Tom’s Trek: How a Law Firm Owner Operator Hit $200K in Year 1 - #232

Becoming a law firm owner operator is the hardest shift you'll make—and Tom pulled it off in year one. 

Tom learned the hard truth: an owner-dependent business can't scale. We dig into the systems—billing software, time tracking, e-signature retainer automation—that make the firm run without you. 

Here’s how a first associate hire and real systems let him stop doing every case and start scaling—$200K top line, $123K profit. 

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📄 CHAPTERS

0:00 - Law Firm Owner Operator Mindset: Facing Fear and Thinking Big Picture 

1:09 - November and December Numbers: Revenue, Client Intake, and Hires 

2:44 - How He Hit $200K Top Line in Year One as a Side Hustle 

8:09 - Phone Consults and E-Signature Retainer Automation 

13:25 - Three Lessons: Ambiguity, Scaling Vision, and Measuring Core Numbers 

22:18 - Systematizing a Law Practice So the Firm Runs Without You 

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Transcript

0:00

I wouldn't go as far to say fearless. there's always fear, there's always some sleepless But, you know, try to focus on big picture and where you want to go. Hello and welcome to the Sterling family Law Show. I'm Jeff Hughes, I'm your co-host, along with Tyler Dolph, also a co-host. And we have we're back here with Tom Hartin again. Tom, it is January, late January. We haven't met in two months, so we've got two months of of results to cover. So take us away. What's happened in your practice over the last two months? That's right. Thanks. Thanks for having me back. The. Yeah, it's. I apologize if it's going to be hard. Hard for me to recall some of the details going back to. I don't know about you guys, but November feels like a year ago to me. So, yeah, we're sitting here January 30th talking about November and December. January has been a very I know we're not here to talk about January, but been a very awesome month. New associate joined call volumes been been up significantly. Cases signed has been up. So you know we'll talk about talk about that more on the next podcast. But just setting the stage there since I might not have too much to say about November and December. November. November was, you know, average standard month. I'd say looking back in my previous months, pretty, pretty par for the course. December was December was slow, but not terribly. Actually. When I did the numbers, I was surprised. I was actually surprised it was that high because in December we took a notification. It took took, you know, a five day, you know, including weekends. So it took three days off. I had the flu and we had Christmas and New Year's. Right. So I was not I was actually expecting them to turn out a lot worse. So yeah, just running through the numbers. November top line revenue 21,409 leads, seven consults for them, turned into hires. And then for December, a little over 17,011 leads, eight of those turned into consults, and only two of those turned into hires. And as I you know, we were talking before the podcast, a lot of the reason that was my worst month, by far, from consults to hires and the reason for that not well, not entirely, but largely, is that I met with a lot of people in December that wanted to file for divorce, but wanted to wait until January, which I'm sure a lot of firms experience that very normal and right. Well, doing 17 grand in revenue in December, the lowest month of the year historically for family law is really strong. Yeah, especially given the flu and the holiday. I was I was I remember when I started with my numbers, I was like, I hope I break 10-K this month and I was like 17. That actually wasn't that bad. Yeah. Well, I'm looking at your entire year results. You did just shy of 200 grand last year in your first full year. That's like awesome, Tom. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And it's a side hustle. Full time job still as an IP. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah it is. Thank you. It's. Yeah. It's got gratified. So congratulations. Little celebration. Maybe in the heart and home. Yeah. And I will say those months looking back were very, very stressful. It was just I don't know, I guess between the holidays, between that flu, I don't, you know, seems again seems far away at that point. But that flu that was circulating in December feel like everyone I spoke to had it. And it was just that thing, not between the time I first kid got it to the second kid to my wife. To me, it was like two weeks in the house where we were just out. Wow. But where was I going with that? Yeah, just it was just really. And my patent work was really busy at that point. So it was those were that was some of the the most I've ever worked. Like it felt like I was working nonstop, like a lot of weekends and a lot of nights and weekends and everything like that. Yeah. And I just couldn't just kept telling myself, I can't wait till my associate starts. And now here we are. And it's only been four days, but I already feel a weight coming off my shoulder. Yeah. Big. Yeah. You did. Just shy of 200 top line last year. I just looked at your results and bottom line you did about 123,000. Bottom