How to Set CLEAR Goals For Your Law Firm

Discover why a clear mission statement is the key to setting purposeful goals for your law firm and aligning your entire team around a shared vision.

Join Tyler Dolph, Anthony Karls, and JP VanderLinden as they reveal the mission-driven decisions that not only boost culture and client satisfaction but also pave the way for sustainable revenue growth.

By the end of this video, you’ll see how a well-crafted mission propels your law firm forward, unifies your team, and delivers lasting impact for your clients.

📲 Subscribe Now: https://youtube.com/@karls.anthony   

📝Schedule a FREE Family Law Firm Audit: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/ 

CHECK OUT THESE RELATED VIDEOS:

6 BEST Family Law Tips to Reduce Turnover 

https://youtu.be/_qg07SXda8E?feature=shared

The 3-PART Framework to Boost Your Legal Team's Success

https://youtu.be/mbPzAwn-Cec?feature=shared

Cultivating Success: Employee Engagement Strategies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THU3DnmKLLA 

---

📄 CHAPTERS

00:00 - The Hidden Cost of Running Your Firm Without a Mission

02:19 - One Powerful Purpose: Why Missions Matter More Than Ever

08:05 - Crafting a Laser-Focused Mission That Your Team Will Embrace

13:05 - Spotting Pitfalls: How to Gain Real Traction With Your Goals

18:09 - Embedding Your Mission Into Daily Operations 

25:40 - Final Insights: Transform Your Firm Through a Clear Vision

Curious to discover your personalized roadmap to scaling a law firm, no matter where you are in the business?

Follow these steps:

1. BOOK A FREE 30-MINUTE AUDIT WITH US: https://rocketclicks.com/schedule-a-family-law-quick-audit/

2. CONNECT WITH US:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonykarls/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerdolph/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/rocket-clicks

Facebook: http://facebook.com/2311.karls.anthony

http://facebook.com/RocketClicks

Instagram: http://instagram.com/karls.anthony

https://www.instagram.com/rocketclicks/

3. TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT:

Tell me in the comments if you liked this podcast and what other kinds of topics you would like to see.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Hidden Cost of Running Your Firm Without a Mission
• 2:19 One Powerful Purpose: Why Missions Matter More Than Ever
• 8:05 Crafting a Laser-Focused Mission That Your Team Will Embrace
• 13:05 Spotting Pitfalls: How to Gain Real Traction With Your Goals
• 18:09 Embedding Your Mission Into Daily Operations
• 25:40 Final Insights: Transform Your Firm Through a Clear Vision

