Revenue Roadmap
Revenue Strategies for Family Law Firms
Learn from the experts behind the growth of sterlinglawyers.com Anthony Karls, President of Rocket Clicks/co-founder of Sterling Lawyers, and Tyler Dolph, CEO of Rocket Clicks, interview the experts in all the areas that will drive revenue and increase profits for family law firms
Get technical knowledge and learn from the experience of those who paid the price to learn what it takes to grow from an idea to an exclusively family law firm with 30+ attorneys.
Revenue Roadmap
6 BEST Tips to Reduce Law Firm Turnover
Struggling with turnover or culture clashes in your law firm?
This Revenue Roadmap episode reveals how a clear mission, a quantifiable vision, and foundational values define your direction as a law firm, guiding you in every decision-making process—from hiring and firing to team engagement and client choice.
Drawing from real-world experience at Sterling Lawyers and Rocket Clicks, Tyler, Anthony, and JP stress that leadership must define, and then live, these principles consistently, so your law firm operates on a clear alignment across your team, reducing high turnover from mismatched expectations.
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CHECK OUT THESE RELATED EPISODES:
The 3-PART Framework to Boost Your Legal Team's Success
https://youtu.be/mbPzAwn-Cec
Cultivating Success: Employee Engagement Strategies
https://youtu.be/NhjQNBzSyBY
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📄 CHAPTERS
00:00 - The Hidden Cause of Turnover: Realizing It’s Not Your People
01:59 - BEST TIP #1: Strengthen Loyalty Through a Crystal-Clear Mission
04:16 - BEST TIP #2: Align Everyone With an Inspiring Vision
07:02 - BEST TIP #3: Operationalize Values to Embed Culture Daily
10:45 - BEST TIP #4: Hire & Fire Through Mission & Values
13:52 - BEST TIP #5: Protect Your Culture—Avoid Conflicts That Erode Trust
16:00 - BEST TIP #6: Watch Out for These Pitfalls & Keep Turnover Low
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Struggling with team turnover or culture misalignment in your family law firm. The root of the problem might not be your people. It could be your mission, vision, and values. Let's fix that. Welcome to the Revenue Roadmap podcast. The show designed specifically for growth minded family law professionals. We dive into practical strategies to drive more revenue and increase profits for your firm. One insight at a time. I'm Tyler Dolf, CEO of Rocket Clicks, which is our full service digital marketing agency focused exclusively on helping family law firms scale with smarter marketing and operational strategy. Today, I am joined by Tony Carls and JP van der Linden. Tony is our president here at the agency and also the co-founder of our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, which is a 30 plus attorney firm. And he has seen firsthand how internal alignment can make or break a firm. We also have JP van der Linden, who heads up our operations here at Rocket Clix. JP brings a deep expertise and operational leadership and team performance, making him the perfect guest to unpack today's topic. So today we're going to talk about breaking down the mission vision and values trifecta. What they really mean, why they matter more than you think, and how to embed them in your culture to supercharge engagement and hiring within your family law firm. If you like this episode, we do a deep dive into all three of these as separate podcasts. So make sure to follow us along for that deep dive. Gents, great to have you back. Today we are doing a big overview on mission, vision and values. If you continue to listen to this series, we will go deeper into each of these subjects. But today we are going to add a very high level talk through what each of these mean. JP. Why don't we start with our mission? Tell us what a mission is, why it's important, and then, Tony, let's talk about the why for a family law firm. Yeah. So the there's there's three parts here and some they all kind of get come together and talk about them together. Mission is kind of the big overarching like what we're trying to, or we're trying to accomplish here. The the big vision. The big why for why you exist. The vision is a little bit more specific. And so usually it has some like quantifiable of like what does it look like when you achieve the why and like what's the steps you're going to take to get there. And then the values are all about behaviorally, what are you going to do in the day to day? What's your team going to do that's going to lead you to accomplishing your mission and your vision? So basically, where are we headed? What does it look like and how are we going to get ourselves there. Kind of the three parts mission, vision and values. Yeah, we're just we're this dream is really important is, you know, when one of the previous podcasts we did we talked about kind of people framework of, you know, aligned develop transition. The first step of getting that framework put in place is having a really clear, compelling mission, vision values, because that's going to be your it's gonna be your foundation for all of your people systems. So we talked about people systems for a lot of this. This overarching series is