line last year, which is great I'd like to kind of peel back the onion a little bit and talk to you about what what's happened at home over the year because your wife, you have two little young kids, she sees you kind of stepping out of this very secure job, taking a risk like what's been going on there because we all have those relationships, right? That for entrepreneurs that we support. So how has that been? I probably don't say this enough. My wife's amazing. She's she's very supportive. You know, she was worried I think at first more more when I first started like going, you know, going back a year. Yeah. She, she was concerned because like I said, I had a job in the patent field. It's very, very secure and, you know paid well. And I worked worked largely from home. And you know, it wasn't a it wasn't really a night and weekend job, you know, occasionally. But for the most part it wasn't. And now all of a sudden, it felt like I was working 50% more and my income hadn't really changed all that much. So, you know, she she understands that it's a, you know, it's a longer term play. I like to say, you know, it's like a I come from the, you know, technology world where, you know, in the startup world where you start a company, you know, you don't expect to be super profitable in the first year. And I think giving said that, you know, I did okay. You know, that was a lot of a lot of work went into earning that 20,000. But you know, that's that's year one right now I have an associate who she can do work at twice, twice as fast as I can. And you know, I think that will that will allow me to increase my billing rates. She she's been here for days. She's brought in for referrals. Wow, wow, wow. She's already paid for herself in her first. And well, she brought in three. We have another concept Monday. So yeah, she's like, slow down. Yeah. She's she's been great. But yeah, my back to my wife just been. Yeah. She's really understanding. She's hands off. You know, she, she likes, she's, you know, stay at home with the kids. She's a great mom. And, you know, I guess as long as as long as our mortgage is being paid and car payments are being hit and the lights haven't been shut off, you know, she's she's okay with it. I think she knows she was she was with me. You know, we've been together a long time. She was with me when? Before I started law school. So she saw me leave. You saw me leave engineering to go to law school. She saw me leave New York City to go to Philly, and she moved with me. And then she saw me jump from patent prosecution to litigation and then back. And so she seen me make a few career transition at this point. And she's always she's always been with me. So this was definitely the biggest transition so far. But have you shared these numbers with her to give her a sense for a little bit? I don't think she's not interested to be perfect for like my wife. Yeah. Our bills getting paid. Okay. Cool. Yeah, yeah. She's got enough on her. Played for sure. She definitely does. Little kids around. That's that's a lot of work. Yeah. All right. So now we're in January. You're just started. Anything else that's happened that is worthy when. Hold it over to the next. Yeah. Baker office is open. That one. Yeah. That was just in classic Tom heart and fashion open. That was had the least start in on December 1st. I just put our desk together on Saturday. We had the office for about a month and a half. But you know, it's fine. I want I knew that was going to happen to an extent. You know, I wanted the office to be open for, you know, for a month. Let us get some get some reviews, get some credibility with Google and everything like that. I think we've had we've had a, a console out of that office already, which is, which is good. You know, especially it's only been it's been a few weeks really. Yeah. And she you know, one thing that I was never able to do well was phone consults. I always I did in person, which I still think in person. And I think we've talked about this, you know, there's an advantage to in-person consults over phone consults. But I'm in a you know, I'm in a difficult situation where she works. She works in Bayshore, which is 20 to 30 minutes away. Well, let's just say 30 minutes away, you know, but my most of my traffic is still coming out of the office that, that I'm currently in. So, you know, obviously I don't want to give that up. You know, my Massapequa office is a location. You know, there only real thing to do is to kind of switch over, either for me to still handle all the consults, which I'll handle some, but I prefer not to be handling all of them, you know, and to switch to phone calls. Also, just watching her take those first few phone consoles and handle them really smooth was it was awesome. And then her being like sent him a retainer for signature and I'm like, I usually print it and they sign it and she's like, no, get DocuSign and send them a retainer. Yeah. You're teaching me already? Yeah. Yeah, right. I don't know, I didn't do that a year ago. Yeah, right. And the best DocuSign or actually I used the I didn't even use DocuSign for this one. I just used Adobe Adobe sign I guess they call it you can you can set it to remind the