How Law Firm Owners Can Level Up Their Business - Featuring Craig Goldenfarb

Get in touch with Craig here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/craiggoldenfarb/
https://www.goldlaw.com/

Owning a business is a challenge. Knowing how to keep innovating in your business is an even bigger one. Join restaurant owner, motivational speaker, and innovation expert Sara Frasca each week as she guides fellow business owners in taking the next step to level up their business. If you've ever pondered hiring a business coach but want a sample first, come along for the adventure!

Send us a message to join the show for free business guidance: https://pointnortheast.com/contact-us/

Sara Frasca is the founder and owner of Trasca & Co Eatery in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, an experienced and engaging motivational speaker, and the CEO of global business coaching firm Point NorthEast.

Transcript

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You're listening to level up your business, the podcast where we talk to hardworking business owners and leaders and help them solve real issues in real time. I'm your host, Sarah Frasca restaurant owner, keynote speaker and business coach. I've spent my career not only in corporate America, but also as an entrepreneur, carrying on my family's legacy through my restaurant. Now a business coach and consultant. I'm helping other businesses to use creative problem solving and innovative thinking to drive lasting change. Stay tuned to hear some inspiring guidance that will help you to level up your business. All right, well, today, I wanted to join in just really welcome Craig Goldfarb. Craig, thank you for being a part of our point ne level up your business podcast. My pleasure, Sara. Great to be here. Yeah. And it's good to see you. I know it hasn't been too long. Since I've seen you in person. Where are you calling in from today? I'm in West Palm Beach, Florida at my main office operations? Great. Great. I know, you go around speaking and stuff. So I wasn't sure if you are in your office or on location somewhere else. So good, good. Well, you know, you and I have known each other for a while. But I'll just set up for our listeners a little bit about the podcast. And hopefully they've joined us on other episodes. But really, we are trying to get a sense from business owners, from business leaders, where they've been, you know, what has helped them in their decision making along their path and in where they are today. And then really where they want to go to in the future. And if we can be of help and ideas today, or you know, I'm the host today, sometimes we have several of us. But you know, it would be fun to brainstorm in the moment with you if there's an opportunity. So again, thank you for being here. My pleasure. So with that, you and I are well acquainted. I've known you for many, many years. But can you share with our viewers and listeners a little bit about your history? Why did you decide to become an attorney? Well, I grew up on the west coast of Florida. And I had the wonderful distinction in the 1970s of being raised by a mother who happened to be an attorney. And in the 70s, there weren't a lot of female attorneys. So I had an interesting role model at my house as a very strong and very smart woman who I discovered at an early age, I was a lot like her. And as I watched her struggle and fight as a female, as a criminal defense attorney in Clearwater, Florida, I was really inspired to follow in her footsteps. And as I grew up, I realized I was good at debating. And I liked to have the logical and analytical part of my brain being used a lot like my mom. So I decided to follow in her footsteps and had a neat, neat journey along the way. It's great. It's really great. Have you always practiced in Florida? I have. I went off to college in North Carolina, and then came back to law school at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, Florida. And then I moved down to Miami to start my career when I was about 26 years old. Yeah, that's great. That's wonderful. And I know you're a dad, a proud dad. So what about your personal world? Sure. Well, I'm a father of two girls, aged 21 and 23. Neither of them is interested in law, which I'm fine with, would have been okay either way. The ones in college and ones just out of college. I've been married for 25 years and celebrated my 25th year anniversary last week. And I live here in a city called Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which is about 10 minutes or 15 minutes north of West Palm Beach on the East Coast. That's great. And congratulations on your anniversary. Thank you. That's a huge deal. It is. Yes. Well. Okay, so you became an attorney? And then how did you decide you wanted to open your own practice because of course, there are many, many different types of, you know, law that you can practice. And then there's the scary component of being an entrepreneur opening your own office? Well, I tell a joke, and please, everybody take this as a joke, that actually slipped my way to the top. So what I mean by that course joke is that I dated a girl while I was in law school, who was getting her master's degree in journalism at the University of Florida, so she was not in law school. After a week or two of dating her I realized her dad was a lawyer. And that's not why I started dating her. Didn't even know really. So as I was going to law school, and she was finishing up getting her master's degree in journalism. We got pretty serious. And we dated my final year of law school at the University of Florida, and it was her final year getting her master's degree. So we got pretty serious and with my 2.8 GPA in law school, yeah, I did say at 2.8. I didn't get a lot of interviews, out of law school with any of the good law firms because I had such a crappy GPA. So her father took me to dinner towards the end of our, my, my law degree and said, So I heard you're getting a lot of interviews. And after I start stopped laughing, he said, Well, hey, loser. Are you serious about my daughter? And I said, Yeah, I'm serious about your daughter. And he said, Why don't you come to work for me in Miami? And I said, You're a personal injury lawyer, right? And he said, Yeah. And I said, Well, I guess since I don't have any other offers, maybe I'll take you up on yours. So I literally did sleep my way to the top. And that's how I got my job offer and that I was dating my