We'll delve into the world of data-driven decisions in law, effective financial management, and the importance of maintaining a financial safety net. Learn how to systemize your practice areas, identify successful models in your area, and make informed decisions about case acceptance, hiring, and firing. Plus, discover how taking a financial course can boost your understanding and management of money within your law firm. Get ready for insightful revelations on running a successful law firm – you won't want to miss it!
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.
It's still a mistake to get in bed with someone who's not an A for you, and it's a mistake to keep someone around who's not an A for you. You may feel some moral responsibility, okay, but you're dragging everybody else down with that or you're slowing them down with that anchor over the boat. Again, if you have the right people and you know what your purpose is and what your objectives are, it's just really easy to measure whether we've made a major mistake and hopefully you have systems in place that can help you see the future. Okay, that was wrong. Before it becomes super wrong, let's change the course. Right before we land in New York, we were heading for Chicago.
Speaker 2: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.
Speaker 3:So in law firms in particular and it's true of our law firm as well the owner's name is above the is the title of the business Ben Glass Law And that's the case with a lot of law firms. How do you reconcile the idea of it's my name above there? I'm writing all the checks, it's my product going out And then where I'm specifically going with this is but I'm enabling my partners, associates, et cetera, to be the face of, to be the person operating with the client. The big thing is everyone's scared of what if they run away and they take everything they know and they take clients. I think there's a big overarching decision about that ownership factor unique to law firms in that regard.
Speaker 1:Where I thought you were going to go first. I was going to say remember, why do we exist? We exist to run a great business. So now the objection is and you're right, i hear this from lawyers If I allow Joey and Billy and Susie to have these great relationships with clients and Joey and Billy and Susie decide to up and leave, then I'm screwed All right, legal term screwed. And so there's a again. There's a couple of layers to that. First of all is the layer of your relationship with Joey and Billy and Susie. If you're getting the right people in the bus, if you're forming these partnerships or you're hiring associates and you're hiring good people with the right spirit, then you are going to lessen the chance that they up In law firms.
Speaker 1:When a bunch of lawyers up and walk, there's something deep. There's something deep going on there And I suspect I've never really had that happen, but having seen it from the outside with some firms, it's usually some version of the owner is not being transparent enough, maybe about the finances and the money and generous and all of that stuff which we can talk about, and we trend towards more transparency, not less, and I think that there are underlying personality issues. So there's a practice I can think of right now where the owner is the name on the firm. There's two other lawyers who are leaders in the firm, three different practice areas. The two other lawyers are running their practice areas very well. The owner is running his practice areas And so that's a risk. That's a practice, in my view, at risk. I don't know how you fix that except to recognize, hey, my two partners are killing it over here and mines always has staff turnover, unhappy client reviews, and you got to fix that stuff. That's a practice at risk. The owner's responsibility, because the owner is not aware of the degree to which his part of the practice is underperforming what it could be. I don't know how you fix that, except to be self-aware and get your own crap in order. The other thing that happens is the owner not only abdicates or delegates responsibility for doing the cases, but the owner has no other connection to the clients. So we try to guard against that being a thing that could lead to people leaving and taking clients. With the marketing side, with the stuff that the owner does in the community newsletters, the voice being there and saying look, you have any issue at all, come back to me.
Speaker 1:But the best sort of inoculation against all of this goes back to, again, great people. So having great partners, who you're all on the same page. You're having these difficult conversations about not the legal stuff, but where do we want the firm to go, what is our goals, and finding out early on in that process oh, billy, you kind of have a different view of what five and 10 years down the road looks like for me. We got to have a hard discussion now because I don't want to be in a place where you're leaving and taking all the clients. You wouldn't want to be in a place where I kick you out and try to keep all the clients. So let's get on the same page early And again.
Speaker 1:This is lawyers who are in partnerships, taking the time to work on the business and to work on the partnership, and when there's something generating inside of them that says I'm not really sure that this is good, i don't have a good feeling. You got to put that on the table. You've got to have those discussions And if you don't think you can have open and honest discussion, then again you're in bed with the wrong person.