person, like, every day, every day or every other day or once a week. So I sent someone a retainer like two weeks ago and I put it on remind every day. And I was like, that might be a little bit that might be a little bit. I signed like a week and a half later and I never followed up with her. I just I was sitting there Saturday and it was like this person signed the retainer. I was like, all right, Adobe doing my work for me. Those are fun. Yeah. Sending those email reminders every. She's probably like, the only way to stop these Adobe reminders is to sign the retainer. So yeah, whatever it takes or power. So with your first full year under your belt, what are the big lessons you can reflect back on the year that your first year of running a firm, starting it from scratch? Yeah. So I mean this year is just is just going to be so different in my mind. And we'll see how that shakes up. You know, I've said all along. You know the typical way for and you know, the way a family law grows. Right. And I think you're you're a different as like me also although you did work in family law, but you know, when you started your firm, you didn't you didn't work as an attorney, right? You kind of started as the owner. Right? So that's that's kind of, you know, year one was me trying to. You know, I was I was handling all the cases and everything like that. And, you know, I think I did, I did I did very well, you know, in the cases I handled, you know, most cases sale most of them. Do. You know, every client that settled the case was was happy with the way the case turned out. You know, a couple trials that also resulted in settlements. So, you know, but now having an attorney with so much experience, I think I can shift much more into that ownership mode. You know, if I can if I can do patent work to supplement, kind of supplement my income and have her taking on, you know, I'm not going to say she'll take on 100%. But, you know, 80% of the work being done at my firm will be handled by her. And it's just good to have her as a resource, even when, you know, because as a solo, you get to points where you're like, I'm not sure what to do here, you know? And I have people I can reach out to. You know, I made I made connections, but just having someone that works for me, that is that's so knowledgeable, that's been doing this for ten years. And you know, she's she'll, you know, it's so easy now to just be able to pick up the phone and be like, hey, what do I do? What do we you know, what do we do here? So I think I don't think I answered your question at all. What did I learn in my first year? You know, I think more on I don't know, I think this year is going to be so different in that I'm going to try to really offload as much as I can. And what I the way I've been doing it is I've been offering people like free, free meetings to an extent, almost like a free consult, even though we're halfway through your case to meet so that they can meet her. And then that that kind of makes the, you know, at some point, if I want to say, hey, you know, I'm going to hand off your case to Christina. They're comfortable with it because they've met her. They know that she's great, right? I've made the decision not to not to charge for those meetings because I feel like, you know, if, you know, I want to hand off the case as smoothly as I can and not have any clients that, you know, and again, it's not that many. Yeah. So it's okay. Like we had one yesterday and and they hit it off. Great. So and he has a court date next Wednesday. So you know I think when I say Christina is going to be appearing at your court, he's going to be like, okay, you know, he liked her. So he's okay with it. So you know, I think this this year will be much more. Last year was, you know, getting getting in the courtroom and, you know, handling cases and a lot like that where you know and I'm still going to be doing that. You know definitely to an extent. But this year I think is going to be much more shifting into that owner. Operator. Well, Tom, we've been talking for, I don't know, 18, 20 months pretty regularly. And as I reflect back on your year three three observations really stick out to me that I think are really helpful for anyone else starting to practice, because it can watch those episodes and see how you handle these things, but you're unique in that your story is not going to be a common story. Most folks who start their their family law firm are going to come from family law. So you have this fearless approach from the beginning of you're very comfortable with ambiguity, which is hard. That's one of the hardest aspects, I think, of being a lawyer, entrepreneurs, that ambiguity that comes with starting your practice, not knowing if and when the clients will come and you started from an absolute standstill, right, because you were coming from IP, your first case, and family law was like your first case of your firm. Right? So it was a trial, don't forget. Yeah that's true I remember that. Yeah. That mentality served you extremely well and it's not a common mentality. So if someone's watching this and thinking about starting their practice, understand that you have to have a level of comfort with ambiguity or else you freeze