Ep. 23 - Play the Long Game

In this episode, I get real about what it actually takes to grow a law firm from the ground up, through the setbacks, and into long-term success. If you’re looking for quick wins or overnight results, this isn’t the episode for you. But if you’re ready to build something meaningful, sustainable, and profitable, then let’s talk.

I share the mindset shifts, goal-setting strategies, and marketing principles that helped me grow from a spare-bedroom solo practice with no revenues and with me as the only person in the law firm to the 60-person firm we have grown to that generates over $10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters building in Coral Springs, Florida.

We’ll talk about why marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, how to set realistic milestones, and why being fearless (even when terrified) is the key to playing the long game.

This episode is packed with practical advice, personal stories, and a roadmap for attorneys who want to build a firm that lasts. If you’re serious about growth, this one’s for you.

Want to learn more about how our agency can help your law firm grow? Speak with John Rizvi ☎️

Transcript

John Rizvi : 0:00

This is Pod Populi, podcast for the people. That's my name. Hi, and welcome. I'm John Risby, the Law Firm Growth Professor. And for my returning listeners, I'm glad you're back. For my new listeners, it's great to have you here. In my podcast, I share the strategies for growth that have worked for me in growing my law firm from a startup with just me, a laptop, and a cell phone operating out of a spare bedroom to where we are today, a team of 60 professionals generating over 10 million a year in revenues from our 10,000 square foot headquarters in Coral Springs. If you've been with me for a while now, you know what my thoughts are on marketing, and you know what I feel about lawyers that are trying to grow their practice, and you've probably gotten a sense that this isn't 10 quick tips to$10 million. Marketing doesn't work like that, and claims that promise concrete results should be looked at with skepticism. I'm hammering on this point because I've seen a few frustrated comments asking when I'm going to get to the really good stuff. The plain fact is, it's all good. It just may not all be right for this specific attorney or that law firm at this exact time. But if you haven't even built your firm's website yet, it seems like a futile exercise to worry about how search strings work and which social media platforms you should market to. By the way, the social media topic is going to be dissected in the next episode. So be sure to come back again for that. Now, internet marketing isn't a sprint, it's a marathon, and there's no quick paths to guaranteed success. You're going to have to try things that aren't always going to work, at least not as fast as you'd like them to. You're going to put your heart and soul into things that fail miserably. And you're going to put what feels like zero effort into something that ends up getting you 25 calls in a week. Marketing is weird that way. You can't be sure from day to day or week to week or month to month what's going to resonate with your ideal client. On average, though, if you do some key things right, you'll see an increase in business over time. The more of these things you nail consistently, the better the results you'll see. But that's on average over time. So if you change the font on your website from Comic Sans to Times New Roman and the background color from beige to a pastel teal, sure it might make your site look more professional and pleasing to the eye. But that's not the kind of thing you can change on Tuesday and expect the phone to be ringing on Wednesday. The thing to remember is that marketing is all about playing the long game. You're laying the foundation now for what you're going to be doing three, six, or thirty-six months in the future. And the key to playing the long game and winning is remembering that every move you make is supposed to bring you closer to an ultimate goal. Take a second here and think about what your goals are. Do you want to double your client count? Is there a certain annual billing figure that you're targeting? Do you want to expand your practice as services or be able to afford a prestigious address and attract higher net worth clients? Do you want to attract fewer clients with higher dollar cases? Or do you have a practice that provides affordable legal services in volume? There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these goals. The point here isn't to run your goals down or tell you that they're unrealistic. But having fixed goals in mind helps to guide your firm's specific marketing agenda so that you can capture the clientele that will take you there. Bear in mind too that your goals can and probably will change over time. What moves and motivates you and your firm now will likely look very different five or ten years down the line. It's okay. We grow, we evolve, we change. We're not static entities, and it's not reasonable to expect that the things that drive us now will stay static either. So when we're laying out goals, it's a good idea to build in some flexibility. Now you need to set uh specific milestones, for example. If you want to hit 5 million in billings and you're only bringing in 250,000 a year, you're probably not going to pow that off in two years. And even if you could, it comes with a huge cost in your personal sanity and a risk to your reputation. It's important to keep your goals realistic. So say you are uh bringing in$250,000 a year and your benchmark is$5 million. You set a goal to increase your billings by 25% per year. How long will that take you to break the$5 million mark? You're probably not going to like this answer, but it'll take 15 years to hit$5 million. But here's the cool part: at 15 years, if you have a reliable locked-in 25% growth rate per year, you'll have about$5.7 million. And three years later, you'll be looking at$11.1 million. Of course, growth is almost never that steady or reliable. The good news is that a practice bringing in$250,000 a year can easily double