Our Law Firm Business Coach Hot Takes

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge. Hosted by Lynda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Stephen Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone, and I think this week is going to be a fiery topic. But how is everybody? We're doing good. Sarah, your lipstick and your glasses match perfectly.

Oh, thank you. It's actually a stain. It's like a lip Oh, looks good. Not stain. One of those oil stains, I guess you could— Oh, looks good. Something fun. Thank you.

Yeah.

An oil stain. Okay, there's a story here.

What's—

There is.

Okay, come on, Steve, get with the plan. I know.

How do I look today?

Your hair looks beautiful.

Oh, thank you.

It's this one, right?

It's Kulfi. K-U-L-F-I. She finds the stuff like—

Yes, she does.

You know, it's probably very bougie. Sarah's very bougie, so it's probably a bougie.

I just like good quality things. She does.

Now I smell like herbs.

Thank you very much.

Herbs.

Essential oils, natural oils.

Yes.

Oh, I love essential oils. Well, as a former spa owner, you would appreciate that. Yes. But yeah, no, this, we are in the midst of season. We are, I mean, obviously we're first on deck, all of us, because we do stuff prior to, and then we have to answer all the questions.

And I have to actually go to the hairdresser. Yeah, I need to go to the hairdresser more often to stop the grays because I want to pull my hair out. Um, this time of the year, every year I always hope it's going to be better. I'm at least a hopeful thinker, and every year it just gets worse and worse. People are demanding, they are rude, um, they think that they're the only client, and they want things like drop everything because they've asked for one thing that you haven't answered 50,000 things I asked for last year. You know, why are your books not done? They're not done because you never gave me what I asked for. But, you know, we're not here to complain, but that is definitely a thing. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir. Anybody who's on here that does bookkeeping probably really knows what that's like.

Yeah. Well, you know, the thing is, is we get all the work done, we get all the year-end work done.

Yeah.

And then we're like, oh, I made it. And to your point, Sarah, then you get this little tiny gap and then all the questions start rolling in. Yeah. And to Lynda's point, it's like, well, I asked you for this document 7 times starting in October. So great, we're there, let's do it. But oh yeah, it, but yeah, so we're in that second phase right now. We're post-1099s, we're in the second phase. There's a light at the end of the tunnel.

There is, there always is.

Yeah, what's that date again, Steve? I forget every year.

What's the date? Is it March 16th?

It's when the IRS says.

It keeps moving, to be honest, because it doesn't matter anymore.

I know, it doesn't seem to matter. It can go all the way up to October. But our topic today is law firm business coaches' hot takes. And I'm hoping this doesn't turn into complaints about the business coaches that we see from the other side, because sometimes we work with coaches and sometimes we are so siloed out here. We know they've got a coach because we see exorbitant amounts of money going out the window for the coach. We get asked to give a slew of reports. And when we ask the client, what do you need these for? And they'll go, I don't know, coach told me I needed to get them for them. And so they don't even know why. Like sometimes the request for reports is odd. I'll tell you what, if you see Rainmaker on your chart of accounts, ka-ching, that means they have a coach.

Ah, good one.

Rainmaker is one of the names and one of the terms that one of the coaching companies that we see that's quite popular uses on their chart of accounts. They will change the chart of accounts for this one thing. I think it's how they kind of justify their pricing. And they'll throw a million chart of accounts onto their list that I don't think are necessary, but for some reason they think it's necessary to use, to have. Client won't know why. That's the bad part about these coaching platforms. And lately, today, CFO is like a catch term for, I decided I don't want to do bookkeeping anymore and I'm going to call myself a CFO. No, you can call yourself, you know, Chief, I don't know, Nut Catcher. It doesn't matter. And, you know, there's no certification around that CFO, or I just see that too much where you've got all these professionals that are now CFOs. There are good ones.

Don't get me wrong. There are good ones.

Really good ones.

There are good ones.

And then there's the others.

Yeah.

And a lot of times, the money that people are paying doesn't equate with the value. And that's the part that bothers me because it's the ones that don't have any money that think throwing a ton of money at a coach is going to fix the problem. And the problem isn't really— maybe the coach is giving them advice. I don't know the advice because I'm not sitting in the meetings. We do get to sit in meetings with some of our coaches. But a lot of the coaches leave us over here and don't keep us in the loop and forget it. You think the client's gonna be able to keep us in the loop?

And doesn't that break your heart?

It does, because we're not able to help, right?

Right. Right.