about is about people and people systems. This is the absolute foundation of a mission vision values. So if you don't have it and it isn't clear basically you're building a house really soft or sandy substance and then you're going to you're going to see the org just go the way it's going to go because you haven't defined it. You haven't made it clear. And it's it's really important to do that. Kind of setting and who, shape who should who should build the mission vision values for a family law firm. Yeah, it's got to come. It's got to come from the top down. It's got to come from the leadership. It's got it from the folks who are directing where you're going. Because if you don't have a clear vision, if you can't articulate it, the odds of your team being able to are incredibly low. And I will say like one of the temptations I've actually heard this from, from folks who have led organizations or growing their organizations, is there's a temptation to like, involve like everyone in it. Like, what do you guys think it should be? What do you want it to be? And it's like there's a time and a place to get feedback and input, but this is not it. This is the place for you to make a definitive statement and plant your flag on what you stand for, what you will and will not tolerate, and where you are going. This is your differentiation for your team internally. This is not a democracy. You need to step forward. You need to own. This is the leader. I think I mentioned this on a different podcast, but we we internally both at the agency and I'm not so much a law firm, but definitely at the agency tried to crowdsource this and and have everyone have a say and a voice. And from personal experience, I will tell you it is not effective because if everyone has a voice kind of no one does and then there's no in. Yeah. You know, when we when we crafted ours over at Sterling, it was just this kind of created the first version of what we called our vivid vision, which included mission, vision, values and like being part of the co-founding team, I didn't know what a law firm should look like. So he took a first stab at it, and then we wrestled over that for probably three to 3 to 4 weeks of just crafting that statement and defining like, who we are and what we're going to be. And then, you know, let me read that out loud to each other every week to just reinforce it and kind of come back, come back to who we said we're going to be or make decisions in that. Are we executing against it? That type of thing is really important. Like this does seem small and insignificant. It's like, who cares? I can just smile stupidly at work. Yeah, that's that's that is true. Who are you trying to become? And what are you trying to create? I think it's also very important if you want to grow your business. So we we've done the work and we listen to all, of, all of our podcasts and did a deep dive into mission vision values. We've created it now to be how do we use it to engage our team? Yeah, I'd say there's really two areas that you're going to think about this one is that you're going to constantly remind your team on the the mission and the vision. I heard I heard a pretty well known leadership coach say recently that if you're the CEO, you're actually the chief reminder. That's your main thing for the org. And you're constantly reminding everybody of where we're going because it's so easy to, to Tony's point to just get down and I'm just going to do good legal work. I'm just going to do the work right. I'm going to do good plumbing work, I'm going to do good Hvac work. I'm going to do good marketing work. Right. I'm just going to do my job. But why am I doing this again? And like, you'll feel you will feel 100% like you. Like I'm blue in the face. I'm saying this. I say it every 20 minutes. I feel like I'm saying it all the time. And right about the time you feel that way, that Tarantino's to be like, oh yeah, I remember that now. So don't don't get tired of saying you're the chief reminder. You need to keep bringing it up and reminding people of where you're going. That's one really big thing. We do that once a week with our team. We also do that on a monthly basis where we deep dive further. It's like you got to figure out your cadence and your rhythms, but you're going to assume people remember it because it's super important close to you. And they they don't at all. So, Tony, I knew you guys had some rhythms at the law firm for the vivid vision that you, you use as well to kind of think about that, reminding me. Yeah, it was something that we would read as a leadership team once a week, and then the individual teams and there tend to also read it once a week, and it's just up to like come back and prevent the drift to from continuing to drift. So but also say like this is, you know, you know, family law firm. There's these are really intense emotional conversations at times. A good chunk of them. So having like really good clarity of like why we're doing what we're doing can really help you get through some of those tough times because, like, you're you can kind of get mired down into that and forget, like, what what what's the purpose of what we're doing? Why are we here? Because some of that