7 Considerations to Start and Scale Up Your Practice Without Breaking the Bank

So welcome everybody to today's learning objectives webinar, and with us today is Chris Stock. Um, Chris is the CEO for Shift 6 OS, um, but formerly with Leap and has worked with, uh, any number of legal tech companies. And for your delight and enjoyment today, Chris is Australian, and so he brings with him the most beautiful accent. So, Chris, you want to go ahead and get started?

Sure. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine, for the kind introduction. I will say I'm actually a dual citizen now, so I have the, I have the luxury of saying that I'm an Australian-American. But, you know, I thank you very much to you and the North Carolina Bar for hosting this today. I just thought I'd give a little bit of an introduction, and, you know, One of the reasons why I present this webinar is that over the years I've worked in a number of roles, in particular in legal tech. I was the former CEO of Leap. I was also the former CEO of PC Law Time Matters, and I was the chairman of Wealth Council and Elder Council. And I used to attend a lot of roundtable discussions that were very much law of business focused rather than law focused. And what I discovered was that there are a lot of law firms out there, law businesses out there that are looking for ways to firstly start up. There are a lot of people out there, you know, particularly in legal where it's one of the few places in, sorry, one of the few professions in the world where you can, in the United States, leave college and start a practice, hang a shingle. It's quite easy to break away from a firm that you're currently practicing at and hang a shingle, but there's not a lot of support after you do that from a business perspective. So I found myself fielding a lot of questions about how firms should market themselves, how firms can generate client bases, and I discovered that there was a lot of vendors out there that specialize in the legal space, but a lot of the work that they do is quite often cookie cutter. And not necessarily effective for individual firms, but also at the same time, it's quite often a little bit premature for law firms to be engaging those services when they're starting out, because there's a lot of things that you can do effectively without having to spend a lot of money to be able to grow your business. So really what I want to talk about today is things that you can do pragmatically to start your law firm and to scale your practice. And I'm going to steer clear from kind of the next step once you've started, once you've hit the point where you're ready to scale it, what do you do next? That's, that's a different session on its own. But this is really how you go about beginning your practice and building it from being a solo practitioner or a practitioner with a couple of people who you, yeah, and how you move on from there and how you grow the business from there. So the first thing I want to talk about is a cash flow forecast. Now, when starting a business, what happens is that a lot of people understand that they need to budget and they create a budget for their business. And budgets are really good, but you generally do them fairly, fairly sporadically, you know, once a year. And then you use those budgets to measure actuals against. One of the problems with creating a budget and managing actuals against it when you're not actually looking at your cash flow forecast is that the two are actually different things. And if you're, say, tracking on budget, for example, in your P&L, when you run that and you run the actuals versus budget report, it doesn't necessarily have— mean you have the cash in the bank to complete that budget for a number of reasons. One of them is that, you know, quite often a lot of accounting is done on an accruals basis or an amortization basis. So for example, if you decide that you want to exhibit at a family law— exhibit your law firm at a family law symposium in September and you pay for that out of the bank today, that actually isn't recognized in your results, in your P&L, until the point that that symposium takes place. So it means that your cash flow forecast and your results and your budget actually don't all match. And, you know, businesses that are actually starting out with only a very small amount of startup capital need to monitor their cash flow very, very carefully because, like I mentioned, there are going to be discrepancies between kind of what your budget and what your cash flow actually says. And your cash flow is really the key indicator as to whether you're going to be able to continue operating your business in its current mode. And it is, you really the first alarm bell. I always call it the canary in the mineshaft when it comes to monitoring how your business is tracking from a financial perspective. It's the first place we're going to notice if something is not going right. And there are a couple of ways that you can create cash flow forecasts. And what I've done is I've prepared a very basic cash flow forecast that I'll make available via Catherine after this session that any law firm can use very simply to make sure that they're not ever going to run out of cash. So I'm just going to show you that now. Let me just go back. Okay, so what I have here is a very simple cash flow forecast. And what we've done is I've started this from the 1st, from January 1st, 2023, and I've input an opening cash balance. So basically, at any point that you create your cash flow forecast, whether it's when you're starting a business, if you've got some startup capital that you need to put in there, or whether it's now and you don't have a cash flow forecast, what you can do is put your opening bank balance in on the correct date. So if we were doing it for today, we'd go through to May 17th and we put in our opening balance. And then what we do is we go through and we put in expenses that we