Speaker 3:It's right. I was going to ask you exactly about that. If you have a disagreement between yourself as the owner, so let's say you have 100% equity, but you do have partners that you really respect and want on board, how do you reconcile your vision, what you'd like to do with potential successors in the firm, potential people who could purchase the firm, and just people that you?
Speaker 1:like having there. Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. So I think, again, you're going to be selfish in your own financial and emotional security as primary. So you have to have a well thought out philosophy for yourself about what you want And then, when you start to sense that disagreement or you actually have disagreements you got to get to the real issue, because you might have something that pops up Maybe it's money, or maybe it's ours or whatever but that's not the real issue. And so what we teach is you need to ask questions, and you need to ask questions where you genuinely want to know the answer. And the person on the other side of that question needs to know that you're not asking a setup question, that you're asking a question because you genuinely want to know the answer. And again, if you don't have that fully fleshed out personal philosophy of your own life and what you want to do, okay, it's hard to make a decision about what do I do now with this problem, because I don't know where I want to land, and so we want to give lawyers permission to have that first and to be selfish.
Speaker 1:But it goes back to our like our hiring, like our firing discussion.
Speaker 1:The longer you let a known separation in your own gut fester, you are not giving yourself and the other person the dignity of time to be able to figure this out.
Speaker 1:And so firms who get in trouble and by that breakups are acrimonious is because no one was willing to sit down and have a hard discussion, and we've known plenty of firms that do have a breakup. The breakup is amicable. They both the partners go on to be in the perfect place at the perfect time for them, but it's because they have the integrity with each other to have the hard conversation as soon as it comes up and to not be as each other. Again, if you've formed a relationship with someone based upon they are a good person, they're a good person of character, then they're not going to lie to you, they're not going to cheat you in these early discussions, and that's why it's so important whether you're hiring someone and certainly if you're going to be a partner with somebody. It's a lot more than hey, it would be really fun to practice together. Let's just get together and start to practice together. That's a recipe for not a long term relationship.
Speaker 3:So I'm going to ask you a question that actually is for both of us in some way, which is you've worked with family, i've worked with family. I think that's a tough decision thing, in terms of both hiring and what if things go poorly and we've had members who have had the relationship go poorly. What do you do?
Speaker 1:So our joke in our family is I have one daughter who's worked part-time for me twice, got fired twice I laugh about that And currently my son is a partner here. We have a 10-year sort of transition plan that we're flushing out. And then let me just also preface this discussion by saying I think a lot depends upon, again, the discussions that you and that person have had in the past. If it's a child like, how have you raised them? What have been the discussions at the breakfast table and the dinner table? What have you modeled for them? So it's complex.
Speaker 1:That all being said, it's still a mistake to get in bed with someone who's not an A for you And it's a mistake to keep someone around who's not an A for you. You may feel some moral responsibility, okay, but you're dragging everybody else down with that or you're slowing them down with that anchor over the boat. So nothing wrong with family. My son is from college. He'll be here this summer working hard in both of these businesses. But you have to be willing to say Susie, this isn't the right place for you. It's not helping your growth to be here if you're not an A player.
Speaker 3:I know a lot of our members have a spouse who's employed within the firm The nature of a small practice. I know that Sandy works on the Benglass Law side, works in bookkeeping and counting. What are those discussions like, even beyond just tough decision stuff? How do you transition that we have our home life but there's also a business life?
Speaker 2:How do you?
Speaker 3:keep those from interfering.
Speaker 1:So I'm not the greatest of this, because I actually don't like talking about business once I go home. But Sandy does the bookkeeping and so she'll have these questions and I'm like go talk to somebody else.
Speaker 1:And so I think the number one thing a spouse, a partner, who is your life partner, who's working in the business, wants to know is everything You can't really keep. you have to be open to talk about your fears, to talk about your challenges. I found that to be very helpful. This is bothering me. Hey, i've got an employee. This employee is driving me crazy. We talk about this employee every meeting. It's frustrating to me. I just want to. I don't want to unload on you, i just want to let you know that this is what I'm thinking.