comes along with it. But if you can't remember what the what the real why was behind your mission like it's sterling hours was empower family law clients super simple. So every decision we made what to that ones it helps us during those times. We have to make hard decisions. I think the second piece tell us about how it gets it gets you. So like Tony said, the first piece is like you're repeating it. You're reminding it, you're using as a filter. The second piece is really specific to the values. Values should be behaviors that you're looking for from your team. And you use those those value behaviors to hire, to fire and to reward. Like it's very straightforward. Like these are the things that you use to evaluate every single potential team member or current team member. Are they living out our values so they have to be. When you're forming them, you have to ask yourself, what I fire somebody for not doing this? Would I hire somebody who does all these things? How would I reward people for doing this? And if you're not willing to live that out, don't put it in your values. It's not enough? Absolutely not. It feels false. It feels fake. People can smell that a mile away. And they want authenticity when they're joining someplace and they're hitching up, they want to they want to buy into the vision. So you have to operationalize them very much in the hiring process, the onboarding, the coaching, every step along the way. And then when it comes down to it, like when you're giving people praise, tie it to a value. When you're giving people bonuses, show how they're living out the values, because what you're showing the rest of the organization is these are the behaviors that we want you to authentic. If you say we're going to be candid, if you say we're going to be hard working, you have to follow through on that every week, every day, giving those praises, giving those shout outs, giving those bonuses, saying, hey, this person's not here anymore because they didn't live out our values. We didn't see them showing up the way we needed to. Also, yes, has to be the lens to which you're evaluating your your law firm team members that so in concept sounds great. How to and what we one of the things that we that we do is our final interview is a presentation from a potential hire. And they going to present to us why they're a good fit for rocket clicks and our mission vision values and why we flex is a good fit for them. So it's to kind of two sided and they got to deliver that presentation with that camp, articulate that. It's not a great interview. And we typically pass on those those opportunities. But it really gives you an opportunity to see like are do they really are they actually passionate about the things that we're passionate about. Or is this just going to be like about the seat. Because butts button seats don't really work? Like that's not something that typically will actually help you grow and sustain growth over the long term. I mean, another way is we we get really specific with our vision. So we break it down into three buckets. We'll talk more about it when we get into that. But it's like we want our legacy to be like, what's the impact for the marketplace? How do we want to impact people and then financial what we want accomplished. That kind of gets three different lenses of where we're trying to head. And then there's very clear ways that you can operationalize that. So like one of our hierarchical looks is we want we want to achieve 1000 PDF goals with our team in the next ten years. So that's personal professional financial goals. We want to see our team accomplish a thousand. So how do we operationalize it. We got to track it. We got to execute our conversations. We got to do lots of things in coaching. We got to celebrate as we're getting closer to those milestones. So there's a lot of ways that you can like once you get specific, you can then really create operations behind it to make it real and like make it part of the culture, not just something that's like set every week, but it's actually something that's lived process. We literally have that employee self diagnose self-assess against the values and the manager. Anybody should be like rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 or something like that's the end of it. But like I mean reach for the uncomfortable. We don't just ask them to say like, are you good at this core value? We say, please provide specific examples of times when you have lived out this core value. Well, and so like if you say, oh, I'm great, and you can only come up with two examples where you lived it out, well, you're probably not great. Like you probably need to have ten examples and you have to pick four of them that you're going to give because you ran out of characters like or you're actually just kind of like, okay at it. And we're gonna talk about like, what does it look like for you to model this with integrity for the rest of the organization and be authentic with it? So, really make it like part of the ongoing process. Put in your performance reviews, show your team that you're serious about it because to the degree that you are, they will take it seriously and to the degree that you aren't, they will