This ONE Metric Will Change Your Business Forever (It's Not Revenue!)

If your employees are super happy, they're going to take care of your customers. They're going to work harder, they're going to work smarter, they're going to be more responsive to coaching, they're going to be more responsive to feedback. And if they're really happy and engaged and productive and they're going to take care of your customers, you can charge whatever you want, you're going to get more done, you're going to have more profit and more revenue. But if you focus on how happy your customers are, your employees feel burned out. So, Brian, nice to see you. I'm glad you are participating in this coaching program so that we can actually help you and your company grow, but also so that others can see what a coaching call might be like if they're interested. So thank you for joining us. Before we dive right into coaching, my coaching is always a balance of a few things. There's a little bit of direction, there's a little bit of development, there's a little bit of support. Sometimes there's a bit of holding you accountable, kicking you in the. Sometimes it's holding up the mirror for you to see your own contribution to the problem. But I largely let my clients drive the agenda in terms of what they're covering, even though I tend to take them through of a bit of a model. But today, as we're doing it with one call, why don't you tell us just so that I understand and so anyone listening or watching understands. Just give me kind of a quick high level on what your company is and then I want you to walk us through what's going well, what's not going well, what you're working on over the next month and where you're stuck and we'll dive in from there.

So I run two companies. I have a law firm called Benglass Law. I've been in business with my dad for the last five years, been practicing law for 15. So the first 10 years of my career I was out on, not on my own but at a different firm, you know, kind of competing across town in the same space. Made my own friends and way of doing things and then joined his firm in 2019. My niche is auto accidents. I represent people that have been been hurt in car crashes against insurance companies. He does a highly specialized federal portion of the law in the law firm. We have five lawyers and 12 staff members and we do about three and a half million dollars in top line revenue per year. In addition to that, we run a company called Great Legal Marketing, which is a Mastermind and a coaching and a consulting firm that teaches solo and small law firm owners how to do direct marketing style, acquisition of clients and then how to run better law firms. So we have two mastermind groups there. One for lawyers generally doing less than a million dollars in revenue, trying to crush that mark. Another for lawyers and law firms that are doing over a million dollars in revenue. And our avatar there is anybody who's in a consumer facing practice usually with less than three partners. Right. Because you have too many partners, you nobody's in charge. So that's the overview of the business that that business is smaller. There are five full time employees and then we have a COO and then two admin level. So what's going well is in both businesses our product is really good. If you asked lawyers around the Northern Virginia area, they would tell you we're.

Really good at what we do on.

The auto accident side. And we are regionally dominant in this ERISA long term disability appeals space. We file more lawsuits and win more lawsuits than the next six people in our state combined. Wow. So the product, product is really, really good. And on the the coaching and consulting side, the product is really good also. We have an annual event every year in October. Got raving reviews out of the last one. And we' when people come into our program of taking them from doing about a half million dollars in revenue to about 5 million, kind of where we top, bottom where we can teach people. And we've taken dozens of firms over that million dollar mark freed the lawyer up to run the kind of business that they want to run. So the product's really good. What's not going well is running two businesses is a huge time commitment.

Right.

And so personally my time between the two businesses and I have three boys who are under the age of 10 is just really, really, really busy. I did just recently on. I've had a paralegal legal assistant for years but I've never had somebody to manage all of my executive assistant needs. So I have that and it's getting better. But the personal time commitment is really tough.

Okay.

And business wise, we're sort of struggling to raise up the second generation of leaders within the business.

Yeah.

As we kind of sit in this and effectively the CEO and the COO seat, especially in the law firm, we're having what I would call a leadership gulf in like the middle management range. So that's a struggle. What I'm working on in the next month is really, is like growing up evolving from the doer of the work and I'm trying to do less and less of the actual legal creation of the product and less and less work with any clients to a leader of leaders and trying to raise my people to do the management. But I'm finding myself having to, you know, go back into files and correct and micromanage much, much more than I would like to. And then where we're getting stuck in, in one business it's with leads. So in the law firm we're a little bit stuck on generating enough leads. And Internet marketing is harder and harder and harder. So that's been a struggle. And then in the coaching and consulting program it's conversion so we can generate leads. But we've relied heavily on email marketing follow up campaigns to get people to convert into clients, get them to convert into Mastermind. We don't have the capacity internally to do direct sales and to sell people that way. So we're struggling to find a solution there to bring more people into that product.