know we're going to incur on any given day. And quite often, you know, things like your utilities, you might know that you get charged on the 16th of every month. So you can go through and put in to utilities, you know, subscriptions for things like legal practice management software. They're generally the first or second day of the month. So then what you do is you go through and you fill out all of the expenses that you know that you're going to incur. And I suggest doing it as far in advance as you possibly can and then going back, you know, once every 2 weeks for, say, 20 minutes and just going through and making sure that everything is still up to date. The most important thing to really figure out is a billing cycle. So one of the things I've really noticed with small law firms is that they quite often bill sporadically. And that's really quite often not so much a resourcing problem, but really a discipline problem. And it's important to be very disciplined about billing in regular intervals because that way you can make sure that your cash flow is constantly flowing. And then you can also create a predictable revenue model for your firm. So in this particular instance, what I've done is I've put in— I've said, okay, we know that every 2 weeks we're going to bill, and I'm assuming that we're going to be getting $5,000 every 2 weeks. Now you can tailor this to your firm very easily. So let's say that, you know, that your firm generally bills on average you know, $3,000. You can go through and you can update all of this to say $3,000. So then as we go through, if I just go back, sorry, to this tab here, I've got a tab here for assumptions that actually adds in salaries as well. And what I've done is I've said, okay, well, John Smith wants to pay himself $100,000 a year and he runs on 26 pay runs per year. And that's actually flowing through the cash flow forecast to say, okay, on the 15th of each month and on the last day of each month, that's when payroll runs. So now that we've got all of that information in our cash flow forecast, you'll see that down the bottom here we've got a running total of our closing cash balance. And you can run through this, and if you're going to fall into a deficit— and in this particular instance, we fall into a deficit in March, the 3rd— on March 31st, you know that you need to take corrective action. So, you know, when taking corrective action, there's usually a few things that you can do. You can try and arrange funding through alternative sources. You know, if you've got a lot of cash sitting tied up in WIP, there is the ability to obtain finance against WIP. There's the ability to obtain finance against receivables. So that's an alternative. That's an option if you look like you're going to run low on cash. But really the idea is to make sure that we're planning well enough in advance so that we can take that corrective action. And a cash flow forecast can be done in a couple of ways. It can be done on a monthly basis. But when you're really starting out in a business, being able to pinpoint the exact day where you're going to run into a cash problem allows you to take corrective action much earlier than when you're discovering it, say, at the end of the month on a monthly reporting basis. So in this particular instance, we could go through and we say, okay, well, we've just looked at our retainer and we— our retainer funds, and we can see that we actually have about $10,000 worth in there for billing this, you know, this, this week. So we can go through and we can put in the $10,000, and you'll see that as we go through, it updates the cash flow forecast all the way through. Now, one of the things about this cash flow forecasting model is it's been designed in a way that you can just continue it on kind of forever. So if you wanted to hide all the stuff that you've already— all of the, all of the dates that you've already been through and then go through to the end of it, you can always just, as with any Excel document, drag the rows to continue with them on to say the following year. So you can run this cash flow forecast out using this template as far as you'd like. The other thing you can do is add rows pretty easily. So if you just say insert, what it'll do, if you wanted to say split out staff taxes, you could then go and do that, and it will also calculate it through to the bottom. So we can say, and you'll see it automatically updates it. So the idea is to create really a very simple cash flow forecast that law firms can use to understand what their cash position is. And this is the first key in making sure that you grow your business without ending up in a situation where you run low on cash. I'm sorry, Catherine, the chat messages that are coming through, did you want me to check them or did you want to interrupt if it's something I need to answer?

If you see something that you can answer, I just chatted not to forget to add your estimated taxes that are due quarterly. So if you pay quarterly estimated taxes, so in addition to those monthly expenses. Sometimes you've got quarterly to pay attention to as well.

That's right. That's right. So that's the reason why this has been built to be a really flexible model so that, you know, I kind of left taxes out on purpose so I could show you how to insert it. But you can go through and you can put all of that information in. And, you know, some people like to split out subscriptions into practice management and into bar association subscriptions. Professional fees, they might like to split out into accounting fees or external counsel fees. All of that can be done just by right-clicking clicking and saying add another row and you can put in all the information there that you need to put into, put into it. So that's— I'm going to make this document available for everybody after this. Does anybody have any questions about that before I move on to show how you might do the same thing in QuickBooks?