All we get is, I need my reports on X date because I gotta go see the coach. Coach date, the 8th. Well, I don't have your books done for the 8th. Your credit card closes on the 10th. I can't get you what you're asking for unless you're okay with a preliminary chart, you know, preliminary financial statements. They don't understand what that is. So I think a lot of it's basic understanding is where they should be getting something from their coach. But then they're not getting the guidance to help.

So my question is, why do you hire a coach? What was the point of hiring a coach? Because the other people—

To get profit. That's how they're advertised.

Okay. You know, my answer to that, Sarah, kind of folds into what we were talking about just a minute ago when the question came up or the comment came up. You know, why does the solo hire one? And, you know, quite often the, the small, tiny newbie lawyer will hire a coach in the plug-and-play mode. I'm going to get this coach and everything's going to be fine, and the busy bus will pull up to my front door. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, the, the, the larger, mid, mid to large size firms, sometimes they need a coach, sometimes they need someone to come in and look at the entire firm. Yeah. The entire firm and work with the bookkeeping and accounting people. And when I come across those scenarios, I'm just, just like I do with the CPA, I reach out, find the coach, talk to them and figure out what's going on. And then I'll go back to the client and say, well, they want you to use purple paper and I'll say, you really don't need purple paper. Yeah, yeah, we're going to stick with white and this is what we're going to do and this is what it's going to look like and this is why. Yeah.

Yeah, we just had one the other day wrote to us and the client said they want me to get another QuickBooks file and take all the trust account out of QuickBooks and put it in a separate file. It shouldn't be mixed. I said, who said this to you?

Right.

My tax person coaching people. I said, well, tell them to reach out to us because no, we're not pulling out, ripping it out. You're— you get a 3-way bank reconciliation.

There you go. And you handled that, right?

Why do you need to rip it out? Why do you need to pay QuickBooks another $200-something a month?

Yeah.

And why would you disconnect the flow?

So I asked the question because to me there needs to be value, and you answered it, Steve. And the value is why did you perceive to do this? Because oftentimes what we see is we're in a program, so we're going to do this and then we're going to do this, and we're going to hope that the bus comes up, right? Like you said, and—

Busy bus.

The busy bus.

Busy bus.

I love that.

I say in my mind, and I think I can say this because Lynda Artesani and I have approached it this way for ourselves, is, okay, we know something's off, we want to see a difference, but we fundamentally understand where we have pieces. We'd like to hear what you have to say, help us understand what we're missing potentially. To your point, Steve, you've got the rest of it, right? Our expectation is that we're not siloing things and we're not not being inclusive of other individuals who are predominantly in this space with you. We should be complementing each other as a— Right. As a whole. And so, I feel like there are moments where maybe it's getting the right people in the right seats kind of thing. Maybe it's realigning the workflows to make it more efficient. So when the party bus shows up, you can take them and it can line up, right? But you have to want it.

We're the bridge between them and the tax world.

Yeah.

You know, and a lot of times the business coach isn't. The business coach is more big, in my mind, is more big picture. More big picture. And if they can understand that, you know, look at more than just the numbers and the chart of accounts and want to change that, that's just one tiny little piece of it and involve us. But look at the entire operation. You know.

A lot of times too, they'll ask for a budget.

Can you give me a budget?

The coach wants a budget. Okay. Are you going to do a budget with the coach so we can put the numbers in?

Or do you want me to make a budget based on last year?

I can do that like that. Well, I don't know. They don't know. That's the thing that bugs me when I see that they're paying lots of money. And there's one firm that they just pay thousands of dollars every time they want to watch a video. They get suckered into the platform and the group mentality. I think they do group things. And, you know, then attorneys are very comp— they're very competitive, right? They're very, um, who can do— who can outdo the other?

They find a lot of times— Yeah.

How many times have one come to you and said, Well, I heard that Smokeball is a great software because my buddy in court said he really likes it and it's free. Oh, really?

You know what free gets you, right?

Free is never free. And the value is not there.

So, Lynda, you just touched on something and you said group things. They do group things. You know, I quite often get contacted by people who are coaches to lawyers and they're like, join our business group, join our you know, mastermind group. And I stop and I really look at 'em and have to see if it's a fit or not. And I have yet to have one approach me that really, really grabs me. And I'm not knocking them, I'm just saying, you know, there isn't one there that, you know, going to a cocktail reception once a month is not coaching in numbers for me.

A lot of them have travel. They go like travel to these exotic locations. Right. And it's like, I know why you're in this thing. So you can write off your travel to these beautiful islands that—

Yeah.