Okay, this is awesome. Well, luckily is not often that I actually have any kind of industry or domain expertise. But strangely there's an industry or a company that was in your industry who helped hundreds of personal injury law firms do their marketing. The company was called CJ Advertising out of Nashville. And I used to coach Arnie Malam who is the CEO of cj. I spoke at their industry conference a couple of times and got to know a bunch of personal injury lawyers. So then I actually coached for a couple years William Matar out of Buffalo in Rochester. I coached George Sink out of South Carolina. I coached Seth Bader and Louise Scott from Bader Scott in Atlanta. And then I also coached Jason Hennessey and Scott Shrum who run Hennessy Digital. It's an SEO firm law firm. So somehow I've been around this legal and personal injury space for a bunch of years and I got to know the business both from a marketing. Oh, and then I also coached Bill Hauser who runs SMB Law and kind of has helped a bunch of lawyers too. So I've been around the industry and seen it from both sides, kind of the space that you're in. And also they're running the marketing for a lot of firms. So I can kind of dive in and give you some expertise there. Normally I don't know my clients industries at all, which is actually pretty helpful because I can see the industry from a very different perspective. So I'm going to ask you to treat any of my experience share or any of the advice that I'm giving you with a bit of understanding that I don't run one of your firms, right? I studied. I have my undergraduate degree in law, but I didn't, I didn't go to law school. So I did four years of law courses in university and I got my bachelor's degree with a law major. But not allowed to practice law. I'm not a lawyer. I've never run a law firm and I've never worked for a law firm. I've never run a marketing agency for law firms, but I've been around them enough to at least understand your business. So one thing that you said is running two companies is hard. There's an old saying that when you sit on more than one toilet, it gets kind of messy and you're sitting on two toilets. So here's the only way that you can sit on two toilets or that you can run two companies. It's to make sure that you set up each company for success. I had dinner with a guy named Morten Lund in Germany about 10 years ago, and I asked him what he was doing and he said he has 86 companies up and running. I'm like, how do you oversee 86 companies? He's like, oh, I don't. I suck at that. I'm like, do you go to the board meetings? He goes, no, they'd kick me out of board meetings. I'm like, do you coach the leadership team? He goes, no, I suck at coaching. I'm like, do you manage the financials? He goes, I can't read financials. I'm dyslexic. I'm like, so what do you do? He goes, I'm really good at starting them and making sure that they have a plan and the people and the money in place. And I let them do their thing. Where you are with the two businesses now is, as you said, you have, you have to grow up, and you have to grow this team of people up is to make sure that each of the two companies have a vivid vision in place. So it's that four or five page written description of what each individual company looks like, acts like, and feels like three years in the future. So do you have a vivid vision for each of them yet?

Not fully complete.

Okay, so you've read the book, but you haven't done it. You need to do it. And the reason is that it will completely align your team, your customers, your suppliers. It'll act like a marketing tool. It'll help you with the onboarding of clients. It becomes like a magnet for everything in your business. So you need to get that, the second part is you need to put a plan in place for one year. And you don't have to be the one executing on the plan, but you have to ensure that the team has a plan of the top kind of initiatives, the top projects that they're going to do to make the revenue goal happen, to make the profit goal happen, to make the customers happy or whatever. You have to make sure that a plan exists to make those things happen. That's a staffing plan, a marketing plan, an operating plan, an operating budget so that you feel comfortable in giving them that or that you feel comfortable in making sure that you're coaching them on that, holding them accountable to that. But that plan, that framework will allow you to have two companies going because you're gonna have a vision for each, you're gonna have a plan for each. Each of the companies likely have the same core values.

They're very similar. So we run on EOs and we've done that, and they're very similar.

Okay? So make sure that the core values are rolled out, that they're deeply integrated in the company, that people live by them, that you fire people who are breaking them. That's all good. If you're operating on eos, the next thing you need to do is make sure that like in eos, the right people in the right seats, you have to be ruthlessly honest with yourself. For the money that you're paying today are each of the people in the roles and it's lucky enough that you don't have tons of people. You can do this on one piece of paper. Put a four box matrix in place, right. And have on the Y axis, the up and down axis is results. How are they doing on their results for the money that you're paying? And have the axis go from a 1 at the bottom to a 10 out of 10 at the top and just rate them on that axis in terms of where are they getting results for the money that you're paying? Right. If I was going to pay ahead of marketing $2 million a year, they're going to be better than somebody who's getting $60,000 a year. So for the money I'm paying, where are they in results? And then on the x axis, the bottom axis, grade them on their core values and their culture fit for the company on a scale of 1 at the bottom left to on the far right, a 10 out of 10. So you're going to plot them in these four boxes if they're in the bottom left, if they have Results less than five and core values, culture fit less than five, you have to fire them. And I don't care if it's your mom or your brother in law or somebody who's worked for you for 17 years. If their results and core values or culture fit are both less than five, you get them out of the company. That's usually an decision. If you have people in the companies that are an 8 or greater on both or a 9 or greater on both, these are the God forbid they ever quit people, right? These are the people that you have to handcuff to your company for the next five years so that you can sleep at night. You also know that these are probably your emerging leaders, right? These are the people that you want to grow. So I've always had this adage that you give your grain to your best horses and your A players are racehorses. These are the nines or tens. The B players are the solid workhorses. Those are like the sevens and, and great run both. They're going to plot along, they're going to do the job. And then anybody with less than a 6 or a 5 on both are your C players, they have to go to the glue factory. I want you and your dad giving your time to your A players, not as much time to your B players. The workhorses will do their job. They'll do their job. They'll do their job. Don't worry, don't alienate them. But I want you to really, if you're talking about up leveling your team and growing your team so that you can do less and grow people, really focus on those two or three or four true A players grow their skills. I would put all of them through the invest in your leaders course. Yeah, if you use the promo code Cameron H10, it'll give you 10% off for each of them. The invest in your leaders course covers the skills that they need to run the business for you. So it's situational leadership, coaching, delegation, time management, project management, handling conflict managing, email and slack communication, one on one coaching, classroom teaching, running interviews, running meetings. It's the executive functioning skills that they need to be good at. Give them those skills. What we tend to do as a company is we tend to give people the skills around what we do. How to manage a case, how to manage our legal software, how to talk with legal, how to negotiate. Like that's all good, but that doesn't scale the company. Right. What scales. The company is growing them as leaders. So that's going to be important. The Second part of this is for you and probably even your dad, but certainly for you. Identifying the stuff that you would like to delegate but someone doesn't have the skills to do yet. I want you to delegate it to them anyway, and I want you to grow their skills and grow their confidence at doing it. So one of the best examples I've seen of this was years ago, I was running this business and I had to meet with the head of finance for our budgeting meeting. And Trish sat down and she said, this is Elaine. She's going to be running budgeting eventually. She's not going to say anything in the meeting. She's not even going to ask any questions. She's just going to listen in as we have our meeting. I said, cool, nice to meet you. So Trish and I did the meeting, and a week later, Trish and I got together for the budgeting meeting again. And Elaine walked into the room and Trish said, elaine might have a couple questions today. She probably won't say much. I'm like, cool, good to see you. A week later we walk in and Trish goes, elaine might have a few questions. She might say a bunch of stuff. Week four, Elaine walks in. I go, where's Trish? She goes, she's not coming. I run budgeting. So what happened was Trish trained Elaine and didn't spend any time training Elaine. She trained Elaine by letting Elaine watch her in her job, by letting her attend meetings, listening on phone calls. She blind cc'd Elaine on all communication for a period of a month. Your role is to kind of do the work that you're doing, but someone has to watch you, shadow you, listen in on, observe, whatever, everything that you do. Because your job is to get everything off your plate except the one or two things that you're amazing at and that feed you with energy. Yeah.

