Transcript

Davina Frederick: All that hard work ethic is the thing that they think is going to get them to a million dollars and it is not. The thing that gets you to a million dollars is to start learning how to leverage your resources.

Voiceover: You’re listening to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas. Now, here’s your host, attorney Holly Draper.

Holly Draper: Today I’m so excited to welcome Davina Frederick to the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast. Davina is a Florida licensed attorney, law firm growth strategist and business coach for women law firm owners. She’s the founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a company that helps women law firm owners scale their law firm business to and through $1 million in gross annual revenue without burning themselves out in the process.

Davina is the author of two books on law firm marketing and management, and she’s also the host of the number one podcast for women in law in the US, the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. She also happens to be my business coach. So I’m very glad to have you join me today.

Davina: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Holly, I’m really excited to be here.

Holly: So and you know, yes, you are the wealthy woman lawyer coach, but for all the men out there listening, don’t leave us because this information will be equally applicable to you. So why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background?

Davina: Yeah, so I, before I became an attorney, I had a 15 year career in professional services marketing. And then I had an opportunity in my late 30s, to go to law school. And so I became a lawyer in my early 40s. And I went to law school with the intention of opening my own law practice right out of law school, which is what I did. I probably would not advise people in their 20s to do that.

But I felt like, well, you know, I’ve got business experience, I can do this. And I could, with regards to marketing, but everything else, the operations of the business, I had to learn the hard way. But I grew my law firm, really successfully, very quickly. I brought in a partner, we began to hire a team and set up systems and it was going really well. And then I had some personal things happen in my life that sort of changed the trajectory of my life.

And I walked away from that law firm business. And I wound up eventually starting a second law firm that was virtual. And it was more of a lifestyle law firm business. And about that time, I had gotten introduced to the coaching world through another attorney colleague of mine, and I fell in love with it. And I knew that all that I had learned in growing my law firm that I wish somebody had taught me back in 2007, what I teach people today.

Because it would have made it so much easier for me. And I would not have felt so burned out and so stressed out so quickly in my business, that I didn’t have the capacity to deal with other things in my life, because I was so burned out and stressed out. Mentally fatigued from, and physically fatigued from, running my law firm. So I decided that I would create Wealthy Woman Lawyer.

At the time, it had a different name. I rebranded a few years ago, and really help other business owners, in particular women law firm owners not have to go through what I had to go through. So they can scale their business a lot more quickly. And really make the kind of money that they need to fund the sort of lifestyle that they want. That they tell me they want over and over again, right. The traveling internationally, the time off with the kids, all of that kind of stuff.

Holly: You know, I always see in these various Facebook groups where you no law firm owners or people who aspire to be law firm owners ask questions along the lines of what’s the best way I can spend my marketing dollars, and I without fail will always go in and respond on those by hiring a coach. That’s really what I did. And I started my firm in 2008. But I didn’t hire you until 2020, at the very tail end of 2020.

And I wish that I had hired a coach way back at the beginning because it would have probably streamlined that learning curve significantly. Not probably. It definitely would have streamlined that learning curve significantly. So you know, any young lawyers or seasoned lawyers who are considering starting their own practice, that is my number one piece of advice for that is, it is well worth the money to hire a coach.

Davina: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. And I feel the same way. I wish I had learned about coaches long before I did because it would have saved me so much time and money. I would have scaled a lot more quickly and not wasted so much time and you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the thing, is that when I started out, I didn’t know what was available to me. And there weren’t nearly as many resources. In our defense, Holly, there weren’t really as many resources back in 2007 and 2008.

Because think about it. Social media was, Facebook. I think I joined Facebook in 2007. I think you did too if I looked at your date, right. And Instagram wasn’t even born yet. You know, all of these tech tools that were available to let the world know about you, they weren’t around. And also a lot of the systems tools have for lawyers have really evolved over the last few years.

So before smaller firms were kind of locked out of resources for coaching and resources for technology, because they were cost prohibitive. And now with social media being what it is, and so many people, being able to share their story and come into the world and say, and share the resources, there’s a lot more availability for people now, to get that help a lot sooner and not have to try to figure it out the hard way.

So I really agree with you on that. I encourage people to, you know, find somebody who’s already been there and done that and quit spinning your wheels, trying to figure it out yourself. You’re smart enough. But do you really want to waste 10 years doing that when you can making bank.

Holly: So talk to us a little bit about the different types of services you offer as a coach.

Davina: So there’s a couple different ways to work with me. Basically, as you mentioned in the intro, my goal is to help women law firm owners, and I know you, we talked about men, there are things in here that will be applicable to men. It’s not that I don’t like men, I have had private clients who are male. But when it comes to marketing messaging, the more dialed in and niche you are, the more you’re going to be heard by your audience.

So I developed Wealthy Woman Lawyer with the idea that I would really laser focus on marketing to women law firm owners, because I find women law firm owners’ needs are a little bit different. We don’t have decades and decades and decades of networks in the legal industry, which has been traditionally male. And nor do we have, nor does the traditional business model for law firms work for women.

So I was seeing more and more women coming into the marketplace, starting their own firms, because they tried big law, they tried working at other law firms. And it did not work for the life that they needed as the primary caregivers of their children as well as a primary breadwinner. So I polled my audience and I asked them, what is it that you, why did you start your practice? And most of them said, time freedom and flexibility.

