%20(3).png)
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
Ep. 184 – Designing a Business and Life You Want (Part 2): Connecting the Dots That Actually Matter
In Part 2 of this special series, Ben Glass moves beyond “being good at law and marketing” to answer a bigger, bolder question:
What’s the best use of your next dollar—and your next hour—to build a life you actually want?
Ben walks through his personal life map, revealing how he deliberately connected the key “dots” in his world—family, law, CrossFit, church, philanthropy, and leadership—to reinforce one another and create sustainable success.
You’ll hear:
- How to quiet the noise and focus on what matters using principles, not tactics
- The real reason your team should love coming to work—and how to make that a reality
- Why designing your “perfect life” on paper is the first step to building it for real
- Why confidence isn’t arrogance—and why your clients need you to own your expertise
At the end, Ben challenges you to draw your own life map, identify what needs to grow or shrink, and choose one small behavior to change this week.
Listen now and take the first step toward designing a life (and business) you actually love.
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.
Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach and father of nine, this show is about more than just practicing law. For over 40 years, ben has built a law firm that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money, do meaningful work and still make it home for dinner. Each week, ben brings you real conversations with guests who are challenging the status quo Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Hey, it's Ben, and in part two of this series we move from I'm good at law and marketing to the better question what's the best use of my next dollar and my next hour to build a life I actually want? I'll walk you through my own life map the big dots that matter to me, the firm Great Legal Marketing, love Without Boundaries, church, crossfit community, and how I designed them to connect and reinforce each other on purpose. You'll hear why we built our training center office the way we did, how a give-first posture with community partners turns into real opportunity and why you have permission to sketch your perfect on paper before you build it in real life. So listen for three themes you can use today. Number one principles over methods. The filter that quiets the noise and keeps you from buying shiny things you don't need. Tighten the screws, plug money leaks, review calls. Raise your standards to match what clients expect from companies like Amazon and not from the typical law firm. And number three design your own philosophy. Make your passion and your work one and the same, and do it with people you like. So grab a pen and by the end you'll have a simple exercise to draw your own life map. Pick one dot to grow, one to shrink and choose a single behavior you'll change this week.
Speaker 2:All right, let's dive in. So we have guys and gals that come to us that are really good. They're really good lawyers, they're really good at marketing. Okay. So what's the next thing? Right? What's the best use of your next dollar in your next hour to build the life you want? That's what we're good at, right. And again, if you're here for the first time, we're good at helping get it all organized so that you don't go waste your time and your energy and your money on stuff that isn't right for you right now.
Speaker 2:So here's kind of a diagram of the interactions that I have in my life, the big things that are in my life and their interconnectivity. So this doesn't happen. It didn't happen for me by chance. I pretty much have figured out how to design things for my life and given myself permission to be able to do that, to not let the world tell me what to do, but to be able to do it and to create interconnectivity between all of these big dots. So of course, we have GLM and BGL, the law firm, and great legal marketing.
Speaker 2:Lwb is Love Without Boundaries. So it's a foundation that Sandy and I do a lot of work with helps provides care for orphans and impoverished children now in four or five countries, and so it's really cool. So I'm on the board, cries me to get on an airplane, fly around the country to board meetings. All right. Well, what if I build my office, which we started two years ago and moved into a year ago? What if I build an office with a training center in a room where people would actually like to come and it would be cool and the coffee's not $90 an hour? Board meeting last week, two full days, 15-minute commute, right Connected to lawyer, to office, to LWB, refereeing, crossfit do it for fitness. I want to live to be 100 and still be able to get myself up off the floor when I'm older.
Speaker 2:Right, but in both of those realms, a lot of community law, firm connectivity and it's always with the attitude of what can we do for you, what can we do for the referee in the sports community? So we have our soccer sportsmanship challenge, big, broad inroads. Community likes it, teams like it, crossfit we say to the gym owners where we go what can we do for you, what can we do to help you make your business better, just tell us and we'll be there and do it right. We say in our training center community groups, politicians, charities boards, come on in, right, what can we do for you? So my question to you is right, what can we do for you? So my question to you is and church, church I mentioned on the email back to David. So this is really interesting.
Speaker 2:I go to a small Lutheran church it's not so small anymore in Northern Virginia with a pastor who was, I think, smart enough to say teach me what you know about what you do here, and we're one of the few, tiny percentage of Lutheran churches that are growing. She's now introduced me to her regional group and the local group and in February this year we had 50 pastors and church leaders in our training center. I was teaching them we called it evangelism, but it was marketing how to get people into pews right. So what is that? That's me in front of tribal leaders. But it was marketing how do you get people into pews right. So what is that? That's me in front of tribal leaders, potential referral sources, walking into a place. That's really really cool. So here's my challenge for you Do you have this?
