BEFORE: When Carlos, the managing partner of a law firm that focused on M&A and corporate law was referred to me he was exhausted.

He felt like he had to do everything in his firm and was working over 100 hours per week. He was doing everything he thought necessary to run and grow a law firm while also training the associates, business development, and a lot of fee-earning work directly for his clients.

He didn't have any joy in his life because he felt there was never a moment to breathe, to appreciate the business he’d grown. Instead, he felt he had to constantly work harder and for longer hours to try and keep everything under control.

He thought the solution was to hire more people but after hiring many new team members things didn’t get easier, they got worse.

He was also receiving over 250 text messages a day from his clients, his staff and the people he was working with asking him a constant barrage of questions by text. 

He knew that working so much wasn't sustainable and that he needed a solution but he didn’t know what that solution was and he didn’t have time to do anything about it.

DURING: I was referred to Carlos by one of my past clients and we connected via LinkedIn and then on two Zoom calls.

On a third call, Carlos chose to invest in working with me and said. “I really appreciated talking to you in those initial calls. I didn't feel like you were trying to sell me something and you were very good at helping us digest where we needed to go with things. And we really liked that.” 

Initially, I worked with Carlos and another firm partner Jenna to get clear on what their dream targets were three years from that day and then to get clear on what needs to happen in the next year, 90 days and the coming week's most important actions to take to be on track.

This included Carlos communicating boundaries about how he chose to be communicated with and setting weekly one-on-one calls with his fee earners to give them the training and support they needed to increase their monthly hours of billing while also requesting that none of them unless necessary contact him outside those one-on-one sessions.

Within a week he’d gone from receiving over 250 text messages to less than 10 messages a day which enabled Carlos to have solid blocks of time to focus on what was important.

Previously Carlos let his team take advantage of him because he thought that if he simply showed his team that he was too busy they would help and do more but this wasn’t the case. Instead, we worked on improving the effectiveness of his communication and I showed Carlos how to make clear requests, hold his members to account and cut out all communication that didn’t forward him toward his targets.

When his team didn’t execute on work and dropped the ball, previously he would just pick it up and do the work himself, or if they did the work poorly he would just fix it and send it on to the client which caused him to become relied upon by his team to keep doing so. Instead, I showed Carlos how to hold his team members to account to fully complete each client's work to a high standard while also maintaining a great company culture.

AFTER: Within four months, Carlos was been able to cut back significantly on the heavy, strategic and business-oriented legal fee-earning work by effectively delegating it away to his existing and some new team members while his firm gradually became much more profitable than it was before. 

Carlos said. “I pushed against Dan for a long time. I am the highest billing person in our firm and I bill at the highest rate and the most hours so we're going to lose.” The solution to making his firm more profitable while Carlos carried out less billing work, was to grow his team with more senior lawyers to directly take over the billing work from Carlos.

This was done by having new team members dial into Zoom calls with Carlos and his clients until the clients expressed confidence in each new employee’s abilities.

After 6 months of participating in one of my programs, Carlos’s firm gained several hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra profit, an 89.15% increase compared to the same 6 months of the year before. See the screen shot below:

As Carlos says. “If you have the right processes, if you have the right team, if you have the right no-fluff communication, you can actually spend more time doing the things you love while successfully building your business and not killing yourself and growing your profit.”

He’s also been able to cut back on a lot of lower-level tasks which has enabled Carlos to go from working over 100 to less than 50 hours per week which he says. “This has improved my own life quality, as well as really my ability to respond to clients and to help them and to dive into these sort of heavy, strategic things that they want help with which I also enjoy doing.”

In our interview Carlos admitted. “For someone who's watching this, they think there's something about Carlos that allowed him to do that, and it's just not true. There's nothing special about me that allows me to be able to focus on my family life and build a successful business without sacrificing one for the other. It's that there are tools, particularly as lawyers, that were never taught.”

The last question I asked Carlos was. “If somebody's on the fence about investing in one of my programmes, what would you say to them?” 

Carlos replied. “Do it. I think that what we've seen in returns on it is incredible. And it's not just monetary returns. Our monetary returns have been insane and what we have made in extra profit as compared to what we spent on you is incomparable but the most important part to me is every other aspect of this, spending time with my wife and with my kids.”