I mean, so for me, that looks like getting all of the legal off my plate.

Right.

So having. Having the associate copied on everything in every meeting, on every phone call, with questions afterwards. Right.

Correct. Or with questions. And eventually even with questions during. But yes, with questions afterwards. What are the parts of the business that feed you up? Like, what parts of the business do you work on that you're like, this is awesome. I love this. I could do it for free.

In the law space, it's talking to new clients.

Okay.

It's negotiating cases at the end of the case, and it's taking cases to trial. That stuff is fun. Everything in the middle is not okay. And then in the consulting business, it's like, it's the coaching, it's talking on stages, it's content creation, going on podcasts, hosting a podcast, all of that stuff. Stuff is okay.

So you listed out a bunch of things. I want you to be ruthlessly honest and cut a couple from each business. Like, do you really love content creation? Are you okay with it? Like, what do you love that's fun?

That. Okay, that, that part's. So if you made me cut a couple things, I could never go to trial again in my life and be happy with that.

Y.

And I could cut, I could cut out negotiation. I do enjoy talking to new clients. I do like solving problems and I do like, you know, doing. I didn't say this, but doing the high level strategy on cases.

Yeah.

So, so you know me, the five minute summary of the case and let's try to solve the problem. Like, I love doing that.

Yeah. So here's the thing. If you can start delegating everything off your plate that you're excellent at, but that doesn't feed you with energy, you win. So have you ever heard of Dan Sullivan from Strategic Coach? Talk about the activity inventory?

No.

So here's how it works. Pretend that someone follows you around like Gary Vaynerchuk with a video camera for an entire month and they film every everything you do day to day at work. And then I want you to re watch the video and write down everything that you do. So what I tend to do is I open up a spreadsheet and I in column A, I write down every task that I do. Negotiate a case, show up at court, prep for court, read emails, follow up on emails, book flights, book hotels, whatever. I might have 80 things on my list of stuff that I do in column A. In column B, I categorize every project in one of four ways. Either I for incompetent, meaning I suck at it. C for competent, meaning I'm okay at it. E for excellent, meaning I'm really, really good at it, but I don't necessarily love doing it. And U for unique ability, which is the stuff I love to do. And I would do it for free. In column C, I put an hourly rate down. If I was to pay someone to do that job day in and day out, what would I pay them? Because there's stuff that you're doing that is minimum wage jobs. There's stuff that you're doing that's probably only 50 bucks an hour. But what do the combined businesses earn in terms of profit for you, your salary, and profit over the course of a year?

500. 600.

Okay, so let's call it 600,000. 600,000 is $300 an hour. What's your hourly rate that you bill out as a lawyer?

I don't. So it's all contingency fee.

Okay, so if you were billing out as a lawyer, what might your hourly rate be? Yeah, if you were in a, if you were in a similar kind of a law firm, what might it be?

I actually don't know. So I. Maybe we can back into it this way. I can generate somewhere between 800,000 and a million dollars a year in revenue.

Yeah, there.

Working, you know, 20 to 25 hours a week in the firm because I'm split between two businesses. So if you back into it that way, I don't. 5, 500, 600, something like that.

Yeah, it's about $600 an hour. So I would. Worst case, let's call it $500 an hour is your effective hourly rate. You for sure want to start delegating anything less than that. Now, a friend of mine, Dan Martell, wrote a book called buy back your time, and he takes the effective hourly rate of 500 an hour, divides it by four, and says if you do anything less than 125 bucks an hour, that for sure you have to delegate. So I would look at any task or any project in column C that has a rate of less than $125 an hour, and I would find a way to get that off your plate, whether it's to a fractional EA, to an ea, to a junior person, an admin, an ops person, or just by not doing it anymore so that the only stuff that you're left working on is at least 500 bucks an hour fires you up or, or at least it's just such high pay stuff that it just makes sense to do it until you're big enough to then get that off your plate too. Okay. That's the starting point though, is getting everything else off your plate. Because if you can show up with really good energy, let's say that all day, like I love doing speaking events, I love doing coaching. I would do both for free. If I can do speaking and coaching eight hours a day, I'm fired up all day long. But if I have to work in the business on stuff that drains me of energy, I show up for one coaching call and I'm drained. I'm not as effective or I go onto a stage or I do a zoom speaking event, I'm not as effective or I'm not I'm not as engaging. So if I can get all the stuff off my plate that drains me when I'm working in my unique ability, I'm fired up and I'm getting even better results. With the EAs that you hired and the admin that you hired, where are they based out of?