So I will read you this question. With payroll and payroll tax burden, would you recommend a multi-page workbook to calculate totals for cash flow on the first sheet?

Yes, I, I set it up that way. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible so that people that aren't really familiar with Excel can simply add a row or a column and have it still all calculate. But yes, I do prefer to separate things like salaries out into a different tab. I can show you a kind of a more complex one here, which kind of runs through to the P&L. So when we go, you know, this is kind of the budget, and then the budget rolls through to a cash flow forecast, and everything's kind of on a separate tab. The assumptions, the salaries, the cash flow forecast. If anybody wants a more kind of detailed monthly one like that, in addition to this one-page running daily forecast, I can certainly provide both.

Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I think messing around with the existing templates that you can get don't often meet the needs of law firms. So I'm sure anything that you want to share. Mark said, yes, please, because, you know, that many worksheets alone is invaluable.

I think that there's been a good question here about how do you account for not knowing when invoices will be paid? Well, that really comes down to making sure that you have a strict retainer policy. And, you know, I recommend that all law firms have a strict retainer and strict retainer top-up policy. Because that then allows you to be able to run on a predictable revenue model. If the money's in there in retainer and you're authorized to bill for that on a monthly, biweekly, whatever, whatever basis it is, then you actually don't need to account for not knowing when they're going to be paid because you know you've got the money there in retainer and you know your invoicing cadence, which means you get the money on that date. So the other way this can be done is in QuickBooks. So I'm just going to open up an example QuickBooks account here. Now QuickBooks is pretty good with being able to put in things like budgets and being able to run cash flows. So if we go up to cash flow here, for those that use QuickBooks, and go into our overview, you'll see it gives us an overview of our bank accounts. And the good thing about QuickBooks is it imports your daily cash balances. And what you can see here is I've got this example here that says if we keep going at our current rate and we kind of run out of money on May 23rd, we've got a planner here. And what you do in the planner is you can go through and you can expand out the number of months that you want to forecast. And we go through here and we can go and put in recurring items and we can put in one-off forecast items. And yeah, it's a pretty simple procedure of saying add item and then putting in the information and whether it's money in or money out and whether it's repeating. And you can do the same thing that you can in the Excel spreadsheet that I just showed you as well. One of the reasons why I've done it in Excel first rather than kind of push everybody to use QuickBooks, as I do find I'm an Excel person, I kind of find Excel at a glance is a bit easier. But some people do like kind of the nice graphs and stuff that come out of QuickBooks. But also, if you're cost-conscious in the early days of running a business, then this is a more expensive version of QuickBooks that's required to be able to do cash flow forecasting in QuickBooks. Okay, so that's kind of cash flow forecasting. The next consideration— just bear with me while I bring this back up. Is the right fixed costs. So I was pretty lucky that I learned from one of my mentors early on in my career that his father had actually gone bankrupt twice. And the reason for those bankruptcies were not that he was unable to turn his business around. It's that he actually had very heavy fixed costs. He'd signed a number of contracts for a number of years And the biggest killer for him was rent. And what we know now is that in a hybrid world, that people are a lot more comfortable with working outside of an office space. So I always say to solo and small firms in particular, you know, do you really need that space for image? And, you know, when we have a look at it, the average commercial space in Raleigh is $30 per square foot as per CBRE, which comes to, you know, $2,000 a month at a minimum for a small law practice. And there are a number of ways that you can still look very, very professional and not have to expend a whole lot of money on office space. So, for example, there is a idea called a vanity address. And when I first moved to the US, again, we are working with lawyers every day, trying to find a way to be credible, but also having a very minimal budget to spend on office space. What I did upon arrival was I found what was called a vanity address. And there are a number of landmark buildings around the country, you know, the World Trade Center in New York is one of them, for example. Where you can pay $200 a month and use that address on all of your letterhead and also arrange for space to meet clients there on an as-needed basis. And, you know, at $200 a month, it's actually on a month-to-month contract. So you don't wind up in long-term contracts. The alternative really is saying that if you are to enter into an agreement for space, then always try to keep it to the minimum term possible so that if you were to run into problems, that the liability that you'd be facing was as low as possible. But there are a number of places that offer vanity addresses, and there is— ServCorp is the company that I used to use in New York. There's Regus is one that a lot of people are familiar with. Some WeWorks are okay. I generally avoid WeWorks from a legal perspective because I feel Firstly, it feels like a frat house mentality in a lot of them, but