Speaker 1:This is on my mind if I've been a little bit short, or you're having a cash flow crunch or you've got some big motion and the other side maybe it's more right than you are on the big motion. So I think that, again, having open and honest discussions when you're not tired, when you're not already fighting about something else, i wish everyone could have seen the look on your face in that moment.
Speaker 3:Yes, so right.
Speaker 1:So we've learned this with our children is that you, when you have issues with your kids, the worst parenting advice this is the bonus The worst thing you can do is lecture your kid. When you're angry or they're angry, They're not hearing you and you don't actually mean what you're saying. So the pattern there and it translates back to business is and it says this is a sign on our refrigerator You correct in times of calm You have to pick those spots. So it's not nine o'clock at night in my household, because I'm pretty done by nine o'clock at night And sometimes you have to set appointments. So if your spouse or partner is involved in the business maybe a part-time basis you set specific times where we're going to talk about aspects of the business. I spoke to a lawyer recently and his wife works part-time in the business and part of his issue was she interrupts him a lot, Like he's trying to get stuff done and she interrupts.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a hard conversation, Oh my gosh, i need this 90 minutes for myself to think. So, if you have an issue with your computer, go write it down and we'll find a time And I promise you I'll solve it, or better, i'll get the tech guy to come in and solve your computer problem for you. There's no escaping in business and in home life. There's no escaping the conversation that must, in my view, take place at a time of calm, or at least relative calm, because when you're tired and frustrated and already mad or yelling at somebody, nobody hears anything.
Speaker 3:And decisions seem so easy then, because it's all emotion Next day.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. And sometimes, when someone you love disagrees, or at least appears to disagree, with a decision, again you have to ask questions. Tell me why this is important to you, tell me what you're thinking about. And so the language that we use in my family is when you say this, the story that I hear in my head is this, which can be completely different and completely irrational sometimes.
Speaker 1:But, when two people are acting irrationally, you just don't move a ball. I've been able to do it with nine kids married to the same woman for almost 40 years, i think, getting up there, and we have survived and thrived on that.
Speaker 3:So we've talked a little bit about money, a little bit about partnership stuff, and you dropped a little hint of it earlier, but the overall discussion of money within the practice, money makes decisions both easier and harder. How do you so? you made the transformation of we have a whiteboard in the office where people can see the money. I think that is a tough decision for owners to start doing and sometimes even tougher to continue doing. How did you get to that point And how does that change the decision making process?
Speaker 1:And, of course, we're still figuring out like what's the right level of disclosure to employees.
Speaker 3:Are we telling everyone every single salary and bonus structure right, Right Revenue and overhead, and probably not Absolutely.
Speaker 1:That creates its own problems. I think most people who are employed in a business have no clue.
Speaker 3:I had no clue As to the longest time.
Speaker 1:Where the money goes, how much ends up in the business owner's pocket. All that And so, for a lot of reasons, including like teaching someone the important, like how important each call that comes in is, like how much it actually costs us to generate that call. If you let the phone excuse me ring and get a voicemail, what does that actually cost us when that happens? We have found to be important And when we first started disclosing, like how much it actually costs to keep the lights on and run everything and pay all the benefits and salaries for a month, it's mind boggling to them. Versus, i've seen firms where what you hear reported out is the team isn't rowing as hard as they can. They're all in the same direction because they perceive the owner is stingy, driving expensive cars and building this company. That's totally for the owner.
Speaker 1:Again, Ben Glossoli built a company where people can thrive Everybody to thrive, and you know this. My mantra is how much money you want to make? Great, figure out the formula. What do you need to do to help make as much money as you need? right, and that's a different way. It's a different paradigm of looking at business. We have aired more so on the side of disclosure.
