But here’s a truth bomb: automation doesn’t always mean technology – it just means you don’t have to do it. #facts
Here are some more facts:
- You only have so much time in any given day.
- You’ve got 40 hours a week to work, and time outside that should be spent with loved ones, taking care of yourself, enjoying hobbies, and recuperating so you can stay on top of your game.
- If you work a job that caps your income based on the hours you work, then you’ve set a limit on the freedom, impact and wealth you can build.
But, if you hire creative, committed people to support your vision for your law firm and serve your clients alongside you, there’s really no limit to what you can achieve. It’s important to duplicate yourself in your firm, and having the right team is one of the keys to scaling your firm.
The Right People Help You Grow – Quickly
While I’m revealing things… here’s something I keep pretty hush-hush. When Legal Beagle launched it wasn’t automated. Clients would come to the website, answer some questions and request a quote. I was at the other end, manually doing those quotes and going through the engagement process with new clients. Then we’d manually carry out the conveyancing service like most lawyers still do today.
If a traditional lawyer had looked at my law firm as it was, they probably would have said, “Claudia you can’t afford to hire anyone”. Especially a “non-fee earner” – OMG. But I knew I couldn’t afford not to.
So I bit the bullet and hired a fantastic Client Success Manager. Someone who understood the conveyancing process, was strong on execution and great with people. She was (not accidentally) also someone who had a good grasp of technology, and could use that and her other skills to work with my team to automate and systematise the delivery of our online legal solution.
Before long, we had turned our conveyancing services into a scalable online legal solution. I was focused on marketing our online legal solution and we went from strength to strength, scaling up to become a seven-figure law firm within 2 years.
If I hadn’t hired my Client Success Manager, if I’d simply hired someone who didn’t get my vision to manually do the quoting and engagement process while I focused on looking for new clients, I may have had small, incremental growth, but I would have failed to create an online legal solution that grew my firm exponentially and rapidly.
The Team That Helped Me Scale
The team you need to help you scale your firm might look quite different to the team you have now. Having a traditional team made up of lawyers, a practice manager, secretaries, paralegals and legal executives is probably not going to help you achieve scale.
In addition to my client success manager, here are the key people who helped me scale my firm:
- A brilliant digital marketer – who helped me create a better marketing machine to produce a reliable, scalable stream of new clients.
- A developer / tech genius – who believed in my vision and helped me with the technology I needed to deliver my online legal solution.
- A savvy copywriter – who helped me create killer content to add value to my audience and turned them into raving fans.
- A business coach – who helped me to scare the shit out of myself on a regular basis and dared me to dream bigger and be more.
- An epic operations manager – who worked with my client success manager and the rest of the team to systematise and automate the delivery of our online legal solution.
Your ideal team to help you scale will depend on your strengths – one of the keys to scaling is to hire a team that helps you to operate in your zone of genius at least 80% of the time. You will grow faster if you strategically hire amazing, talented people to do the stuff you’re not good at, and that you just don’t wanna do.
You Can’t Afford NOT To Hire
I regularly hear lawyers give reasons why they’re not willing to hire team members. As far as I can see, there are three basic mindsets that fuel this mistake.
Mindset #1: “I need to do it all myself”
A lot of lawyers have been conditioned to believe that if you’re not working really, really, REALLY hard, getting stressed out and exhausted, then you must be doing it wrong and you can’t be worthy of success. I personally suffer from this mindset and am constantly working on it, as it simply isn’t true – if you’re not loving what you’re doing, not kicking ass and not making money, THAT’S when you’re doing it wrong.
Mindset #2: “I can’t afford it”
Look peeps, when you say you can’t afford something, like hiring a new employee, you’re saying you don’t know where you next dollar is coming from. You’re saying that you don’t trust that your law firm will continue to provide. You’re saying you’re not willing to sacrifice to make investments in yourself.
Well as my experience at my law firm taught me (and hopefully you, now I’ve shared it with you), it’s actually a case of you not being able to afford to NOT hire people. Hiring the right people – the ones for the firm you want, not the one you have – is an investment in yourself and will see you flourish, quickly.
Mindset #3: “there’s no one right for me”
The third reason some lawyers give for not hiring people grates me: “there’s nobody right for my firm”. This is HUGELY self-limiting. As an entrepreneurial lawyer, you need to believe the right people are out there. Because they are. And then you need to learn to get good at recruiting and hiring the right people ←– this is a super important skill for a seven figure law firm CEO.
Scale Up To Figure Out Who You Need
If you are intentional with your goals and build the right team for the firm you want (rather than the one you have right now), you will scale your firm to seven figures by doing less and BEING more.
Hiring a team of rockstars to help you create an online legal solution that will scale your law firm is one of the key strategies we help you implement. If you are serious about achieving rapid, exponential growth at your firm then click here and schedule for a Scale Session today.