You go to, and if you're not getting something out of it, I mean, there's some good people out there, don't get me wrong. Yes. I don't want to make it sound like there's not. There are some really, really good coaches that help people through, and they, like you said, look at big picture. They don't just look at the numbers. They're looking at forecasting where you want to go to, what, you know, they are good strong tax people that know some of the ways to benefit the client in looking at long-term, if they do increase their revenue, how do they, protect themselves, you know, do they have key person insurance? They look at things like that that maybe were missed as the client grew their business.

Yeah.

Cyber insurance. You talk about all the different little pieces that might be missing and they see it. They see a lot of that. And a lot of times we're head down doing the work, the daily work. We don't see that or we don't have the tax knowledge that maybe they know some ways around making the taxes less for the client. Or tax strategies that are really not in our forte. I mean, we get asked all sorts of questions and a lot of times we have to turn around and go, you really need to talk to the tax professional about this. I mean, I can give you an answer that could be right, but I think this is really somebody that should know, that knows all of your family stuff, all of your personal stuff.

Yeah, because we don't have the personal where we're drawing the line.

We can't look at this little narrow window and give you advice when they see the personal side of it. And you know, how many kids do you have? Are they going to come into the business?

Yeah.

Your retirement, are you looking to phase out? I mean, there's a lot there.

One of our hot tips, and it's so nice that our assistant here, Tiara, put this together for us, is 'cause she hears us say this. One of our hot tips, this goes for all law firms, your paralegal, your best paralegal should not be doing your accounting.

Nope. Shouldn't be doing bookkeeping at all. Why?

Why, Steve? Why is that?

Why? They should be doing paralegal work 'cause that's what you're paying them using their expertise.

Let's talk about—

They're not bookkeepers.

Not just that, there isn't enough senior-level paralegals in the market.

Correct.

Oh my gosh, people.

That is like the biggest thing I keep hearing. And if we want to develop more and do more with them, why did— sure, a lot of people that are really good at that, why did we think that they're really good at all of this other stuff that's not their forte?

Well, you know what? You just set yourself up for a major setback because when you burn out that paralegal because they're having to do the numbers that they don't want to do, or that their grandma taught them when they were 19 or whatever, um, you're going to lose them and you're not going to have your accounting being done. I've seen it happen. I have seen it happen, and it's very painful when that happens.

So the next one on this list, which I love, is—

Oh, who's gonna do it? Who's gonna do it?

If you hate numbers, that's why— exactly why you need them.

That's my favorite one. I love that.

I think that is your favorite one. And why would you like that one the most? What is it about that one that you like the most?

Well, because quite often we know they don't understand or they do hate numbers. That's not their forte. Bingo. They live in the verbal world. But that's exactly why you need them. I mean, bingo. What else can you say?

Yeah. And then I think one on here that Lynda, I think either Steve or Lynda, one of you read it, was growth without process is just chaos without a logo.

Oh, and we know, we see our clients grow and blossom.

Yeah.

Beyond what we, what they thought they were going to grow, right? They all of a sudden are overwhelmed with so much work and maybe they're still trying to, you know, they, maybe they took you on at the very, very beginning and they didn't have a lot for us to do and we're doing like the work monthly, but quarterly we're kind of billing. And then all of a sudden you're looking at the volume and the transactions and like this, Yeah, I've been looking at all these profit and loss returns over year over year, and I'm like, whoa, some of these people have gone 1.5x, and I'm like, whoa, this is phenomenal. Like, they've really grown. How have they grown? Right? Did they add more staff? I mean, you look at the wages, you look at the variables and see, are things in a line? Or, you know, and what's happening in the firm? And I think that sometimes that's probably what the coach should probably be looking at, and then understanding where their plans are to go forward. Because sometimes growth can happen in a spurt and sometimes growth can happen methodically and planned. And I think, you know, you got to plan for both, but methodically and planned growth is much better than just having all these clients. You know, you threw up a Google AdWords and you're getting slammed with leads. Which leads are good for your firm? I mean, we see clients pay $500 a week. Some of them are a day to Google, to have Google AdWords.

And then— Well, we have right there in our notes, your firm doesn't need more leads, it needs better margins.

You need better margins. You need better clients. Sometimes you wanna look at your client list. And we've been doing that recently too. It's like, all right, who in here? It, 'cause you'd be surprised if you actually do the math on some of your clients that it might be costing you money to have. I had this conversation with my daughter. I'm like, if these clients are costing me money to do their work, they're not a fit. Mm-hmm.

You know?

Yeah. So, I mean, you got to look at it because sometimes in black and white, when you see those numbers, then you realize it.

