Joe Giovannoli  

You’re listening to the Tip of the Law podcast, where legal insights meet practical advice. In each episode, we bring you stories, insights and tips straight from the legal industry’s brightest minds. I’m your host, Joe Giovannoli, founder and CEO of 9Sail. This week, I am speaking with Charley Mann, founder of Law Firm Alchemy. Charley coaches and leads law firm owners in maximizing their practice’s potential as a business. He specializes in transforming law firm owners into entrepreneurial leaders, which in turn drives transformation within the firm through coaching, strategy and accountability. Charley enables his clients to achieve significant returns on their investment in their law firm. Without further ado, let’s get started. Charley, thanks for joining me today. I appreciate you taking the time to hop on. I know you’re a busy guy. 

Charley Mann  

Joe, always a pleasure to talk to you, and I mean that truly, like you’re, you’re someone who you have just a really fun energy to you, and I’ve enjoyed all the conversations that we’ve had up to now, and I fully expect that this will expand on that track record.

Joe Giovannoli  

I didn’t pay you to say that, though, I will slip you to 20 later. Thank you. No, and I feel the same way. I feel like we chased one another on LinkedIn a little bit, and had to, you know, it took a while to connect, and as soon as we did, it was like an instant friendship. So I feel the same way. 

Charley Mann  

Well, let me say something on that real quick, Joe, because I think that it’s a good lesson for every attorney who’s listening to this, every law firm owner, which is, you were particularly proactive, like, let me give credit where it’s due and not take credit where it is not earned. You were particularly proactive in following up. And even though it took, like, a few months, every few weeks, you would sort of drop in and sort of follow up via email. And it was at a particularly busy point for me where I was launching a new program. There were sales going on, all that yada yada in the background, and I was failing, quite frankly, on the other end of the relationship, to really drive things forward, despite an intention to do so. And I actually think this is a huge marketing lesson, like right here at the the top, out of nowhere, which is you very kindly followed up, and where a lot of people would have maybe given up and be like, Oh, maybe I’m being, I’m being a pest. I’m gonna, I’m gonna, sort of shy away. You were just casually dropping in, saying, Hey, how’s it going? Just following up on this. And because of that, we were able to build this type of relationship that we have today, where we’ve had conversations yada yada, but that doesn’t happen without someone who goes, I’m going to help the individual on the other side of this follow through on what both of us intended to do. And that’s a really important thing in terms of developing relationships, that could be a value that you kindly were in the driver’s seat for. So I appreciate that. 

Joe Giovannoli  

And you know, frankly, your consistent posting of awesome content is what kept you very top of mind for me, too. So, you know, I give that credit back, but it is a lesson. It’s a masterclass, actually, a lesson in, just like, what you need to do to, you know, keep up with people that you want to have in your circle of influence, right? And, you know, something that I’ve admired, and I, you’ll notice, in the coming months, I’m going to be posting a lot more on LinkedIn, but it’s very much driven by you and by Ron. Ron Latz, you know, I love the way that you guys post your content, and I just, I think it’s great, and you both have a unique and different way of going about it. Yours is a little bit more personal, mixed in with business, mixed in with, you know, helpfulness. Ron’s is very business and helpful. And I think that the way you guys structure your stuff is awesome, but I think it is so important to make sure you have those different touch points. And I was like, I’ll be damned if I don’t I don’t, at least have a first conversation with Charley. So anyway, glad, glad we got a chance to do it, and glad we’re here today. You are a man of many talents, and I want to get into a few of a few of them today, if we can. You know, but you coach, you coach law firm owners on a regular basis, managing partners of law firms. I say law firm owners because I know some of them are on the much smaller firm size. Let’s dive into a little bit about some of the core themes that you’ve been seeing more recently, that you’ve been coaching and consulting with your clients on and you know, just kind of see where that conversation goes. I know, I know there’s one topic in particular we discussed just before this. So what are some core themes you’ve been seeing with your coaching clients these days?

