Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
Clearing Bottlenecks and Mastering Delegation | Notes from a Mastermind pt. 2
This episode addresses the critical issue of delegation for growth in legal practices, illuminating how lawyers can break free from being bottlenecks in their firms. Insightful strategies are provided for improving delegation, mindset shifts, and the importance of creating standard operating procedures.
• Exploring the hot seat sessions in the mastermind group
• Recognizing oneself as the bottleneck
• The importance of hiring seasoned professionals
• Mindset shift from doing to delegating
• Identifying signs of being the bottleneck
• Creating standard operating procedures
• Using video for effective training
• Communicating results and deadlines in delegation
• The freedom and growth that comes from effective delegation
Reach out to me either on LinkedIn or send me an email at brian at greatlegalmarketing.com. We have a handful of slots in both the Hero Mastermind Group and the Icon Mastermind Group.
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. 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.
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Hello, welcome in to another Friday solo episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design, build practices that they love showing up to on Monday and generally not grow into grouchy old, unhappy lawyers. Brian Glasser on a car crash practice in Northern Virginia, and I also help to run Great Legal Marketing, which is, we think, the number one coaching, consulting and mastermind program for owners of solo and small law firms. This episode is part of a series of episodes solo episodes that I'm putting out going over the topics and the trend lines that we discussed in the Hero Mastermind meetings in January, and so if you didn't listen to the last Friday's Solo episode, I'd go into a lot more detail about where this came from, but the short story is this we run a mastermind group for lawyers that are generally doing less than a million dollars in revenue and, as part of the experience, our members get what's called a hot seat. It's 30 or 45 minutes up in front of the group sharing a resource or something that's working well for you in your practice and then diving into the greatest opportunity or the biggest problem that you have in your practice. We have those sessions recorded and then we have AI summarize your session so that you don't have to take notes. You get the actionable takeaways, you get the resources that were shared by other people in the group and you can listen and fully take in and fully engage in the conversation without having to worry that if you don't write something down, you're going to miss it. And so this time what I did is I had our AI program take all of the hot seat summaries and summarize some themes for me so that I could share them with you on the podcast.
Speaker 1:And so this is episode two of this series. Last week's episode was on the power of niche branding. Again, if you missed that, go back, listen to it and do me a favor while I'm in the pitch of other episodes, hit the subscribe button, leave me a rating and review, share this episode with one person with whom you think it would help, and this episode in particular, share this with somebody on your team, because growing your law firm is a really hard thing to do if you don't have an entrepreneur in your organization who can help you do what we're going to talk about in today's episode, which is break free from bottlenecks and delegate for growth. And so what I see again and again as lawyers approach and then break this million-dollar mark, is that we have a hard time letting go of the vine and letting somebody else, entrusting somebody else, to do the work, whether it's like lawyers, we love dabbling in our websites, we love doing our own social media, we love intake and sales, we love actually operating in the law. Or maybe you don't love all those things, but you just don't trust anybody else on the team to do them. And then, when we do trust people to do them, we bury our heads in the sand, myself included, and six months later we look up. We go how come nobody's following the procedures? Because you didn't actually set any procedures. You just handed the project off and told somebody to do it, but you never set the parameters of how they should do it, or you didn't articulate the goals very well.
Speaker 1:Lawyers, I don't know. Maybe it just feels like we are particularly bad at this, but we are particularly bad at delegating for growth, and so the question is how can solo and small firm lawyers delegate more effectively in order to grow their practice? It starts with recognizing that you are the bottleneck. It starts with recognizing that you encourage yourself to be the bottleneck yourself to be the bottleneck. The only reason there's a line of people outside your door and everybody emails you asking what to do in a certain scenario is because you always respond to it, and so the first thing that we have to do when we want to scale our team and break free from bottlenecks is look in the mirror, and being the bottleneck has a significant cost. The longer that you do everything yourself, the longer it's going to take for everything to happen, and it may be the case that you do everything in your business better than everybody else in your business. It probably is not, but it may be and if that's the case, you need to hire some better people and you need to stop paying entry-level staff and expecting them to do mid-level, mid-career level work right. You will be far better off in your law firm if you stop hiring entry-level people and start paying a little bit more for somebody that's done it for a while maybe not in another law firm, because we don't want them to bring in other bad habits, but start bringing somebody who's marketed for a different kind of business. Bring in an office manager who's managed a different kind of business and who can get you out of? What kind of chairs should we order? Are these pens too expensive? How much should we be spending on pay-per-click ads? Or how often should we be posting on social media? These are not the kinds of decisions that a lawyer should be making.