And that is something that women require that is different from what most men require. Now, the world is changing. And we’re seeing more of just parents in general needing this and wanting this, but women have sort of led the way on that. So I focus on working with women law firm owners, and I help them scale their law firm businesses. So really working with that solo attorney who’s trying to do everything herself.

Maybe has one or two people working for her. But she’s really grinding, she can’t be away from the firm, without worrying about everything falling apart while she’s gone. And say, let’s set up a business model that allows you to pull yourself out of the day to day operations, if that’s what you want to do. You can still be a lawyer if you want.

But it sets up a mechanism that provides support. So it’s not one individual. It’s a team of people, led by one CEO thinker, right. A lawyer who thinks like a CEO, to grow this law firm. And I set it at the million dollar mark, because most solo attorneys aren’t making seven figures. They’re making six figures in gross annual revenue. And what we want to do is help them climb that six figure ladder faster and get over that first million dollar hump.

I do have some clients who are in the multiple millions. But generally I helped get them there. They don’t come to me, you know, I’m making 5 million and hire me. My sweet spot is really, I really want to help those solo women lawyers, maybe maybe a couple of partners, get over that seven figure and learn how to make multiple, seven figures. And there’s a couple of ways to do that.

One is I realized that I had basically three different stages in growing, in scaling to a million dollars. There are those who are just starting out, and they want to get off on the right foot. And maybe they don’t even know they have a few clients. But they don’t know how to attract better clients. Maybe they don’t like some of the clients they’re working with. So they want to get better clients so they can grow faster.

They may want to get off on the right foot, start hiring early. I have one client who started out her law firm, hired me immediately, and started hiring attorneys pretty quickly after we met and has already grown a significant law firm business. But that first stage, that zero to a quarter million dollars, is where you’re really kind of trying to figure it out, right?

Then you’re that quarter million to five and you’re like okay, it’s me. It’s a couple paralegals or legal assistant and we’re grinding and I’m working to my max to get up to that half million dollar mark. And that person really needs help with setting up systems. They really need help with hiring team but they don’t know it. Because what they’re doing, or they may know it, and not know how to do it.

And what they’re doing is the thing that got them here, the hard work, the hard work it took to go to school, then to take the LSAT, then to go to law school, then to pass the bar, all that hard work ethic is the thing that they think is going to get them to a million dollars, and it is not. The thing that gets you to a million dollars is to start learning how to leverage your resources.

So in that spot, they’re trying to figure that out. And then there are ones who are, they’ve hit the half million dollar or more mark, mostly have kind of the mid to high six figure. And they hire me because they want to get over that elusive million dollars. They’ve been hitting that high six figures for a few years. And they’re like, what is it going to take to get me over the million and make me a seven figure annual earner in my business.

And those individuals I work with privately, because it’s a more intense sort of experience, they’re getting a lot more access to me. I work as a business advisor, fractional, I’m a fractional at multiple things. So I’m really helping them as a business advisor. That’s private coaching. For those who are climbing up from this anywhere from the start, scaling that six figure ladder to that sort of half million dollar mark, I have a program called the Wealthy Woman Lawyer League.

And I created it, because I wanted to put together the framework or the roadmap that I teach my private clients, but I teach my private clients in a very custom way around what their particular needs are at the time. I wanted to take that framework and put it in a training in a presentation that where people could access it depending on where they are in their business.

And then also get weekly coaching from me in a group coaching and mastermind where other women lawyers are there to help provide that community for them. So they can have people who are sharing that journey with them. So those are sort of the two different, I hate to use the coaching term, containers.

But those are the two different containers for working with me is that Wealthy Woman Lawyer League, which is where kind of the majority of my clients are, and then I take on a certain number of private clients. Obviously, that’s a smaller amount, because it’s me doing, you’re getting the access to me. So those are the two different sort of ways that I work with people.

Holly: So today we’re going to talk about one very important aspect of running a successful law firm. And that is systems. I know you mentioned systems a couple of times already. Tell us for those that don’t know, in the context of a law firm, what are systems?

Davina: Right. So I think, so a system is something that you can do repeatedly. And you can have different people do it and have similar or same outcomes. So we often think of mechanical systems, so a car engine or when you’re manufacturing something, there’s a manufacturing line, and things are done the same way and you can plug people in and out.

And it works in that sort of systematic way. So that people can get that as a visual image. It’s really about taking that and applying it to law firms. And what often happens is when I mentioned the word system, or whenever anybody mentions word system. A lawyer says to me, I really need to have better systems. They don’t really know what they’re asking for.

What they think about, because what they hear out there is people talking about systems. And so often they think case management system, which is a software product an automation tool that can help them. And it’s wonderful that we have these tools out here now, great case management systems.

But a case management system helps you with only one of the essential seven law firm systems that you require to run a profitable sustainable law firm business. A case management system is a software tool that is applied to a system, right. So there are seven essential systems. I’ve written a book you and I’ve talked about this. I’ll show the book for those who are watching the video. See it behind me.