girlfriend. And so he hired me. And the blessing of that was that he became a mentor for me, and taught me when he brought me down to his personal injury firm in Miami, what I didn't realize was how lucky I was going to be because he gave me an education, both in business and in law. And what was so great about that was that he ran a large business. And he had come from a business background, and a business law firm, before he started being a personal injury attorney. So he knew how to run a business. But he also had a good trial law firm. So he turned me over to his trial attorneys who taught me how to be a lawyer. And he mentored me, as to how to be a businessman. So what I say is, I got a dual degree in law, I got a business mentorship from my father in law. And I learned how to be a trial lawyer in five years. So at the end of those five years, I could kind of write my ticket, because I knew how to do both. So I moved up to West Palm Beach from Miami. In the meantime, I had married his daughter, who was still my wife. And after working at another law firm for a couple of years, in 2002, I decided to go out on my own. And that was about 22 years ago. And I've never looked back. So using the mentorship that I so greatly got from my father in law, who is still my mentor, and still one of my best friends. He taught me that dual degree I mentioned before in business and law, so that really set me on a path to understanding where my happiness, or my happy place was, was it being a lawyer? Was it being a business person? Or was it being both, and after about 10 years, I realized it was really being a business person. So that's why I decided to take the CEO route, instead of the trial lawyer route, even though I had been a trial lawyer for 10 years. That's an interesting, I mean, I love how you've set it up. Because some owners still want to do the trial lawyer route, they let someone else run their business, maybe there's a back end CEO or someone else, but they don't necessarily want to get in on the business side. So tell tell me a little bit more about the business side. Sure. One of when I speak about this choice, I talk about a continuum. And the continuum on one side is full time CEO, on the other side is full time lawyer. And there's no wrong answer for where you are on that continuum, you could be either on one side or the other, or somewhere in the middle. And if one of your favorite things to do is go to court, be in trial, do depositions, then don't give that up. But that wasn't my happy place. I realized after 10 years that my happy place was sitting at my desk, being in meetings. And I know that sounds weird. But you know, being in meetings and running the show, yeah. So if you are really an entrepreneur, and that's where you're happy places, make it your path and your vision to get there. And that's what I did, starting 15 years ago. And now I'm there, which is I haven't handled the case in over 10 years, literally over 10 years, I haven't touched one case. But that's because that's where I want to be, you can surf the middle of the continuum, you can, it's just that you need to surround yourself with people who are on one side or the other. Because if you're going to serve right in the middle, then you're gonna have a lot of business things to do, but you're gonna have a lot of cases to work on. So you need to surround yourself with people who just do the business, and surround yourself on the other side with people who just do the law, right? So you can place yourself anywhere on that continuum you want, as long as you understand you're there. And then surround yourself on both sides with people who fill in the gaps. I think that's great. I mean, I see a lot of people struggling, you know, whether they're in law or in another type of business with that really hard kind of soul searching of where do I want to be on this continuum? And then as they're looking at their people, you know, perhaps a leadership team, their trusted advisors around them, you know, it's it's hard for them to fit those people in around them because as they've grown, they were doing everything. And so they start to kind of narrow their spectrum and those people maybe don't fit perfectly around them. I mean, do you see the same I do, you have to really know yourself to know where the gaps are and had a business coach once who said, Show me your schedule, and I'll show you your priorities. So you tend to do the things that you like doing. So if your schedule is mostly business stuff, and you're basically at peace with yourself, it means you really liked the business. If it's mostly legal stuff, then you probably are leaning towards being an attorney. So unless you're forcing your stuff self to do stuff you hate, take a look at your schedule, because that usually shows where you have pressed the easy button. If you don't do any business stuff, it means you don't like it. That means it just makes sense. So that's why you don't do any business stuff is because you don't enjoy it. Maybe need a C O, or even a CEO or a CFO, you know, the C level staff to come in and run that part of your show, but you need them. You can't run a show just just as an attorney alone. Yeah, no, I totally agree. Okay, so you were growing, and you were deciding kind of at this 10 year mark, that you wanted to go the CEO route? Can you talk a little bit about that? I mean, how did that evolution go for you? Luckily, I had a mentor who kind of helped guide me. And at that point, I was already in some groups that in the legal industry in other industries, we called mastermind groups. So mastermind groups, as everyone knows, are groups of like minded people have a similar interest, who like to share. So there are lots of lawyer groups that are masterminds. So I started entering a couple of masterminds. And I started listening and asking questions like, if you don't want to be doing your own accounting or QuickBooks, what do you do? So that's a good example of a business task, a major task that you want to offload. So what do you do? Do you hire a part time bookkeeper? Do you hire an in house bookkeeper? Do? Do you pay someone to come in twice a week? Do you hire a CFO, immediately chief financial officer? So that's a good example of a business sector of your company that you may hate. So what do you do? Do you still do it? Or how do you offload it, you could even do it with a VA virtual assistant. So that's an example of when meeting with a mastermind you just