Speaker 1:Again if you're working at personal injury practice. The folks are opening the envelopes. They see these checks that come in. They can divide by three And sometimes the checks are very big, Sometimes the checks are enormous, But if they don't see the checks you're writing like for, even just this morning we had a discussion of pay per click ad spend on a certain platform that we're on. Oh my gosh, Where is the data that supports how much we're spending there right now? That justifies that And unless someone brought it up, I wouldn't even know. I wouldn't even know how much we're spending. But it goes back to do you have eight people?
Speaker 1:Because if you got a bunch of wackos that are working for you, that are totally irresponsible, and you're showing them all this stuff. It's not going to move the ball, they're not going to care, they're probably not going to understand it and somehow that'll backfire. So it all starts with getting the right people and, frankly, you don't have to disclose everything to everybody either, but usually when the owner says it costs X dollars or X hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to open the doors, run the marketing and everything else, that surprises people because they're relating to I make 45K a year or 70K or 100K a year and you're spending more than that every single month, just to have a business.
Speaker 3:That was, i remember the first. It was many years ago. I remember the first time that you revealed it and it was a lower number than it is today to keep the doors open. I had not been exposed to any of this stuff as a kid and everything, so I didn't have a total misunderstanding. But when you see how it all adds up, when you see just five people and what a salary is every single month by the way, the people who are getting that salary don't know about the payroll taxes that go on top of that. Their relation to an electrical bill is what it costs at home and that's not what it costs in a 2400 square foot office. Business phones are like eight times more expensive than your cell phone plan. It's very different and it all adds up.
Speaker 1:The government taxes you for every dollar you bring in and then if you go buy a computer with that dollar, it wants to tax you on the computer too. And that's not anything that you sit, you have in your home life, except maybe your car, i guess. You pay a price. You earn money, you pay taxes and let you buy a car and you pay states of car tax. That's the closest they get to understanding that. So again, you can't do this if you don't have good people. It's meaningless.
Speaker 3:And tying a couple of these things together, empowering people to make tough decisions on your behalf. You know them, have to know the numbers. It became a lot easier for me to make decisions on the Great Legal Marketing side when we started mastering the numbers and I understood all of that better.
Speaker 3:Because if we're all on the same page which I personally think that if you're working for Ben Glass, if you're not a family first person, it's going to be hard to really absorb, understand the philosophy of what we're doing here and why we say we're building a business so people can thrive, in terms of empowering people and making that the tough decision, to allow others to make tough decisions. how did you get to that point?
Speaker 1:So first, you wrap your head around like the benefit of it and you get past the mindset blocks that we just talked about.
Speaker 1:Then the next thing is people are going to make mistakes. Okay, i've made a few, they're going to write, they're going to. When you delegate authority to make decisions, people are going to make mistakes. My mantra is there's hardly anything anybody could do that would be fatal to the whole operation. That's my life, not life I'm dying. And those who refuse to delegate because they're afraid that someone else again won't do it as good as I can or will make a mistake, okay, but you're just going to be limited.
Speaker 1:So mistakes are growth opportunities for everybody. Someone makes a mistake. Fine, don't do the same thing three times. They told you not to do it, or at least show me like what were you thinking when you did this. The owner has to be willing. If you let the basketball player shoot, that's to be willing to accept the fact that sometimes he's not going to put it in the basket. So again, I think that's a big part.
Speaker 1:The second part of that I would say is you have to have in place a system to, in many cases, takes makes the decision making mechanical.
Speaker 1:So, for example, if we know that an ad is producing 3x, 5x, 10x, whatever it is, it makes it easier to decide to Increase your spend a bit if you have a system in place for tracking it. Yeah, if we're gonna hire somebody new because we have x cases Coming in the door and we know we know the value of every case or the average value of a new case Then it makes the decision to look for the next person easy again. Finding that person might be hard, but the decision to either Add force or do reduction in force becomes easy, and what I think you want to leave to the owner, as best you can, or the decisions That you know may affect, like which way are we rowing? We still have discussion. I value the input of everybody because I think I've hired people that are smarter than I am, which is nothing we haven't talked about, but it goes with hiring eight people like you can't be afraid to be Not the smartest one in the room.