Philippines.

Okay, good. There's a group that I can introduce you to. If you'd like an intro, send me an email. They also hire help. You hire full time people based in Colombia, based in Eastern Europe and based in the Philippines, but aren't just EAs. They can be like, they can work in legal, they can work in negotiations, they can work in project, they can work in it. But you definitely want to start leveraging even more of the offshore people that are in your business.

About four offshore people right now. So we all are a medical records collection, our video post production and then some of our intake stuff is done overseas.

Great. I would be looking for to get more and more off off of your company's plate and off your people's plate so that you can offload and even look to see can I get stuff that you're doing that maybe it's 125 bucks an hour, but it might be somebody in the Philippines that's 30 or 40 bucks an hour, which is basically like an MBA operations person who's just a maniac that might cost you 150 grand a year if they were in Virginia, but in the Philippines they're only 30 grand a year. 40 grand a year. Right. We often don't think about getting some of the higher priced things off our plate. We think about getting the admin over to the Philippines. But you can get some of the other stuff off your plate too.

Talk to me about the mindset shift between. Well, if I only worked on stuff that was actually worth 500, 600, a thousand dollars an hour, I probably wouldn't have that much work to do.

Right.

And the balance between. All right, now we got to go out and we got to hunt and find more of those things to work on. And I feel like I'm the one that has to go out and hunt for that. Maybe that's not a 5, 500, I don't know, like that cycle, right?

Yeah.

We need to generate more retention cycle.

So the stuff, if you focus on everything that generates revenue and gross margin, there's not a single problem in your company that will exist that you can't write a check for to make it disappear. So if all of a sudden you're Delegating and getting stuff off your plate and you're freeing up your time. You can be on more podcasts, you can be on more stages, you can engage with more clients, you can negotiate with clients, you can spend more time strategically with clients. All stuff that becomes very revenue generating. You could work in taking my leads from people into the marketing agency and converting those leads to clients, which becomes more revenue. The key is to free up your time so that you generate revenue, so that you can buy your way out of every problem, right? So you become more of the rainmaker. The key is to remember that you get to write the rules and rig them in your favor. The beautiful part about being the entrepreneur is we actually get to delegate everything that we hate. When you're an employee, sometimes you get stuck and sucked up. You have to do it because it's part of your job. You don't have to do anything. You get to delegate everything except genius.

Here's the difficulty. The mental block that I have in a small company, smaller company, having come from small company, is the shift from having always been in the trenches and doing the work with the people to now I'm only operating in my zone of genius, and I'm. I'm going to delegate everything else. And you're one of the people that I'm going to delegate that to. So talk to me about the mental shit out of. Out of that. With, you know, co workers who are employees but have effectively been co workers.

I call it the Catholic and Jewish guilt. We end up having this guilt and we feel bad, like, oh, I'm taking all this vacation time. They get it. They get that you're the entrepreneur and they're not. They're okay with that. They also just don't want you messing in their area. And they also probably like to do the stuff that they like and don't like to do the stuff that you like. I'll give you an example. I hate accounting. I hate finance. I don't like anything about accounting and finance. My head of finance, Trish, loved finance, thought it was amazing. She hated doing speaking events. She hated talking to clients. She hated motivating the team. She hated talking to the press. I love that. I had a woman who worked for me in communication and writing, who had her journalism degree and a communications degree, and for me to write a memo to send out to clients would take me like a week to get the memo and it would still suck. I went to Catherine one day, I'm like, hey, could you take a memo of mine and rewrite it. She's like, oh my God, that would be amazing. I'm like, why would it be amazing? You're just merely rewriting a memo. She's like, because I get to rewrite a memo for the coo. This is great. So the fact that I was delegating to work got her excited because she was able to work on higher impact communications for the company and then it freed me up to grow people care about. People care about customers, which then grew the revenue, which then, you know, you won't run out of stuff to do. But you also said something is that you're also sitting on two toilets and you've also got three kids. So maybe what you'll get to do is spend time with your kids. Maybe what you'll get to do is spend more time with your spouse. Maybe you'll get to spend more time with yourself and your hobbies and maybe you won't show up as leftovers, right? Maybe the time that you show up at your kids games and sports and after dinner you're not exhausted because you're burned out from work. Maybe you're showing up as a better dad and a better husband and a better lover and a better friend, right. So I'm actually really good at that.

So I coach baseball and soccer and, and you know, have built the kind of thing where we can leave at 4:30 most days to go and do that. I think when I talk about time it's, it's, you know, the introverts struggle of like I've, I have all these interactions and a lot of meetings and, and I don't have the downtime during the day and then I go home and I got coaching and all that stuff.