There’s a book Seven Essential, there you go, Law Firm Systems That Every Law Firm Needs to Scale Their Law Firm Business. The case management part tool that’s applied is applied to the parts of the system, called fulfillment, which is where we are actually fulfilling the legal services we agreed to fulfill. So case management as we get the case, we’re going to use our tool to run it through and do all the things that we need to do to advance our client’s case.

Now, some of these companies have been coming out in the last few years with other additional modules, like marketing modules for their case management system which helps you with the marketing system aspect. But again, these are tools and automation tools, they are not the actual system itself.

Holly: So you mentioned that there are seven systems that a law firm needs. Let’s go through those. So we’ll start with, I know in your book you break it down between external systems and internal systems. What does that mean?

Davina: Okay, so an external system. The reason I called it an external system is that the external systems are, I like to think of it as client facing systems, right? So client facing systems, there are four external systems. The first one is how the client first sees us and learns about us. That’s our marketing system, our marketing client attraction, marketing system, right.

So we have to get out there and get more visible. We may be using social media to do it, we may be giving in person talks to do it, we may be doing a podcast together, but we’re letting people learn about us through a systematic approach of bringing people into our world, right. So that would be a client attraction system.

And then the next system is when we bring them in, we’re going to want to sell and convert them, right. So that client attraction and conversion system is what we’re talking about here. So you’re bringing them in, and you’re converting them from prospects into clients. Okay. Then next, we have the onboarding system. The onboarding system is where we take and they’ve now agreed that they’re going to work with us.

Now we need a system to onboard them. That onboarding is going to be things like getting the contract out to them, getting payment, very important thing, getting payment, all those kinds of things. Then the next system is service and fulfillment system. That’s where we fulfill the promise that we made to be their lawyer and help them solve their legal problem.

And then there’s the service aspect of that, which is management of the client experience, as they are going through that fulfillment process with us. So really, really making sure they’re a satisfied client through that process. Not just doing the work and going well, you know, I did the work, you should be happy. It’s really about managing that experience. And then the last external system is the offboarding and remarketing system.

So that is how do we offboard them in a way that gets them to leave us reviews, gets into refer business to us. And if we offer the kind of legal services that people can come back to us for some other ancillary service, we want to make sure we’re remarketing to them, or at least even remarketing to them for purposes of referral. So those are the basic four external systems. The internal systems, there are three.

And any professional service business has this, these three internal systems. They are people management, so we have to have systems for hiring, for training, for termination, for reviews, all the things that we need for our people management. For management, how to grow managers within our company, all of that. The second one is technology management. Technology management is really how to make decisions about technology.

What tools am I going to use? How am I going to make those decisions, right. Because what I often see is I see law firm owners go on social media, they are scrolling, they’re tired, they’re drinking their glass of wine at night, they’re scrolling, and they see another attorney say I use this great tool, it’s changed my life. And they go, I gotta have it. And they don’t even know if they need it.

And most likely, in most cases, I find this to be the case, they already have a tool that they’ve paid 1000s of dollars for that will do the thing that this person is talking about is being done by this other tool. And they aren’t trained on it, don’t even know what they have, right. So technology is really about that, how we pick the right tools and train our people on the tools and all that.

Then the last one is the financial management system. It is not unusual for law firm owners to come to me and say, I haven’t even done my taxes in the last couple of years, or I don’t even use a software or I don’t have a bookkeeper. Or even worse, not even worse, but along the line of my bookkeeper handles all of that I don’t know anything about my numbers. They handle that I’ll have to ask them.

Well, it’s not your bookkeeper’s job to know your numbers and you not know your numbers. You as the CEO need to know your numbers, to know what you should be tracking and how to run your business. It is the GPS for running your business, your financials. And so really teaching and helping people sort of understand what they need to be, what they need to understand, to make CEO level decisions based on their financials and their goals.

Holly: So for a small law firm owner who really you know, a solo or somebody who has maybe one support staff or a paralegal or something along those lines, looking at these seven systems as a whole can be very overwhelming. So what advice do you have for those people to get started?

Davina: Well, the first piece of advice I would have is join the League because what I do is I actually lay it out for you in a very systematic way. But kind of the broad overall picture is, if you’re starting out, you have to always look at what is my number one problem. What is the number one thing that is holding me back in my business right now to the next level, right.

So if you don’t have enough clients coming in, if you haven’t got your fees set at a way that it actually makes you profitable, right? It brings in cash flow for you to make other investments. You don’t need a team. You haven’t got enough business coming in the door, to be able to fund and pay for that team unless you have outside capital, right. But most solos I talked to are bootstrapping.

So you don’t need to worry about hiring right now. Until you make sure you’re getting good clients coming in and getting enough clients in. Then as you start getting that ball rolling, it doesn’t take very many to get you where a point where you need to start hiring some help. Then you need to start hiring an assistant or a paralegal or somebody who’s going to provide some support for you so you can continue building on that momentum.

So if you don’t have good clients, people aren’t paying you enough, you’re too busy trying to do low bono, pro bono work because you think that’s going to get you business, you need to fix your marketing efforts. And you need to figure out, you need to really do some work on who your ideal client is, and how they can help you. I have another book, which is Law Firm Marketing in the Virtual Age.

Get that book, it’s super cheap. And that will help you figure out who your clients are and who you need to be targeting with your marketing message. It doesn’t mean that you can’t serve clients that don’t fit your ideal client profile, it just means that we’re gonna figure out who our ideal client is, who’s the person we want to work with. And we’re going to set up a system to attract more of those clients.