bounce ideas off other people. And you find that a lot of people have solved the problem that you're looking to solve. So to me, it wasn't about me figuring it out myself. It was having the courage and the knowledge, I guess, to surround myself with people who face the same issues. Yeah, that's great. All right. So some folks and I and I'm just gonna pause on the mastermind for a minute because again, whatever industry someone is in, I have found that people put up a wall because they're too afraid to be vulnerable to be open and honest. Because someone might come in and threaten their business. How have you dealt with that? What types of masterminds? Or what solutions have you come up with? Well, honestly, one of the first books I read, I think, when I was young, and one of the various life coaches, coaching courses I had was called Mindset by Carol Dweck. And that book talks about the abundance mindset versus the scarcity mindset. And if you approach life with fear that someone's going to steal something, you're really limiting yourself in so many areas of your life. And fear is a natural response to so many things. But in this situation, if you really see that if you meet with people, that the chances of it coming back to harm, you are so small in reality, I mean, I coached some lawyers in my hometown, that are personal injury lawyers that are competitors. But I find that does it come back to haunt me? Do they take a little bit of market share? I don't know. I don't care, because I know it comes back to help me in so many other areas of my life, that it's not like I coach all my competitors. Yeah. And I pick and choose, I am careful, and I keep my trade secrets. But in general, I'm a pretty transparent, open, vulnerable guy. And I find that that just leads to a happier, richer life. And that book was one of the starting points for how are you going to view your life from a, from a scarcity mindset that everything can go away? Or an abundance mindset, which is the more you give, the more you get? Yeah, well, you know, and, you know, I don't ever mean to besmirch anyone else's character. But there are a lot of egos in this particular industry. And I have found you to be one of those people who has the sincerity and this genuine interest to really kind of make everybody around you better. And so I do want to say, I mean, it's been an honor to work with you and to get to know you. You give back in so many ways. Can you can you talk about Yes. I mean, I really mean it. Can you talk about a little, you know, of that coaching, like, what are you coaching them on? Sure, well, I have some private coaching clients, and I only take about six because I have a few businesses, I'm kind of busy. But on those particular clients, those are lawyers who maybe have five to 10 staff, maybe their gross revenues are two to 5 million and or less, and they're facing problems in growth or scaling problems that they can't scale. So I want to take a firm of that size and maybe grow to 50 people, or 40 people, and maybe 10 million in revenues. So they're facing business problems that I've already been through. And that it's easy for me to tell them how I got there and to give them the tools to get there. And that makes me feel really happy to help some other personal injury firm, because in my view, they're helping their clients. And one of the things that I'm passionate about, is helping people against insurance companies. So if I can help a Lawyer in Virginia, fight the insurance companies equally to me, then I'm helping out all of that person's clients, and fulfilling one of my goals in life. Yeah, that's really great. Craig and I, you know, I think like minded people are often drawn to each other, I feel a very similar set of philosophies for my own world, you know, as a restaurant owner, which, you know, I own a small restaurant, but I have the same philosophy. I mean, if I can help another restaurant owner to not have the same issues, I mean, it just, it's a good feeling all around, it's a win win, I would do anything to help people through those pitfalls. So yeah, it's just, that's part of who I am. And so I teach as much as I can, and I get a lot out of it personally. And I spend a lot of my time helping others and I some another cool quote I had, or I had heard within the last year is, the world is a mirror. So if you give out great stuff, it's going to reflect even brighter back to you. And I thought, hey, that's kind of a trite thing. But it's kind of cool and kind of makes sense that the more you give out, the brighter it shines back. And I love these little. I love memes. So that's probably a good meme. That works as well. You know, the other one that might work for you is the golden rule, which actually fits your branding. Right? That's a good point. That's very helpful. So um, okay, so we talked a little bit about coaching and how you were building I mean, any other milestones between kind of that 10 year like, I want to be a CEO on that side of the spectrum, to now like any other big milestones, any other big things in your groaner? Actually, I measure some of the milestones by some of the tools that I began to use. So for instance, six years ago, or seven years ago, I got a software program for my personal injury law firm called file vine. And that was one of the first cloud based software systems for personal injury attorneys. And because I run my firm based mostly on data, or what we call a KPIs, key performance indicators. File, Vine has such a good data gathering section of it, like the whole thing you can run reports on. So I could all of a sudden start to run reports on everything, which is really my personality, I love data, I love reporting. So one evolution of this law firm occurred just six, seven years ago, which was changing software platforms, which was fine. And then a few years later, as you know, I started to read about Eos, you know, based on traction, and that book, and then, you know, through that came my relationship with you. So I'd already had a basis of being centered around data. But then once I started working on an EO S based system, and then hired Usera, as a coach, we started getting a corporate and accountability structure through that book and ELS based structure that supplemented and complemented the already data based company that I was running. So the marriage of the data gathering, and the the structure and accountability system, those two things, I'd say, were both monumental