I'll never forget the day— Bridging that, though, Lynda, it's like, sure, looking at it black and white conceptually, what does that mean exactly? So for every dollar coming in the door is how much am I spending against it? I think simplifying the details, right? And then Sometimes a coach is a great fit if you are participating in it. Sometimes if you're expecting, like Steve had mentioned earlier, the party bus to show up and you're gonna drive this thing, um, or they're gonna drive it and you're just gonna get on board because you want somebody else to drive it, well then we've got a problem. That's never gonna work because you're gonna keep throwing money at something that you're not holistically looking at, right?

Mm-hmm.

So you have to understand the levers and you may not understand them at this depth level, like this certain level. But if you are kind of having the dialogue with either accounting folks like us or other people that you can start to be inquisitive and curious about it, that is when you're ready to look towards getting support. That's what I think is when you're ready for that next stage.

But—

Well, or the business who approaches us or a consultant and says, can you write a business plan for me?

What is that going to do?

What are you—

what is that going to do? Plan. Honestly, what are you doing with your plan? We're required to have one. I wrote one.

Go to the bank and get a loan. That's what I want to do.

That's what they're for.

But what is— but honestly, I don't, I don't want an archaic plan on the shelf. I wrote it once and I'm not— I just met the mark. I want to know what they'll do, intrinsically what I want to do.

To your point, if they don't become invested in the business and the process, yeah, you're going to get that business plan, they're going to get the loan, and then they're going to wonder why they're in trouble.

So, you know. Yeah. Or just the conversation to Lynda, what you were saying earlier. We don't know your personal, we don't, we just, we know the business, but you know, where, where do you think next year is going to go? Do you think that payroll should remain the same for you? Do we have the same optics on it for, you know, you've got to have some kind of planning to pay these estimates and help us understand how to help your tax planning through your payroll. Let's say if you're an S corp or—

And I think every business, there's a place we can all improve, right? Every year, you know, Sarah, try to improve our processes or where— how we're doing things. We always try to improve. And I think that that's part of having a good coach helps you improve.

Yeah.

Maybe holds you accountable. Sometimes they're, they're just to hold you accountable.

Right.

Mm-hmm. You know, and then, and it truly does a lot of times lets them face the numbers so they're not head down working and then they don't look at the numbers until January and then it's too late. You can't fix last year.

Or one thing, uh, Lynda and I were chatting with one of our team members, and I, I— it's funny exercise because this exercise happened with another group, totally unrelated, but two different people in there went through the what we can't live without thing. How much are we paying in certain softwares? And literally, it wasn't justifying, it was like literally practic— practical moments of like, actually, no, I need this for this, I need that for that. Okay, so if we go back to our friend who, who is a CFO, who we've had on the show before, and she has those methods where she kind of breaks them down. Now she's got it. The simplified method. Yeah. But I think using a simplified method, a rubric like that, for every dollar walking in, how much am I spending kind of idea, that helps. And those are things that, you know, if we were to sit down and just simplistically say, hey Lynda, let's go open these books, we can see it. We would already kind of pinpoint a few things. Already.

You know what, Sarah? You look at the books, first thing we look at in the AR, we see what's sitting there on the books that never got collected. Then we look at the uncleared checks and these are simple, simple things to look at. Or we look at undeposited funds and say, oh, what's going on here? There's an awful lot of undeposited funds that go back 6 years. You know, we've seen that though. That's what's the crazy thing. So the other big piece of hiring a coach is, are your records in place before you throw a lot of money and light it on fire? Make sure your books are right so you're analyzing accurate data. If you open up that balance sheet, collapse your trust account, and that number on the trust account liability doesn't match that trust bank account, I'd start there.

Go find a bookkeeper. There's other things happening in that file.

Yep. Something's wrong. Or your undeposited funds has things in it from, from forever. There's places you should probably be spending money to fix it before you move on to, you know, hiring a coach to really stylize everything, because sometimes that is— and then really do your due diligence on picking a coach. There are some great ones out there. We've met them.

And then there's— Goes back to my question. So why are you hiring the coach?

Exactly.

That's what I mean.

Really?

I mean, Steve, yes, I have to look at it through a very pragmatic way. That's my brain.

You know what? I just love it when you say that word rubric.

You had him at rubric, Sarah.

Every time you say rubric, my heart just pounds.

To be honest with you, we— I mean, when you think about it, though, like, Lynda, you're saying this, it is a maze when you're looking at these coaches. Yeah. Because there are coaches for so many things. We got our physical ones, our mental ones, our this or that, our marketing ones.

Crazy.

It becomes explosive. So yeah, it is a mess and you have to figure it out.