within a year to$500,000 and double again to a million dollars a year the year after that. Growth from the startup phase is even faster. But keep in mind that growth is never linear. Maybe one year you're only getting 10% over the previous year. The next year you lose 3% over the year before. The year after that, you gain 35% up and down. The key is to take a bad year as just that, a bad year, not as the end. And if you average it out and you're increasing your billing by 25% a year, you're doing well, especially since 5 to 10% is considered healthy and sustainable. Much more than that is possible, but significantly less than 10% growth will mean you will have difficulty retaining associates and staff and providing them with opportunities for growth. Also, you need to consider what kind of practice you have. But there are lawyers doing incredibly well in every field of practice. You choose your field of practice for a reason, and you've chosen it, and that reason is what drives your passion for that field. If you pivot from your passion to chasing dollars, you'll end up finding neither. The dichotomy will show, and your clients will see it, opposing counsel will see it, and the judge will see it. And you won't be anywhere near as happy. Besides, your passion uh for your practice and your chosen field is a selling point with your clients, so lean into it. You also need to keep in mind that there is an upper limit on how much one person can do. I started my career working in big law in New York City, and I've been through the ringer of 70 and 80-hour work weeks, uh sleeping in the office, waking up in my own drool with my face in a legal document, uh, or chugging down a half full cup of coffee that was warm when I poured it the night before. Uh, nutrition was grab what you can out of the break room or a vending machine because you're perpetually running late and sitting down for 10 minutes isn't a possibility. There's only so many hours you can bill. There's only so many hours we can work. There's only so many hours we can go without seeing the inside of our homes. Many lawyers start their own practice for work-life balance, and they're not willing to uh do what they did as a young associate at a large firm. And I understand why. So as you can see, aiming for 25% growth per year is great, but you really need to manage your expectations. If you aim for 25% and you only get 15% growth, you haven't failed. You've still gotten healthy growth. If you aim for 25% and you lose 10% over the year before, then you need to seriously consider the possibility that something may be wrong. And we're talking about revenues here, but don't lose sight of profitability because top-line revenues do not pay the bills. And I'm not saying your goals shouldn't be lofty. After all, no one ever got to the top by being happy at the bottom. But you need to temper your goals with realism about what's physically possible for you and the outlook for your specific field and the lifestyle that you want. This is the part where you need to figure out how you're going to get there. A SWAT analysis can help you. For those who are unfamiliar, SWAT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This kind of analysis can help you identify areas where your firm can improve and what you tell you what you need to do and what to look out for. COVID-19, for example, probably wasn't on anyone's SWOT analysis in January of 2020. But by June, anybody who wasn't considering COVID-19 as a factor in their SWAT evaluation wasn't paying attention to the news and the fact that there was almost nobody on the streets and the ever-increasing death toll. I could keep going. But the point is, you can't plan for everything. A SWOT analysis can tell you what factors will help and hinder your firm in reaching its goals. But it can't predict the weather, global pandemics that come out of nowhere, or political changes of fortune. You can minimize your exposure and risk in these areas, but some things are simply beyond the scope of even the most tightly focused study. You could have everything ticking along and being a bad car accident that puts you in the hospital and out of commission for three months. Once you've got your SWOT analysis and you've set your goals and milestones, how can we start figuring out how to implement them? This is where all the marketing starts to come into play. Your marketing and your SWOT go hand in hand because the idea is to project your brand as widely as possible to get the attention of your ideal client while also limiting your risk and exposure to outside threats to your firm. We're going to start here by going back to the drawing board with your perfect client and building out a persona. Who are they? Where do they live? Where are they from? What do they do for a living? Do they have a spouse, kids, a partner? Do they have pets? What kind of transportation uh do they use? What are their hobbies? Education level, their hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations, and needs. Give them a name, a history. Really flesh them out until you can actually see this person sitting across from you at your desk telling you about their issue and the outcomes that they're after. If you can do this in five sentences, great. If it takes you 5,000 words, that's fine too. This is your ideal client, and you can make them anything you need them to be. But you've got to get inside their head and figure out who they are. From this point on, everything your marketing does, you're doing specifically to talk to this persona. When you write an article or a blog post, you're speaking directly to this persona. When you put out a blurb on social media, you're practically writing this persona's name all over it. If this persona's favorite color is a specific shade of magenta, you're going to have to find a way to incorporate that into your branding. This may sound silly or crazy or even obsessive, but it works. It works because you're not broadcasting your firm's greatness to the uncaring masses. You're sitting down for a conversation with one person. The difference is now we have someone that we're talking to. Or hey, why not several someones? Create