Charley Mann  

Yeah. So one of the cool things that’s happened in the lawyer sphere, the law firm owner sphere, is the introduction of systems of practice management systems like EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System, which has really helped a lot of people gain clarity on how the business should function. Now, in the midst of it, sometimes what gets ignored. Third is the personal modus operandi, the self management side. So we’re engaging in better levels of practice management, business management, and sometimes losing some of the self management that allows you to be the best leader, the best marketer, the best communicator that you could be, and that when you couple that with a system like EOS, which we’re being ruthlessly honest about it, you’re gonna, you’re gonna break a few eggs to make that omelet in the midst of EOS, right? You’re gonna have people who you’ve heard the term, leadership team every firm that is under, say, seven to $8 million per year in revenue is going to elevate someone onto their early leadership team that probably shouldn’t be there, but they want to make sure that they’re filling that role, even though that person may not have the long term capacity or capability to live in that seat as the firm then scales– maybe into that eight figure territory, or even if you’re a million dollar firm, you end up putting, say, senior paralegal, or just a paralegal, into a position where you realize within the next six to 12 months, oh boy, I kind of messed this up. That person isn’t really ready to be on a leadership team, but now I have to talk with that person and demote them from the leadership team, which just doesn’t end well. It usually ends with a departure, ultimately, and sometimes one that is acrimonious. Now what would have been great is early on, if I can have the communication with someone before they start EOS and work on their personal modus operandi, which is fine sometimes we get to do it beforehand. Sometimes we’re doing it in the midst of it, and sometimes it’s later on, where we can work on that personal modus operandi. And then working with entrepreneurs, one of the things that we might talk about is self management, of that eagerness to be like, Oh my God, I’ve just found the solution. EOS is the solution, and it definitely is a solution, and a very good solution for many problems, but before you walk down that road, can we talk about your entrepreneurial energy, and are you risking your position as a leader by elevating people so fast? Because it just seems like the solution. It’s the panacea that you really have wanted to see, but you’re going to do it too early. You’re actually going to fracture your team as a leader, and you’re not prepared right now to effectively communicate to them that issue, to pull on the reins a little bit and say, Hey, our leadership is going to start small. It’s going to grow. Some people will move into it. Some won’t. But when you haven’t engaged that muscle, you don’t have the practice reps. Usually the easiest solution is, I don’t know, let’s just drop someone in the leadership team. I know that’s really focused on that leadership team concept, but it’s one of the biggest examples of where I see that collision of underdeveloped leadership, self management, with a business management system that ends up creating problems that maybe we could have avoided. So I’m seeing that a lot more these days. Development of, you know, your own operating system, your personal operating system, a term that I first really heard at a Dan Kennedy seminar many years ago, but that’s one of the things that we tend to focus on these days.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, so you said so much great stuff there. You know, for those listening, I always like to drop these when I have a chance to talk about a book. There is a book called Fireproof, which talks about implementing EOS into a law firm. And, you know, many folks that will listen to that, I’ll be like, Oh, it’s a, you know, a personal injury firm. You know, that doesn’t apply here. But if you can get through and the fact of what the practice is, the practice groups are talking about the practice that they, that they, you know, serve, yeah, there’s a lot of really good nuggets there, I fully admit. So I’ve been running EOS since 2018 in my business, and it is amazing, you know that there’s things like to delegate and elevate. We constantly talk about right people, right seat, right person, right seat. You know, they have GWC: gets it, wants it, capacity to do it all. Looking at, you know, is somebody the right person. And you know what? You don’t always get, you mentioned this a little bit within there, but you don’t always get it right. I had, you know, I’ve had somebody on my leadership team that I put there because I really wanted to grow in a specific area. They were not the right person. It set us back. And you know that that is all too common. And pick an industry, right? So, you know, but law firms, specifically, the managing partners, typically trying to juggle managing the business and also managing a book, right, especially on the smaller firm side. So there’s a lot to unpack there, you know, let’s go a little deeper into kind of the delegation side of this, right? So what are, what are some of the situations that you’ve seen, or maybe some of the guidance that you’ve held? Helped managing partners when navigating, taking things off of their plate to give to someone else. Like, what? What has that been like? 

Charley Mann  

Yeah, the delegate and elevate exercise in EOS is great a lot of times. I’ll couple that with the four quadrants exercise, which comes out of the Eisenhower matrix, for those who are familiar with it, in order to help people start from a point of view of what’s the best use of your time, right? So we’ll couple, because most people can understand the smart use of their time. It is not a smart use of a managing partner’s time to fix the copier, even though they may be able to save some money because they’re the only person in the office who actually knows how the copier works. Sometimes it’s just this weird, like institutional knowledge legacy feature that gets locked in place even as the firm’s scaling up, and they don’t want to spend the, you know, $100 service fee to have someone from the company come out and service the copier, and maybe it’s gonna be more problems. It’s gonna end up being $250, yeah, but it doesn’t matter, because if you spend three hours trying to figure out the copier problem, you’ve lost three hours. It may be a value of, let’s say, $500 per hour, and now you’re behind $1,500 in effective time. It could have been taken care of for 100 bucks or 250 bucks. Who cares? It could have been taken care of for 500 bucks. You’re still saving yourself money by getting yourself out of that role. So the first thing that most people can concede that issue, and they can see, oh, if I spent more time on business development, or if they have a book of business, perhaps billable hours, or at least moving matters and cases forward, they can see the value in that. 