Transcript

0:00

Is your law firm just doing the work? are you working with purpose without a strong mission statement? You are flying blind and you're wasting time, money, and energy on misaligned growth. Let's fix that. My name. Is it off? I am the CEO of Rocket Clicks, a full service, hyper focused digital marketing firm that exclusively works with family law firms trying to grow their firms by attracting more clients and converting more leads. Today I am joined by Anthony Carls and JP van der Linde, and, Anthony is our president here at Rocket Clicks, but also the co-founder of our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, which is a 32 attorney family law firm, spread across Wisconsin and Illinois. He brings a wealth of leadership experience in scaling law firms and building high performance teams, as well as, JP Vander Linde. And JP is our head of operations. And client service here at the agency. And as a thought leader in operational excellence and talent development, JP is our rock when it comes to developing amazing leaders here at Rock Flix. And, these gentlemen are here to help us talk through building a mission. We are going to dive into the five essential elements of a powerful mission statement. We'll break down, what mission statements? Are effective. Why? It matters for your family law firm and how to craft one that actually drives decisions and results. We will talk about a download that is available both on our website, and we'll also be in the show notes. So look out for that. Otherwise, enjoy this episode. All right, guys. We're starting a law firm from scratch. We probably need a why behind why we're starting it. And so today we're talking all about mission. How to create a compelling mission, why law firms need a mission. We've thankfully been through this exercise a few times. Both at our law firm, Sterling Lawyers, as well as our agency, rocket clicks. And I think what we've found over the years is that if you just put a vanilla mission together, it's really hard to get people behind it. It's hard to get excited about it. You find that you're never using it in team communication. You're never tying back to it. But conversely, when you have an exciting mission, a mission that you can really get behind, it literally changes the culture. It becomes the North Star for your firm, for your business. And we've we've gone through quite the transformation at our own business. And really aligning on a mission has allowed us to create a lot of momentum, by by having a shared fate, a shared goal. And so I'm excited to talk to you gentlemen about this concept today. Tony, I'm going to turn to you first to give us a little why why does a company, why does a firm need a mission in the first place? I think it's the base level foundation of everything you're going to do. In a previous episode, we just talked. We just did. We talked about the framework of a line develop in transition. It's a great framework, but if you don't have a mission, you don't have vision, you don't have values. You're you're kind of going to be, you know, trying to navigate a ball pretty rudderless. You're going to be going all over the place. What it looks like is there's there's nothing that you're going to be able to leverage from a marketing perspective. There's from a recruiting perspective, from a team member, a development perspective, from a systems and process duplication perspective. Like everything becomes, well, we could do this because we don't have a very clear mission at Sterling. Our mission for Sterling lawyers was empower family law clients. So everything we did centered around how do we empower family law clients. So that's how we thought marketing materials. That's how we thought about our pricing. That's how we thought of our communication. That's how we thought about everything. So everything went through that lens and that gave us so much opportunity as a lot of to attract the right people. Let's market easier and allowed us to build systems internally that are all about empowering family law clients. So it's I think it's extraordinarily important in so many different ways. The foundation of your business. the narrative around the lens. You know, leveraging it as if we do this. Will it get us closer or further away from the stated goal from the mission? JP, I know you've worked in a few different businesses. Any, examples on ones that have had a good mission or maybe more of a vanilla one and that didn't go so well? Yeah. I think I probably experienced the spectrum. Or, of course, my career. Like most folks, I've worked at companies where, the owners basically said we have a business because we want to make money. That's kind of the end of it. And I will tell you that from an employee standpoint, that's super, motivating because I'm not excited about helping the owner make money. Just I'm just not. So didn't really didn't really jack me up. Right. There were some where they had mentioned, but they were like 14 sentences long and they hung on a wall and a plaque. And they'd been there for 25 years, and it was just like, I don't know, felt like it didn't touch my day to day at all. And then, you know, I've, I've seen it used exactly as we just discussed, which is where it is used as a, as a lens for every key decision in the organization. And I do think that is one, one key differentiator is that your mission is an internal facing statement. It is the same as your brand externally. And so your brand should push people away. If it's done well, it should push customers when they go, oh, this isn't for me, right? It should it should be strong. If you think about like, car brands, like certain car brands have certain, like, ways that they appeal to the market. And like, if that's not what you're into, you're not going to get pulled towards that. Like, the reason that you choose the Honda instead of the Mazda is because you resonate more with the brand, because at the end of the day, it has four wheels, a motor, and it gets you from A to B, and so everything else is about how you feel. Well, similarly the mission is facing internal. So it's all about your team and their decision making and who you attract from a talent standpoint. And so like seeing it done really well makes it really obvious when you've seen it done not well. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a huge part of, building a great culture. And when you have a shitty mission, it's not going to help create a great culture. So it's the. The idea here is, hey, you need a mission. Now, help us understand how this mission delivers value. Like, how do you create a great mission and what does that entail? So I think the first thing is it has to start with, you know, the visionary in the org really defining the greater purpose. And I alluded to this earlier, but, like, it shouldn't involve money. So Tony gave the example of empowering family law clients. There's nothing about that about making money. Now, if you do it well, you will make money of a side benefit. And so really think about like, you know, if you had all the money in the world and that was not a thing anymore, would you still get up and do this? And if so, why? Like, what's the thing. And so, you know, there's there's things related to impact and giving back and, you know, fixing a broken system and there's there's all kinds of reasons. It kind of doesn't matter as much what it is, but you have to be super clear on it, because you as the visionary and the leader, are going to have to champion that mission every day with your team. You're going to have to keep reinforcing it, keep bringing up, keep helping the team, or might rewarding against it when they memorize it and when they repeat it back to you when when they live it out. And so if you're not excited about it, there's zero chance your team's going to get excited about it. So that's probably the first place I'd start. think, Tony, we have a lot of law firm clients, and obviously we have our own firm here and some attorneys we talked to. They just, you know, they just want to be the best attorney, and, you know, but to me, that's not a mission because you're only a single person, and you potentially you're leading more than just yourself. And so how does, how does a family law firm owner craft a mission that can be compelling not just for themselves, but for their their entire firm? I would I would say you're what a good way to think about is what problem in the marketplace already solving. And like that's going to become your purpose and your why. And like, the biggest thing you're passionate about. So you know, any any practitioner, attorney, electrician, carpenter, you know pick pick random trade pick random service business just being the best isn't that that's like okay, well that's what we should all attain like drive to attain like the best of what? Because there's different parts of this marketplace. So, you know, if you're if you're a, really accomplished attorney and you're a great networker and that's, that's something you're passionate about and you want to, have be the person in your state for all the, you know, celebrity slash, you know, high profile divorce cases, your service is going to look very different than sterling lawyers, because we are going after kind of the middle of the market where households are between 75 and 250,000 a year. We're actively not looking for those big files because they should have a different service market. It should feel more boutique, it should feel more customized. It should feel a different way than what we're doing. Because it's a it's a different, different clientele. So I think it's really important to like think about what problem in the marketplace are you trying to solve. And then really rapidly go after that. Like where for us, what we felt like at Sterling, we we wanted to see the clients feel more empowered. And we want the client sentiment across the industry. You know, the things they didn't like about the industry was, the attorneys were great at communication. They didn't feel like they were in control of their case. They felt like they didn't understand why they were paying what they were paying. There's a lot of like, I don't understand, which is why we very specifically chose the word empower so that they can make better decisions, because oftentimes in in a family law case like you, you get to the place where you're, you're kind of haggling over some pretty insignificant pieces. And for us, one of the reasons we want to fix fee is we wanted to put the client in a position where they could say, this is actually important for me, and I am going to pay $25,000 for it or this isn't that important to me. I can give this up and negotiate because I don't want to pay more money, like, and really put them in the driver's seat versus, you know, what we see in the marketplace, which is a lot of I don't really I don't know how much it's going to cost for us to argue for this last little piece, and you can't really make the the decision. Is this something that I really care about? Is it worth the cost? You know, what's the cost benefit and all that. So I think figure out what you want to solve in the marketplace I think is a really good place to start and make it simple. You know, JP, you mentioned like 14 sentences. Like there's a lot of that out there. Nobody remembers it and it loses its meaning. Like what's the one sentence that's super short and simple and uses common language. So. sentence. That's so we'll have a, we'll worksheet that'll come along with this podcast that will present. But yeah, it's it's pretty prescriptive on how to think about writing this. But one sentence is definitely one. Yeah. It's, It's funny how and when we've done this in the past, and we've. We've tried and failed a number of times. And building a mission that, you know, we feel like we can be excited about and also have the team be excited and for for me personally, it all came down to really being able to be okay with the fact that like it starts with starts at the top, it starts starts with the ownership group. They got to be excited because they got to live it and feel it and be able to communicate, and almost have it like ooze out of them so that it feels genuine. I know that when I started, I kind of overtook a mission that was there that I didn't help create. And it just it didn't feel like me. And so it was really hard to get behind it, which I think is a difficult task. Yes. It's not not your business to start with. And so I would and what I hear you saying is we need to encourage our listeners and law firm owners to to really look introspectively about what type of firm they want to create, both today and in the future. And how do they craft a mission around that? Because it'll help attract talent. It'll help move the needle in a lot of ways. Like if you don't have one and you create one. An expectation should be that not everyone's going to like it. Which be? So now you probably actually landed on something, you know, like part of your tribe doesn't really want to accomplish what you want to accomplish. They have a different mission of their own. They're not really aligned with yours, so they're not going to actually help you push yours forward. And lessons. You can't be everything to everyone. It's not an option like you can. You can try to be, and you're going to end up being average and unknown and, kind of have middling type business. That's what that's what it will look like versus very sharp, very clear, very passionate business that can do a lot in the marketplace, in a very particular area. I think. Okay. So for those of you listening who don't know us as well yet, Tony and I are very future based. Quick, decision makers. We like to