secondly, it's kind of very much coworking. And I think that, you know, privilege becomes a concern in spaces like that. So I generally look for kind of the Regis and the Surf Corps of the world that have Class A space, that give you the access to a credible address that you can use on all of your correspondence and branding and all those sorts of things. So the biggest, you know, consideration that I've seen particularly small law firms running into problems with early on in their operation is that they've overcommitted to space for image. Post-pandemic, there's a lot more flexibility on space for image where you can have access to a beautiful office space on an as-needed basis for a couple of hundred dollars a month. The other one is salaries. So salaries is, of course, where— and we'll talk a little bit later about when is the best time to hire. So the one thing I would say about understanding, you know, about salaries and where I've seen law firms run into trouble, it generally comes from loyalty. And I've met a number of solo lawyers who have spun off their own practice And what's happened is they've taken a, a very loyal secretary with them who'd been with them for X amount of years. And the problem was they actually weren't drawing enough income to pay for both them and the secretary. And they generally left it until it was too late to make that commercial decision to effectively downsize their small practice. So I always say, I know that it's really hard, but I think that during the pandemic in particular, we realized that these things, when we need to downsize, all businesses understood that it's not personal. And downsizing quickly when you see there's an upcoming problem that you can't solve in your cash flow forecast, that is the time that's right to downsize. When you see that approaching and realize that you're not going to be able to adjust the business in time. And that's the reason why that cash flow forecast is so important, because you can pinpoint it right down to the day way in advance. You can run those forecasts out, by the way, for, you know, 24 months if you need to. So it gives you a very good understanding of exactly where your pressure points are. So equipment's the next one, and I'm going to talk just a little bit about the importance of the equipment that you use. I think that, you know, as we've moved to a vastly different world in the last couple of years, It's become more important that the best tools are invested in. And I spoke a minute ago about, you know, fixed overheads when it comes to office space. The right tools to do the job have become so much more important than office space now. And then when you're hiring people, giving the best person the best tools means that your practice is going to be much better because of that. And I have met many lawyers over the years that have cut costs on their laptop, for example, and they'd be saying to me, look, my laptop's always freezing, I can't get my work done. And it was really because they purchased a Chromebook for a business. So, you know, purchasing great hardware means that you don't run into those annoyances that really cut into your efficiency, which actually cut into your ability to generate revenue. The other thing to keep in mind is that hardware can also be depreciated. And, you know, your accountant can take you through the best ways to either claim expenses or depreciate it with hardware and kind of what accounting models can be used to do that. But that's the reason why it should always be upgraded consistently, because it is actually pretty tax effective to do that. And, you know, it makes a lot of sense to have the best equipment at all times if it's tax effective and financially effective to do so. So again, budgeting for equipment, I just, just reiterating the best tools for the best people. And, you know, efficiency makes money. So if by purchasing lower-level equipment you're decreasing your efficiency, it's probably costing you more than it would have cost you to buy the best equipment in the first instance. But that also brings me to practice management software, and there's a couple of things that I'd recommend looking out for in practice management. And I was saying to Catherine before, a couple of years ago, I couldn't have done this agnostically, but at least I can do this agnostically now. When a business is starting out or in its early days, getting paid is the most important thing that you need to do. And the advice that was given to me when I expanded a business into the UK, and it was the first time I was actually running a business, was the CFO at the time said to me, Chris, you've got the two most important things you have to do is collect the money and meet the payroll, and you can worry about everything after that. And that's advice that's really stuck with me forever. And every time I've started a business, that's been the first things that I've set up, the ability to collect the money and the cadences for collecting the money, and then making sure that staff are paid to the minute on time every single month, because the second that's missed, that impacts credibility of any employer. Because the reality is, as much as we love our jobs, we all work because we need the money. So making sure that you have software that makes getting easy— makes it easy to get paid. My immigration attorney, for example, who did my citizenship, they don't have a credit card provision for me to pay the disbursements that were paid out to USCIS. And I rang him the other day and I said, I don't own a checkbook. Like, it's 2023. I, you know, so I know that it's not just me. I know that there's going to be a lot of clients out there that are sitting there thinking, how am I going to pay? You know, sometimes it costs a little bit. Like, there's companies like LawPay, ClioPay, RapidPay, you know, they all have kind of a way that they get paid