different personas and talk specifically to each one. The point is that you know who you're talking to and you're giving them a trail of breadcrumbs right back to your law firm's door. Sure, that person only lives inside uh your head, but so what? If you're going to have a conversation, it can't be one-sided. Even if the conversation is a product of just one mind dissecting two different points of view. Now we can start getting into the technical stuff, the website architecture, SEO, the link building, metadata, and all the other stuff. A lot of it sounds so complicated, uh, and you've got some talking head throwing acronyms at you. But most of us have been doing these things for years or decades without even realizing we've learned how. We've got a plan, we've got a goal, we've got milestones, we've got a persona or two, or 17. Uh, something that we can use to shape our marketing and the tone we use to get the message out. And now we've got the tech dialed in. Here's the thing internet marketing is great and important, and I'd never tell anyone it isn't. In today's marketplace, it's essential, but you can't neglect the real world. Passing out business cards, networking, making connections, attending functions you'd probably rather skip in favor of uh being mythbusters, signing up to do a TED talk, uh, asking your clients to refer you to their friends, family, and colleagues if they have similar issues. Hell, asking other attorneys to refer clients to you if they think that you can help them. Volunteering and serving the legal community or the community at large, writing thought pieces relevant to your area of practice. Probably the biggest thing though is to be fearless. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be worried or keep on top of things. When I say be fearless, I mean be fully committed to doing what it takes to meet your goals. Don't try to be Superman or Wonder Woman. That's not sustainable. But once you've settled on your course of action and you've got your plans in place, say, okay, damn it, I'm gonna do the things and I'm going to own the results. Being fearless isn't easy. In 2001, my wife and I packed up our two kids, and she was expecting our third daughter at the time, and I left my cushy position with Fish and Neve in New York City, the most iconic patent law firm in the country for an uncertain future in South Florida. My colleagues couldn't believe that I'd leave the premier patent law firm in the United States and arguably the world to start my own law firm at the other end of the earth. Okay, so I got a lot of comments like, we'll hold on to your resume for when you want to come back. And I thought, like hell I will. I looked confident and like I had a plan. And I did. Sort of, but driving out of New York City for the last time with the twin towers in my rear view, I was terrified. My stomach was churning in fear that I was going to let everyone down that's counting on me, and that my dream of being an attorney that worked with inventors instead of other lawyers at corporations was doomed to go up in smoke. I imagined myself going back to Fish and Eve and sheepishly asking for my old job back. Just the thought had me clawing for my pack of Rolades. The next couple of years weren't easy. I'd crammed a family uh of five into my parents' house. My office was a spare bedroom, a laptop, and a cell phone. And yes, maybe a briefcase uh a few times. I've considered uh often throwing uh throwing up my hands and saying, screw it, I'm going back to New York, even if working for Fish and Eve was crushing my soul. My wife knows me well though, and she was my rock through that tough first couple of years, and it made it a little easier for me to be fearless and not ask myself painful existential questions like, why had I been such a damn fool to throw away the job security and prestige of big law to strike out on my own? And now, almost 25 years later, I'm proud of the results I got. I own them, just like I own my failures. Thankfully, I've had a lot fewer of those than wins, and that's made it a whole lot easier to take the L's when I had to. The point is, no matter what your goals are, you can achieve them. But uh know going in that there you're gonna have to play the long game. You're gonna have to plan, commit to your goals, and be disciplined about going after them without cutting and running into things and running when things get tough. You're gonna have some downturns, some setbacks, and some rough moments where you wonder what you're even doing. You're gonna wonder if all this marketing, Mambo Jumbo, uh, is actually just so much snake oil, and you're going to wonder if you're doing it right, or being an imposter, or setting unrealistic goals. I can't promise you the journey is going to be easy or smooth, or that you'll hit every single milestone and every goal you set. That would be irresponsible and disingenuous. But what I can promise you that it'll be worth it when you get where you're going and look back to where you started. Now, before I call it a day, I'd like to hear from you. What is your long game? How would you measure your goals? Have you done any of this already? And how did that work out for you? Is there something you do differently? And if so, what is it? The comments are open and I'm listening. Thank you for tuning in today. Don't forget, in the next episode, we'll be doing a deep dive into social media channels for law firms. So be sure not to miss it. And before you leave, it would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button, subscribe to my channel for more uh marketing tips that your law firm can use, and if you know a friend, a colleague, family member, any other attorney who you think would like this podcast, please be sure to share it with them. Once again, I'm John Risby, the law firm growth professor, and I'll see you next time. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name. I'm a law school professor. An engineer too. I think math is fun and at If the patent office says your idea is not new, that's just red tape that will cut right through. So when a new idea pops into your brain, call the patent professor. That's my name.