move very fast. And thankfully, we have, our man tape here to help slow us down a little bit, help us understand what's happening in the organization on a day to day perspective. And I can remember the three of us sitting in a room crafting our message, and Tony and I are like, yes, it's fine. It's good. As is. And and JP would say, no, guys, this this word, this single word in the sentence isn't right yet. And I'm so thankful that JP, you were able to, to stand up and, and force us to really think through it because it, it allowed us to land on something that, that we can really be passionate about. So JP, tell us a little bit about maybe that experience or the importance of taking the time. You only have one sentence, so you got to craft that thing. And think about every word. Yeah. So I would say that, you know, we mentioned earlier the the founder, the visionary leader. The organization's gonna have to carry the inspiration, the belief part of this. That doesn't necessarily mean that's the right person to do the wordsmithing on it. In fact, there's a good chance that that's not the right person, and they need to bring the other people in. And so what I would encourage is don't make this a solo exercise. Like, don't feel like you, you know, have to have to do it yourself, just because you're the business leader. In fact, it should be a group effort of kind of the key voices in the company, the ones you trust, because you're going to get the expertise of those people who are super detail or in super nitty gritty, who care a lot about word choices. And, well, this word means this to me. Is this what you meant by this? So if you kind of set the, like, general direction and say, like, this is where I want to go with this and then like handed off to somebody to like, you know, kind of polish it up and fine tune all the stuff like that's, that's a great use of all the resources on your team. And I think it's because, like, what we're trying to do is get to something that's very compact and very, you know, it's kind of like the best technology, right? You get really excited when you have technology that's like very small and has nothing extraneous going on. Right? It does exactly what it's supposed to do, doesn't try to be anything else and stays very focused. Like that's what you want out of your your statement. I'll pick on a couple companies here. So I'm gonna read you to two different mission statements. I want to see which one seems like it would land for you. The first one is, this company will provide higher value added logistics, transportation, and related end to end business services through a fully integrated digital, digital and physical network to ultimately yield superior financial returns What does that mean? wants to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives. One of those is going to stick in your brain. The was Fedex and the second company was Apple. And so one of those is a very strong, very compelling brand, the other one less so and so like this. This stuff matters. Like word choice matters. Because if you're only going to have six, eight, ten, 12 words, we recommend 15 or less. If you're going to stand for 15 words, every word has to has to count. And so you want to take the time to agonize over is enrich. The right word is empower. The right word is dominate the right word. Like, how are we going to say this and the way that our teams are going to get behind and be able to use this for, and we're going to get excited about. So go slow to go fast. Take your time, don't rush through it. Don't try to get it done in an afternoon. Like spend the time on it, deliberate with it, sit with it, because then you want to be able to not change it. Because the other thing that is not great is if you're at a company that changes the mission every like 3 to 5 years, like we got a new one, like it gives your team whiplash and they're like, I don't know, this is not what I signed up for. They're going to bail out. So it's been the time, so you don't have to spend the time later. And I'm now, just as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about what happened when we built ours. And we sat in the room and we did the thing, and. And at the end of the day, we thought, okay, that feels pretty next day, one of our leadership team members was like, you know, this, this part of it just isn't sitting right with me. And it was so much better after we had, you know, the night to sleep on it. And we came back to it with fresh eyes. So what I hear you guys saying is like, just just take your time. Do it right. Get really excited. So that you can build that excitement behind it. Now, if we're if we're building a great mission statement. You know, one thing that we talk about is wanting it to be easy to memorize and repeat. And I think we've seen this where we'll it'll come up in conversation or we're, we're shouting a team member out on an all team meeting, and we're able to tie it back to that mission because everyone kind of knows it. Right. So how So we've already talked about it being brief. That's that's going to be part of it because it's hard to memorize long things. The other thing is choosing words that are in your team's lexicon. Right. I give you the example of Fedex we're talking about, like, yielding high end logistics end to end. It's like maybe they're talking that way internally. Maybe they're not. Right. So you want to pick the words that your team is going to know how to use, feel comfortable, how to use has a cadence to it, keep it fairly short. And then the other pieces what make something easy to memorize is spending the time to memorize it. And so you're going to have to make this a part of the rituals of your organization. You're going to have to say, hey, every morning we're going to do this, or every Wednesday, we're going to do this. Or at the end of our all team meetings, we're always going to do this. And like, this is how we're going to get the team engaged in it. We're going to use it for shouting people out. We're going to put it into these emails. We're going to recite it as a group. Does it feel a little weird and awkward at first because we're trying to. Yeah, but like the great places to work, they take their mission very seriously and they work it into everything. And they use as a lens like, hey, if you want onboarded this, go find someplace else where you are, because we only want people who are passionate about this. And so like, make it short, use words that people actually use and understand. Spend the time with your team to help them actually learn it in practice, and then We. Yeah. Tony, how do you, How do we use it in our day to day, both here and at the firm? Yeah. So we, implement a little differently at the law firm than we do at, the agency. Just as we've evolved the process here. But we have an even team. We have an all hands meeting