themselves. But most of the time there's a way to set it up so that it's largely absorbed by the client. And I understand that people get a little bit nervous when they hear that, but the reality is all of us every day are paying surcharges for things, for convenience. And those convenience fees are, you know, are why those surcharges are paid. And law firms that make it easy to get paid are able to manage their cash flow and are able to end up with a predictable revenue model. Um, from an accounting perspective, I think the next thing I would recommend would be adopting best practices now. If you're lazy with your accounting in the early days of working, of starting a law practice, and you don't do things like reconcile your bank account on a regular basis, or you don't put your receipts in on a regular basis, then you're never going to be able to scale a business and you're likely to remain kind of in a lifestyle business where you pay yourself a salary that you kind of just pull every month based on what you need forever. You know, to scale a business, and with every business I've ever set up, the first thing I've done is made sure I've put in very good accounting systems. I've made sure that they all integrate with things so that I'm able to have an entire bird's-eye overview of the business. And again, law firms are businesses like any other business, and having the best accounting standards in place will ensure that you're able to run your business properly. The other thing I would say is that particularly when you're starting out, you know, and if you— some people come out of college, some people leave a practice and don't bring templates with them. Everyone needs legal templates, and ChatGPT is actually a really good opportunity to try and build some of that fairly quickly as you need it. So if you think about a retainer as an example, I'm just going to go to GPT here. So let's say we wanted a— we'd started our own practice and we got our first client. You know, the sooner we get that retainer for signing, the sooner they become a client and the less likely they are to go elsewhere. And, you know, if we take time drafting one, you know, that can take a few hours as we review it and get it right. But I'm just gonna say, I am create a retainer for a divorce for John Smith. My rate is $500 per hour. We need $5,000 in retainer. Okay, so that's fair, a fairly basic plain language statement. As you see, as it goes through, it gives a basic template of a retainer. Now it's not gonna be perfect, but what it does do is it gives you a basis to be able to work off. I use this to set up a whole range of template documents for my current company. I created a service agreement using GPT and then matched it with my external counsel's document. And the substance of it was exactly the same. Style aside, the substance was exactly the same. So this tool is something that I recommend people don't use to replace them doing legal drafting, but it's certainly a tool that can be used to create templates. And I'm just using a retainer as an example, but like I mentioned, the service agreement is something it can be used for. And it gives you the basis for you to be able to go and get things together quickly. And then I suggest you review them as you would any other document. But at least it gives you the basis very, very quickly without having to pay for very expensive software to do it.

Chris, thank you. I will mention, and I put in the chat, I also have templates that I've collected from the ABA, Lawyers Mutual, if anybody needs more templates. And also I I've got the— if you're a member of a section, go in the communities. A lot of the communities have libraries that you can go and they have templates and sample language. That said, that was pretty darn impressive.

Yeah, GPT. I'm going to give another example of where you can save on costs when setting up a legal business in a moment with GPT. Look, it comes with its problems, that's for sure. You know, I've seen people cheating on exams in, when trying to hire people, but, and things like that. But I think that overwhelmingly the positives for us to be able to utilize it as a tool to save costs when setting up a business. And, you know, I've set up a number of businesses in the last couple of months or assisted in setting up a number of them. And GPT has taken creating websites content for websites down from 2 weeks of work to a couple of hours of work. And I'll show you an example of that when we get to that. The next is finding clients. So there's a couple of things that I'd say here. So naturally defining your ideal client, and I think that, you know, largely area of law and community demographics are really most important. So, you know, if you're doing a divorce, if you're a divorce attorney in a low socioeconomic area, then, you know, you need to define your ideal client and then decide what the cost is, what the cost of your service is going to be to them and how many divorces you're going to need to do a year to be able to achieve the revenue that you're looking at achieving. So, you know, there's no use going into an area, I say, that, um, let's say you're a criminal lawyer and you go into North Bergen, New Jersey, where I am, which is one of the— has one of the lowest crime rates in the country. You know, you've got to understand your demographic and you've got to understand your area of law, and you need to cater to that. But then from there, it's really about coming up with strategies for attracting clients. And I know that most of you are probably aware of all of these, but I do put this in there because one of the— one of the one of the best businesses I ever saw, one of the best legal businesses I ever saw. When I was a child, I played basketball in a local community club, and in that club there was, you know, 500 to 600 children that played in that club, which means, you