leaps in my ability to have a very profitable and very well functioning company. Yes, that's great. It's really great. I mean, you know, another one of the things that that strikes me about you is that you're humble enough to know that you don't have all the answers. And so I feel like you're a bit of a Constant Learner. You know, you you are seeking outside influence seeking other viewpoints seeking. And you as you well know, I love traction, I think it's, you know, one of the best books out there for an operating system that we can adopt. So very aligned with you on that. And just, again, kudos for, you know, being willing to keep learning. I think that being a lifelong learner is part of that abundance mindset that I mentioned earlier. Because one of the reasons people don't want to keep learning is that of some set of fear, which is they're scared of change. And they're scared of breaking something, or breaking something that seems to be working in some way. So, you know, the, the worst phrase in the corporate mentality is, that's how we've always done it, right? The worst I think it's five words, the worst five words in a company. That's how we've always done it. So that phrase doesn't exist here at my company, because another cool meme if it ain't broke, bro. I get that one. That was from John Morgan, who runs a fairly large law firm. He actually was the first guy I heard say that almost 25 years ago. He probably stole it from somebody. But a great phrase, If it ain't broke, break it. Because you never want to just continue a system that is just That's how we've always done it. So we encourage people here at my company to always question why we're doing something and see if they can build a better mousetrap. So again, this I think the foundation really is that abundance mentality, which leads you to lifelong learning, and leads you to always be open to suggestions and changes. And I am in at least four masterminds right now. And, and one of them is not even in the legal industry, it's just cross Business Mastermind, so, so even going outside of the legal industry, to learn concepts. And to me, that's fun. I really liked learning from really smart people in other industries and within our own industry. It's really great. It's really great. So now I'm going to kind of look forward. I mean, what does the future hold for gold law? What? What do you see as coming up? Where do you want to go? That sort of kind of vein, we've got, you know, I have two offices here in South Florida. i People asked, Do you want to be huge, you know, how big do you want to be 10 offices, 50 offices. And I asked myself that question a lot. And I've, I am not an empire builder. So I don't need more than two offices unless some opportunity comes up. That makes sense. But so I say that I have two castles, because I have two offices, I want to keep polishing those two castles. So I'm not a big fan of a third castle, and I don't want to be all over the country, I just want to be in Florida, I really want to have two offices, maybe a third someday, if it makes sense. But I want to keep polishing my castles and making them as perfect as they can be. So my personal vision is to continue to grow in my geographic area, which is Southeast Florida. And to keep perfecting what I have no that will come with growth of staff, we have 80 staff right now about 10 lawyers, that will come with growth. But I think I always say growth is the byproduct of excellence. And to me, that's been true if I focus on quality first. And excellence, growth is a byproduct of that I do not want to grow, and then suffer a lack of quality but beneath the growth. So growth is not a goal. Growth is a result of polishing and excellence. So that's how I view it a little bit backwards in some entrepreneurs. Yeah, no, that's great. And I would say, you know, I think that's really evident as well, I know your team so well. So I can say this. They also believe in in excellence. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the culture and kind of, you know, the fact that you've built core values that everyone buys into. And yeah, I also do that backwards. So a lot of people say growth is the number one measure of success. And I would disagree, I say excellence is one of the measures of success, which results in growth. And the second thing that results in growth is is firm culture. So I do that one backwards too, which is that I think if we have excellence and a great firm culture that those two things are going to join, leading to growth. So the first is excellence. And that's just high quality work product. And the second is culture. And what I mean by culture is, I have one sentence Do they like to get up out of bed and come to work in the morning. And if most or all of my staff enjoy getting out of bed, if it's not a moan, if it's not, oh, gosh, I gotta go to work. If it's this is a pleasant place, I've chosen to spend my next eight hours, then that's a victory for me. So what I did early on is I made what I consider to be a quite a smart hire, which was about 12 years ago, I hired someone who was in culture and development at Disney World to run my office. Now Disney World, as you may know, they have the Disney Disney Academy, they charge over$100,000 to train other companies in have a great firm culture. Well, I got it for free. took someone from Disney World who had already been trained, and I had her come working for me. So she started to implement policies, procedures and systems to make sure everybody was happy. Today, we've actually divided out HR from culture, we have a culture and people team with separate employees, including her and all they're responsible for is employee happiness. We call it employee happiness and satisfaction. So we have all these initiatives, all these programs that are solely responsible for making our people wake up in the morning and want to come to work. So I'm lucky that I have enough staff and I'm big enough that I can have a culture team living, if you have three people in your office three, you can have someone devote an hour a week or half an hour a week to come up with something that will make all three people happy. Whether it's going out for drinks, or whether it's additional time off, or some team building, it doesn't matter how big you are as a company at all, you can focus your some of your energy on making sure they like their jobs. It's great, really great and very important. I do agree. Okay, switching