just go, hey, this is just fluff on the wall and I don't have to care about it. And like that. So like that little last point that is so important because when you said the degree, the degree to which you take it seriously will be, it will be either it won't. The team will never take it more serious than you, and they will likely take it less serious than you. So the degree to which you take it seriously will dictate how seriously take it. You have to own it. Really be truly, authentically you. Because if it's not, it's not going to be the team. So yeah. 100% until I agree. And I feel like we've, you know, I wanted to, to end on a few pitfalls or how companies especially, which I know we've talked about, a few of them, but JCPenney that we missed that, you know, off homeowners can avoid when, when truly building out their vision. Guys. Yeah, I'd say there's probably two that I would call out. One is being unspecific with your your language being vague. And so, you know, if you're not detailed with your values, with your, with your vision, then people are going to have different interpretations and they're going to think they're living it out when they're not. And so you need to be crystal clear to the point where it's if you're not repelling somebody with the way you describe it, you're probably not being specific enough and clear enough. Yeah. Like. Yeah. 100% agree with that. You know, I always say, look, one of the biggest reasons I love the Cowboys and I love the Yankees is because most people don't like baseball or most people that like the NFL football. They like the Cowboys or they hate them. They like the Yankees, or they hate them like perfect. That's great branding because now you have an opinion and you know who they are versus I don't even know what the Cleveland Indians new name is because most people don't care about that team. It's like they don't really they they don't like, create any emotional response. To Gigi's point. If you're trying to be everything to everyone, you're nothing that you're actually nothing to everyone. Like you haven't killed anyone, you attracted anyone. It's just mush. So and I would say if you're if you do have them clearly articulated out and you're doing this within your firm, you're not living these values out and you're not like allowing them to have financial impacts because you're going to have situations where you have a client that they're going to try to push you outside of, push you outside of your values, or it's an opportunity you really should take. And like, are you willing to truly live that? Because if your not, your team isn't going to trust you, that your team isn't going to actually believe it because you don't really believe in what when you know the rubber hits the roof because you're willing to violate it or, you know, a couple extra bucks. So now I can violate it because I don't have time to do it. It's going to be how your team member thinks about it. So yeah, that was an at least my second, my second one, I think we haven't really talked as much about. It is like, when you go to apply these if, when, if, when things are down, you opt for things that you didn't put in your mission. Vision, values as you you probably didn't accurately represent your desires for the organization. Well. And so if you're interviewing and you've got somebody who like, you know, you've got kindness as a value and this person's a jerk, but they're a super skilled, super successful jerk. And you're like, yeah, but they're going to do such good things for the company. And you hire them and you bring them in. It's like, okay, then either kindness isn't actually one of your values or something you didn't list, or you're willing to to mortgage those and give those up, which case you don't really believe in them. And so like you have to be willing to say no, all right. You have to be willing to pass on somebody who's really talented, has a great resume, you know, looks like a great, you know, client because they violate your values to be willing to fire clients, to say, like, hey, this one isn't a good fit because they treated our team badly. And that does not align with our values. You win so much from that, so much respect from your team. But if you don't follow through on that, you don't apply it in those cases. Like again, people can smell BS. All day. But they trust that any of the other values were right. If you know you’re showcasing as the owner, well, they're only right sometimes I love it. This is great. Appreciate the overview, gents. If you're listening to this and you want to learn more, we are deep diving into each one of these elements. The mission, the vision and the values. So make sure to stay stand tuned and listen to to our further deep dives and we will see everyone next time on the revenue. If you liked this podcast on the overview of mission Vision values, make sure to check out our future episodes where we dive deeper into each individual topic one on the mission, one on the vision, one on the values. And we also have a great podcast on the Employee maturity model, which you can check out here. Thanks. So we'll see you next time on the revenue roadmap.
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