Speaker 1:That's hard to do It is because people who are lawyers have tended to do well academically in college and in law school And they are smart people. So you have to be. You talk you mentioned ego earlier But you have to be able to, to give people that room to accept that they're smarter than you. Again, if you have the right people and you know what your purpose is and what your objectives are, it's just really easy to measure whether we've made a major mistake And hopefully you have systems in place that can help you see the future. Okay, that was wrong. Before it becomes super wrong, let's change the course right before we land in New York when we're heading for Chicago. Let's change the course of the airplane. Let's check in with air traffic control, and this just gets back to to building in business systems again, taking time out from the production of legal services To building in real business systems that help make hard decisions Easier.
Speaker 1:We talk about having data-driven decisions a lot and at least, if we're not gonna have a data-driven decision, at least we want it as best we can. Have a data-driven metric. Have some metric to show us whether now that was really stupid. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it really, in retrospect, is stupid. Okay or no? this is good. Let's add some fuel to that fire. Hey guys, this is Ben. If you like what you've been hearing on this podcast Not just the marketing and practice building strategies, but the philosophy of the art of living your best life parts You should know that my son, brian, and I built a tribe of like-minded lawyers who are living lives of their own design And creating tremendous value for the world within the structure of a law practice. We invite you to join us at the only membership organization for entrepreneurial lawyers that is run by two full-time practicing attorneys.
Speaker 3:Check us out at greatlivermarketingcom can't make tough decisions on guesswork.
Speaker 1:No, you can't, and that goes from hiring people. So we even have some version of analytics with our work with Jay Henderson to help do some profiles of folks that were thinking about Hiring, to put some science on top of a. We really liked the person, but you also gotta know I'm gonna pay X plus taxes, plus benefits, and what is what am I expected to get out of this person?
Speaker 3:To go back to. I want to circle back to money because I think in law firms in particular And especially a contingent fee practice where it can feel like feast or famine one of the toughest decisions I think is often how do I handle money when it comes in? How do I create a balance in a law firm that one month may bring in $300,000 and then have two months of $20,000? How do you deal with money? That's a big tough one. How do you deal with money? Dave Ramsey live below your means.
Speaker 1:Once you've been doing this for a number of years, you're able to project within certain boundaries. Once you've been doing planus personal injury work, you able to project within certain boundaries. And I think Sandy and I have always tried to live below our means often joke when the cable guy comes to our house. We don't have connections for this TV. It's so old now We don't have the.
Speaker 1:We don't have the oldest stuff in world But we don't typically don't buy brand new cars. We typically we don't have the fanciest furniture. That's just us, we're, we're, we're happy with ourselves, we're happy with the business that we run. But I think that's a main thing. The other, in particularly contingent fee practices, having a realistic view of when cases Will settle, in what amount. You get that through experience and you're always gonna through your career. You're gonna win cases You shouldn't have won. You're gonna lose cases You shouldn't have lost and, as you, the emotional highs and lows used to be very high and very low. That happened Now. You just kind of get used to when you have a good practice with marketing machine that produces a lot of for us, a Lot of leads and a lot of good cases. You can smooth through that. But I think the number one thing is Having the discipline You to set aside funds for your war chest, for your safety net, and then making decisions about case acceptance, hiring and firing.
Speaker 1:What do we do with the business that are really based on this much data, data as you can. Most lawyers if you look at some of the published statistics for solo and small firm lawyers they don't buy large, they don't make a lot of money. They only get paid for two and a half to three hours of their work every day. That's reports out of a Clio has aggregated a whole bunch of data on that. There's a number of reports that are similar to that. There's something about this lawyer business model that ain't working. No, there's a reason why so many people are depressed, and that rounds back again to looking outside the legal industry. But you asked a question about money and it really is.