The issue, Joe that I see crop up time and time again and like, I’m over here raising my hand right now, for those of you who aren’t actually seeing this, I’m raising my hand and saying I am guilty at times of what I’m about to say, which is, we all have moments where we go, Yeah, but I’m the best at that, oh, that horrible phrase that holds us back. Yes, I am the best at no one can do it better than me, which we all know is patently false. And when we have these little things, like, let’s say it’s posting to social media, like literally handling getting the media physically uploaded onto whatever platform it is that you use, sure you may do it a little bit better, because you have your particular spin or voice your way that you use an ellipses or an em dash that is special to your language, because you fancy yourself the David Mamet of Instagram. That’s a reference that went over nearly every single head. My apologies, but if you look into Mamet and the way that he uses language and punctuation. It’s actually really interesting. Anyways, you think that you’re really, really good at that, but the truth is, it’s still not a good use of your time. And my, one of my favorite books, one that’s become canonical for me, is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. And that book says 80% someone else doing it at 80% is better than your 100% because you spending time crafting that perfect Instagram caption that is a bad use of your time if you can have someone else handle it for you, or even just taking care of the physical, physical, I mean, digital is not physical, but we think of it the more tangible side of uploading the media to Instagram, you don’t have to be involved in that the same way. 

There are parts of the legal process, there’s a lot of communications that, perhaps go to clients or check in calls with clients that as your firm grows, that can be done by someone else. And I’m sure that you, the attorney or the managing partner, are phenomenal at those conversations. You check in and you make them feel loved, and boy oh boy do they appreciate hearing from you, the owner of the firm. So your ego gets wrapped up in that, and you forget all the other work that requires your attention. That actually does require your attention. You could have a paralegal who’s awesome on the phone, or even an intake specialist who has some extra hours in the week placing those outbound calls at nearly as high in efficacy and love rate that you place them. That frees you up getting people to see that you being the best at it. One, you’re probably not the best, and you can find someone to replace you. Or two, someone else doing 80% level of work is just as if not more valuable, because they can do more of it than your tight schedule allows for when we can get past that point now we can really make some effective change in the practice.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, wholeheartedly agree. EOS talks about being 80% strong in all of the competencies around the wheel. You know, if you can look up the EOS wheel and it’ll show you all the different components, but something that law firms tend to think that they’re, I don’t know if they’re immune to, and for those listening that, you know, have thought more progressively than this– I apologize for generalizing, but I, you know, if I had a nickel every time I had this conversation, I probably would never have to work again. And that’s sad, because it’s literally a nickel. You know, law firms think in the way of like, well, they want to talk to me, and you hit it right on the head, as soon as you start to think that, hey, think to yourself also, is that an ego driven thing that I just said, or is that an ego driven thought? And the answer is yes, like you don’t, you know, doesn’t matter who you are, right? There’s a saying in, in anything that’s not law or maybe accounting, which is that founder-led sales is the fastest to the sale, where sales-led sales is fastest to scale. So if you’re looking to build a lifestyle business where you’re collecting a lot of money and you’re just focused on making as much profit as you can for yourself, and you don’t want to scale the business, hey, you know what? Maybe you being involved in some of the other little stuff because you don’t have the bandwidth or the ability to hire somebody to take on the social media or take on whatever, fine. But even in law, this is something that I think is a very low hanging fruit that’s not being adopted enough by the smaller firms having business developers, you know, people that actually help you to open doors. And sure, maybe you go in, you help, help to close, right? And you’re the person that’s speaking with the prospect after somebody’s opened the door and warmed them up. You know that that’s a huge opportunity to offload a lot of time off of your plate. Think of all of the networking events that manage it, smaller firm managing partners go to meet people, where they’re going to conferences to drum up new business opportunities. Think about what it could, what you could make, versus what it would cost you to send others out into the world, to kind of do that brand building and networking for you, right? Just one thought, as you said, what you said that really came to my mind was like, there are so many little areas that you can just pass off to somebody, and there is a model out there in another industry that’s not legal, that you can follow to a T and it’ll work, because it works everywhere else, right? 

