The Unsung Hero: Mastering the Integrator Role for Law Firm Success

Ever wonder what makes the cogs in a law firm turn smoothly? Grab your earbuds and prepare to discover the powerhouse behind the scenes – the second-in-command. I'm thrilled to share the wisdom I gleaned from speaking at the Great Legal Marketing Summit, where I dissected the importance of the often-overlooked integrator role. These are the folks who ensure your firm doesn't skip a beat, from streamlining operations to nurturing growth. For the visionary firm owners out there, I've got a treasure trove of strategies to attract and retain the kind of talent that will complement your leadership and drive your practice forward.

Peek behind the curtain to see how a successful number two operates within a law firm's ecosystem. My own path post-law school was a revelation: managing people wasn't my strong suit, and realizing this led me to embrace the integrator role within my firm. For those wondering how to spot and support a stellar second-in-command, you're in the right place. We discuss the peaks and valleys of being the number two – from the occasional lack of recognition to being perceived as the "bearer of bad news" – and how to navigate them. Plus, I'll share some unconventional recruitment hacks that go beyond the usual headhunters and job boards, offering a fresh angle on finding your firm's perfect match.

Finally, we delve into what really keeps a law firm's team motivated and engaged. Is it the paycheck, the office perks, or something more? Here, I unpack the intricacies of incentive programs like profit-sharing, and the double-edged sword that is bonus structures. We talk candidly about why talented individuals might leave a firm and how to curb the turnover tide. For those looking to leave a lasting impact on their firm, this episode is packed with insights and anecdotes you won't want to miss. Consider this your blueprint for fostering a leadership duo that not only resonates with your core values but also multiplies the talents of your entire team.

____________________________________
Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.

Want to connect with Brian?

Follow Brian on Instagram: @thebrianglass
Connect on LinkedIn

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome back in to Life Beyond the Briefs. Today's episode is a recording of a talk that I gave at the Great Legal Marketing Summit in October of 2023. It's the first half of that talk. There's a Q&A from that talk that I'll put out probably in a couple of weeks here, but it's about how to find and train or how to find and be a great number two in a law firm so many young lawyers are talking about. The path to happiness is to leave the firm where you are and go and start your own law firm, and for many people that is the path to happiness, but not for everybody, and so this talk is. It's in part, how to be a good entrepreneur at a law firm where you want to be and you want to stay. That's good for you and good for your family and doesn't involve the risk of going and starting your own firm. Nothing wrong with either option. But there are plenty of people out there for whom there's no advice on how do I go and be a great number two somewhere. The flip side of that there are many, many law firm owners who don't have a great number two, who don't have the Pancho Via to your Sancho, to Don Quixote or whatever that analogy is that I just butchered, and so it's about how to find and attract somebody who doesn't want to be the rock star, somebody who doesn't want to be the face of the business. If you are the face of the business, who can bring all of your ideas to light. If you're a visionary, this is an integrator. If you're a CEO, this is a COO, that kind of thing. This is somebody who helps you shine and is happy, typically in a role where they're helping you shine. So if you find yourself on either side of that equation, or looking for the other side of that equation, this is the episode for you. By the way, there's still no inter music to this show and so on with the show. Give me a sense of who's in the room. So I've got a couple of different talks that we can give and I'd love to make this as interactive as we can. So, if you are, the way that I think about this is this Most law firm owners in the early growth stages are the number one in the firm.

Speaker 1: 2:08

You're a visionary and you're a true solo, or you're a supported solo, and then you get to a point where you're either, you know, hiring key staff. Maybe it's a marketing director, maybe it's an associate, maybe it's an office manager, and so if you're in that stage and you do not have somebody who's like your good second in command, can you raise your hand? All right, handful of those? How many people have a second in command and want to have a better relationship? Okay, and how many people are a second in command? Okay, a couple of those, anybody, an aspiring second in command? And so when I say that, I mean like, is that Michelle? Okay, yeah, okay, good, got it, okay, cool, cool.