Are you working nights after dinner and after coaching and stuff? Are you doing rarely good? Yeah, I would, I would try to get you down that you're only allowed to work one night per month to catch up because you actually somehow got behind on something and it's needed and you're only allowed to work one half weekend day per month to force yourself to delegate. The other thing is again during the day, if you can only spend time, kind of three to four hours of the day working in the business and the rest of the time allowed you to be strategic, allowed you to grow people, allowed you to mentor people, allowed you to work with customers. Like if you can work on the higher impact areas and work on the higher leverage areas and work on growing people, your business is going to scale. Spending the time with the A players. I actually did a video this morning on Instagram and I talked about that so often, entrepreneurs and leaders are so busy doing the work that we forget that our job is to actually get results through people. And it does lead to the same result. In fact, it often leads to a better result. Every time I've ever delegated something, it usually ends up getting done better by the person I delegate it to than it was getting done by me in the first place. One of my mentors years ago said that a true leader has to say no more often than we say yes. How much do you think is on your plate today? That is below a hundred bucks an hour.

There's not a lot. You know, it's hard. So I am in a lot of meetings. Right. Because each of the companies is running on eos. We're having two L10s a week. And then the, the, the injury vertical is running a kind of a bastardized L10 meeting that's meeting once a week. And then I'm doing one on ones with their marketing director and with my chief paralegal. You know, I don't know how you calculate exactly the time of that, but the stuff that I'm spending on client case files is all over a hundred hours, $100 an hour, and I'm really not doing any admin tasks.

Okay, so you're pretty comfortable that you're not doing much under a hundred bucks an hour?

I'm pretty comfortable that there's, there's not more than a couple of hours currently that are under 100 an hour, especially now having onboarded the new EA.

Okay, right.

So he's, he's taken all my email, he's taken all of my calendaring. We're working on building, you know, kind of the CRM of me and having him do outreach for podcasts and guests, and I have somebody editing all of those. So let's say I'm pretty confident.

Let's say it's a couple hours a week that you're spending on stuff below your effective hourly rate. If you're, If I'm paying you $500 an hour and somebody could do it for 50 bucks an hour just for easy math, that's $450 an hour times two hours a week is $900 a week times 52 weeks a year, it's $45,000 that you're wasting. If I was your CEO, I'd be pissed off that you're wasting $45,000 a year. Right, Right. So I would find a way to actually start getting that stuff off your Plate. In terms of your people, is there any efficiencies that you can have with your people and your team? Like, do you find that any of them are wasting time, or are they all pretty effective and pretty maxed out? Out.

Oh, it's difficult without micromanaging.

It's not micromanaging if you expect or inspect what you expect. Yeah, it's micromanaging if you tell somebody how to do something when they already have the skills to do it. It's not micromanaging if you tell someone how to do something when they're overwhelmed or they're new at something or there's a better way. But how much time do you think you've got? People that are working on the wrong stuff or are too busy on stuff?

We just have people maybe that are too slow with stuff, too reactive and not proactive enough to move files through. So, again, we only get paid at the end of a case. And. And there are times when I look down into the file and go, I would have done it, you know, kind of in this order. Because then we can run the trains in tandem rather than consecutively. Yeah, Run the timelines in tandem. I don't know. Like, we. We have a good system in the c. In the CRM that shoots out tasks, and people usually follow it. But I get frustrated when I look in and it's not being done as efficiently as it could be.

So the key is when you see something is to show the people on your team what you see and how you saw it so that they start to see it too. So I was. I was at a gym in Scotland last summer, and I was working out in the gym, and I'd become friendly with the owner of this. This gym. And I called him over. I'm like, hey, I want to show you something. I said, I've been here for an hour, working out, and there's, like, three old towels crumpled up in the corner over here, and there's a bunch of weights sitting on the floor over here. And there's some. Somebody, one of your team members, sweatshirts on the ground over in this corner. He goes, holy, you're right. Let me pick it all up. I'm like, no, don't pick it up. Call your employees in. Ask them to stand in the far corner of the room and just say, what do you see? And wait until they see what I just showed you. You. So that you need them to see this stuff. How old are your kids?

10, 9 and 5.

Okay, you're right there with your 10 and 9. Year old with your 10 and 9 year old, it's about pulling them into the kitchen and saying, hey, what do you see? Oh, oh, I see my dirty dishes. Yeah. Where did dirty dishes go? They go in the dishwasher, put your dirty dishes away. You stand there, they put them away and you go, good job. Don't do that again. And then a day later, when you see the dirty dishes, you don't put them away again. You bring them back and you go, hey, what do I see? Our job is to get them to see what we see. It's the same way with. When you see a better way inside of your company or a more efficient way or a way to run the, you know, the trains you mentioned, like in conjunction versus so have you got a system in place to grow people so that you can show them those things?

No, you would not describe what we have as a system in place to grow people so that we could show them those things.