up. You just like you won't make decisions. And you didn't do that. You took some risks, but you didn't measured risk. You state you you hung on to your job, right? You kind of ease the opening up locations. You didn't take a bunch of big swings. You took things in a real measured way. So that was one thing I noticed over the past year as you as you built out your practice, another one, and this was like this took some willpower to, is that you have stayed true to your vision of, I want to start a practice that I want to scale. I don't want to be the practitioner, the technician of the practice. I want to be the business thinker in the business mind behind it. And the fact that I remember having a conversation as long about September ish of last year, maybe even like August, where you say it's like a year and a half ago, I'm talking even in 25. Okay. You presented the idea of, look, I'm looking at hiring an associate, or should I hire an associate or a really good paralegal? And I think I said I would stay away from the associate. At first I would hire the plants, and I remember giving you that advice and you just said, no, I'm going to do it because this is my vision. You with it? Yeah. No, no, that's that was the right thing to do. I mean, you got a really good associate that's joined you. That's, that's that was it. And that was part of it is that I had already had this referral in mind. And I knew that I knew that she was a rock star. So that definitely played a role in that decision. But yeah, I think I would have done it. You took a salary that was a big salary. I mean, for a fledgling law firm, right? So that was like you stayed true. That was a risky move. It was gutsy. Right. So and the third thing, and this applies to everyone, and it's shocking to me how little people pay attention to this, that if you're not measuring something, you're not managing it. And you have selected the top most important core numbers to know. You measure those and you watch those like a hawk. And you can manage when you see those start to decline or having an issue. So I think those three, those three lessons are transferable to any one start of the practice. And you really executed well on that last year. So kudos to you and how well you did that. Well thank you. I will say, you know, going back to the first point, I wouldn't go as far to say fearless. There's I'm sure, you know, as an entrepreneur, both of you, there's there's always fear, there's always some sleepless nights. But, you know, try to focus on big picture and where you want to go. You know, there's there's going to be fear in anything you you didn't freeze through it, you got you confronted. Yeah. Right. So that's that's awesome. Yeah. One thing that's shocked me, and I'm going to eat these words in like a month or two, is that I did not have a single month in the red, even. Which is, which is very surprising. You know, my my expenses are not up. My expenses are not low. Two offices marketing Google ads. You know, Adobe, I mean, a Lexus. Like, you know, there's a fair amount of expenses to opening up a law firm, at least the way that I did it. You know, if you want to go truly small and you know, and not look to grow. Yeah, you could you could run on a much cheaper budget than, than what I'm doing. But yeah, you know, I yeah, my expenses. You'll see when I do my expenses for January. You know I have a salary now I have, I have another office, I have, you know that's that's going to go up significantly. And I think what was what I expect to see in Q1 of 2026 is the top, top line revenue going up. Definitely, but also the expenses going up significantly. So, you know, I there probably will be a couple of months in the red to start off the year, but I expect by springtime, you know, that will be over that hump. And you know, I'm not talking about significantly in the red, right? If it's a few thousand bucks each month, you know, something like that. Not not a not losing significant, but I am. You know, one of the big risks that I took on is, you know, I'm hoping these Google ads start paying off because again, like Tyler said, it's, you know, it's only been I only activated them on Monday. So we're we're on day. It's just starting day five here. So yeah they're probably not fully integrated yet but yeah. Yeah hoping hoping that those bring in some leads because I did you know I set my my Google ad budget is is 5000 a month. So I don't I didn't go crazy high but I don't think that's I don't think that's a low ball either. I think that should be enough to, to bring in some leads. Yeah, it should be. Well, Tom, you've been real transparent with your numbers. And if you want to look at Tom's numbers, go to J. Sterling where Tom gives us his numbers and we post them there. And looking back over your history, Tom you November of 24, you bottomed out at $125 in profit that month. That was like your third month in existence. And since then everything was in the thousands and double digits started around May of last year, with the lone exception of a 9000 month in August. You've been double digits ever since, so you've managed your money well there? Yes. Well done. Yeah, yeah, it's been a I'm thankful it's been a good year, you