Speaker 1:I think, being conservative, trying to build a model where you've got your nut covered with cases that don't take a lot of, frankly, your time, that can be systematized, no matter what the practice area is. Lee Rosen proved this, i think, in family law this flat fee divorce practice That was systematized And people said you couldn't do that. It'll never work, it's never been done before, all of which he disproved. It's one of the reasons to hang with great legal marketing, because we have seen and have members across the spectrum of practice areas. So don't tell me that because your practice is estate planning, that you have all these problems, because I can point you to five people Don't have those problems, even down to bankruptcy. I can show you the lawyers are killing it in bankruptcy. Same law, same people, same type of avatar client. We've been running this giant lab here, so finding a model in your practice area of people who've been successful and we have them. It's not everybody.
Speaker 1:but we have them, We can point you to them.
Speaker 3:So, on the other side of money, i'm not going to ask you, ben, to reveal your personal investment strategy or anything, but when you do have money, how do you look at? oh, i can stash this away, i can reinvest in the business, i can hire another employee. How do you know when to make those choices?
Speaker 1:You stash it away first and you get it out of your site. So out of site, out of mind. and I'm not an investment guru, So my money gets dumped into broad mutual funds. And so I'm 61, so I've lived through all the cycles now.
Speaker 3:I've lived.
Speaker 2:You've seen it.
Speaker 1:There was a time like it was in the 80s. There were many people who were active, watched the stock every hour and buying some of the trade almost like day to day.
Speaker 3:That was the era for it.
Speaker 1:And then everything crashed and went away, and now everything recently has been back. So for me, hey, keep it simple Take it, pay yourself first, right? So go read Mike Mahalovich's book Profit First. And the whole philosophy of profit first is is I can't spend it if I don't have it. And when it comes in, if I take it and put it where I can't touch it, then I don't have it. Ok, i don't have it to spend. And so you learn, because if you're in a practice where your cash flow is low, you learn to not go spend it. You can't spend it, you don't have it. So what you're trying to do is create an environment where it replicates that feeling. So that's OK, money in, money out where I can't touch it.
Speaker 1:The second is and it takes a level of sophistication, but internalizing the idea that, as best you can, we're going to track everything.
Speaker 1:We're going to track every spend that we make, whether it's on a person, whether it's on a fancy training center that we have here, whether it's on advertising that we do and marketing that we do. The mere fact that you can't get, penny for penny, 100% accurate tracking for everything, doesn't mean you shouldn't try Absolutely. And today there's all sorts of technology that will help you account. So a lot of lawyers the money drops out of the holes in the bucket and they don't even know it. They have no way of measuring it. If you don't know it and you can't measure it, you're not going to fix it. So again, one of the great things that I think we do at Great Legal Marketing is we stop the bad spend, and part of our mantra here now this is slightly off topic is but for our members, we just want to make this clear Before you sign in a long term contract with any vendor, send it to us. Just had a member do that because you told them that.
Speaker 1:We will help you make the decision of the best spend of your next hour and your next dollar with your marketing and your practice building stuff.
Speaker 3:Hey, those contracts can be very big numbers. Those can be very tough In some cases.
Speaker 2:I know we've seen contracts that are five figures a month and some in mid five. It's a long time commitment.
Speaker 3:Those are tough decisions And you have to have a base of knowledge to make those things.
Speaker 1:You have to have a base of knowledge to at least understand what it is.
Speaker 1:And we're not saying those are wrong because we spend money, but we are saying don't make that on a gut, don't make that on a whim. Don't make it because you see a line forming in the back of the room and everybody else is doing it. That's the wrong reason to do it. Now I'm a Dave Ramsey guy. We sponsor a Dave Ramsey financial course. That's in high school near us And it's not very fancy. That thinking isn't very fancy. There's no substitute for getting smart on this stuff. You don't have to be a financial wizard, you do have to have discipline. But discipline and simple stuff with money is actually rare and it'll get you far Ben.
Speaker 3:Thank you for sharing your philosophy and principles to begin this Cool.
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