Yeah, so I think we. I think what you want to do is start to create that because your job is to coach people to see what you can see, to not to necessarily do it the same way. I've been showing my oldest son that whenever I go somewhere, I pick something up on my way to where I'm going. I learned this years ago when I ran a restaurant that I. Every time I walked into the kitchen, I brought something with me. When I left the kitchen, I brought something with me. Like I was always. So when you're in a house, you know, if I'm walking towards the bedroom, stuff moves towards the bedroom or it moves towards the garbage. Like stuff's always moving towards where I'm going so that it becomes more efficient later. Right. We need to teach people that, otherwise they don't learn efficiency. The key is to not say, do it this way. It's to say, this is a better way to do it. Here's why it's a better way to do it. Right. Do you see what I'm seeing? Or for us to say to them, hey, what other ways do you think we could do this and get them to uncover for themselves what it could be? So it's using some of the Socratic method, but the only way that happens is when we can slow down so that we can spend time growing people instead of doing the work work. And then it's for us as a leader to look for the missing systems and the broken systems versus blaming a person. So years ago I had a mentor who was being groomed as the CEO at Starbucks, and he Said the CEO called him one day and was pissed off that the letter B on one of the signs at the location in Seattle wasn't working. And Howard said, or Greg said to Howard, I don't care. It's a terrible question. Like to ask me why that letter B is not working. Howard goes, well, what's a better question? Greg said, we need to ask questions such as what system should we have in place to ensure that every letter on every sign at every location is always working? Right. So that's the kind of questions we need to be able to. You need to be able to grow your people with is, you know, what system can we put in place to ensure that these things don't happen again? Or to ensure that we have a better way? And always looking for those efficiencies.

You know, I'm going back to the quadrant that you drew with the results and the core value match. Because one of our core values is proactivity. And if you, you know, if you put these systems in place and, and you're still having a mismatch, then it's not that they don't know.

It could also be an interviewing or hiring system. Right. We could have interviewed or hired us, or we might have outgrown a person, or we don't have a good coaching program in place. I'll tell you something else, though. If you have a core value called productivity, you actually have a core values problem. Activity, Proactivity. You have a core values problem. Core values should never be single words. They're confusing. Core values should never be lined up to be an acronym because people then think the acronym is more important than the core values point. Core values. You should have a maximum of four or five core values. They should be short, simple to understand. Phrases that need no explanation, like deliver what you promise. Respect the individual pride in all you do. Find a better way. Those are good core values. The only time I've ever allowed a single word core value was one of my clients had the word simplify. I'm like, that's so good.

And anything you do to that's gonna unsimplify it. Right?

Like so. So that one made sense. But product, was it proactivity? Yep. I don't know what that means, but you could have a three or a four word phrase that includes that proactivity. That would be clearer. Now the key with core values is to be willing to fire people if they're breaking them, or they're merely like an aspirational value or a behavioral trait and they have to Be easy for people to understand. And then you can train people on how we live them. You can also praise people on when they live them, which is really, really critical. As you scale the company now is one of the ways you'll get your employees living the core values is to constantly thank people for living a core value. Value. To constantly praise people for living a core value. To point out to somebody, hey, great job delivering what we promised. When you had did that with a client. So you kind of, you, you praise them on something specific they did, but you tie it to a core value. Just even in the way you mention it. The more that we do that as humans, we're still 15 year olds trapped in adult bodies. Right. We're still, we're still starving for that praise or direction or support or love or whatever we were missing. And as a kid, the adults who we work with still respond the same way. I have not found a leader yet that works hard enough at saying thank you. Praising the core values, celebrating the little wins, celebrating all the successes. We're constantly driving to the next goal, solving the next issue, setting the next objective, driving towards the next rock. But we forget that we just, you know, we set three new rocks, but we didn't celebrate the three that we got done. Or we're setting two new goals. We forget to celebrate the two we just achieved. Or we're pointing out the three ways we broke core values, but we didn't celebrate the seven ways we just lived the core values. The more that you can bring systems in around that is going to create these super happy employees inside of your company. Then what's the number one metric you have for each of your companies today?

What is the number one metric that we have?

Man. Yeah. So you've got two companies. What would be the number one metric for the law firm? What would be your number one metric for your marketing agency?

That's an awesome question because I struggle to come up with anything that's not revenue.

So in eos, they talk about having core metrics. Right? Right. The one thing that Gino did wrong, and there's a few things that are wrong in there, there's also a few things that were in my book, double double, which came out two years before traction. So it was kind of intriguing to me. So the one thing that he missed on was the most important metric is never revenue, is never customer satisfaction, it's never profit. The most important metric in every company should be your employee net promoter score. It's how happy and engaged are your employees. So if you can drive towards a high employee net promoter score. If your employees are super happy, they're going to take care of your customers. They're going to work harder, they're going to work smarter, they're going to be more responsive to coaching, they're going to be more responsive to feedback. And if they're really happy and engaged and productive, and they're going to take care of your customers, you can charge whatever you want, you're going to get more done, you're going to have more profit, more revenue. But if you focus on how happy your customers are, your employees feel burned out. Out. If you focus on how much revenue you're making, your employees feel burned out. So you can have those metrics. But what I like to do is an employee survey twice a year where I ask one question on a scale of 1 to 10, how enthusiastically would you recommend this as a place to work? And then I take the percentage of people that give me a 9 or a 10. Those are my promoters. I subtract the percentage of people that give me a 1 through 6, which are the detractors. And you end up with a result of somewhere between negative 100% and positive 100%, which is your net promoter score. The goal is to get at least over 50%, which is considered world class. But to become a best company to work for in your city or State, you're positive 85 or greater. So what I like to do is measure that number twice a year. Once in January, once in July. And the second question, I only asked two questions. The second question is thanks for your rating. What's one thing we could do to make this an even better company to work for? And then in July I say, thanks very much for your response. What's one thing we can do that doesn't cost money that would make this the best company to work for? And I take the data points of what they tell me would make it better and I just start doing those things. If you can focus around what your employees are saying would make this a better place, you'd be blown away by how fast the company starts to scale.