know. And I guess what I'll say to people listening is if you're in your early mid 20s, you're not married and you don't have kids and you think you want to do it, do it now. I wish I could go back to and do it because I'd be I'd be living in a closet and dumping, you know, even more money into this firm to get it off the ground. Unfortunately, I can't do that. What's ironic about that is when I was that age, when not married, I was so concerned about getting married, I didn't want to do a do a business. So. Well, you got to pick your point. Yeah, I guess I've been with my wife, you know, we we got married when we're 30, but we've been together since we were 22, so. Okay. We've been. Yeah. Thomas, do you think about next year and the fact that you've made your first hire something? I hear a lot on our podcast from law firm owners. Is the amount of change or growth that they have to go through themselves as leaders, as owners, to continue to scale their firm. Have you thought at all about what it's going to take from you to help lead this new employee, and potentially several more into the future? How are you going to have to shift and change those priorities and personality and all the things? So I have and I think that will again, not get on with here, hopefully apply more to future hires. You know, I was very careful with this hire. She is again. She's been practicing 9 or 10 years. She I've seen her walk through the courthouse. Everybody knows her. You know she if I you know, maybe I think I said one day we'll get her on the podcast. So hopefully we could set that up. I love the amount like the numbers that she pulled at her old firm were crazy. So, you know, I think she doesn't obviously she knows the law. She doesn't she doesn't need much guidance there. So she sent me something the other day and she's like, I'll send it to you for a review. And I was like, I'll review it because I want to learn from you. I said, I said that to her because, you know, she's she's she's a rock star. You know, she so she's she's smart, she's hardworking. And you know, she, she wants she wants the firm to grow like she's actively when I, when I told her what I said to you guys a few minutes ago that we might have a few months in the red, she's like, no, I don't I don't want that. She's like, well, we'll do what we can. I'm like, it's okay if it's a couple months. I'm not saying I want to be in the red for six months or a year, but if if it's three months where I'm in the red. But you know, and that's what it takes to grow. That's part of part of a risky take when you start a firm. So she's she's very conscious of all that, you know, again, from, from intake all the way through handling the case through trial. She has the experience. So I honestly don't think to answer your question. She is she is that that great that I don't think I need to really change that much. I think what I need to do is, is get some systems in place, because the way that I do things is not sustainable for a firm that has more than one person that lives outside of my head, because all my folders are organized in a desktop and they are, there's I think most people would have a heart attack if they saw my desktop. It's just random documents and random folders. And you know, I know where everything is because that's that's kind of how my brain works. I've never been an organized person on on paper, but, you know, it's here, but she doesn't have access to this, so I need to make everything make sense to her. I don't have time tracking software. I don't have billing software. Like, I just do all this stuff myself so that, like, that's, I guess a long winded way of answering your question. That's how I need to grow right now is getting more, getting her the tools that she needs to succeed. I think you have some of the skill sets, like Jeff was saying, because of your background, a lot of law firm owners we talked to are scared to let go of the vine. They're scared to not be the the one that knows everything and that can do every single thing within the law firm. You're like, hey, you know way better than I do. Go go nuts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I will not not dispute that she. Yeah. And if I can focus as much as I can on the business and she can focus as much as she can on, you know, from console all the way through handling the case and she's, you know, epitaph and her best position and I think puts me in my best position. And, you know, for the cases that I'm still handling, I have her as, as a resource to help me out. And so I think, you know, the firm is just is now immensely better. And I took a I took it I did an intake call yesterday and I got to say I will have one of our attorneys reach out to you because that was a great feeling. Usually it's me on the phone saying, I'll get back to you, but now it's, I get to say, one of our attorneys. It felt a little bit. Yeah. Well done. Yeah. I'm so happy for you, Tom. So happy for you. You've done so well. Yeah. I'm looking forward to talking about January next time. It was great. Yeah. Cool. All right, well, if there's nothing else, let's wrap it up and we'll see you in February to talk about January. All right. Sounds good. Stay warm