every day. It's 20 minutes long. So that's how we start our day. And then on Tuesday mornings, we we read through our mission vision values in some way. Sometimes it's a more fill in the blank quiz. Sometimes we popcorn read it, sometimes we, you know, talk about what it means and examples of different parts of what it means. So we try to keep it, you know, interesting. And at the firm we do something very similar where we read, we read what we call our vivid vision, which includes our mission, vision and values. Once a week in our in our weekly audience. So it's, it's something that you have to be intentional about, try to drive because it will get lost and then everybody will kind of drift. So like, what's your a good way to think about it is, when you're, when you're building a team and running building a culture after you as the leader say something. Everybody's together, but immediately after everyone starts drifting. So if you, if you talk about your mission one time when they onboard, just imagine how far they've drifted off your mission. Because you said it one time at onboarding a year and a half ago, versus if you're, you're doing it every week, like you say, here's here's our mission. We come back together, the team is going to go apart. And then you very back go part bring it back. And like what you're going to see is like we're going to stay way more on track, way more towards the North Star than, you know, giants this way or this way. And you know, Tyler went the opposite direction. So we're not even going, you know, north we're going south now. So like it just creating it into the rituals. I like that word JP. I think it's super important. Now, 100%, I think, We always talk about, that our team has to hear something seven times before they hear it the first time. And so the more different and fun, creative ways we can share our vision, you know, hopefully one of those times, someone hears it and and internalizes it and thinks about it. I think one other thing that we haven't touched on is how we, once a month, we'll deep dive into the why Okay. about, that? Yeah. So, giving somebody a sense to memorize is one thing. But if you want to inspire behavior and belief, they're going to have to have such a vivid picture of what that is in practice, how it looks, that they can, you know, they can visualize it. They can own it, who can actually cause behavior difference. And so if you're going to say, we're going to enrich people's lives, give examples of what that looks like, how are we doing it in their day to day? What are some cases? We've accomplished it. What are some places it could look like, for us to accomplish it in the future? If you're going to say that we want to change the world What. Like you're going to have to make it real for your team, for them to emotionally connect to it. And so, you know, one of the things we do is we share wins with our team. And so if we say that we are going to, you know, accomplish whatever, help our clients do this or that, we didn't have to bring examples, right, because they have to know what good looks like, and they have to be like, oh, we're accomplishing it. We're doing it. We're actually living out the thing we say we're going to do. Because you go back to your first point teller. You say, what are some companies, you know, some places you've been where you do it badly. Most people are pretty cynical on this stuff because most companies don't do it well. And so when you actually do it well, you say, we're going to do this, and then you uses your land and then you go do it. People pay attention. They go, oh, they're serious. They actually mean it. And the trust in the leadership goes up. The belief in the cause goes up, the commitment goes up. And that only happens after you've been able to say, hey, this is this is reality. This isn't just words. This is an actual practice that it looks like about it and how that implement. And so we do it. We have a monthly meeting where we bring the whole team together. And a dedicated portion of that is, Tyler, you lead that, you help the team see the crystallized vision of our mission in practice in the day to day, to remind them to avoid that drift that Tony talked about, like, hey, this is what we're doing and why, and this is what it looks like to keep people excited. You know you. every month is the opportunity to. To deep dive into the why behind the work that we're doing. I think our employees sometimes get stuck in the nasty middle, gets stuck in, Okay, well, here's just another Wednesday that I got to do the thing and work with the people. But by tying everything back to to our mission to helping family law firms grow their business and their firm, it really helps crystallize the why behind why. You know, why we're here. You know, it's. I'd say at at, the law firm. This was, one of the things that we added to our weekly, weekly rhythms is, with two things. So one is, at our all hands each week, we, we read reviews and, like, what are they about? How did we empower our clients? And, like, the bigger you get, the more you can read. And it just like it fuels the team because especially, especially in a federal law firm where a lot of the situations that you're working through, they're really hard, like, they're they're hard, they don't always feel like wins. So having your team hear how well we're doing in certain in certain cases with some clear examples, is super motivating. And then the other thing we, we do because that's, that's, that's kind of live shout outs. We put it we call it our practice Brief. It's a newsletter that we send to the team once a week. And it's, one of the things that highlights is what clients are saying about us. And we we put a lot of effort and attention on that because it's motivating to the team. It's us getting feedback from the marketplace that we're actually living on our mission and having an impact, and that that drives behavior, drives performance. It has makes an impact. I love it so. Whether you're starting a brand new firm. And you have the opportunity to create your very first mission. Or you've been in business for a long time. And this is an opportunity to refresh that mission. I encourage you to take it seriously and know the impact it will have on your firm, on your employees and and ultimately on your clients. Gentlemen, really appreciate your time today. And, looking forward to seeing you next time on the revenue roadmap. As we mentioned, if you enjoyed this episode and you want to get the free download, it will be available in our show notes. And also on our website. And if you found this, episode on a the importance of a mission statement, you will love our next episode on the importance of the mission, vision and values, which we continue to dive a little bit deeper into. So make sure to check it out. Here as well as in the show notes below. Thanks.