know, you've got 1,000 to 1,200 parents And there was an attorney who was one of the parents who offered everybody at the club a free will and a simple will, just a free simple will and a free simple power of attorney. And from that he generated, he was a general practice firm. So from that he got family law out of it, he got estate planning out of it, he got real estate transactions out of it. And he at one point said to me that he generated upwards of 500 clients from his children's sporting teams and not a related field, but there was also a mechanic who saw this model and did the same thing. And the mechanic, when I was asking him about his business model, said that he purely targeted the parents of his children's sporting clubs and he was running a multimillion dollar auto repair business purely through his children's sporting teams. So I think it's kind of an overlooked area, and it's certainly a place where you're liaising with people every single day outside of the legal community who may at some point need your services. And I always say that a will and a power of attorney, they're really good— they're kind of really good starting points because The simple ones, you don't necessarily have to be an estate planning attorney to draft a simple will or to draft a simple power of attorney. But just by doing that, the next time there's a legal problem that that person has, they're more likely to call you than somebody else that they don't know. The other thing is complementary practice areas. So I've kind of introduced— I have my immigration attorney and I have my corporate attorney and I got my divorce attorney, and they all work in different practice areas, but I've kind of introduced them all to each other and they now work together and refer each other work all the time. So, you know, you just never know when you're talking to a client if they are— let's say you're a divorce attorney and they're working with a real estate attorney, you know, working very closely with their attorney in other areas of law can certainly open doors for you. So it's just a little bit there on, on finding clients, and I'm going to get to kind of the web component of it in a moment because the web component's a little bit different. But I do think that particularly people with children in sporting teams, it's worth thinking about how you can generate business from those organizations. The next one is the right online presence. So the question is, do you need a law firm-specific web design company to create your first website, or do you need to crowdsource it? Now, the reason I say that is you'll see at the top that, you know, FindLaw says that 74% of consumers visit a law firm's website to take action. And really what that means is that 74% of consumers visit a website to engage that attorney. They're not going to go elsewhere if you pick up the phone. They're not going to go elsewhere if you respond to their email. And we'll talk about how we can make sure that you're getting, you're getting those responses out in a timely fashion in a moment. But, you know, law firm-specific web design companies, in my experience, are pretty good. But at the end of the day, the content is still— the content all still comes down to what you want to have on the website. And I used to do websites for law firms, and we gave away 5,000 free websites, and of those 5,000 free websites, only 1,500 firms actually provided us any content at all. So what we did is we created some generic content that firms could use, and lawyers don't like to use generic content because they like it to be specific to their practice. So when I was setting up some businesses recently, I tested crowdsourcing over using industry-specific companies because one of the things is if you can crowdsource the build of a website and it cost me $500 to do. When you can actually afford to go to the law firm-specific web design companies, they're gonna be able to port that information over and it's gonna be a much smaller job for you to redesign it than to design it in the first place and a lot less costly. So I just wanna show you, you know, I'm just said here as well, you know, no need to procrastinate on website content. You can use ChatGPT for that as well. So I'm just going to show you, I built a couple of websites. This website here I had prepared by Fiverr. It's called, right here, and it cost me $500 and they just said, look, I need you to provide the content. And then a couple of weeks later, we decided that, I decided I was venturing into another startup business and we said, okay, well, I need this website in time for ABA Tech. That's in 2 weeks. So we got this website up and running within 2 weeks, and again, it cost $500 by engaging someone in Fiverr. Fiverr is a crowdsourced model. There are other companies, there are other websites such as DesignCrowd that you could use to do it. But what I found was that really what they needed most from me was the content. And the way I created the content without having to spend weeks and weeks on it was I actually went and— so here's an example I created earlier. I— this one here, I said, you know, my name is Chris Stock. I own a full-service personal injury practice called Stock Law. Create the content for the homepage for my website. I have 35 years experience. And then what happened is GPT created all of this content here. And then afterwards I said, I actually rewrite considering SEO. So then it was rewritten. So page 1 of my website was written here. And the, I went through it and the way I looked at it was, look, it's pretty good for a first run at a website. And if I don't have enough cash to engage somebody locally for thousands and thousands of dollars, having one provided professionally for $500 through crowdsourcing and providing the content that they require per page using ChatGPT again provides a cost-effective way of creating a really beautiful