Yeah, that's good. We say that we're trying to build a place where people can thrive for exactly that reason. Right. Because if ownership is happy and employees are happy, then of course the customers are going to be taken care of. We've never implemented net Promoter score.

They though it's the number one metric that I have for all my clients. The second most important metric is my customer net Promoter score. And then I go to profit as a dollar figure which drives all that comes from revenue. So I kind of flip the org chart upside down where my job is to support the people, right? And my supporting them is always caring about them, aligning them, coaching them, growing them. And then I really again, try to give my grain to my best horses. I try to find the, the, the core kind of 10 to 20% of my people that God forbid they ever quit. I really focus on growing their skills and their confidence and their connections. We started a second mastermind community called the OP Spot, which is an online mastermind community for anybody that's in a manager, director, or VP role that or is in operations in any type of a role. It's a community for them to grow their skills and their confidence and then their network. And then we have the COO alliance. You're not quite there on the revenue side yet because you need to. You need to do at least 5 million or greater. But are you involved in any coaching or any mastermind communities for yourself?

Executive coach, coach, the lawyers, Sammy Chong, and then I'm in gobundance.

Okay, great. Yeah. So I would get your operations people going through the invest in your leaders course, your managers and directors to grow their skills, and I would put them into the op spot. The op spot's only 300 bucks a year. It's a rounding error, but it's a place that if you grow their skills and their confidence and their connections and they feel special because, wow, they're this emerging leaders that you're investing in their growth, you're investing in their skills. They're going to go through brick walls for you, and then you can keep getting more off your plate. Right? Remember when you were like 4 years old and you wrote a letter to Santa? It's like, dear Santa, I want these three presents. And then like six weeks later, under the tree, the presents appear. You're like, holy Santa, read my letter. It's like, no, Brian, your mom read the letter on the way to the mailbox, right? And all mom and dad did is they bought the stuff that was on your letter. If we listen to our employees, they're going to tell us what's going to make it a better company. If we start doing those things, they're more engaged, they're happier, right? And often it's coaching. More praise, more time, more advice. Sometimes they want to be micromanaged. Sometimes they really have no idea how to do a task or a project or they're so overwhelmed or their confidence is lacking. They really need to be given in step by step instructions and then when they succeed, it's to give them the, the energy boost. I think you should also go through the invest in your leaders course so that you get the skills, specifically skills around situational leadership coaching, one on one coaching, meetings and delegation. Those four skills would be really powerful for you. Yeah. How much training have you and your team had on doing job interviews? None.

I've had none. So my, my wife joined our team about 18 months ago after she was working at a software company. There's 80 people, they got acquired. She does HR, so she's had training for interviewing and, and people management. I don't know in particular what, but I've had no interview training and I, I don't do any interviews now for exactly that reason.

Okay, well who does the interviews? Just her or do other people in the company do it?

Her and. Yeah, her and a panel of, of, of staff admin Staff level poker.

And have they had training on doing interviews?

No.

Yeah. So here's the problem. It's really, really hard to run a company when people have no idea how to hire people. That's one of the 12 modules in my invest in your leaders courses on interviewing. Just to give the basics. But I would have them go through that module and then I would have them read the book who by Jeff Smart and give them the base level of training. It's kind of like your 10 year old. Do either of your kids play baseball? Nine year old. Okay. Your nine year old, before they went off to play little league, you probably taught them how to, to catch the ball. And you have taught them how to throw a ball and you taught them how to hold the bat. You gave them the basics. Right? And, and if you didn't give them the basics, they would have come home from little league saying, daddy, baseball sucks. It's like, no, Johnny, you suck at baseball. Right? But we give them the basic skills. Entrepreneurs are like, every time the entrepreneurs go to GoBundance or go to Vistage or Strategic coach and they complain about business being hard, I'm like, you're not getting the basic skills at running a business. Of course it's hard. Like if you've never been trained on running a meeting and you've never been trained on interviewing, you've never been trained on coaching, you've never been trained on delegation, then of course business is difficult because you have no idea what doing. It's the biggest problem that lawyers and doctors and dentists and chiropractors and physiotherapists and engineers and architects have is they get like an hour's training out of 10 years in school on how to run a company. And you're running a company, you're not running a law firm, you're running a business, and you've had no business training. Exactly right. Right. So that's what we need to give you. The skill development in is is growing as a leader. And we need to get your managers and emerging leaders that God forbid they ever quit people. We need to give them the skills at being leaders and then they actually can scale and that. That's all your job is to grow them and promote them and cheer them on and praise them. More leads for the law firm. My gut is you probably have enough leads. We're not doing everything we can around the conversion of those leads.

That's part of the issue. Yeah. Right. So we, we've done a much better job in the last 12 months of plugging all the buckets that are plugging all the holes in that bucket. Yes. And the struggle for us and everybody in our position is if you don't get there immediately and it's not somebody that's been referred to you like, if it's somebod found you online, they're on to the next. So we've gotten better at plugging that with a 247 answering service and we brought intake back in house so that somebody can run screaming down the hallway when there's somebody on the phone. But it's not perfect yet.

So there's a couple parts here, is we can hit people from a few different ways very, very quickly. The first is, do you use ad roll or Google's remarketing?

No.