Charley Mann  

100%, and that’s an important note that you put in there, Joe, which is modeling what you see in other industries and other professions. Look, the classic thing is, in doctor’s offices, at what part of the process do you actually see the doctor? The doctor is oftentimes a small part of the process, compared to the people who are doing lab draws for you, compared to the nurses who are first checking in with you and taking vitals, who then come in and mention the recommendations that the doctor had, who are following up about scheduling. The doctor is there just to whiz in and be a temporary expert who solves very acute issues. But for the most part, unless it’s like, you know, a resident who’s in training, who’s actually taking your blood pressure, something like that, they’re there to consult at a high level, not to do the basic stuff, not to do the intake, not to do the scheduling the next thing, because they have ego related but also appropriate business concept. They understand what their value is, and are willing to guard themselves against the minutiae that would otherwise drag down their time. 

Joe Giovannoli  

Yep. My mentor said to me, many, many times, one of my mentors, I have several, but one of them said to me, if this is not something that you can bill $500 an hour for, why are you doing it? And there were times and again, like you had that admission earlier, I admit there’s still some things that I do, because either I actually really enjoy them, and maybe they’re not worth $500 an hour of time, but, like, I get some sense of pride and accomplishment when it gets done, right? It’s like that viral video that went around of the naval commander that, the “make your bed” video, right? About what’s the first thing you do, make your bed, it’s the first thing you accomplish, right? There are some things that I do that I know it’s like, all right, I should, and could give this to somebody else, but I get enjoyment out of it. It’s become part of my routine, you know. But I think that, and I want to go down this rabbit hole a little bit, I think that there’s a personal management piece of this right, where you have to be able to manage your own yourself and your own time, and you need to decide what you do and don’t want to be doing and take the steps proactively to getting yourself into or out of the things that you want to be in or out of. Would you, would you agree with that?

Charley Mann  

Absolutely. And the issue that immediately comes into play here is, and it’s funny, because when I, when I, when I coach people, Joe, we talk about the marketing, operations, finance triangle, and this idea that each part of the triangle basically when done well– recently, I was talking with Tom Tona over in the Lead Counsel podcast about this recently– done well, each one of those kind of creates a problem for the next space. Marketing creates an issue for operations by bringing so many clients. Clients, operations have to hire and scale, invest in systems which then finance looks at and goes, Okay, well, marketing, you now have this amount of money in order to bring in more cases, which then causes more disruptions for operations. The reason I mentioned that is because we’re talking about a personal operational structure, which translates to the business, of course, but it starts in what you’re willing to do as an entrepreneur, what’s between the ears and your decision making principles? And one of the issues that often crops up, especially in firms that are under about the one-five to $3 million per year, most prevalent under one-five, 1.5 is the owner has managed to build a practice, and this is especially prevalent in the six figure space. The owner has built a practice over time, and the practice has hit a certain plateau, or at least the growth now is, say, in single digit percentages, year over year. The issue is that the partner, or the owner, has started to take out so much money from the practice and built a lifestyle that is often they consider, quote, unquote, reliant on that income coming out of the practice. All of a sudden they get to this exercise like delegate and elevate. And what are they unwilling to do? Put the money where their mouth is, and actually bring in the people to handle that. So what they end up doing is going well, you know what? I need to keep my lifestyle where it is. I’m not willing to make those sacrifices. But next year, when we get our 7% increase on revenue that we’ve been doing year over year, I’ll take that 7% and invest over here and say, by the time we get to that point, you’re going to have figured out a different way to spend that 7% because so much time will have accrued. You’re going to have a brand new hobby. You’re going to want a new boat, whatever it is that that money’s already spoken for. Let’s be real. That’s why I love getting to a firm when you have an owner who is legitimate about the balance between what they want for their lifestyle and the ability to scale the practice and live an even better lifestyle, both through wealth and through time, freedom. And then that person will make the investments. But if we’re at that point where intellectually, we cannot overcome the barrier that allows for investment in the practice because we’re too invested in our lifestyles, that’s the hardest thing, Joe, and it’s always unfortunate. I had this wonderful practice that I coached for a while. It was about $900,000 per year in revenue. Had spouses working in the practice family law firm. The issue was that the spouses were taking out 600 to $650,000 per year from the practice. And it paid for private school for a whole bunch of kids. It paid for two homes. It paid for a lot of stuff, and they were up to the hilt on it, and they could not bring themselves to invest in the talent needed to break through that million dollar barrier and scale past it, because they always kept looking at personal finances, and they were too scared to trim even $100,000 out of their take home and maybe sacrifice for a year, even though, by the way, I knew that they had a big enough nest egg that taking that, taking that, quote, unquote hit for a year, really wouldn’t be a problem. They couldn’t overcome it. And eventually that coaching relationship couldn’t continue anymore, because we had no space to work with it. Yeah, some people might say, Oh, you could have coached them through the financial, you know, barriers that they had in their head. I genuinely tried. We talked about it pretty extensively, and it became clear that every call was going to be just butting up against this issue. And over and over again, when there are other people who could be served and who are willing to make a transition in their life, right, there are other problems where they could shift and we could have an impact. You know, as a coach, at some point it’s not enough to get paid. It’s much more about, you want to see the impact happen. You want to affect change. So that way you, as a coach, also learn from that and can take those ideas other places.