So that’s where I’d start, if you didn’t have good clients. I find most lawyers in this day and age are getting a lot of clients quickly. Because there’s such a need for legal services at all levels. Whether or not they’re getting good clients or clients who pay them, that’s something where they need to do the work.

But if they are, and they’re now at a point where they’re, you know, super busy, and they’re constantly up and at work, and they feel like oh my god, I never have any time to rest. And I don’t have time to market because I’m so busy doing all the work. That’s where you need to start looking at expanding your capacity, as a firm, as a law firm. So that’s where you need to start thinking about automating, setting up systems and automating and hiring people.

And this is what I call leveraging your resources. So the first part of my framework is attract better clients, then we’re going to leverage our resources. Leveraging our resources mean, we’re going to learn how, instead of us being the doer of all things, we are going to learn how to cultivate and manage and lead a team of people to help us dial in our systems, and automate where we can automate those systems.

And that really, the secret really, the secret sauce, if you’re taking notes, take notes now is not working harder. It is learning how to when people say work smarter, what they mean is leverage your resources. Leveraging capital, people, automation, systems. Any leverage points you can find in your business, that’s what you want to do.

Holly: So one of the tips that I got from coaching related to systems, and you know, how do you get started with those, how do you set those up, you had recommended a book to me called Systemology, which I would highly recommend for anybody who is trying to get going with systems.

And one of the things discussed in that book, and that you discussed as well is creating videos of yourself doing whatever the task is that you’re trying to replicate or teach someone else to do. A good example of where I used that, when I was first starting creating systems was billing. I spent a lot of time doing bills. And I’m sure a lot of solo and small firm owners are in the same position.

And so I needed to teach a person on my support staff to do that. But I wanted to do it in such a way so that if she left or if she was out sick, or on vacation, somebody else could jump in and pick up that job. And I didn’t have to be the one to go back and to do it. So I got on Zoom, I pushed the record button, and I talked my way through sending out bills at the end of the week.

And then I have a virtual assistant who does, you know, a variety of administrative type tasks for me, and I would send her the video and she would type it out into a checklist or you know, just writing out the steps as I had discussed them. And then we have our systems folder on our drive that has both the video and the written out instructions so that if somebody doesn’t understand they can go watch the video.

Or if they are short on time they can read it. And then you slowly start, you know each time you have another thing you want to teach someone, do that process. And then you’re slowly building up your library of systems.

Davina: Yeah, I actually teach this very methodology among other things in the course that’s a companion to this book. And it is a law firm system solution, and I teach exactly how to go through each of the systems that I’ve shared with you of the seven systems, I teach you exactly how to go in and set them up from start to finish. And I teach the methodology for doing that in that course.

So if anybody wants, I’ll share the link for that course in the show notes. But it is a companion with the book, because in the book, I talk about all the different systems. And I get into some detail. But in the course, I go deeper into all those little tips and tricks and tactics, like what you just shared.

Holly: And people don’t need to get overwhelmed and feel like they have to get this all done immediately at one time. I mean, I’ve been working on this now for what, two and a half years, and I still have systems that need to be created. I’m still working on doing new, you know, intake or whatever.

Davina: I think it’s an evolution, I think the mistake that people make well, high achieving women, this is what we do, we go, oh, I need to create systems. This is a project that needs to go on my to do list, and I need to do it all by next week. And what you don’t realize is that you are not, see where you are Holly in your business, you have evolved over the years to be this person.

So you’re no longer the person you were when you started your firm. And the way that you evolved to do that is you learned a little something, you took action. Learned a little something, you took action. And even since we’ve worked together there’s been an evolution. You learn something, you took action, and you’re like, oh, and then there’s a light bulb moment, and it changes the way you think.

So what happens when people feel overwhelmed is it’s one of two things. One is there’s a knowledge gap. So I feel overwhelmed, because I don’t know exactly what to do and how to do it, which we can solve as Holly and I’ve just shared some great resources. And/or, we’re going too fast. That’s the other thing, if you feel that panic and overwhelm it means I’m going too fast, I need to slow down.

And I need to not worry about what other people are doing. And I need to think for myself, what is my number one problem that needs to be solved right now. So if right now, your number one problem is you need to hire people, don’t worry so much about some of your systems, because right now you don’t have a team to operate them. Right.

And if you want to, you know, stay single solo, and then you might turn to automation to solve some of those problems. But if you want to be able to leave your business, and not have the business fall apart while you’re out, then you really need a team. And that team, one of the things that we often think is we think to ourselves, well, I’ve actually had women lawyers tell me this, well, I need to clean up this mess before I hire another attorney in here.

And I’m like, no, no, you’re gonna hire another attorney, and they’re gonna help you clean up this mess. They’re gonna free up your capacity so you can focus on cleaning up this mess, or they’re gonna bring their brain to the operation and help you figure some things out, right. So we often think we have to do it, mark it off the checklist and go. Growing a business is an evolution, it is never going to be finished.

And it’s really hard for those of us who love lists and love checking things off lists to accept the reality that a business is never finished, it’s never cooked fully. Because as it grows, it means that the business changes. As your business grows, you change and what you want changes, and how you view the world changes and how you view your business changes.