Speaker 2:Do you have this? Take some time and maybe craft out on one of the either on your playbook or on the green sheet like, what does it look like for you today? And if one of those dots is like really big, like I'm at the office 80 or 100 hours a week, what I want you to do by the end of the three days is to be able to craft out what perfect would be like for you, and then let's have a discussion about how do we get to perfect for you. Again, one thing that I mean look, we're good at marketing and I started this 15 years ago to teach personal injury lawyers how to market, how to advertise really. But what we're really good at now is taking you wherever you are right and helping you. What's the next thing I need to do? What's the thing I need to do this week to get to perfect? And so I'd really encourage you if you've never thought about this and how everything can be linked together to start to think and to craft If you're not there to craft.
Speaker 1:This Dan Kennedy taught me this years ago. We've got more coming up, but first a quick break. Here's something we think you'll want to hear.
Speaker 3:Just a quick break. If you're enjoying this episode, you're going to want to check out the GLM Summit happening October 2025. It's where entrepreneurial lawyers come to rethink what's possible in their practice real strategies, real marketing, no fluff. Head over to GLMSummitcom to grab your seat. Now back to the show.
Speaker 2:Back to the show and I've shown Sammy in my planner. You know this is actual. I handed this off to an artist, to Maria, but this is in my planner and every couple of months I look at it to see. Is it in balance? Is there something new that's crept in? Is there something that I'm avoiding that maybe I'm not giving as much attention to as I should? So here's a picture. This is from our training center, looking out into our kitchen area. If you haven't been there, it's really cool. It looks like Starbucks, right, and all around all the doors are signs.
Speaker 2:And this is what I want you to think about. Forget about being a lawyer for a moment and how many here are. But you're not the lawyer, you're not the owner of the firm, you're a marketing assistant. You're part of the team. This place is for you too, okay, and I don't want you to sit there and think, well, I'm on the marketing team, so Ben isn't talking to me because I'm quote just an employee. That would be wrong, right? We tell our team members look, you need to build your life, you need to build your life. That's perfect. We hope that it's here because we really like you. But when it gets to the point when it's not perfect for you, it's not fulfilling your financial and emotional security, for you and your family, then we'll help you move to your next space, right? But every day my team sees this stuff.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a funny story. Well, today's Thursday, so Tuesday we have a mediation. We're involved in a really big, very, very sad case the death of a child. So it's got multiple defendants, it's got multiple insurance companies and multiple excess insurance companies, and so we're having a mediation. The case didn't resolve, but all these lawyers are big law, right, and all these insurance suits are big insurance suits, suits like in this stuff. And so they walk into my place and I'm like what the hell is this? Is this a law firm? I go well, you know, we do some mindset sort of stuff. It really it blows them away. And then I, when I tell them what we do, right, they're like oh, for some of them they go oh, that's interesting, tell me more about that. When we bring clients in to Ben Glass Law, we walk them past the conference rooms where we'll meet, we walk them through this nice Starbucks-like kitchen area and I open up the door to the training center and I say this is where lawyers come from around the country to be trained by us. Let's go talk about your case, all right? So, again, what is that? That's deliberately and we created this, and Sammy and Charlie will tell you we started with a blank piece of paper and drew out our vision for what perfect would look like for our new offices and our training center.
Speaker 2:Right, and part of that was how to be near a hotel. We manifested. We'll talk about what the universe wants in terms of clarity in a few minutes here, and then it just came to be. So what I'd like to get you to do is to spend some time, particularly this weekend, when you're away out of the office, right, thinking about what areas of my life aren't perfect for me. And I want to tell you what no one else outside this room will tell you is. I want to give you permission. It's your life. You go build it, okay, screw what anyone else is saying about what you should be doing. All right, build on paper first what your perfect life would be, all right.
Speaker 2:So, charlie talked about some of this, but I think it's important because, again, you've taken time, energy and money to be here, and so, first, we are on the lookout for new information. I'll tell you in a couple of minutes that the principles don't change. Haven't changed since one man was trying to convince another man to do something. So the principles of communication Dave Fries will back me up on this they haven't changed. They're hardwired into us. How we deliver information, how we get people to raise their hands and see us to start a conversation that changed.