Speaker 1:It's a great book. If you haven't read the book, buy back your time. Does the equation of what your effective hourly rate is? And then Dan Martell says anything that's less than 25% of your effective hourly rate that you can outsource. You should outsource because you will find other problems to solve. And the question that? I think it was Marcus Vaden, who's a lawyer in Arkansas. This is his first time in the room in this mastermind meeting in January. We're going around the room and he's hearing people. We delegate sales, we delegate intake, we delegate the marketing. He says what do y'all do? And the promise that we made to him is if you can elevate and delegate this stuff, you will find other problems to solve. You will find better and more expensive and more lucrative problems for yourself to solve.
Speaker 1:A couple of signs that come up in your law firm that you might be the bottleneck, because if you look around and you have all kinds of incomplete tasks, an overwhelming schedule and at the end of the day, you feel like you are spinning your wheels and not going anywhere because you're missing, actually the growth opportunities. And if you find yourself in that position, you have to begin shifting your mindset from I am the only one that can do this to who can I find that knows how to do this, and this is Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy's who, not how book. And I am still working on this mindset shift, so I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I have got all of this figured out. The problem with lawyers is that to get here, you have been such a high achiever. You did well in high school, you got into college. You did well in college, you got into law school. You did well in law school, you passed the bar right and we did all of this by figuring out how to solve problems.
Speaker 1:And so when a problem comes along, our brains tell us we are somebody who's really good at solving problems. We love doing research, so we dive into Google or we dive into YouTube. We go to Udemy and we take a course on how do I optimize my YouTube channel. But guess what? There's somebody out there who already knows how to optimize your YouTube channel who. You could probably pay $1,000 to optimize the YouTube channel and win back the 25 hours that you're going to spend trying to figure it out. And if you can figure out a way to make more than $40 an hour with those 25 hours, that $1,000 investment is ROI positive. It's an investment, not a cost, and so the more that you can think for every problem that comes through your law firm who can I find to solve this for me the quicker you will get out of being the bottleneck for all of the problems.
Speaker 1:There's an expression if you have a problem that money can solve, you do not have a problem. And with the example of the $1,000 YouTube optimizer out of the top of my head, I don't know what it caused to optimize your YouTube $1,000, that seems about right. But if I spend 25 hours trying to figure it out, I've lost a lot of money because my effective hourly rate when I'm working on cases or when I'm selling the firm to potential new clients so that somebody else can work on cases is way higher than $40. And I am losing probably $500 an hour by trying to figure out YouTube. Is it fun? Sure? Do you get that little dopamine hit, like when you make the changes and then the video does better. Of course, is it the best use of your time? The changes and then the video does better? Of course, is it the best use of your time? Not at all.
Speaker 1:And so the tactical thing to do here is to spend your time not trying to figure it out, but trying to figure out what result you actually want. And this is the key I have found to good delegation is what result do I want to achieve? What impact will that result have on my business? What impact will it have on my business if I don't achieve that result, in other words, if we stay where we are right now? What will the impact be? Okay, what am I willing to pay for somebody to figure out for me? And then can I pass that list, oh, and when do I want it figured out by? Okay, and then can I pass that list to my EA and have him go and find the person who can solve the problem within those parameters. That's a secret, right? I don't even have to go and find the person. I can find the person. Who finds the person. Dan Sullivan would call it finding the who. Who finds the who's and when you can figure that out and you can keep the cashflow machine running in your law firm, you're going to find that everything becomes just a little bit easier and your flywheel begins spinning just a little bit faster.