So to deal with overwhelm, you really have to just get granular and go back to it and say what is the number one problem. Yeah I got all these things I can be doing, but what is the one thing that’s going to move my ball closer to the goal, right. And so when we started working together in your business, it was marketing.

You had a lot of attorneys working for you. They didn’t have much infrastructure under them. There were no paralegals. There was a legal assistant. And you had a great business model that had done well for you at that point. But you really wanted to scale and make a huge leap. Well, so what you needed at that time, your number one problem was, I need to be more visible.

So I need more folks to know about our law firm, and us as a law firm, not just me as Holly, but the Draper Firm. So I need to get the name out there. So we spent a lot of time working on your marketing systems and the things you were doing to get more visible and attract more clients. That was where you were at that point.

Since then, you’ve had some people challenges that have caused you to oh, I need to address this. Okay, we address that. And then oh, I need to do this. And so right now your focus is on fine tuning your systems. You already have systems because you obviously have a functional business that’s making a lot of money.

But now you’re wanting to fine tune some of those systems, maybe automate some of those in places they’re not automated and doing some tweaking. That’s not where I recommend that people start if they don’t have some of these other things in place, right. So it’s really about, it’s really about that sort of checking in with yourself.

The other thing I would say is this, this is really the very first step of my framework. And that is cultivating a wealthy woman lawyer mindset. Because you have to have the difference between your mindset and say, somebody else’s mindset is you are open. You are open and willing to say, hey, there’s something I don’t know.

And maybe I need to hire somebody to guide me and help me know, figure out what I don’t know, right? Even though you knew a lot, and you’ve already done a lot, right? There is a mindset, that if you just start with shifting your mindset a little bit and say, I want to be a little more open to resources that are available to me, that I may not even be aware of right now.

I know for me, that’s what I do. I will often go back to that as they I want to be open. I’ll ask the universe to help me be more open to new ideas, new people, new ways of doing things that I have never even considered and would not be able to consider. I think that’s a great way to start with help you with overwhelm as well.

It’s like, I may not know the answer, but I know that the answers exist, I wouldn’t have been available even ask the question. And I know I look around me, and I see all these other people have done this. If they’ve done this, I could do it too. I remember, when I was a new attorney, I used to go sit in the back of the courtroom. And I would watch lawyers going in front of my judge, I was an intern for a judge.

And I’d watch lawyers. And I would think to myself, if they can do that, I can do it. Some of them are great. And some of them are not so great. And I was like, if they can do it, I can do it. You know, I can figure this out. And that was a huge relief for me to be able to see people and say, oh, well, you know, not everybody’s showing up like they did, you know, do on these legal shows like Ally McBeal at the time, way back in the day.

Or, you know, LA Law or whatever legal show there is out now. You know, we were envisioning that attorneys show up in suits, with no boxes, and just one yellow pad. And you know, and that’s what you did. And you just gave closing arguments off of your heart. And, you know, we didn’t think about the reality of being a lawyer. Well, it’s very much like running a business, the reality of running a business is different than what, what people often have in their mind.

So when they get into it, they go, oh, my God, I didn’t expect this reality. And so first, take a couple of deep breaths and then say, okay, what is it? You know, I know that there is somebody out there who’s got the answer to this question. So I’m going to be open to hearing that and be open to those opportunities.

Voiceover: This episode of the Texas Family Law Insiders podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm, providing family law litigation in Collin, Denton and Dallas counties and appeals across Texas. The Draper Firm has represented parents in cases before multiple courts of appeals and prevailed in the Texas Supreme Court in one of the biggest parental rights cases in Texas history. For more information, visit draperfirm.com, or call 469-715-6801.

Holly: When I was debating on hiring a coach, which was a relatively lengthy process of internal debates, you know, my biggest fear was that there was going to be this cookie cutter, if you want to build a successful law firm, this is how you have to do it. And I was very determined that I did not want to be a traditional law firm model.

I didn’t want to be brick and mortar. I didn’t want to work a million hours a week. And, you know, that was one of the first things that I really learned once I started working with you was that it was about finding what was going to build a great business for me and the type of business that I wanted.

You know, marketing was my biggest concern at the time, because I felt like you know, I’ve got plenty of money to spend on marketing, but I don’t have any idea what to do with it. I don’t want to waste it. You know, way back in 2008 when I started my firm, I wasted way too much money on, you know, ads in local magazines or whatever, that never panned out.

So the podcast is actually something that we came up with in the early days of our coaching. Never in a million years, would I have ever come up with that idea on my own. And now I just looked up as of this month, I’m the number six rated family law podcast in the world according to somebody who rates them.

Davina: Congratulations!

Holly: And we just checked yesterday, I think we had about 17,500 views or downloads. So it’s been a crazy evolution from where I started to where I am now.

Davina: And you also get, you also get recognized. I know when you, it’s like being a little bit internet famous when you go to conferences and stuff, people are coming up to you, I love your podcast. And I don’t recommend that as a marketing tool for everyone. Because it’s a lot of it depends on where you are, what your goals are, and all that kind of stuff.