website taking into account SEO, search engine optimization, which helps you be found on Google without having to break the bank to do it. The other thing that I've got here as well is don't waste money on the wrong SEO and build out your Google profile. It's free. And I wanna show you what I mean by this. So if we go to Search for divorce attorney Wake Forest. So if we go and have a look, we've got these ones up here that are pay-per-click. So if I click on any of these people, it will— they will pay for that click, and those clicks can cost $20, $30, $40 every time these paid ads are clicked. And what happens is a lot of external marketing companies will encourage you to pay for these clicks. But what I found is that they don't actually target the right areas. So all of these people, when I clicked on them, are in Raleigh. I looked at one for my area yesterday when preparing for this, and I, and I Googled divorce attorney North Bergen, and I'm in New Jersey, and all the ones that were paid came up in, and they were all New York attorneys that weren't licensed to practice in New Jersey. And what happened is they had been to these outsourced, what are called SEO pay-per-click digital marketing agencies who set this up for them. But they're going to be spending thousands of dollars on leads that are actually useless. What most people do now is they look at what's closest to them on the map. And this here, these listings are free for you to update. So if we go to more businesses and you'll see that I Googled attorneys in Wake Forest, it's showing me just the ones that are in Wake Forest. And this is what— where you can really save money. Because if you are here on the map and you're able to get former clients give you 5-star ratings, you can actually start generating client leads without actually having to pay for any PPC and SEO straight off your free Google listing. So it's just something to keep in mind. When I've spoken with people at roundtables about this in the past, they have always spent so much money on PPC and SEO, but no one had suggested to them they simply come and set up their free Google ad and update their address and really focus on getting the 5-star rating up there by talking to former clients, you know, family members you've done work for, people that can have it up there kind of, you know, above the 4-star rating. Because this is where people go and look for services more and more frequently now. So that's what I mean by, you know, not wasting money on the wrong SEO and PPC, I should say, as well, and building out your Google profile. So the next part is hiring the right staff. So how do you know when it's time to hire? So the way I look at it is I say, okay, if I am— if I have at the end of each month— if I have at the end of each pay cycle $10,000 sitting in the bank, I can actually afford to employ a support staff member. Now, that's one of the reasons why the cash flow that I showed earlier and budgeting is so important. And I think there are a couple of things to think about about the right time. The first one is if you were doing all your own administration, you are not working on your business. So the second your cash flow is at a point where you can afford to hire an assistant, hire somebody that does your administration so that you can start working on the business. And Milestone 1 for you should be that you're only doing billable work. Once you're only doing billable work and you find that you have too much billable work, then at that point you could look at bringing on an associate. And then milestone 2 is really that you have associates for you doing most of the work and you're out there generating the business as the rainmaker of the firm. And that comes to, you know, that brings me to the quote above. So in the latest Clio Legal Trends Report, they said that 54% of solo law firms work Saturdays and 40% work on Sundays, which means a lot of solo lawyers out there have no time to rest whatsoever. And that's because really they— a lot of people like to have controls. They never graduate out of doing their own administration work. So the senior can hire a support staff member to take over the administration work. I always suggest identifying the necessary roles. And, you know, the way I do that is, okay, well, what we know is that 70% of consumers hire the first lawyer that they speak to. So we need to make sure we have someone managing our phones and our CRM, our customer relationship management database, and ensuring that we are receiving the inquiries and we're acting on the inquiries so that you're not missing out on those first calls. And also doing the screening so that you're not wasting half an hour of your day doing screenings every day that you could actually be billing for. And quite often someone in a small law firm is capable of managing the CRM, being your assistant as well. And if you're lucky, you could also find someone who's adept at bookkeeping. Bookkeeping in the early days, I always recommend outsourcing to— there are a lot of accounting firms out there that specialize in doing it for law firms. So I wouldn't— you know, I generally think once you've got about 5 to 10 people, that's a good time to bring on an internal bookkeeper.. And then marketing, you know, we talk about spending money in the right places, and I can tell you from experience that external digital marketing agencies are very, very expensive, and you get what you pay for. And what I've actually found was it actually was much more cost effective for me to employ an experienced digital marketer to manage my marketing campaigns. And because they are always part of my business and the culture of my business, and they understand the strategy of my business. And again, this is the same in law firms. Law firms are businesses like any other, except for one thing. When it comes to obtaining leads, there are much more