You know, when you go onto a website and all of a sudden you see that person's ads follow you around the Internet for a and year. Year. Do you ever see any of my ads for my second command podcast or for the invest in your leaders course or from my second command book, do you ever see any of those ads? I spend about 400amonth total. And the only people that see those ads are people that have been to my website. So with AdRoll, you can get some basic ads created and anybody who comes to your website today is going to see your ads for the next couple weeks. You can also have it set up that they see a ton of your ads for the next couple of weeks. So that everywhere they go, they're like, holy. These guys are everywhere. Right? That branding. The only time you pay is if they click on the ad and come back to your Website. But all that branding and imaging is like them seeing a billboard on the edge of the highway. But you only click on it is if they phone the number on the billboard, which is amazingly cheap. Right. So that's one. Number two is to make sure that you get a couple of really good loom videos that you send out where it's. It humanizes you and the company. So it's like, hey, we, we learned you're a prospect. We're learning you're looking into our service, whatever, and speak to them over video. I would also make sure that you engage with them over text message because you've got their cell number. And then I would, yes, try to get them on a phone call immediately. It's incredible how you can get an EA or an automated system to really quickly ping somebody within minutes of them filling out the form to get a call booked. That, that's powerful. As if you can get the call booked on the calendar immediately.

You know, we've had a VA in Honduras doing that. That's it's been less than perfect. And we have somebody coming back in house. She started earlier this month and should be live on the phones beginning of April.

Okay. I think that's something that I would focus on. Right. Is how do you get that engagement. But also hitting them from multiple levels, hitting them with video, hitting them with text messages, hitting them right away. The other part is to add value and to sell later. Right. So what are the things that you can create that are valuable to them? And it could be, you know, top 10 tips to pick a law firm. Top 10 ways insurance companies screw you. Top 10. Like if you can create a few of the top tens that you can send these prospects every day for three or four days to give them value. Even if it's not picking us and even if you say you don't even have to pick us, but here's a way to choose. You know that by doing that they're probably going to pick you anyway. But if you can kind of odg shucks it. One of my favorite sales approaches. Look, I'm not going to sell you. I'm just going to walk you through the program. I'm going to sell you. But I'm going to tell but I'm going to tell you I'm not going to sell you. So you could just say I'm not going to sell you on using us. I'm just going to next for the next few days, give you some information that'll help you pick a law firm to go with, with. And then if you can add more value and if you can do it with some draw shop videos that you can get AI to create now, you know you have like the hand drawing stuff. Yeah. You can have a couple videos like that, a video from you or your dad or something that humanizes it. And then I would never, ever, ever have any of your lawyers speak to any of your prospects with any of you ever wearing a shirt and tie.

Well, you know, we don't speak to hardly anybody either in person or on Zoom anymore. It's crazy how many people, when the pandemic hit, we thought everybody would want to do Zoom. They just want to talk on the phone. So I hear you on, on don't look like a lawyer.

I would also don't let them only talk on the phone because if you can connect with them over video, you win. Like here's the problem with talking over the phone and I'll do it right now I'm actually going to go off video and now I'm going to be talking to you. And now that I'm on video, there's no video. And you're like, where the is Cameron? He's not even on video. It doesn't humanize anything. I come back on video and you're like, oh, there's a connection. Connection. You need to not allow the client to drive the process. I've been telling people to work over video for 14 years. There's videos of me online 14 years ago telling people to use Skype in the banking world because if you make that human connection, you win. So don't let them drive. Don't let the tail wag the dog. And then I would never, ever, ever have any of your lawyers working with anybody. I would also on your company website, no pictures of you and your team wearing shirts and ties. You need to be dressed properly, nice dress shirt, nice sports coat, whatever. Open neck, vulnerable like we need. Because we, we always wonder who the behind the tie. We wonder who the real person is they're going to buy from you. And the personality versus the dress for success, you know, version that helpful. Hopefully you got some good value there. Hopefully everybody listening also got some good ideas on what coaching can be. I know I did hammer you on, on putting your people into the course and into the op spot spot. I honestly think it's completely irresponsible of you not to because the thing you opened up with was you want to be able to grow your people and you're in a, you've got a gulf in the Kind of middle management. That's how you grow them.

You know, I was committed to doing that before we got on here because like I said, I binged a couple of your other videos and I'm like, that's exactly what my, my team needs. Right? So we, we, we came into this year kind of looking at like, do they need life coaching? Like, how do we help them them? And I'm like, no, damn it. They need to know how do I operate within a business so that I can stop operating in the business and.

So that they feel better and more confident in their jobs. They don't feel like they're going to fail. They don't feel like failures. Right. So, yeah, if you give them the skills, Gen Y. So anybody right now that is 44 and under down to 25 and then Gen Z, 25 and younger, they care about two things. One is working with a company that's aligned with core purpose and core values. And number two, they care about career development. They want to grow their skills. Gen X and baby boomers never cared about skill development because business didn't change fast enough for anybody to need more skills. You could join a company in a job that you were in. You did the same job for 12 years. You didn't need to get any better or any faster. Now that we have technology and business changing so quickly, someone joins a company in a job today, their job is drastically different six months later. So if we're not growing their skills and their confidence in the connections, their confidence is so shaky, they're worried they're not showing up as their best selves and they're fail. Right. Or somebody else does care about them. So the way that you have to care about them is growing their skills. Okay. All right, Brian, good luck out there, man.

Thank you.

Have fun, man.