So I do, you know, we discussed many things, and you’ve implemented many of them. And some are, it really matters about your practice area, it matters about your personality, it matters about your goals. All those things matter in deciding your tactical things you’re going to do. But I know what you mean about taking a while to think about hiring a coach, because a lot of people, you know, there’s a lot of information out there.

But in your particular case, one of the things that you brought up, when our first conversation is, I don’t want somebody telling me I have to do things a certain way. Because I think this works. I like what I’m doing. And you have a fully remote law firm all of your team, they’re locally remote, but they’re all remote.

So you don’t have the brick and mortar office. And one of the very smart things that you did is you hired attorneys first, which I cannot stress how important it is to hire other lawyers. And seems to be the big, big, big stumbling block. And oftentimes a coach can help you just see what you cannot see for yourself.

My own coaches, people I’ve hired to coach me, will hold up a mirror sometimes and go, you teach this, but are you applying this thing to you? Because we all have our own blind spots. And so that’s really what a good coach will help you do is just say, what is your vision, and they may open your eyes to new ideas. And I know Holly’s tried some of the ideas. And some things worked really well.

And some things she goes, I don’t really like this. So the key is kind of being open to ideas, but also you are entitled to have your own vision. I had people tell me when I started out, when I went virtual with my first virtual firm was in 2011. And I had someone tell me, it was a more experienced lawyer who owned his own office building. And he said, oh, your clients are not going to like that.

That’s never going to work. Fast forward 2020, yeah, it sure does work. And it worked back then too, my clients loved it. I had clients all over the state. But his agenda was he wanted me to rent space in his office building, because he spent all this money on this office building, he had that big mortgage. And he wanted me to rent space in it and help offset his mortgage. And so he had a hidden agenda to the thing.

But I stuck with it and said, I’m going to try it my way. And I really encourage women to do that. Because there will be a lot of naysayers out there who will say that won’t work. And maybe they’re right. But try it and find out for yourself what you want to do and see if it does work. And you’ll learn very quickly. And if you learn a lesson, you learn a lesson and you apply it and you keep going.

Holly: So we don’t have time to deep dive into each of these seven areas. But I wanted to touch on a couple of them. Let’s switch over to the internal systems piece and start with hiring. That’s one of the systems that I found even as this I think this would apply as a solo trying to build up. And even as somebody like myself, who I’m still the one that handles hiring and firing and onboarding, and those sorts of things.

But by creating a system and having a checklist, every time I have to do that in the future, it’s so much easier. I don’t have to go look things up. I don’t have to, I don’t forget about things. So talk a little bit about what you think should be in an attorney’s hiring and onboarding system.

Davina: So again, this is something there’s a lot of detail here. So I’ve created a course around that. I have actually created a, in addition to the law firm system solution, and the million dollar law firm framework, I actually created a course specifically for hiring. And I did that because over the last few years that has been the number one challenge that most of my law firm owner clients have had is hiring.

And it still is going to be a challenge because there’s, somebody quoted a statistic to me, there’s like 1% unemployment in the legal field. So it is a challenge to hire, and some areas are harder to hire than others. However, one of the things that I think has really helped my clients be able to hire a little bit better is having a system.

So that if they have to, if they hire doesn’t work out, they have to hire again, they don’t have to start from scratch every time. It just kind of what you alluded to, is this idea of, you know, every time somebody leaves, I had to start from scratch. And so now that I’ve created a system, I have templates in place, I don’t have to do that. So it’s a little too much to get in here to the details of a hiring system.

But I will say that I’ll give you two or three sort of tips. One is that when you’re creating your job posting for your ad, we no longer live in the world of the early 2000s, or whatever, where you could put a job ad and put all these hoops for people to jump through, and send me a video of you standing on your head talking, telling me about elephants. And you know, so that you can get those, find out if they’re detail oriented or whatever.

What you really need to do is think of the ad as a little bit of a seduction. You want to attract, just like you want to attract clients, you want to track those ideal team members. So starting out with something that is kind of a catchy lead hook that will get them into, get them to read your ad, and then saying a little bit about why it’s such an awesome place to work outside of money. So what is it that is, what do you love about your firm? What do you love?

In Holly’s case, her firm, one of the things she loves about her firm is that everybody works from home or wherever they want to work. And they also don’t have to work these gut wrenching 2000 hours a year. You know, her billable hour number is a lot lower than that, because she wants people to have work life balance. That’s hugely attractive to people that she wants to be on her team.

So really dig deep into why people would want to work for you. What is it about the kind of work that you do, that you love and how your firm operates. And then you can get into asking, saying what you’re looking for in an employee. But I will tell you this, if you don’t spend a little more time trying to make that a little bit more of a lure to people, they’re going to skip it. And they’re going to go to the next one.

Because there’s plenty of opportunities available for people. We have a whole generation of people retiring, which is going to cause a big issue in our labor market. So if you want to hire people, you need to, you need to sell it. You need to sell it why your firm is awesome. And then worry about you know whether they’re a good fit.

You have the whole interview process to help figure out some of those questions. Don’t put it in your ad. The other thing is, I’m hearing a lot now as people are recommending putting the unemployment range. And I’m hearing the younger generation because I read a lot on this subject, talk about that they won’t even apply for an ad if it doesn’t have a salary range.