Speaker 1: 2:50

So here's what I want to do. I've got slides. Obviously I'm gonna walk you through a framework, and then we've got these catch-box mics that we'll toss around if people have questions, and I would love to do is figure out what problems you have so that we can specifically address that, either for me or from somebody else who's in the room who can help you. My opening promise is people get fired after this talk, right, and that just happens, so I'm not sorry about that. So what I want you to think about, if you have a number two or if you are a number two, is what the relationship between the one and the two is right now on a scale of one to ten and you can't use the number seven. So for me, seven is like the safe space when people go, where they really mean six, and so at an eight, you're pretty happy with the relationship. It could use a little bit of tweaking. At a six it's failing, and at seven you say that because you don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. How many people are eight or above in that relationship? Cool, cool. How many people? I won't do that, because maybe your number two is sitting here. Here's the roadmap that I want to walk through today is how do I find the number two? Or, if I'm the number two, how do I find the number one? What do I do now that I have them? How do I keep them here and what do I do if they leave? Would it be okay with you guys if I kind of went over my backstory first? Alright, cool, because what I realized is I took over the hero accelerated group and I was starting to run those meetings is that people didn't really identify with me because they're like your Ben's son and you have it easy. So I want to kind of tell you where I came from and see if this resonates with you at all.

Speaker 1: 4:19

I graduated law school in 2008, and if anybody else graduated in that era, our understanding and the promise that was made to us when we went to law schools we were gonna make $160,000 a year when we got out of school right, but then the economy tanked. I got 157 rejection letters. I got one actual job offer, and that job offer was missing the one from the starting salary. That job offer didn't include any PTO for the first six months, right, and so when I came to my boss and I said, like on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I'd like to have a couple hours to drive up to my wife's family in Pennsylvania, he said that's great. What you need to do, though, is shift your hours and come in at six in the morning and start working. Like dude, it's Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Nothing happens in law firms on that, and so that was when I decided I need to move on. The other thing that helped me decided I need to move on was this was the marketing strategy. We had to hire a consultant to come in, and this is the idea that he came up with. We plan to win. Because we plan to win, like Last piece on my first firm is, I had no oversight whatsoever.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I got sworn to the bar on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday I was sent to court by myself for a traffic defense case, with no instruction on what the hell do I do when I get there. So I quit after six months and I moved on to personal injury law, which is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. I have always hated jobs where I make the same amount of money as somebody else, because I think I work harder than 95% of the people that I work with. So I love jobs where I was waiting tables because I could turn them faster, I could sell more stuff and I can get better tips. I hated jobs where I was scrubbing dishes. I worked in a bagel bakery for about four weeks scrubbing dishes and their whole thing was we pay everybody a quarter over the minimum wage because we think it's insulting to pay the minimum wage and I'm going. It's like ten more dollars a week.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And so the firm that I landed at through a connection with my dad I think he's in the back it was an interesting firm. My boss was half Korean and looked Korean enough that that was our market, that was our niche. So all of our staff spoke Korean. 75% of our client base when I got there was Korean and it was awesome because I didn't have to talk to anybody. I looked at medical records, I wrote demand packages, offers came in. I told the staff what the case was worth. They worked with the clients to get to a number and we settled cases. It was great. And then I got my first origination credit.

Speaker 1: 6:43

All of a sudden one day I looked down on my paycheck and it was twice as much money as I thought it was. It should have been. And I said, dave, is there a mistake here? He's like no, you brought in a case. So I gave you a portion of money and I unlocked. I was like, okay, that's that thing where I can now go and make more money and make as much money as I want to by connecting to my own referral sources. And so what I started to do was, every time, a fee check. Every time a check came in for a client and we didn't know the doctor, I just hand delivered the check to the doctor. Right, doctors hate lawyers for the most part, because what are we doing at the end of all injury cases? We're calling. We're saying you need to cut your fee. It's taken 18 months to get them their payment. But I was putting a face, with a name and I generated my own referrals.

Speaker 1: 7:32

My greatest hits came from somebody else. I talked about my first million dollar settlement yesterday. I had a $3.4 million verdict ina medical mile practice case that we I don't know. That verdict came in like on a Thursday and I started it BGL on the next Monday and in my last two years there I generated originated $750,000 and $800,000 a fees. How many people want an associate that does that for them? Yeah, all right, why did I left?

Speaker 1: 7:59

Three things happened. Dave and I decided not to expand over into additional space in our office. We had a key employee leave and my third child was born and my wife ended up in the hospital in the ICU for a couple of days and he was in the NICU for 10 days. And I looked around and I said, well, shit, if I don't go now, if I don't take this opportunity to go and work with my dad now, it's never going to happen. And so that's why we moved over in 2019.

Speaker 1: 8:26

And here's what the personal injury section has done since 2019. So, 2018, we did $500,000 in revenue. 2019, 1.2,. 2020, 2 million. 2021, screwed up because of COVID. 2022, 2 million right, and this year we'll do a little over 2 million. So 4x increase in revenue to the PI section. And what this chart doesn't show is that these two years, 75% of that money came from one case. 80% of the money came from no. 80% of the money came from one case. 75 came from one case here and it was a medical malpractice case with a $600,000 fee, right and Virginia. Those are a coin flip, so that goes the other way, where $600,000 was in the hole for the year.

