That is some Bull. Shit.
The hacks I have for you today are gonna help you do something about it.
I believe the key reasons for that pay gap are a lack of continuing business education, mentorship, and good quality role models.
That’s why I’ve put together my top 5 non-negotiable must-dos for female lawyers.
To address the biggest things that women in law struggle with, and give you solutions to do something about them.
Watch the video for simple tips to take your work, your life, and your career to the next level.
In this video, you’ll learn:
- Why you can have it all, but you can’t do it all
- How to set boundaries to maintain your positive energy
- Why you should preach your ambitions
- How to maximise your strengths
- How your inputs control your results
This is about supporting entrepreneurial women in law to be their best selves.
If any of these tips really resonate with you, and you want to figure out how to make them happen, then email me and let me know what you want help with.
I’ll come back with a plan to make it happen, to kick start your journey to getting ahead and growing your law firm today!
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READ THE FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
I was recently reading an article with some really sobering statistics around women and money and business. And I wanted to share some of these with you.
90% of the world’s millionaires are men, only 10% are women.
Only 2% of women-owned businesses earn more than $1 million per year in revenue.
90% of women-owned businesses earn $100,000 or less per year.
When I was reading these statistics, I started wondering about the legal industry, and women law firm owners competing with male law firm owners. I went away and did some research and this is what I found out…
So on average, male sole practitioners and small law firm owners earn $220,000 per year, and female sole practitioners and small law firm owners earn $136,000 per year. So that’s an $84,000 difference.
Now there are so many reasons why men earn more than women, and male law firm owners earn more than female law firm owners. But I believe that one of the key reasons is a lack of education, mentorship, and a lack of role models.
As someone who has smashed all of those statistics, has had a seven figure law firm and sold it, and who now runs a multiple seven-figure legal technology company, I really wanted to share with you what I believe are the most important and non-negotiable must-dos that female lawyers need to do to achieve the success that they crave. So here they are…
#1 – You can’t do everything
You can have it all, but you cannot do it all. This is all about getting some help.
I work with a lot of female law firm owners, and usually when we start working together, they are doing all the things. They don’t really have a team of people that they can rely on. And when I’m talking about help, I mean help in the business as well as help at home.
A great way to get started with this is to do a time study, and really look at where you’re spending your time, both at work and outside of work. Find out what you’re spending your time on, and see how much time is being taken up by low value tasks that you can get off your plate.
So, for example, if you were spending five hours doing the laundry every weekend, then that’s a pretty good sign that you should probably be getting some help with laundry. You could outsource it to a laundry service, or bring in a housekeeper to help you with that.
Because the weekend is time that you could be resting to prepare yourself for the week, or spending great time with your family, or getting prepared to go into your business the next week and start to make the moves you need to make to grow it.
#2 – Boost your boundaries
For many of us as women, we’ve been taught to put everybody else’s needs before our own. And often as a result, we really struggle to set good boundaries with people.
Because of that, often there’s a lot of behaviour from other people in our lives that really impacts us and robs us of time and energy. So setting some boundaries is really important.
This is with everybody. This is setting boundaries with your children, setting boundaries with your partner or spouse, with family, with clients, and with friends.
A couple of examples for you:
Clients often think that they can contact you anytime they like. So setting some boundaries around when you actually will be available to speak with them is really good.
I did this not long after I had my first child. I was really worried about setting boundaries with my clients around when they could talk to me and when they couldn’t. I thought that I would lose them as clients, because I thought that they just would expect that I would always be available for them.
So I was really nervous about telling them that I was only available to talk to them between certain hours on these days. But when I did tell them they were all very supportive and they said, “Good for you.” They all really respected those boundaries.
So when you deliver the news that you’re not going to be available day and night, it might not be the epic blow out that you’re expecting it to be. So that can be a really good one.
Another one that I had recently; I was in a three-hour board meeting and my husband was texting me to ask me where my son’s yellow swimming cap was. They had a swimming lesson and he couldn’t find the yellow swimming cap.
That was a really good chance for me to have a good conversation with my husband about boundaries and how, when I’m at work and you can’t find something like that, especially when you can easily buy another one when you get to the swimming pool, it’s just not something that you can text me about during my work hours.