Speaker 2:So every year we try to bring you some of the top vendors that we work with. You should know that there's a lot of people who want to be in that hall and they wave their credit cards and we say no. So we pick people that we believe are philosophically aligned with us, whose business ethics are aligned with ours. And if you ever have a problem with any of our vendors, I want to know about it. All right, and we will work to get it solved. I want you to know that we don't just let you come in here because you have a credit card. I want you to be inspired. Look, here's a.
Speaker 2:So how many people in the last year have wandered into a bookstore, a regular bookstore? Oh, come on, that's better, because I was going to be really disappointed. All right, you cannot get the same experience wandering through the. If you bought this, you should like this at Amazon. Okay, wander through a bookstore when you're on vacation. My family always finds the independent bookstore and we always go and spend at least 100 bucks and we overpay and have a conversation that lifts other people's lives up.
Speaker 2:But and that leads me to my point here is that if you walked into the fitness and health section of like, say, Barnes, noble, and just closed your eyes and randomly picked out any book, took the book home and follow that book whatever it says to the T, you would lose weight and you would feel better and you would get stronger. All right, that's the easy part. What's the challenge of dieting and fitness? Keeping at it right the next month, right After the glow wears off. So I want, and so what you're looking for is somebody or something that will inspire you to get through that. You know the honeymoon is over and now I got real work to do, all right, and so I think you'll find that here. You'll find it both from the stage Again, my team is carefully selected to be of that spirit but also you'll find it from each other.
Speaker 2:I don't think there's any other group of entrepreneurial attorneys who get together like this group, where there is no whining. I don't need to hear any more lawyer stories about how judges suck and the insurance companies suck and all the lawyers are beating me up and the client's awful. I mean, that's not what goes on here. So hopefully we're giving you the tools, but we're also giving you that message that keeps you going past the next 30 days. You're here to quiet the noise. So it was great.
Speaker 2:Charlie mentioned, you know, laptops and stuff. I get it. I'm glad that not too many people do it. I'll tell you on my iPhone I'm now over. This is like I'm over a year more than 365 days no email, no web browser, no Facebook on the iPhone. Right, it was really hard. It's buzzing and you've got to do a thing and I just and I figured out you can actually turn this stuff off. Right, it's cool and nobody has died. I didn't get run over by any hurricanes that I missed, right, I still use email, I still use web browser, but it's not tied to my heart, right, begging for attention every 30 seconds.
Speaker 2:Where's Adam? Adam and his team? There he goes. So Adam and his team are staying over an extra day, not flying back until, I think, sunday evening just to have and it's our mastermind group created environment of silence, of let's think about the three days of info we just got and let's organize ourselves for the next year. So, while you're here, I guarantee you, unless you're waiting, that you have a jury out like there's hardly any. That's going to be happy news, right, it's all like. It brings you back down right To the extent you can use this to find, to create the space.
Speaker 2:Hey, we may say something. You go, I've heard that before. That's awesome. Every time my friend Dan Kennedy who's now very sick and he's still alive, but he's in hospice but every time, for at least six years, at a Dan event, he'd start a story. I'm like I know exactly where this story's going. I know exactly the principle that's going to be taught here. Still, I'm like I know exactly where this story's going. Right, I know exactly the principle that's going to be taught here. Still, I'm in a different place on year seven than I was on year one, and so I hear it differently. Or someone at the table might go yeah, you know, I listened to that three years ago when I did this and get improvement. So, yeah, you'll hear stuff that you've heard before, and that's okay. And there's stuff that you know and you think you know, and I want to challenge you to rethink it.
Speaker 2:Charlie talked a little bit about this new technologies, new ways that consumers are interacting with lawyers but not just with lawyers, right, we always have to be thinking how are our consumers interacting with every other vendor company out there? Right? What is their general level of expectation now in terms of responsiveness? I filled out some form the other day on a Thomson Reuter or somebody had sent me a thing hey, you can download this report, and so I wanted to see what they said and I did the report and it didn't end up in a download, it ended up in a thanks, one of our reps will get in contact. I'm like well, that's not what I was asking for, that's not the experience I wanted. Screw it right. So you have to be aware of, like, how your people, your potential clients, are interacting with Verizon and with the cable company and with Amazon, because that's the level that they're expecting to get from you.