gears for a second, I just want to ask you a little bit about marketing, because, you know, you started with a different name. And a couple years ago, you changed and I think that's one of the most brilliant things you've done, in my opinion, but I you know, was there when you guys decided so can you talk a little bit about that, that evolution? Why? Well, again, not something I came up with. In many industries, there's the concept of branding, and most professional corporations, whether it's lawyers, doctors, accountants, on the egos at the top, want their names on the door. So it's always Smith Jones and Johnson are law offices of Craig Goldfarb in my situation. And that's not sustainable when you grow as far as branding, and it's not easy to remember, especially when you add another partner because then it'd be golden Farben, Smith and golden Farben, Smith and Frasca, and then ultimately, it gets diluted. So your brand is something that gets diluted if it includes names. Plus, it's hard for people to remember, even the good law firms in my town, they're all peoples names. But if you figure out a way to brand, you can brand an idea you can brand a core value, you can brand your name, if it's brandable. Mine happened to be brandable My name is Goldfarb. So we changed over to gold law, no gold law can be independent of me. And now people don't call and expect me they're buying a brand and a type of service that has become synonymous in the community with good legal service giving back to the community, etc. So the good law brand, with a logo, as you see on my screensaver has become synonymous with the, the way we want to be looked at in the community. So there's a great book called Story branding, or the story brand, which was one of the evolutions of, of our brand is figuring that out another great book. And that's an example of some reading or research I do or learning in a cross industry area. Because that book has to do with any industry. So it talks about the importance of a brand. Most doctors, most lawyers, most professionals, they don't even know what a brand is. So they're too busy with the ego of their name. And so that was part of the evolution of branding our law firm, it came with a jingle, it came with a logo that you see. And it comes with all sorts of elements of brand or lots of elements, including color, color, design, music, etc, etc. I don't suppose you'd sing the jingle for us, which I'm sure it's pretty easy because it's my phone number, which is also branded. So I have a phone number in five area codes, which is 2222222. So actually, one night, as we were starting our branding, I wanted to know some jingle that had seven notes. So all I did is I typed into Google seven note song. And as I saw the results, I realized that one of everybody's things they learned as a little kid was the shave and a haircut two bits, which goes to tu tu tu tu tu tu. And so that is actually what plays at the end of our commercials and some of our social media, which is a recognizable song from our youth, which is was shaven haircut, two bits. So a lot of our music is Doot doot Doot doot, which is now synonymous with tu tu tu tu tu tu tu. So again, just mean, you know, having insomnia one night going on Google came up with our song, would you call that a sonic brand is a musical brand is audio. It's called a sonic brand. So our Sonic branding has now come to terms and now on the on the radio or TV. If you hear that in my county, you may be thinking of our law firm. It's great. It's really great. And again, just these little connections that you're making with people, their decision making their awareness, you know, my background, you know, in branding and marketing and making those connections I think is so important. So all right, well, we talked about kind of some of the core components, you know, do Do you have any things that are keeping you up at night? I mean, anything that, you know, I or my team or you know, even just in our brainstorm here, I mean, what what are the big challenges that you could use some help with? Well, I would say that since I was a young lawyer, the biggest challenge for people who are lawyers is that they're often control freaks and it's hard to delegate. So the skill Oh, that was the hardest for me to learn. Yet the most valuable for me to learn as an entrepreneur was to balance the need for control with the need for delegation. And I listened to a couple podcasts specifically on the skill of delegation. And there's a couple that specifically are great. There's one by Ari Mizel AR i, m Eisel. And his podcast is, I think the art of doing nothing or doing that's what it is the doing less podcast. And one of his podcasts is on the levels of delegation, and how difficult each of them are. And he goes through the six different levels of delegating a task and examples of each from hardest from easiest to hardest. And when I heard that the first time was like, like, oh, my gosh, he's right. He's just made a scientific study of how hard it is to delegate. And on that doing less podcast, I started to learn and be able to identify, if I just give something to somebody, and say, Get it done, give it back, that's a level one delegation, that's really easy. But when you get to a level six, I'll give you an example of a level six delegation, hey, marketing director, go get our website redone. And let me know when it's done. That's a level six, because I didn't tell them how much to spend. I didn't tell him that I want to read anything or look at the homepage. I didn't tell him how to do it. I didn't tell him, pick vendors. And then I'll go through and demo all the vendors. I said, Go get the RIP website redone. And let me know when it's done. That's impossible to do unless you've already mastered levels one through five whose delegation, you can't, nobody can do that. Because they want to be involved in all parts of redesigning the website. I got to that point a few years ago, where I said, Hey, marketing director, redo our website, let me know when it's done. And at that point, I knew that at least built the six levels, whether I comply with that all the time and stop being a micromanager. That's certainly hard. But I at least have mastered the ability to be able to understand the concept of a level six Delegated Task. And to me, that's continues to be the hardest challenge, which is to let go and hire people and gain their trust enough to be able to do a lot of level six delegations. And once you can do that, across your business, you've really gotten to a point where you allow yourself some freedom. And you can take that vacation, that's a month or two. And you can do some of the things you might want to do apart from your company. And that's a point of total freedom, which is what we all say we want when we start a business, but nobody really ever gets there. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a, I would say that's a delegation I'm, I maybe struggle with to I'll have to listen to the doing less podcast, because I certainly don't think I'm at the level six yet i i can imagine kind of being, you know, a perfectionist, wanting those cases, wanting those clients, you know, really dealt with in the high quality care that I know is really important to you. I mean, that would be very difficult. So having good people, which, you know, I think that's, you know, a kind of a training component of, you know, making sure that they understand the process. And I would say kind of done in the gold law way. Has that been something that you feel like the team daily, big time, so we realized early on that having the right people in the right seats, and the right people on your bus, are just absolutely the one of the most important thing. So we actually because we are detailed here, we created an on a hiring, recruiting and onboarding system that hopefully others can do. So once I designed it, I gave it up to HR and culture. And I said, Okay, now we've designed this together, now I can let it go. So I you know, we have, as I said, at staff, 10 lawyers, I'm only involved in the hiring process, the final portion of the hiring process with attorneys, and with C level employees, meaning a CEO CFOs do well. So I've taken myself out of the hiring process, because we created a system that hopefully includes everything that we want, and everybody that works at our company. So having the right people and having a system to make sure you get the right people is just it's the standard you need to have. Are you doing any auditing, like where you come in, and you just kind of drop in to see that the processes the way you want it and the people are being, you know, the clients are being managed the way you want it? Are you are you? Yes. Well, what's interesting is I audit, the four people report to me. So we have an executive team of five people, including me, and the only people that that report to me or for others. So the auditing is done in a tiered system, which is that so let's say those four people have supervisors or managers under them, who then in turn audit people below them below them, so I only need to see certain data. So I would never be on Anything, something that's a very low level data fact, but I have, I have about 20 KPIs which I audit. And within those 20 KPIs are measures of whether systems are, are working. So if, for instance, a system is broken, it will show up in one of the 20 KPIs. Makes sense. I don't audit the systems, I audit the results of the systems, which are the key performance indicators, I don't have time to audit systems, I have to audit results are seen but below me audit the systems. Okay. I mean, that makes sense. I was, you know, in my attempt to think about this a little more broadly, I was thinking back to, you know, maybe my days at General Mills, where, you know, the organization is so large, you know, the CEO has to trust that the things made at the yo play plant, are being done the right way, in a food safe manner, and with all of the, you know, safety mechanisms in place, and certainly the CEO cannot audit every plant every day, etc. So, I was sort of wondering, you know, as you grow in this skill to delegate at a level six, are there other industries where safety or compliance is so critical, and it is kind of navigated through the chains, I don't know if there's anything there. But I was just thinking to myself, I wonder if there are folks out there, almost like a quality assurance type of manner, that would even be able to give you more trust that everything is being done exactly how you want it done? Well, there's, I don't remember the book, it might be the four disciplines of execution, I forget, that talks about lag measures and lead measures. So a lag measure is a data point that comes after the occurrence. So for instance, with work safety, if you have zero accidents at your plant, that's a lag measure, right comes after the situation. And a lag measure of zero incidents, that your plan is an audit of sorts, because it's a KPI that reflects that you have good safety systems going on. So if you have zero accidents, probably you have good systems, or you just got lucky. If you have 100 accidents, you know that there's something broken in your systems. So the the good CEO would be measuring the number which is zero, not necessarily auditing the system. And if you get people involved in, in caring about the systems, that there may be financially incentivized or incentivized in some other way to have zero accidents, then you're putting some money behind it. And you're also if they if one of your passions is work safety, and at the core value of, you know, safe, safe environment, if you have some sort of core value, that if you hire people that have the same core values of you that you do, then work safety might be something that they're passionate about, and therefore, it's going to be double likely that you're going to have very few work accidents. So in that example, Craig, I mean, I don't know what it would be, but what what in your mind would be a lead metric or a lead the lead measures are what are your systems that are in place, in other words, so lead measure, there's something you do to prevent workplace accidents, lead measure could be we bought 3200. Jigsaw covers to make sure that our 3200 workers don't get hurt by the saw that they're using in the middle. So that's a lead measure is that you've spent money. And it hopefully will produce a lag measure, which is zero accident. So a lead measure in that situation would be a proactive move, a proactive purchase of saw guards to prevent injuries. So that would be a lead measure. So what would be a lead measure in your business to help with this accountability, and this delegate a lead measure is the amount we spend on marketing. It doesn't produce anything yet. So we spent X millions of dollars in marketing in a year that has produced nothing. It's merely a lead measure. So how much are you