Speaker 1: 9:15

So what we did is we started looking at the portfolio, and Ben will be the first to tell you his gift is not numbers, right. His gift is encouraging people to make decisions and moving the ball forward, but it's not looking at what do we actually have in the portfolio? That's my gift, and so, as we get into this talk of what are you looking for as a number one, you want somebody who complements your gifts and plugs your holes. So I looked at this and I said we are making way too much of our money in one centralized place and we need to broaden the base. So that's exactly what we did. We started taking on the soft tissue cases that this firm wasn't able to efficiently run at the time, and I brought over my not exactly a volume practice but a larger practice manager to come run the cases and we installed a new system here and forex the revenue.

Speaker 1: 10:08

The thing that changed is that BGL at the time had a visionary but not a good integrator, really had a visionary and another visionary right, but nobody who was good at the details. And so the question is which are you? As you're looking at and Randy will tell me, randy's in the back, he's our EOS implementer and he will tell me everything that I get wrong here, because Randy is a stickler for EOS. Visionary, loves solving big, complex problems, has 20 new ideas a day, usually before nine o'clock. They're great leaders and they're optimists if that sounds like Ben spent a lot of time outside the firm and they create the vision. The integrator, on the other hand, is going to identify and articulating what the actual problem is. Okay, one of the things that we do in our weekly meetings is we go through ideas right, identify the problem with particularity right, discuss the problem and then solve it. Integrators are really good at asking the three questions. They get to. What is the thing that we're actually trying to solve for here? Taking the best of those 20 ideas and making them a reality.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Being great managers of people and I'll tell you, I'm not a great manager of people, and so that's a hole that I've plugged by having Lisa come on, who is a much better manager of people than I am. Being realists I am definitely a realist, spending lots of time inside the firm and executing on what the vision is. So if you're in this room and you don't have a number two, this is kind of when I think you need them. When you start seeing people issues all over your firm where you have the wrong people in the wrong seats, you have the wrong people at your firm. When you are hitting the ceiling if you've been at one million or 1.5 million for the last three years and you can't get past that when it just feels like nothing works and you have a lack of control and you're not growing here's what integrators help with. Number two is help with. They run the day to day of your business and they remove roadblocks for your employees.

Speaker 1: 12:00

In an ideal firm, neither the visionary nor the integrator are actually working in the operations of your business. The job of the integrators, really the job of the COO, to find the problems and to solve them for the people or help the people solve them. They have a healthy obsession with organizational clarity. This is not my strong suit. My wife helps me with this one. They provide a filter for your ideas Manny's sitting here and he knows Manny is Adam Rawson's number two and knows exactly what I'm talking about where you get 20 ideas before nine in the morning through three different channels. Right, I get it by email, I get it sometimes by phone call, I get it by text Ben won't use Slack, but taking those ideas and saying, okay, of these 20 things, which one will actually get us closer to the goals that we say that we have? And now what's the plan to move forward on it? And convincing the skill it really is, convincing the visionary to forget about the other 19.

Speaker 1: 12:59

And developing KPIs to take the numbers out of your visionary's hand so that he doesn't have to worry about where's the next dollar coming from, because you've figured out what the numbers are in the early part of the cycle that will feed the revenue and the profit towards the end. Here's the problems that you face when you're a number two in an organization. You are not the face of the franchise and there's not a lot of glory right. You can be seen as the pessimist and the office bad guy because you're the one enforcing the rules, you're the one asking people to hold themselves accountable to KPIs, and you can get overwhelmed. It can feel like you are making everybody else's job easier and your job harder, and that's a growth stage that we refer to as being in the suck, because, I said, in an ideal firm, the integrator is not working in the business as much, he's working on the business. But as you're in between this like one and $5 million mark, you just don't have the additional revenue to hire all of the people to also do the work, and so you end up doing the integrating and running the business and also doing your own work for a period of time. So that gets overwhelming. All right.

Speaker 1: 14:11

So how do you find them if they're not a blood relative of yours? I made these. Do you guys like these slides? I made them in beautifulai, which is awesome. The thing is it doesn't always translate into PowerPoint, and so there should be a check mark by you must clearly define what you need and X's by recruiters, and indeed. So the very first thing that you should do is go through what your actual needs are and I'll come back to this in a second, and this fonts didn't translate either Defining your need. So this is a EOS tool called delegate and elevate, and if you could picture this like a grid, you wanna take all the things that you love and you're great at and put them up here, and you do this over the course of like two weeks.