Another one that can be really, really beneficial is setting boundaries with friends and family members around conversations and what you will talk about. You don’t want a whole lot of people who whinge about things, and their partners, and their lives, being part of your life. That is just negative energy that will drain you.
So setting some boundaries with people around what you’re willing to talk with them about and what you’re not is also a really powerful boundary to set.
#3 – Be honest about what you want
So what do you want? What do you actually want?
Have you ever asked yourself that question? And if you have, can you answer it?
Often I find that female lawyers are so busy serving clients, looking after their families, doing all the things, that they just don’t even give themselves the mind space to actually think what it is that they really, really, really want. And so if you can’t answer that question, then you are not alone.
With all the women lawyers that I work with, more often than not, when I first ask them that question and get them to visualize what it is that they actually want, they really struggle with that.
Being really honest about what you want is super important because I think that a lot of women lawyers are a lot more ambitious than they’re willing to admit.
But it’s that ambition and those goals that will help drive you and help keep you on track. They will help you through the ups and downs and the journey that you’re going on to grow your law firm.
#4 – Work your strengths
You may have heard me talk about this before – it’s one of my old-time faves.
Working to your strengths is all about knowing about what you’re naturally strong at and making sure that you do that as often as possible. We’re talking ideally at least 80% of the time.
This is not about what you’re skilled at; what you learned at university, or what you’ve learned on the job. This is about the strengths that you were born with, the things that you’re inherently amazing at.
Often people don’t know what those things are. So if you don’t know what they are, that’s fine. You can go and find out.
The way to find out is by doing some sort of a personality test or strength test. There’s StrengthsFinders, there’s DISC, there’s Kolbe, there’s a free one available at 16personalities.com. Start to learn more about who you are and what it is that you are amazing at, so that you can do more of it.
As you begin to do that, it’ll increase your happiness levels. You can begin to start shifting all the other stuff off your plate, to the people who you are hiring – because remember, step one was all about hiring help.
So as you’re bringing on more people, instead of doing all the things that are outside of your strengths and being miserable doing them, you can start to shift them off your plate to those people, who are amazing at those things.
#5 – Improve your inputs
Up until about a year ago, I was very focused on outputs. Things like results, achieving goals around revenue, generating a number of leads per month, and achieving a certain profit figure. And whenever I’ve worked with business coaches over the years, they’ve always been very output-focused as well.
So we’ve set big goals and it’s been all about working towards those goals. But what I’ve learned over the last year is all about focusing on inputs rather than outputs.
It’s very important to have great, big, amazing goals – absolutely. But it’s also very important to focus on the small things that you do every day that accumulate and help you to actually achieve the outputs or the goals that you’ve set for yourself.
So for example, some of the inputs in your business might be around your hiring process. You can look at your hiring process for your law firm and at all the different little parts and how you can improve each part, bit by bit.
Overall, these small changes that you can make on a consistent basis can really, really improve your law firm because it will really improve your hiring process. And as a result, you’ll be able to bring on way more amazing people.
So instead of focusing on hiring three more people, it’s about focusing on the hiring process and all the little inputs that go into that and improving those consistently over time.
Another example is around your marketing funnel. You’ll probably have some sort of an online marketing funnel at your law firm. So it’s about breaking that into bits and looking at the different bits and really working on improving them consistently over time to really improve the inputs.
You can also really improve the inputs when it comes to your personal life and your health and wellbeing. Think about inputs like, what sort of food you’re putting into your body. What sort of exercise you’re doing every day. How you’re starting every day. What your morning routine is, and what your evening is like. How you end each day to set yourself up to have a great day the next day.
These are all little inputs that if you do them well on a consistent basis, it means that you’re going to greatly increase your chances of achieving the big goals that you’ve set for yourself.
If there’s anything these past months have shown us is that the time to make lasting impactful change in the legal industry is right now. So I want to challenge you to shake things up and create change today.
If you’re interested in scaling a law firm, or building, designing and selling online legal solutions and learning about how to do the marketing around that, then there’s plenty more for you to discover over in my Savvy Lawyers Facebook group.