going to spend on marketing? How many people are you going to hire? What are your salaries? These are all lead measures. They haven't produced anything yet you hope they do. But that those are lead measures. On the accountability front, though, I'm wondering for like you are describing your challenge that you continue to have, you know, in your world is that level six delegation, so I'm just trying to think of like lead measures that would allow you to know, sure, well, the best businesses then meld at the end of the year, their lead in their leg. So for instance, one way I measure or I combine and meld a lead and a lag is if I spent $1 million, hypothetically on marketing, and it produced 100 cases, that would be $100 per case, I think 10,000 Whatever it is per case, you divide a million by whatever number of cases I said. So that's called acquisition cost per case. So the way you meld those two things together, is you figure it out. If you're getting a cost per product cost per case, that's an effective number. So that's at the end of the year, whether you figured out whether your marketing was effective. So if you have a 1000 cases, and you settled a million dollars, then that means you got $1,000 per case, I think. So you know that your average fee per case is $1,000. So that's another melding at the end of the year. So there's a purpose for adding lead and lag measures, which is at the end of the year, you combine them and figure out meaningful data based on what your lead measures versus what they produced in lack. And if if it ends up that you spend money on TV, and you've got zero cases, well, then from TV, you know that there's a mismatch between your lead and your lag. And therefore TV is not the best place for you to be. In the example of accountability, would you say kind of like leading measures would be are we running meetings effectively? Are we attending meetings, are we staying connected, in which case, I know your firm is doing a great job with that. But that becomes kind of a measurement on the front end, and then results on the back end? Sure, there's some lead measures that don't necessarily have an ROI or return on investment. So showing up for meetings, it's tough to produce a lag measure from that, but but showing up for meetings, one would say that if everybody has the same value system, and we have accountability as one of our core values, that it does result in a unified firm, which is going to be successful. So it's hard to put an ROI on just showing up for meetings. But on the other hand, you know that there are certain corporate principles and certain things in a corporation, which are definitely going to lead to success. And if people don't buy into the principles showing up for a meeting, you've got problems you don't have buy in. Got it. I'm going to keep thinking about this challenge. Just because I'm, I'm interested in. And I've never read the book that you described on the lead and lag measures. But that's also the four disciplines of execution is one of my favorite books that I read early. And it really produces produced a lot of good metrics and data for how I run my company. And then another one by Pat Lencioni. Great Business author is Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which talks about trust. So when you're learning how to delegate, don't only listen to podcasts, you really got to study the concept of trust, because all of delegation is based on trust or lack thereof. And The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a wonderful business book, very well known book that talks about how you establish trust before you can be able to comfortably delegate. That's great. Really great. Okay, I have a tangent question that is a little bit unrelated to what we're talking about, but it relates to what you talked about at the very beginning. So, you know, I, I'm just curious for women attorneys, you know, this is relating back to what you said about your mom seeing the challenges that she was faced? Do you think that's getting any better? Have you seen a change in that through the years? I have I in a way, I think the the problem is that the concept of motherhood still exists, and in a male's head, the risk of hiring a female and then dealing with the choice that a female might ultimately have to make about staying home or not that that risk is still there. And so that's still in males heads. And as long as males are still running companies, that hard for them to remove that from their heads, if someone might be of childbearing age. Once you get past that age, I think that that stigma is erased for most males to be candid, because that woman has already made her choice. So I think that is the biggest hang up in our, in our society of hiring younger females, because males are still left in the the, the mindset of am I going to lose this woman to motherhood? It's interesting. I have a couple of clients around the country right now that are law firms, and they are hiring women who may have left their law degree. And they are fantastic intake attorneys because it's a more flexible arrangement for them. And so it's kind of it's kind of fun to see people be creative with it, but it obviously does create, perhaps the fear of, you know, losing someone the fear of, you know, kind of having that work. Not be met by the same person as they go into becoming a mom. It's true. It's a part of the reality. But yeah, there are lots of creative ways I've had, of course, I've had female attorneys at my company. But there's still that stigma, I guess in our career and in any career that is the career itself as a jealous mistress and that it'll eat you up and make you work 70 hours a week if you let it in. That's true whether you're male or female. So professional services It is a tough industry to balance with your family life at all whether you're female or male, right? Yeah. Well, I'm grateful for those who have continued to be creative, obviously, as a woman. So that's, that's cool. Well, okay, so anything else that you want to ask me or any other components of your business that you want to share? I know you have a mastermind coming up. Sure. So for the past seven years, I've run a one day seminar. And it's called the seven figure attorney. And I named it that because one of my early goals as a young attorney was to have a million dollars, which is seven figures in gross revenue. And that's, that's a lot of people's goals. I mean, that's a lot of money to