Joe Giovannoli  

Again, you just said so much there, which I can’t even begin to unpack, but I’m going to tackle the core, the core piece, right, which is that people, a lot of times, don’t, you know, they can’t make the investment, or they can’t pull themselves away to make the investment. You know, oh, we, we’re growing 7% what got you here won’t get you there. That’s, that’s something that is always in every part of my life, has always rung true. And you know, you have to take a step back sometimes and invest in things to move forward. And that is, I think, a lot, largely why law firms struggle. You know, mostly, right again, this is, this is a generalization, but they struggle because attorneys, by nature, are risk averse, right? So they don’t, they don’t necessarily want to jump into a new thing that comes with risk that they could lose money on or put themselves in a bad spot, so that a lot of times they’ll, they’ll get stuck in that status quo. And this is not just small firms I see. Large firms. And frankly, when you, when you look under the hood of some of these larger firms like you would actually be really surprised, where you have some managing partners that are managing full books of business and supposed to be managing the firm as well. And but it’s, we laugh, but it’s, it’s, it’s wild to me, right? Because, you know, running a firm, you know, let’s say 40-plus attorney firm, is pretty much a full time job. It should be a full time job. It should be where all of your time and energy is spent, and if you want to practice law, or whatever you are practicing law, should be spending time sitting in on other attorneys calls as the managing partner, just to show force and to show that the firm is appreciative, right? You could be spending really good time there and potentially uncover other areas of upsell, cross sell to your clients. But this is where people go wrong, and you hit it right on the head. They’re used to this lifestyle, this, this quality of life that they’ve become accustomed to, and they’re not willing to take the step backward, to take the step forward. 

Charley Mann  

Even though the book of business at that point is such a small percentage of what the firm does, and taking that step back, it doesn’t matter if you have the highest hourly billing rate, you just, you find a couple of really awesome associates who can step in and handle that work, or a senior attorney. There’s probably a way, if there’s another partner in the practice who wants to handle the high end stuff, I’ve worked with firms as well where you have a business development partner and a partner who just loves being the head of legal strategy and wants to sort of split their time 50/50 between working on, say, trial work, and then working with the other attorneys to develop their trial skills, or just develop their negotiation skills, whatever it is. So that way you have the other partner doing the business development. That can make a lot of sense, but yeah, you have to get past this idea that me holding onto the book of business makes a difference now. Boy, oh boy, Joe, we sort of stumbled right into identity territory, which is, you’re scared to lead attorneys if you are not actively being an attorney yourself, that’s that’s often where that comes from. And you start panicking, well, they’re not going to see me as an attorney. I have to, I have to be the best attorney in the practice. I’m going to keep proving it to him over and over again. There’s that idea of you got to be the best that completely kills otherwise good businesses.

Joe Giovannoli  

And it’s, what’s crazy too, is that the firms– and I just was at, I was at a conference, the Managing Partner Forum Conference, which is in Atlanta, amazing conference. And one of the core topics that I heard constantly being talked about is firms implementing CEOs into their business, right? And when we’re talking about this, I kind of chuckle, because it’s like folks that can’t wrap their head around making that investment at the small side, they’re never going to get to a place where they’re going to implement and put in a CEO into their business and and it’s going to become required at some point, you know, not, not ethically, not by law, but to really grow and excel. As soon as firms start placing CEOs into their business that don’t think like lawyers, the game has changed, and what you did today or what you did years ago is not going to work for your future, right? So the mindset of the folks that aren’t willing to let things go, you know, that’s going to be to their ultimate detriment. 