And the thing is too, Sarah, the ones that can't afford it, we see them flipping their business into a loss category because they've spent so much money on coaches.

It's hard.

And they're not, they're now in a loss. They're looking at a loss at the end of the year because they've spent so much on a coach and they didn't fix anything. Like that should be a red flag. If you hired a coach and you spent $30,000, $35,000, $40,000 on the coach and at the end of the year, your loss on your books is $35,000, You got a problem there when you picked somebody like that.

And how much money did you take home to mama to buy the bacon that year?

Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah, it's so true. Okay, a different thing here. Well, stop hiring—

I like how she takes her glasses off to read her note.

I know. Well, it's big enough right now. If you stop hiring to fix your pricing, stop hiring before you fix your pricing. So I think is that probably coming from you're hiring too many people, but you don't have the top numbers?

You're throwing people at the problem.

Yeah.

Throwing.

Okay. All right. That makes sense.

All the good acronyms today. The busy bus, throwing people at the problem. I know.

Let's throw—

I'm thinking in my mind, blog post topics.

It's the spaghetti thing. Let's throw it at the wall and see what sticks. I love that one.

I do have to go back to that revenue solves nothing if your systems are broken. Like Lynda was saying, it's like all of a sudden you throw out this Google ad, it becomes explosive and it comes in. I mean, you're just, sure, the market is shifting. I guess that's where I'm kind of thinking when you were talking earlier, Steve and Lynda, is the market's shifting. How do we turn all the knobs to shift with it? Because what happened here 2 years ago may not be working. I mean, we know this in times of AI.

That's it. I was just gonna say AI.

There's, there's another coaching. Marketing is completely different. Marketing is completely different today. It's not just where did you rank on Google? Because a lot of people don't go to Google anymore to ask the question. Although ChatGPT hasn't been working so well and everybody's going, go back to Google and use Google AI or Gemini AI.

It's so funny. It's baked in. It's, it's already in there.

So it's already—

Yeah.

But a lot of people are complaining that Chat's giving them bad answers and then they're all going, now they're going back to Gemini.

So they're all going to run here, there, there.

And I wonder when I drive down the street and I see all these legal billboards and I'm like, how much does all of that cost? And what does— what do you get in return? I mean, when I'm flying 75 miles down the freeway, you know, I don't have time to read the phone number on the billboard.

It's exposure, though, Steve. You see, it depends on how many times you see it.

There you go.

Statistic that still in play where it's like you see it how many times if you're sitting in traffic, where is it at? What are you staring at? At some point—

The bus.

It just hits your mind. You almost know where to look for it.

You get in that truck accident, you can go, oh, 1-800-da-da-da-da, and you know because you rode by it every day of the week.

Yeah.

So—

Or some concert that's gonna happen at such a—

They are expensive to have billboards.

Yeah.

Well, you know what's really funny to me? And that they're kind of a source of, or another example of, a consultant, you know. But it's kind of— it always amazes me. I'll, you know, see these billboards all over where I live, and then I go to another city for a convention or something, and there's a TV commercial with that person. I'm like, well, what do you mean?

But you know what I will say? Lynda and I were taken aback because we both— we didn't say this to each other until much later— Utah has a ton of billboards. Really?

Oh my God, I thought Vegas was bad. Utah was worse. I think— And they're the kind that change, so they're— yeah.

It was bad. We were like, "Really? This is crazy." It was everywhere.

The electronic ones that change?

Yeah.

Yeah. That flash?

Oh, she was on one once.

Oh, Tierra, yes. She was on a billboard.

Of course she was. Who wouldn't put Tierra on a billboard?

Why not?

That sounds like the name of a movie, Tierra on a Billboard.

Well, we have squirreled away on this, but I know, I, I think in total, I think if we look at this, like what we've accumulated, all these different rabbit hole moments, if you're going to hire a coach, make sure you're ready to hire the coach and, you know, make sure you're ready.

Yeah.

Do your homework. And not only that, not to blame the coaches, because sometimes the clients hire it, throw money at it like you're spaghetti at the wall, and then they don't do the things they're supposed to do.

Do it.

Yeah. They're not following up with the things that the coach told them.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. I'm worn out. I need a nap after this one.

I know. My coffee's not going. So am I.

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Oh, that was so sweet. We love you, Tiara.

Thank you. Thank you for your topic piece.

Yeah, Tiara keeps us in line with topics. We all looked at her when we saw this one and went, ew, what are we going to talk about?

We did.

That was a good topic. It was a good topic. They were like— Yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks everybody.

Bye.