I’m old school, I’ve always believed that a salary negotiation is something that occurs based on the individual parties. Because you might have somebody really qualified, who applies for your job, and you want to pay them more, or you might have somebody who’s not quite what you were looking for.

But, you know, you think you can train them up, so you want to pay them less. But I am hearing that feedback. So that is something for you to consider whether or not I should put a range or put, you know, something that indicates the value of the position. So they don’t feel like they’re wasting their time by applying. So that is kind of the sort of detail that we go into, all the way down to, you know, your hiring system is not just placed in the ad.

The second tip I have for you is be proactive. You can’t just put your ad out there on Indeed or Zip Recruiter or god forbid Craigslist, some people say that. And expect, I’ve had lawyers tell me that I hired them off Craigslist. And just let that be enough. You really need to be more proactive with more direct outreach to your network.

Reach out to your network through LinkedIn. Reach out to your network through Facebook. I know Holly’s, one of Holly’s great ideas is she’s been active in Facebook groups since 2007. So a lot of people know her. So when she goes to hire, just like clients, you know, she’s hiring team members, she can go in there and say I’m hiring. And we’ll get good contacts that way. So really think about how you can be proactive in reaching out.

And then the other thing I would say is don’t get so caught up on all of the hiring pieces that you forget about, oh my god, what if I, so there is a process for interviewing that I go through and I talked about in the book and in the course. But one of the mistakes that I’ve seen multiple law firm owners make is not having an offer letter prepared when somebody and so they have to think about it.

I’ve got to think about it, I got to think about what I want to do, I got to think about it. And by the time they do that they lose that person that they wanted to hire because they’re so busy analyzing overthinking because they haven’t prepared ahead of time with the expectation they’re going to hire. And so preparing those offer templates, and maybe having one for lawyers and one for paralegals and one for other staff, that you could just change a few of the details because the basics are the same.

So that once you make a decision, you can think okay, what is the, what do I want to pay this person what offer do I want to make them. Here’s all of our benefits that are included. And I can just go ahead and get that out to them. So there’s a whole lot to the hiring system beyond just that ad that goes out. Right? And so I really encourage you to think through your whole system and how do you want it set up?

Especially if it’s something you have to do over and over again. One of the things that I recommend people do, so I guess this tip number four is, if you have a team already, involve your team in helping you through the interview process. I have a client out in the Seattle area, and she has finally been able to hire a good lawyer. She’s been through a couple and she has a really good right hand lawyer. And they needed a paralegal.

And my client was going to be gone on a couple of conferences back to back. And she was, you know, of course, thinking about this hiring and, and she has an office manager, but the office manager isn’t always that on the ball. And so I said, why don’t you get the new lawyer to pair up with the office manager, and let them hire this person. And you just let them go through it and then you meet the person.

And if you’re okay with it, you rubber stamp it and get them on board. So that’s what she did. She came back from her conferences, and they had two people, two different positions lined up. And her team was able to do that. So again, it’s depending on where you are, if you’re a solo, and you’re just building your team, you don’t have that.

But you might be able to have a friend or relative who has expertise in that area, or somebody who can help you with that process if you feel so overwhelmed by it. Hey, can you interview this person first, and give me a good sense whether you think they’re a good fit based on this criteria, and then they whittle down to one or two people. Really save you a lot of time.

Holly: So, we don’t have a ton of time left. But I wanted to dive in just a little bit on another one of the systems and that being the finance management system. I think a lot of law firm owners, and you could probably put me in that category, at least for a long time in the past, you know, for a lot of the years that I was doing this, you might know, you know, this is our gross, or this is our net, but you don’t really know the numbers beyond that. Can you talk about KPIs? What that means and what some KPIs are that law firm owners should be monitoring?

Davina: Sure. So KPIs for those who don’t know, are key performance indicators. And they’re simply metrics that provide information that let us know the health of our law firm business. There are key performance indicators in every one of these areas that we’ve discussed. So for instance, in marketing, there are key performance indicators that we track.

So I have an agency who runs ads for me, and so they’re gonna give me a cost per lead. That’s a key performance indicator that lets me know how much it’s costing me to acquire a lead for my business. That’s an example of what a key performance indicator is. So there are different ones that you want to track. I think I have a list of like 62 that I share in the League. But you don’t need to worry about all of those. I tell people, just like everything else, you don’t need to put the cart before the horse.

So you don’t need to worry so much about all the different things you can track because you can track so many things. You need to focus on your number one problem you’re trying to solve and what you need to be tracking to give you the data that you need to solve that problem.

So from a financial standpoint, the reason I talk about getting to and through a million dollars in gross annual revenue, that’s revenue that comes into the business, income and comes into the business before we spend any money. And people say, oh, well, why aren’t we talking about profits instead of revenue? Well, the reason why I talk about revenue, that is a key performance indicator.

I’m going to be looking at revenue, because that’s going to tell me how much money is coming in. And it’s going to give me a budget to work with. So I could spend a little bit more on marketing and get more clients in, or so I can hire that extra attorney that I need. If you’re just starting out in your business, and you’re not making $350,000 in revenue, then you’re probably not ready to hire another lawyer.