Speaker 1: 14:57

Every task that you do in your law firm, just write it down, put it into one of these boxes. I love it and I'm great at it. I love doing it, but I'm not that good at it. I'm great at it, but I hate doing it, and I hate doing it and I'm not good at it. Who's got tasks like that? Bookkeeping right? And this is the hole that we wanna plug first. So when we're crafting our job description and crafting the set of things that we want our integrator to do, we're starting here, then we're moving over to here and then we're coming up here. You wanna keep all this stuff right. All right, how do I go back? Go back, go back. There we go.

Speaker 1: 15:45

I don't like recruiters, because the problem with a recruiter is how does a recruiter keep making money? They move somebody in your firm for two years and then they move them on to another firm for two years, right, so, using recruiters, you wanna end up with good long-term talent, and it takes probably a year before your integrator is fully set and ready to operate in your firm. And I don't love Indeed, because who's looking on Indeed people without jobs? So I think you probably know your next number two. My suggestion to you is that it's probably a lawyer who's in your market somewhere. For me it was a defense lawyer, and it's probably somebody who is good at the things that you are good at doing, and I think I have a slide later here on how do we go about attracting that person to our firm.

Speaker 1: 16:30

The other variation of this that I like is this one. You're probably not gonna be able to read my handwriting, but after I'd done Delegate and Elevate, I stumbled on this one called Light, medium and Heavy, and I just started, over a course of about two weeks, populating my whiteboard with things that I like doing, that are light to me, things that I have serious resistance to doing, and then stuff that comes in the middle and then, as we hire, our most recent associate, making sure that all of this stuff goes away from me. So anything in general district court, any small claims in Virginia, prepping clients for depositions, managing C-plus employees I'm okay with drafting discovery and getting ready for trial. Actually, this one is now heavy for me, like talking to clients in the middle of treatment when I don't have direction for them is heavy, but I like all this stuff so I don't wanna take this off my plate. Talking to new clients, drafting demands, negotiating settlement, helping people who want help which is kind of a narrow area of people and then projecting fees and budgeting I'm good at that, so I wanna keep it.

Speaker 1: 17:35

So number two is here's where you ought to be looking at Is the person and this is something that'll change your life. If you're a number two and you're trying to figure out what do I do for the rest of my career, is the person who I'm working for living a life that I want to live? If you look up the ladder at your job and you don't like what you see above, you get on a different ladder. Okay, who in my area has a good business but is too old to figure out technology, like if you're a young lawyer and you know somebody who would have been completely and totally overwhelmed by everything Andy said this morning, that's blue ocean for you. And I have a letter that we're sending out to older lawyers in our area saying chatGPT's coming, ai is coming.

Speaker 1: 18:22

Google ads are really hard to figure out. Rather than you try to figure that out, could I just like acquire your practice? That'll be going out in January and I'm happy to share that with anybody that wants it. Who doesn't like doing the thing that you do like doing, so creating that same box for you and then going out and saying here's the things that I like doing. Who wants help?

Speaker 1: 18:43

And then ask around. This is how we got Lauren to be our marketing director. Lauren was running Google ads for us and we said do you know anybody who would be interested in being a marketing director? And here's a job description. And she said I would be interested in being the marketing director. And so the tip on that is as you're asking around, you're not asking for a job, right? You're asking do you know anybody that fits this criteria? So the letter that we're sending out really isn't are you afraid of all this stuff? It's hey, do you know anybody that's tired of sitting in depositions? Do you know anybody that doesn't want to try cases anymore? Right, and I'll pay you a referral for you if you can hook me up with somebody who's practice I can acquire, all right. So I'm gonna get into the meat of how do we work with our number two.

Speaker 1: 19:24

So five rules that have really served me and Ben in our relationship of this great how to have a great relationship. Number one is having regular same page meetings. I'll go back sorry, I got a slide on each of these. So, regular same page meetings. What does that mean? It's important that the visionary and the integrator be on the same page and be trying to achieve the same thing. You ever worked with somebody where you're trying to do something over here and they're trying to do something over here. Right, it's very hard. And what happens is, if you're not having regular meetings and talking about the goals and asking like are you still happy here? Is this working out well for you? Then we end up in these relationships where we'd score it out of seven and we're just grading on each other over and over and over, and it doesn't get any better. So our rhythm is about every two weeks we go out to lunch, go through how's everything at work, how's everything at home? How are we tracking on our quarterly and our annual goals? Oh good, he's here.

