How to Build a Large, Influential Law Firm (Part #8)
Thinking Like a Lion While Still a Kitten
This series lifts the kimono and exposes the unvarnished details on how we built Sterling Law from scratch to be the largest, most influential family law firm in Wisconsin in less than 3 years.
I hope our story and the lessons help you build your practice or business.
Our first 18 months were not all losses. We did have some critical wins.
These victories formed the foundation of our firm. In many ways, this is the blueprint that positioned us to become the largest family law firm in Wisconsin.
Built the firm around an operating system
Months before we accepted our first client, Tony and I installed an operating system for the firm.
Like your phone has a master software system to run apps, we have a similar program for our firm. Yearly planning, goal setting, meeting rhythm, hiring, and other core processes all run off our firm operating structure.
We adopted the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS).
EOS is a simple set of practices for establishing priorities and organizing a business around 90 day cycles. The book “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business” by Geno Wickman describes how EOS works.
Their site is here where you will find tons of resources. EOS structures a business around Vision, Data, Process, and People.
It works for any small and medium sized business, not only for law firms. My teams at RocketClicks.com (~30 people) and DISHPromotions.com (~20 people) also use EOS.
There are many other business operating systems out there. Another popular one that I have used in the past is described in the book “Scaling Up” by Verne Harnish. His site is here.
From our inception, Tony and I maintained disciplined, and rigorously followed, EOS week after week. For the past four+ years we have not relented and remained focused.
There have been compounding results from implementing EOS. We have avoided most distractions, which are quietly expensive. More importantly, EOS has kept us centered on following through and measuring progress.
A good business operating system will help you in both of these key areas. It’s worth the commitment.
Wrote a vivid vision — the picture of our firm in 5 years
A popular movie came out in 2006 called “The Secret.” I think Oprah popularized the film on her show. People everywhere were talking about it.
The premise of “The Secret” is that you can have or achieve whatever you want by thinking about it all the time.
This, of course, is ridiculous and misleading. The harsh reality is that we can visualize some ideas all we want, and we will never have them.
However, our mind is extremely powerful. I believe that our subconscious thoughts and our physical world do tend to harmonize over time. This is a tendency, not an absolute.
The physical proof and human experience to support this view is overwhelming. I have seen this thousands of times in my life, both for the negative and the positive.
So, Tony and I invested countless hours writing and editing a detailed description of what we wanted Sterling to resemble in 2023. We called this our Vivid Vision, and we have both consistently visualized it since we started.
We understand the power of our subconscious mind. Tony and I are both excellent problem solvers, and we saw our law firm vision as a monumental problem to solve. So, if we could both focus our subconscious mind on solving the same problem and harmonizing the same picture, the results would be amazing.
Our Vivid Vision ended up being two detailed pages of a specific picture of Sterling Law in 2023. (We revise it every year to keep it five years out.)
We read it out loud at every weekly meeting. We filter decisions against our vision.
As each year has gone by, we have refined our vivid vision, sharpened the scope, and simplified the wording.
Four years later, we have seen many aspects of our vision become reality ahead of schedule. We expected this to happen and are not surprised.
Patiently hired great people to build around
One of my close friends and business mentors is Ken Muth. He has cheered for our success and advised me all along the way.
His consistent drumbeat advice has been to “hire the best people” we could find. We have done our best to follow his wisdom.
We have kissed A LOT of frogs to find our prince and princesses. And there is no doubt that our team was the most important success in our first 18 months.
Three of the first four lawyers are my partners today. They are wonderful people and amazing attorneys. We are building the firm in Wisconsin around these three attorneys.
On the support team, we have been similarly fortunate. Our first, and now only, paralegal, Nancy has been a rock and total wellspring of legal knowledge for our team. Additionally, Kelley Shaw was our first hire on our intake team. She leads that team today, which we have renamed Client Service.
Thought big and mapped actions to our mindset
Our initial mindset was to think big. Very big. We only pursued strategies and tactics that scaled. We avoided one-off moves that limited growth or that we could not easily duplicate in 100 different markets.
Tony and I always expected that we would be the top law firm in our market. So, we have endeavored to only do things that the #1 law firm would do.
We have feared thinking small because we didn’t want small results. So, we have pushed ourselves to keep thinking large to get large results.
In retrospect, we have made many costly decisions as a consequence of this thinking.
For example, we chose Salesforce as our CRM tool because of its large ecosystem for plugins and scalability. We could have chose other off-the-shelf CRMs built for law firms. Some of the more popular are Clio, InterAction, Uptime, Firm Central, etc.
Implementation for these systems would have been cheaper and faster. But, they would not have served us well over the long term as we have grown.
Instead of cheap and fast, we pursued expensive and slow. But now, with Salesforce, we have the scalability we need to dominate every market we enter. We could not have done this with a cheaper, faster off-the-shelf CRM tool.
There are dozens of other impactful decisions we made that didn’t make sense in the short term. Almost every one of these choices required more money and more time, but they have been worth it.
Key takeaways from the wins in our first 18 months:
1) Running your business with an operating system sets up long term success. We chose EOS. It’s not easy to stay focused on a system, but an organizational process is essential to reduce distractions and achieve goals.
2) Write out your vision and get all the key players’ minds subconsciously working on the same problem. For us, creating a vivid picture of what we wanted our business to look like at a specific point in the future has been important. We filter decisions against our vision. And we focus our subconscious minds on the same problem.
3) Prioritize hiring the best people you can find. They need to (a) get it, (b) want it, and (c) have the ability to do the job. These, of course, come after vetting them for character and values. Nothing else impacts success or failure more than the people on our teams.
4) Think big and make decisions that harmonize with your thinking. We always knew we would be a large, influential law firm. We did not want to stunt our growth with small thinking. We have endured short term growing pain to have the framework for longterm success.