Speaker 2:Tightening the screws is hey, we're really good at this. Every week, our leadership meeting has a meeting for 90 minutes. We'll talk about that here in just a little bit. But we're always saying where is money or opportunity leaking out? Right, it can follow up, fall down, it might be in. Someone was off script on a phone call, because we listen to a lot of our calls. Tiffany does and then trains the team back. So, taking what you're already doing really well and making sure you are really doing it really well like that you actually know what's going on in your firm and then figuring out how can we make it better. Look for a new opportunity. Get your specific questions answered.
Speaker 2:When you run a really good business, opportunity comes. So where is Tim Semelroth? Tim, right here in front and Tim spoke a couple of years ago. Amazing marketer, really smart guy. A couple of years ago, guy comes in with a social security disability practice, says, hmm, I like what you're doing. I think maybe I should just sell you my practice and you can explode it in a good way. And Tim was telling me last night. Now another lawyer in a different practice area has come to Tim to say I recognize you and your marketing as superior. I've got talent, I've got people, I've got systems. But man, if I could come under your umbrella we could explode this. And so when you get really good at the sort of stuff we do and you become a leader in your community, opportunity comes.
Speaker 2:If you leave here without, if you leave here with any questions about technique or strategy or mindset, then I think you've wasted the opportunity. So my team is here and we're available. Again, we'll have some Q&A time. You can write questions down, you can grab us in the hall, get your questions answered and then figuring out what other people do, because a lot of people have been here for a while. Right, so you shouldn't go to lunch with the people you came with. Honestly, you should go to lunch and ask questions. Right, what do you do? Why are you here? What have you tried? What have you not tried?
Speaker 2:Here's the thing A single thing can change the trajectory of your life a single idea. I write about this in my book, about four or five instances of either people or opportunities or circumstances that brought me now to this stage. With nine kids launched seven to six different Virginia universities, got a son studying in Taiwan. For those of you who know more of my story, our two youngest, who lived in orphanages and who for many years we feared might not launch right, might not be able to be self-sustaining. It looks like they will be able to A lot of hard work. There are things, there are people, ideas and opportunities that will come to your life where, if your brain is settled and quiet right and your business is good and stable, that you will see these opportunities that will come to you, as they've come to Tim, as they've come to me and as they've come to many of you.
Speaker 2:All right, so again from the video, living a principle-based life and running a principle-based business is how you quiet the noise. I mean just you pick up the newspaper. It's awful. I get the paper version of Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal every day. It's just. The whole front page of the Washington Post is a sea, a tsunami of negativity, all right, and of noise and all meant, I think, of course to sell papers, but to just distract you, like they out there want to bring us down into a life of misery. How do we do this? Now, this is worth writing down. I was introduced to this quote on a. I listened to a podcast from one of the CrossFit gurus, right. So again going outside of category. So again going outside of category. A business efficiency expert, harrington Emerson, again early 1900s.
Speaker 2:As to methods, there may be millions and then some Principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods ignoring principles is sure to have trouble. I'm on a bunch of marketing listservs, lawyer marketing listservs. I can't tell you how many times they ask the absolute wrong question, grasping for an answer to a method without even having an idea of what marketing principles are, without ever having given any thought to principles and trying to figure out how the method is going to fit into the principle. I guarantee you that if you understand principles and you have your own principles for a living, your life will be quieter, right, your life will be better. And if you understand principles of marketing, the noise just goes away because it makes it easy to decide. All right, and a principle is not how many pages of notes you write while you're here. And, yes, I appreciate it when people come up to me at the end of the event and go I got 25 pages of notes. 25 pages of notes Great.
Speaker 2:What is your behavioral change? Again, the thing with the iPhone. That didn't happen overnight. I mean, I turned it off so I couldn't get the email or the web browser, but I still kept going to it. Right, and it took a while where that just went away. I don't pick it up to look for anything because it's not there. But what are these things that will actually change behavior? And the good news is you can change behavior.
Speaker 2:It gets harder the more ingrained the habit is. It's easier when you read into this world. It's easier when you have a coach like Sammy Chong. It's easier, jay, are you here? Jay's in the background. So Jay Henders, stand up because you're sitting down and nobody can see you. So do you have that slide? So I found it really valuable to have coach. You can come here. You can read all Ben Glass's slides. You can write notes right.
Speaker 2:Crossfit I have a coach. I got two coaches in business. Jay is a coach and Jay Henderson, who you know came into our world knowing and teaching a lot of how to hire. So we still use Jay to hire people and to vet people. He's got some weird tests that just always seems to work. But Jay's doing a lot of executive coaching now and, importantly, jay understands what it is we're doing here, what it is to be a solo and small firm lawyer. So he's doing a nationwide benchmark study for law firms. He's really smart and so we're on a break after this session. You could track him down, but if you text consult to that number 919-264-2026,. Jay's got some time, a lot of time, this weekend. He'll chat with you, all right.