You know, I actually know of a firm, and I’m not going to say who, or anything like that, but I know of a firm that the managing partner takes the top person in the class at their law school, their school that they went to for their law degree. They recruit them each year, and they don’t do any legal work. That person that they recruited does all of their legal work for them, with their– under their guidance and their guides, and they use it as a tool to train up the next best in class, in their practice area, right? There’s so many benefits that it would take me the entire episode just to dive into. I was always so impressed by this thought process, but especially, they’re recruiting one person a year. By the time that person finishes their year, one– they’ve had more exposure than a fourth year associate could have possibly ever gotten, because they’re working directly with somebody that has business coming in the door regularly. And I think that that is so incredibly impressive, and it’s something that it just goes to show that running the firm has to be a core focus, and in this person’s specific instance, it is a core focus for them, right? And they found somebody else to delegate work out to. 

Charley Mann  

That’s so, that’s such a smart idea. I actually have a member of our Genesis program, Brandon Osterbein, who else? Shout out here. He has gotten good at nurturing people, young lawyers, often fresh out of law school, some who have found law as a second career later in life as well, and starting relationships and starting employment, even with those people while they are in, say, their two or 3L students, and getting them to work practically in the practice, and investing in them early on. And he has one trial attorney in particular who became very successful very fast because he was willing to entrust this individual with early on, some of the personal injury work stuff that other attorneys might not be comfortable entrusting to a five year associate, frankly, because he let go of well, it’s got to be done exactly my way, and I don’t want someone coming in who might do things a little bit different. And over time, he was willing to turn over and let her discover best new best practices for the firm. And that’s, that’s a brave step to make, but a valuable investment.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, I, I really, and it’s, it’s interesting that we speak about folks like this in law one, because it’s, unfortunately, very rare that people, especially in the smaller firms, they can think like this right out of the gate, you know. But in other industries, that’s not the case. Like there’s, there’s proteges and there’s folks that that, you know, there’s training programs, there’s, you know, in corporate there’s high potential hypos, right? You know. And it boggles my mind sometimes that law firms don’t adopt some of these very simple core tenants and core principles that have been around for years and years and years, you know, decades and decades, because these, you know, firms could grow much more quickly if they adopted things outside of their industry. And you know, the folks that are not afraid to do it are the ones that are succeeding. And you know, we look out to Arizona. I believe it is right, Arizona, Nevada and Arizona, where they can, non-attorneys can own law firms, right? Like, eventually, if that starts to spread like wildfire, well, like, I think it will one day again. What’s going to happen to these firms that have always done it one way, right? You’re going to have folks that are coming in. They’re kind of, they’re playing out of a different playbook that you know, you’ve never seen before, right? So I think we’ve harped on this, this topic enough, and I think that it’s, I think it’s something we could probably talk about for hours and hours.

But I want to go a little bit further into the delegation and management of time when it comes to delegating it to maybe other equals within the firm, right? So you weren’t, you just mentioned a spouse pair, partner pair at a firm, right? So I’m sure you deal with, you know, firms that have multiple partners that are similar, either in equity or similar in, you know, kind of their stature in the space. You know, when you have a firm that’s really small, maybe two or three attorneys that are all partners. How do you guide them in determining who should be doing what and when, especially when they maybe don’t have the revenue to support a large scale team under them? 