Speaker 1: 20:24

The integrator needs to hear the idea first. I asked, randy, why were you chosen to be first? I was like I'm serious, I don't say you want to shoot a video, because it's not like you should be doing it without that. So this is the rule. I forget if I heard this from you. Actually, maddie, I've got to hear the idea first. It's not fair to bring the idea to the rest of the leadership team and get everybody else amped up about it if it's not something that I think is going to move us forward. I might disagree, right, and if I disagree, you can bring it to everybody else, but don't bring it to them first. Give me some time to think about it.

Speaker 1: 21:29

Integrator gets to break the tie and your leadership team if we're voting on what we're doing next. The integrator is somebody who you've delegated the authority to make the decisions about the day to day running of the law firm, and so if there's a disagreement about what's the best strategy, what's the best use of our next dollar or our next hour, the integrator gets to break the tie Inside the business. When you're in that area, where you're both still working roles in the business, you're equals. Think about the organizational chart visionaries, up top, integrator and then there's operations boxes. Here, to the extent that we're working in the operations box and you heard Adam talking yesterday about he's still in six boxes or he was in six boxes you are co-equals in that space. There is no boss number two relationship and, lastly, maintain mutual respect. So that's pretty easy. The thing that I would recommend that you do if you're looking for your number two, if you haven't done any of this process yet, is this your own personal people analyzer. So I showed you this yesterday with our core values. But I think it's really important that you figure out what your personal core values are, even outside of your firm, because it won't always track and I didn't grade anybody on this one, but I'll just run through a minor.

Speaker 1: 22:48

So I like being around people that shut up and do the work. I like being around people that can tolerate change. I like being around people that don't complain when things get hard. I like working with people that'll try new things new food, new exercise, go travel, whatever. I like people that give a shit. I don't care what you give a shit about, but it's got to be something. I like people that are hungry and you can't teach hungry.

Speaker 1: 23:14

And if you're running a law firm and you've ever had an associate who is not, you know that I like people that view the world as wide and opportunistic. So in many rooms you'd think somebody like Andy Stickel, who's at SMB team, is a competitor to ours, but he's doing something different. He's a great educator, so we let him on our stages and Ben's going to be on his stage in December. The world is wide. And then I added this one lately about would I like this person to be around my kids? Because I was hanging out with a couple of friends who I, my wife. We had this conversation when I, like I wouldn't want my kids to be like them, so I added that recently. So I run everybody who's coming into my life through this filter. If I spend more than a couple of days with you and I figure out, do I want to continue investing my time in spending a couple of days with you? So if you're looking for somebody, if you're still on that stage, do this and run the people who you're interviewing through that filter.

Speaker 1: 24:18

All right, the guide to the great first 90 days. Don't do anything for a while. You're just watching. If you're new at a firm, you are just watching. You were there to learn. You're not making any suggestions, you're not answering any questions. You are learning what everybody in the firm does and how they work together. At the end of that first 90 days, you're going to pick one project to work on. We're going to fix one thing at a time. If we try to fix everything, we're going to fix nothing. Pick one thing, get it to eight or better and move on to the next one. Find your voice. You've got to be able to speak up when you have a disagreement with the visionary. That's what you're there for. Remember why you were hired? Kind of the same thing. Hey, you brought me in because you had this problem. It's OK to remind them of that every once in a while and then expect it to take a good part of a year before the relationship fully works out.

Speaker 1: 25:10

Bill, it was a bill that recommended this book yesterday. I promise this was already in my slides. This is a fantastic book. How many people have not read this book? Oh, get the audible for the plane ride home. This book is incredible and it tells you everything that can go wrong in your organization and how to spot it before it goes too bad. So here's what you watch out for in your number two, let me back up.

Speaker 1: 25:36

This book contrasts multipliers versus diminishers. The idea is that in an organization there are two types of leaders. There are multipliers, who take people who are smart and talented and multiply their intelligence and their talents, and there are people who are diminishers, who take people who are smart and intelligent and diminish that intelligence. And so Liz Wiseman breaks down and contrasts five kinds of employees that we find in leadership roles in businesses. So number one is the talent magnet versus the empire builder. How many people have had a person comes in, hires talented people and underutilizes them, stunts the people under them and hordes resources for their own gain. Every time somebody leaves, you go. Well, that person was being paid 40,000, I'm now doing their job. Give me half. What you want is people that hire talented people, use them and develop them fully and get out of the way. We help people thrive that way Know-it-alls versus challengers.