That’s kind of a baseline to hiring a lawyer. So that’s why we sort of look at that number is we look at how much total money is coming in. Because the more total money that’s coming in, the more money, the more resources we have for making investments in our business to grow it and scale it right. And so profit is another performance indicator. I am of the school like, you know, Gary Vee, who is a well known business coach.

What I want to do is go in and get market share. So when I’m starting a business, I want to go and I want to gain as much market share as I can in that business. So for me, I’m gonna grab people revenue, that’s what I’m looking for. The profit number doesn’t bother me as much. I’ll spend more on marketing, I’ll spend more to get more market share.

So my expenses are going to be a little bit higher as I scale. I’m going to hire people I’m going to spend on marketing, I won’t take home as much profit in those first few years. It’s only been you know, like when books like Profit First come out, which is a good book, by the way. And the concept is good, although I’ve made tweaks on it for myself.

This idea that I take profit immediately when a business, when I start a business, is really not traditionally how businesses grow. Businesses grow you expect for that first three to five years not to take a profit. The reason why is because extra money you’re getting, you’re putting that back into growing the business. So you’re maybe paying more for marketing and that kind of thing.

Another key performance indicator is looking at the percentage that you’re investing in marketing, for instance. That might be a key performance indicator. There are a lot of the cost to acquire a client might be one. Digging into when you start hiring lawyers, really understanding how that lawyer makes you money and looking at what metrics to track there.

In other words, what you’re charging for the hour, how long it takes to get a job done, what their hourly rate is, what the number of hours you’re requiring them to bill a year is. Even if you do flat fees, because the flat fee naysayers are always in here. Even if you do flat fees, you still need to understand your cost of delivering those services to your client, and make sure that you’re charging enough to give you a profit.

And oftentimes, the mistake I see with flat fee-ers is that they don’t charge enough because they haven’t done the math and the homework to figure that out. They just go with their gut or what they think the market says or some advice that they got from somebody whose business model is completely different from theirs.

So I’m not opposed to flat fees. But I do think that the mistake I often see that I help business owners turn around is they don’t really know, because they haven’t been tracking the data they need to make that assessment.

Holly: So we’re just about out of time. But one question I like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast is, if you could give one piece of advice to young lawyers, what would it be?

Davina: Young lawyers or young law firm owners? Because it might be different.

Holly: Well, you could do one of each.

Davina: All right. So I would say for young lawyers, well, both actually, law firm owners and lawyers. One of the things that I did, I wasn’t young, necessarily. I was a baby lawyer, but I was not young. But I did this in my career in marketing, and as a lawyer, and as a coach is I really sought out mentors. I sought out people who had more experience than me, who could advise me.

I used to joke about when I became a lawyer, I would go to my different mentors, I’m not going to have to turn in my bar card if you don’t help me, because I’m just so over my head here, you know. Cultivate those mentor relationships so that you have people who can help you. Lawyers often will cultivate, I encourage you to cultivate subject matter mentors.

So people who are lawyers who practice in your same area who are willing to mentor you. And it doesn’t have to be a formal mentorship, it can just be somebody you call when you have something that comes up. And I have found the legal community, at least in Florida, where I am, to be super supportive, helping young lawyers. And not everybody is but there are a lot of people who are.

The other thing is if you are wanting to start and grow your own law firm business, same thing. You need, don’t try to be a lone ranger and do it yourself. Yes, you can figure it out if you had enough time. But you are only hurting yourself if you continue to go down that path because you can get to where you want to get a lot faster.

So there’s an opportunity cost to trying to figure everything out yourself. And I know because I did it. So I did the wrong thing. And so I know the opportunity cost to that. So that would be what I would say is really cultivate, seek out people who are willing to mentor you or hire a coach. I’m very much a firm believer in skin in the game. I had mentors, but I never asked too much of them because I was not paying them.

So anytime that I really want to go deep on something, I hire people to help me. I hire agencies, I hire coaches, I hire all kinds of business advisors and experts to advise me because I know if they’ve got skin in the game, they’re going to be more serious about my business. So that’s my advice.

Holly: So where can, you’ve mentioned a couple times that you have a couple of books and you have courses and you do private coaching. Where can our listeners go to find those resources and to learn more about you?

Davina: So I will provide you some links that you can put in the show notes. wealthywomanlawyer.com is my website. On there on the shop, you can go there to the shop, you can click and you can buy one of my books or both of my books if you want. And also you can join, I have a Facebook group called Wealthy Woman Lawyer Facebook group.

You can join that. It’s a free group and you can come in there and you can see a lot of the resources that are available to you and connect with other people. And follow me on Instagram at Wealthy Woman Lawyer. For the Wealthy Woman Lawyer League.

We are coming up, I don’t know when this is going to publish but in June we are running a promotion for the Wealthy Woman Lawyer League. So if it’s something you’ve been considering, then you might want to check that out come June. So you want to get on my email list. You go to my website, you can sign up for my email list.

And when you do you get a free report that says what wealthy women lawyers know that you don’t. What wealthy women law firm owners know that you don’t. You can get that free report. You’ll be on my list. And you’ll be able to hear all about our enrollment come June in the League, if that’s something that you think would help you.

Holly: All right. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for joining me today. And hopefully, there’s a little bit of a deviation from our normal family law topics, but I think a lot of our listeners will benefit and maybe we’ll pick up some new ones along the way as a result.