stringent ethical requirements about how you can market. So that's why I always think that having somebody— my suggestion is quite often, for a long time, been upskill somebody you trust who already works in your law firm, have them trained on digital marketing, so that way you can have the best of both worlds. Somebody who understands the ethical requirements that you face, and at the same time you're providing the ability for somebody in your firm to scale up their own skill set. And then last of all, again, once you start looking to get to milestone— once you're doing really well in Milestone 1, then I would start looking towards associates. And then there is outsourcing. So, you know, one of the things you can do is maximize your budget by utilizing lower-cost salary bases. So, you know, what I've done in a number of the businesses I've run is I've said, okay, well, you know, what's most important to me is that I have a— let's talk from a law firm perspective. I need to be able to compete with the large firms in my area hiring the best associates. How do I do that? So I had a look and said, okay, well, a legal secretary in in North Carolina, um, is paid an average of $80,000 a year. But we can also have integrated staffing solutions, which is outsourcing it but having the people you outsource to work directly within your company, um, for $24,000 a year, which means you've actually just freed up two-thirds of that legal secretary salary to move to your budget for an associate budget. So by being very careful and kind of selectively deciding which jobs you need to have, um, direct access to in the United States, or whether you're prepared to move some of these roles out that, you know, may not be client-facing, for example, allows you to really maximize that budget. And, you know, the first time I really did that was when I was in software, and, you know, I had a very limited budget and I needed the best coders available and I wanted a really high quality CTO and that was a very expensive role to fill and I wasn't gonna be able to do that and employ the rest of the development team. So what I did was actually utilize the budget I had to employ the most senior person I could find onshore. And then I got him a very senior team of people offshore. And what that actually did was maximize the budget to allow the business to scale. While making money, but also having the best outcome as well. So, you know, there's also a way to be very, very effective from a cost base when it comes to hiring by considering solutions like that. And 7, don't go broke. So how not to go broke? Oops, I've just got a chat that I'll take a look at. That's a good point, Catherine. The thing, yeah, you're right with outsourcing is that, you know, you generally have like a, it's anything from a 14 to 30 day notice period if you do need to downsize quickly. But, you know, that is a lot— it's generally a lot more cost effective than providing severance to people if you do provide severance, you know, in a local work environment. But it does allow you to downsize and upsize very quickly. You don't have the— you don't have to worry about any of the HR side of it. You don't have to worry about the stress of letting people go, the emotional toll that it takes on you. You have someone else managing all of that for You, you don't have to worry about the payroll. You have someone managing all of that for you as well. It really means that what you do is you manage your staff members as though they work directly for you, but all of the administrative part of managing them is looked after externally. And generally at about a third of what it costs to do in the US. So then lastly, keep your cash flow forecast up to date at all times, even when things are looking great. You know, updating it once a week, it generally takes 10 minutes, ensures that you always have a very clear view of where your business is going and how it's going to get there. And again, watch for those early warning signs. It's color-coded red. You get the early warning sign, and the further out you extend that cash flow, the earlier that warning sign is going to be for you. Now, any questions? I just check, Katherine, can you hear me? Yeah. Okay, okay, cool. Okay, is there any questions or comments?

So I'll first thank you, Chris. This was very enlightening. I think that spreadsheet alone is going to be invaluable. I've taken some notes that I'll add to the follow-up email, and I will also stop recording so that if people are shy about asking questions where they're recorded, I usually do that so people people are a little bit more free to ask whatever comes to their head. So again, thank you very much. I'll stop recording, and if anybody has any questions for Chris, we'll let you ask.

I will say, Katherine, I've just put up there as well. So I understand there may be some people in this session that might be past where what I was talking about today, they're already at the point where they're really ready to ramp up their business. What I've just provided at the end of this for those people is a list of scaling up resources that I've used over the years to scale every business that I've been involved in. And particularly those two last links have been invaluable. And Verne Harnish and Jim Collins, for people who are looking to scale, have scaled thousands of businesses around the world, including law firms. And I am also happy to help anybody out at any time. If anybody wants some help on scaling a business or wants some advice, you know, my passion is working with small law firms. It always has been. I don't charge for that. I want to see solo and small law firms successful. So if anybody ever has just a question, I'm always available.

Thank you so much, Chris. That's great information. And Chris says he's going to be in Raleigh a lot more. And I'm gonna stop recording and I'll ask you some questions.