grow seven figures, a million dollars in fees, or an income at the end of the year. So I remember when I was young, that was one of my first goals. So that's I named as a seven figure attorney, the website is seven figure attorney.com, spell out the number seven, seven figure attorney.com. And this year, we're doing it on Thursday, April 11. In Boston, that's 2024. It's a one day seminar. And it's the only personal injury seminar I'm aware of where one law firms being mind basically opens up all our techniques and secrets to 100 or more might be 150 law firms this year in Boston. And I'm the main speaker, I speak four times about four different topics, a lot of them involving what I talked about today, whether it's compensation models, KPIs, how to scale and grow, and all of my topics apply no matter what size law firm you are. And then my other speakers, my chief marketing officer, and he focuses on how to market for solo and small firms, and even medium firms. And then my other speakers, the woman I spoke about earlier from Disney World, Michelle, who is now our chief culture officer, so she's C CEO, at our company chief called culture officer. So she talks about the techniques, she's used to make it, what she calls the happiest workplace on Earth, playing off the Disney slogan, you know, the happiest place on earth. So she talks about that. So it's only three speakers. And we have a really awesome guest speaker this year, a fourth speaker, which is my wife, and she's going to come in this year, and talk about your identity as a lawyer and provider is bullshit. That's actually the topic of her speech, because she wants to tell a cautionary tale of allowing your business to swallow up your life, at the expense of your spouse, and children. And I've tried to serve that as well as I could, I failed in some areas, because I'm an entrepreneur, but she's actually going to be very vulnerable, about me and about her in in making sure that you're aware of the way a business, even a well run business can take over your life to the exclusion of your family. So again, one of the only speakers I know who let someone get up there and dump all over him. It's because she's going to get up there and tell the truth, which is we struggled in some areas with work life balance. And I know there's not going to be a person in the room who does not struggle with work life balance if they went to law firm. So those are the four speakers this year in Boston, April 11. It's called the seven figure attorney, it is only a one day seminar. And the reason we do it on a Thursday is for work life balance, which is please bring your spouse or kids and spend the weekend Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Boston doing some fun stuff. So we always pick it on a Thursday, and we do it in a city that you may want to go on a vacation to. That's great. No spring in Boston is great. We've done Manhattan, we've done Chicago, we've done Atlanta. So we tried to make it a family friendly event and you're only busy one day, you only busy on Thursday. So if you bring your family you can spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday and whatever day in whatever city we pick, that's great. Well, we had talked about it. So I'm coming so yeah, I'll be there. Maybe I'll bring my husband. Well, we'll see. Have you really good, good idea. If you like the great city. That's why we picked it. Well, Craig, I just I mean, again, from the bottom of my heart, I mean, thank you for being willing to kind of, you know, first of all, trust me to be a part of your, you know, business world, your team. I've had such a it's been such a pleasure to see your team developed over the years to be a part of it in a small way. But really, really fun to see you guys grow and scale and and thank you for being on today. Thank you for being here. You must say you've been a lot more than a small part of our growth. You've been an instrumental part of our growth in helping helping me scale and delegate and, and help my life become a better life. And I want to thank you for that too. Yeah, well, a lot of people have written a lot of great books, Craig, but I kind of find that you have to have a partner to help it to help you execute it to write and so I love reading I just like you do and I think again, so many great book books out there, making it come to life on a daily basis. Sometimes it's harder than people anticipate. So having a partner in crime, I've been happy to be there to just say, remember what the book said, right? Well, I think accountability, a lot of accountability is based on a relationship and someone you trust, you wouldn't read a book and then go to war, and protect your fellow people in your platoon based on what you've read. But you would based on your relationship with those folks. So when I have partners like you, or other partners that are people, they go to war with me, and I go to war with them. And that's not based on reading. It's based on my partnership and my trust. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thank you. It's been a been a true honor. And I think the future is so bright for gold law, in whatever capacity I think, you know, It's especially fun to watch you grow in the, I'm going to use my fingers. But I really believe it the right way, right to make sure your people are happy and healthy, to make sure your clients have the quality of care that they deserve. And to watch you really serve your community. It's been pretty fun to see. So with that, I shall see you soon, I'm sure but definitely in Boston. And thank you again for joining the podcast today. Fantastic. And just send me a bill for the golden rule. Pointer UK will be utilizing that in some way in the next month. I have to trademark attorney in the background. trademarking it, so I just texted somebody that it's already been done. Sorry. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Well, have a great rest of the day and enjoy your 25th anniversary and I will see you and your wife and your team in Boston. Thank you so much, Sarah, for having me on. Yes, Craig. Thank you again. Bye, everyone. Bye bye. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of level up your business with me, Sara Frasca. If you have a problem in your business that's keeping you up at night. Please join us in a future episode so we can help get you unstuck. Just clicking the link in the show notes and send us a message. Please remember, stay innovative friends.