Speaker 1:Now, inside our law firm, there are a bunch of highly specialized things that we do in our cases. You do in your cases that you can't probably go and buy the framework for right. There are checklists, there are standard operating procedures, there are playbooks that you're running on your car crash cases, on your social security, disability cases, on your family law cases, whatever it is. There are things that you do that are the special sauce to how your firm runs, and lawyers are. We think very highly of ourselves in that we think that we always are the special operator, but the reality is your staff or an associate can do 85 or 95% of all the things that you could do, but they can't do it if they don't know how. And so if you can spend some time creating standard operating procedures or creating playbooks that you can hand off to somebody else to do all of those things, then amazing. But lawyers like I don't know about you. I hate sitting down and trying to craft the playbook.
Speaker 1:So here's how you do it. You just video record you doing the thing. You can get a Loom account it's relatively cheap, it may even be free to a certain number of videos, certain number of hours and just screen record you doing the thing. And while you are doing the thing, you have a microphone set up and you just narrate. Here's what I've done, here's why I'm doing it. Here's what I've done. Here's why I'm doing it. Then we could pass that off to somebody else to create the framework and create the standard operating procedure, the protocol, whatever you want to call it for how we do sending out of discovery requests, how we do getting clients to help us answer discovery requests right. And then all of a sudden, you don't have to be the one who's operating in that space anymore.
Speaker 1:And the best time to build your playbook was three years ago. The next best time to start building your playbook is tomorrow, because if you shoot one of these videos and it sucks, you just hit the delete button. Nobody has to know, and you could try it again the next day. And so many people get wrapped around the axle of trying to create the perfect training video when in reality, if you just filmed yourself doing it three times. You'd probably have it down and then you can narrate through and people can watch it on one and a half speed or two X speed and they can pause it. When they don't understand, they can go back. It's an amazing way to train people through Loom. And then there's other video, there's other software Trainual or Sweet Process that you can upload these things into Whatever seems most intuitive to you and to your team. That's the one you should use, and you can do this for every part of your business, from intake to sales, to case management, to case closure, to marketing. I find that teaching how I think about marketing to somebody else actually helps me think more structurally about marketing, and so it's a flywheel that helps you do the thing better yourself. All right, and so once you've created all these processes, you can load them into a train you all or into a notion page and just help build and build and build.
Speaker 1:This is one of the things that we're doing in greatly marketing right right now. This is meta. What are all the things that happen from the time that somebody gives us their email address to the time that they sign up as a client, join a mastermind group or tell us to go away and die. There are things like somebody ought to be manually looking into this person and trying to figure out are they somebody that we want to serve or not? Are they a government employee? That person's not our avatar client. Are they a lawyer running a practice that has three other lawyers, a crappy website and no social media presence? That person we can help and so, if they're that kind of person, you go down this decision tree of here's, the outreach to them, both electronically and manually, and maybe on the phone, and maybe we invite them to an event or maybe we give them a discount on a ticket.
Speaker 1:Somewhere like all of these things that are in in the operator's head, in the good salesperson's head, in your office, can be put down on paper and then you hand that to somebody who doesn't operate in that space and you go. This is the the process. I want you to walk through it and tell me what you don't understand. That'll show you where the gaps are. You can begin to fill in those gaps and then, all of a sudden, you've got a practice that it can't operate without you and none of the anybody actually wants a practice that operates without them as much as lawyers say that and as much as we buy packages. It'll teach us how to do it, but it frees you up to do the things in your business that you actually enjoy doing and that are your highest value time and effort activities. And if you had a practice like that, you would love showing up to it on Monday. All right, I hope this episode on breaking free of bottlenecks and delegating for growth has been helpful to you.
Speaker 1:If you dig this, if you're wondering how to make it work in your practice, I want to invite you to apply for one of our mastermind groups.
Speaker 1:Reach out to me either on LinkedIn or send me an email at brian at greatlegalmarketingcom. We have a handful of slots in both the Hero Mastermind Group and the Icon Mastermind Group. Hero generally is less than a million dollars in revenue. Generally we're trying to solve marketing and sales and growth problems and then, once you've solved those and you're over a million dollars in revenue, you're more appropriate probably for the Icon Group, where we talk a lot more about management people and getting to the next level of your business. So we have a space for you, no matter the size of the firm that you're running, if you want to hang out and pay. I call it paying for speed. You could figure out all these things on your own, probably, but by investing in your future and by getting around law firms that are trying to figure this out at the same time as you, I promise you you will run faster. And so that's it for this week's episode. I hope everybody has a great weekend and I will talk to you guys later.