Charley Mann  

Yeah, and I’ll say for the most part, when I’m dealing with firms, it’s usually no more than two partners, and that’s just, that’s part of who I work best with, right? Most of the time I’m working with a firm that needs to be a little bit more nimble. It’s usually going to be in the upper six to low seven figures when we get started. And I actually have a firm, you know, that I’m working with right now that has two partners in it. And they do have sort of a division of interest, and there is that discussion of who’s handling what, and they have different case types that they handle, and they have different business development matters they handle. The first thing I’m looking at is, let’s– we have to have a realistic discussion, like looping back to the earliest concept of leadership and communication. Okay, are we all capable of putting our cards on the table and saying what it is that we actually want? So what I did for these two attorneys is we had a call where, ahead of time, they were both responsible for developing personal vision statements for themselves, independent of each other. I asked them to do it completely independently, related both to their lives and the law firm, and then also to create a stop, start, continue, documentation regarding the firm and the other person. So the other partner in this, and what we quickly discovered is they actually both understood each other’s strengths pretty well, and they both understood, likely, the roles that they should play in the firm. It just hadn’t been articulated recently. So there starts to become this drift, and this, maybe this little bit less trust that the other person is filling that role. And I usually find in talking with people who have some sort of stake in the practice and its growth, whether it is, say, an equity partner or a significant team member who feels invested as an intrapreneur within the practice that a lot of times there’s just this need to put the cards on the table, to offer up a level of not just honesty, but candor. And I find, Joe, that a lot of people are afraid of candor and the way I describe candor is the ability to extend past the point of honesty. Honesty is, I’m telling you the truth to the question that you just asked. Candor is I’m telling you the truth and I’m filling in future gaps and or information that you didn’t think about asking, but I think is important and relevant, so that way, we can progress past just this first question and have a deeper discussion. So if we can develop that level of candor from within all the partners invested equity, whatever or otherwise, then we can really say, Okay, this is if we all tackle these things. Great. Now, the caveat I’ll put in there is there’s one thing that everyone needs to kind of agree on, which is where a system like EOS can be helpful, or at least having an agreement overall on what are the core, important principles of business. The worst thing that we can have happen, and I’m sure, Joe, you’ve seen it happen before, is where you have one partner who’s all in on the marketing, business development– really they’re like, Hey, I’m trying to– there’s this great company, 9Sail, I want to work with them, right? And we’re going to get invested in our marketing. We’re looking for a path of growth. And the other two attorneys go, Yeah, but it feels icky. I don’t, the marketing thing, I don’t want us to become that type of firm. What type of firm, a successful firm? That’s what I want to be a successful firm. That battle, that, hey, we don’t agree on the baseline principle of the value of marketing. That is where you can see it all crumble. And unless there’s buy-in, I pretty much promise you that that partner is eventually going to go and start their own firm and will find great success on their own. That’s the good news for them.

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, so Radical Candor is a book that I love. I actually have anybody that’s going to maybe take on a management role in my company, I have them read it at some point because I think it’s awesome, and it’s a different perspective on leadership and management. We do start, stop, continues as part of our– we do quarterly coaching conversations. So I don’t do annual reviews or quarterly reviews. I’m allergic to the word review. We do coaching conversations. Coaching conversations is something that I’ve, we’ve developed kind of custom to ourselves, but we took out of some of the core themes of EOS, is 50% focused on personal growth and personal fulfillment. And 50% focused on professional growth and professional fulfillment. Nowhere within there is the review of performance. What we do is a 360 start, stop, continue. So the manager does a start, stop, continue with the employee, and the employee does one for the manager. And these conversations, it always happens. The first one, the manager comes to the employee with things, and the employee doesn’t, comes to the table with nothing, and they and then they get the conversation of, let’s do this live, because I know I’m imperfect, right? And this starts off continue those the folks that really engage in that tend to be with us the longest, and they have the best relationships with their managers, because they have this conversation where one those start, stop, continues quarterly, tend to become emptier and emptier because they’re having these conversations on a frequent basis, enough to give feedback live and in person. And the goal is for those, those sections, to actually end up empty, because they’ve dealt with their challenges throughout, right? And what you just said about doing a start, stop, continue with the partners, I think is really important, because it does open up that line of communication. I feel like there’s such a great tip and nugget, even within that alone, of like, if you have partners and you haven’t sat down and done a start, stop, continue with your partners, you’re probably due to do something like that. It doesn’t have to be that exactly, but you’re probably due to do something like that. 

Charley Mann  

And by the way, it’s going to be super uncomfortable at first, because you have not established this pattern. But this is so– like in in marriage counseling, one of the things that they’ll have you do is this, like mirroring exercise, which you learn about in a lot of early therapy texts, etc, where you’re supposed to listen to the person and you’re supposed to repeat back to them what they said, not your version of it, but say their version of it through your mouth. 

Joe Giovannoli  

I heard you say…

Charley Mann  

Yes, yes, exactly. And so it is unbelievably uncomfortable at first, but if you’re not willing to tolerate a small level of discomfort to build a new communication pattern, we all know where it ultimately ends up, right? If we can’t agree to deal with the discomfort, because something like stop, start, continue is well documented in its value in communicating, especially within businesses where communication is always balanced against trying to move up the ladder, against different levels of success of a million different variables that come into play if we can’t agree on going through that discomfort, what are we even doing? And. Here, like, what’s the point? Let’s just sit down, be uncomfortable. We’ll figure it out. Agree, and this is my favorite thing, Joe, is– I tell him ahead of time, the first thing we’re going to agree on is that this is going to be uncomfortable and that it’s going to be weird at times. And that’s a-okay. You haven’t done this before. If I asked you right now to go swing a golf club on the other side than you would normally swing a golf club, it’s gonna be pretty darn uncomfortable. It’s gonna look really bad, but maybe over time, we can get you to have a decent swing on the other side, but we’re not gonna know until we start trying.