Speaker 1: 26:47

So in a meeting, does the person use questions as a way to motivate other people and help them grow, or do they use questions as a way to show off everything that they know about the topic? Liberators and tyrants this one doesn't really resonate in my size of a law firm, but I can see at a larger firm how you would have this problem where we create a tense environment and, in fact, probably this is more likely to come from a visionary than from an integrator, because visionaries don't understand that the numbers are what actually move us forward. But creating a tense environment by yelling at everybody and telling them they need to do more stuff. Debate makers and decision makers this is almost the same thing as the way that you use questions. Debate makers engage people in rigorous debate because we want to know more. Right, tell me why. Right. Don't tell me why you think that, but tell me more about what that decision will get us closer to or further away from. Decision makers, on the other hand, stake out their ground and then make other people tell them why they're wrong.

Speaker 1: 28:01

This is another thing to watch out for in yourself. If you are an integrator, a visionary, are you an investor or are you a micromanager? So diminishing micromanagers, try to do everything else, everything personally. This is the. It will take me one minute to do it, so I'll just do it rather than teach somebody else to do it. They jump in and out of projects and we don't finish them. Oh, I'll do that. Right, I'll write this. This is the thing with Hona. I'll write the scripts for Hona and then I don't do it and they create confusion and over dependence on them. All those things are toxic to your organization.

Speaker 1: 28:39

Let's see the question. Question for you to figure out, kind of where you lie on there is when you're in a meeting, what's your talk to listen ratio? How often are you asking questions and shutting up Good deposition technique also. And how often are you talking? The more talking you do, the more likely you're diminishing everybody else's ideas. All right, once we've got them, how do we align payment, pay to make them stay right?

Speaker 1: 29:09

So there's a couple of schools of thought here. I've heard lawyers say this I pay a good salary, it's fun to work for me. Why isn't that enough? I think there are roles for which that's fine, but if this is your opinion, then you can't ask people to go out and generate business for you because they're not incentivized to do it. And so one of the firms that I worked with at it got a percentage of case origination.

Speaker 1: 29:36

If you have somebody who's not out there originating cases and you don't want them to be out there originating cases, you'd rather them be in the firm operating in the cases, you probably either get a percentage of the revenue or the section profit under the many firms that operate in pods. Mike Morris's firm up in Michigan, for instance, gives authority to each of his lawyers who are leading pods to say here's your budget for the year and your bonus on profit of your pod. Right, if you want to work less and your team wants to work less, you can hire more people and spend more money within your prod. You're gonna make less money. If you guys want to grind for the next 18 months, 24 months, we can spend less money on people. You'll have a higher profit but you'll be working harder. But just beware the secondary incentives that your bonus structures create. So one of the things that we've done in the past as we get into the end of the year is we create these bonus structures around getting demand packages out right, because we don't get them out by the middle of October, we don't get offers by the middle of November and we can't have money in the bank before the end of December, and in past years, we've bonus around numbers of demands out in time periods. Problem with that is, when the team recognizes they're not gonna hit that number, they sandbag until the next time period, right? So what you'll see is a whole bunch of demands go out of first in the next quarter.

Speaker 1: 31:00

The other thing to remember, though, is that not everybody leaves because of money. You probably can't read this. Number one people leave jobs, toxic work culture. Number two low salary, but closely close behind low salaries, poor management, lack of healthy work-life balance and inability to work from home. All right, what do you do if they leave? People leave, and so the way to prevent against damage to your organization by people leaving is having actual written protocols. Right, have your number two go through and write down everything that they're doing. I saw I think I saw a TikTok about, like the way that you know you're about to be fired. As HR comes to you and asks you you know, like, for the next week, could you just write down on a hour to hour basis like how are you doing your job? Start that before it's a problem. Right, have actual written protocols.

Speaker 1: 31:56

There's all kinds of tools out there to do this. You can use TrainUl, you can use Loom. Loom is a huge one that we're using now. We'll record your screen. You can, and it'll record a video of you where you can explain to somebody else here's what I'm doing, here's why I'm doing it and then that thing lives in your training system forever. When you decide that it should be over, make it quick. Long exits are not good for anybody and then accept that it's for the best. We've never had somebody leave, voluntarily or otherwise, where we didn't get better afterwards, so somebody's gonna leave. That creates opportunity for you to go and find somebody better who's gonna better fit that role.