Speaker 2:So this is bottom line. No marketing or business tactic should ever be employed without understanding the principle. That should be its master. So Charlie Institute so we have our mastermind group gets together three times a year. They come in for two days and people. We don't spend a lot of time these days talking about marketing per se and advertising per se. It more is about business growth, finding the right people, developing compensation schemes, things like that. But Charlie has set up a texting hotline before anybody and we'll do this for you. Charlie will give you his number, not mine. But you walk out here in the halls and these vendors are great, but not every vendor is right for you today. I guarantee you that right.
Speaker 2:So what we want you to be able to do as GLM members is, before you invest in a contract for something, reach out and have a discussion with us. See, one of the reasons that we GLM doesn't sell like hey, we'll do your PPC for you, we'll build your website for you, we'll write your book for you, and we have vendor partners in that right. But we want to be your source, as best as we can be, of unbiased information. Again, we want to know when you reach out to us, where are you? What are you doing? What's the practice look like? Have you done this? Do you have newsletters? Do you have a responsive website that has follow-up sequences? Oh no, but I want to create. I want to go buy this thing that someone's offering. It's all about Facebook, okay, but you don't have this stuff over here, so we're going to pull you back into doing the fundamental stuff, all right.
Speaker 2:So ask yourself always before I go to buy this service or product what principle of marketing is this helping me achieve? Now let's get back to this for a moment. Right, what is the principle that governs your life? And here's one of mine. It's probably my number one. Again, this is over a door in our office. Make your passion and your work one and the same, and do it with people you like. Can't get much simpler than that. I really like the people that I work with. Things change, people grow. Sometimes they don't grow as fast as the rocket ship is growing and they leave. But pretty much all those things I showed you on the diagram are things that I'm passionate about, I like doing, and I've got a great bunch of people around me to do it with. And I've got a great bunch of people around me to do it with.
Speaker 2:So no matter again, no matter whether you're the owner or the person working for an owner, you should have some governing philosophy for your life. And you know, my honest and sincere message is I think the world is in a conspiracy to make you believe that this isn't possible, all right, that you shouldn't, that it is selfish to have a philosophy for your life, that it's not good enough for the rest of us and I say BS on that right. The leaders of the world and the leaders of the communities are you guys and you gals, and you're going to get better at it if you fundamentally know why you wake up in the morning, all right, if you fundamentally know why you get involved in the things that you get involved in that form. The spiderweb for your life and again, these three days sleep is for the weak. You got early morning, you got late night, you got breaks. I mean, give some thought to this, right? There's no, I joke with my team, but it's true. My decadent pleasure when I go away for conferences is I'm in bed at nine o'clock because I can't get to bed at nine o'clock too much at my house, because there's too much stuff going on. But have a philosophy. So here's I'll share it with you Mine. Just because they're mine doesn't mean they have to be yours. But I would really like to provoke you, on your playbook, on one of the pads, to start to think seriously what yours are if you don't have these. They've been really, really helpful to me. They've been really, really helpful to me.
Speaker 2:I have a one-way journey through this life on earth. I don't actually know what happens when I die. I have some ideas, right. You don't know for sure what happens when you die. We just know this is one way. I can't be 18. I try to be 18 a lot, right, running with 18-year-olds on a soccer field is trying to be 18, right, that's hard. But I have this one-way journey. You have a one-way journey.
Speaker 2:There's no reason to let anybody else, anybody else, decide what's right for your life. Yes, we have partnerships, we have marriages, we have long-term business relationships. That doesn't mean that you have to compromise and give away what's right for your life. That means you have to find ways to make your life and that other person's life or group. How can we develop win-win relationships that we all are ecstatic about? We talk about this a lot with my team, the Ben Glass Law team right, the 16 people I got running around. It's a really high value for us that they love coming to work at Ben Glass Law and that if there's any disruption, hesitation, question, fear about that, we can have an open and honest conversation to figure out what's going wrong, how we can try to fix it or how we can try to help you find that next place. That'll be great, great for you.
Speaker 1:So that's it for today's episode of the renegade lawyer podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on, subscribe, leave a review and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger. Want more tools, strategies and stories from the trenches? Visit greatlegalmarketingcom or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn. Keep building boldly. We'll see you next time.