Joe Giovannoli  

Right, exactly. Yeah, that’s well put and well said, and, and, you know, I’m part of Entrepreneur’s Organization, and we, all the time, we do mirroring exercises in forum where, you know, it’s always, you know, what I heard you say is this, did I get that right? Right? And they can fill gaps, they can fill in the void. 

So we’re going to take a quick break here. We just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge our sponsor for the Tip of the Law podcast, 9Sail. 9Sail is a law firm-focused digital marketing agency specializing in providing lead generation and awareness, building services such as SEO, paid search, content creation and Digital Public Relations. Grow your firm with 9Sail. 

So you so elegantly put a guardrail around our time today, and I appreciate that, because work life balance is super important to me too, and I also have a boundary. So what I want to do is, I want to ask you to do two things for me. First, it’s called the Tip of the Law for a reason. I want, I want to know what your one tip is, that you can leave our audience with. And the second thing is, I want you to tell us briefly, you know what your company specializes in, what you specialize in, and how people can find you if they want to talk to you more.

Charley Mann  

Sure. So the tip that I would give, and I’ve been talking about this relatively frequently, is make the ask. Okay, I’m just gonna let that phrase settle in for a moment: make the ask. And it relates to several things that we’ve talked about. One– very beginning, Joe, you followed up with me, right? You made the ask, and clearly you were not uncomfortable with it, making the ask of your team members asking for that feedback. If you want to, shoot, appear on a podcast, you can’t sit around and wait for it at some point. You need to make the ask. Surprise, surprise. The world is not waiting around to give you your moment. You need to go and do it. And I think that the most direct version of this is honestly follow up, or is what I call follow-through marketing. And the reason I call it follow-through marketing is the way that I frame it is, we’re helping the potential client follow through with his or her intended outcome, which was to have a communication with and very likely hire an attorney to handle an issue in his or her life. So we’re going to go and make that ask of them. We’re going to follow up with them and ask simple things like, did you already find an attorney to handle this? We were taking a look at our open files, and yours is open right now. Did you already find someone to handle that matter for you? Oh, no, great. Let’s have that conversation. We need to continue our discussion here. So make the ask is my tip here.

Joe Giovannoli

Awesome. Thank you. 

Charley Mann

And then so what, what Law Firm Alchemy does is we are coaching courses and publications business for law firm owners. And I very specifically say law firm owners, because what I work with, what our team primarily focuses on, is development of the entrepreneurial skill set and tool set for the owner, so that way he or she can be a full throated entrepreneur in the practice. My friend Craig Goldenfarb has his event every year, Seven Figure Attorney Summit, where he shows this sliding scale. At one end you have lawyer. At the other end, you have entrepreneur, and the objective that we have is to move people on that sliding scale farther to entrepreneur. So that way their dominant identity is that. And I found that the most effective way to do that is if I can give you the tools and decision making systems that allow you to make more confident entrepreneurial decisions, you will want to be the entrepreneur more and more. And so I’m not forcing you to be an entrepreneur. You start to want that outright. And that’s where we see the identity shift and real transformation happens. So it’s called Law Firm Alchemy– I like to say I’m in the business of seemingly impossible transformations. People who come to me and they say, ah, you know what? I really want to be a lawyer. I want to, I want to build myself. I still want to be a great trial lawyer. Like, okay, let’s talk. In six months, after we’ve done six months of coaching, and in six months, are going, you know, I kind of want to get out of some of the trial work. I was like, Yeah, we were going to end up here. I’m glad, I’m glad you made the decision for yourself, though. 

Joe Giovannoli  

Yeah, that’s awesome, Charley. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Thanks for, you know, taking the time and, you know, interviewing me also on your podcast. I’m looking forward to the episode and so, yeah, I think that there’s going to be a part two to this, because I think you and I could probably go on for hours about pretty much pick a topic and we can go so, so really appreciate you and to our audience. Thanks for being here. If you haven’t already, please like us wherever you listen to your podcast and write us a review. Greatly appreciate it, and tune in next week for another episode of Tip of the Law. Have a great day. 

Thank you for tuning in to Tip of the Law podcast hosted by Joe Giovannoli. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to Tip of the Law and leave us a comment wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. You’ve been listening to Tip of the Law.