Jamie McDermott founded Clearman Lawyers in 2019 but hit a wall with admin work until reading John Jonas's The Outsourcing Lever. He hired VAs from onlinejobs.ph to handle accounts, onboarding, and marketing, which now takes up 80% of their workload. That freed him to focus on strategy and helped the firm scale with consistent content and better cashflow.
Questions this video answers
2019
The Outsourcing Lever (by John Jonas)
About 80%
Two
onlinejobs.ph
Chapters
Running a law firm means I just have to spend a lot of time in the office, don't I? My two year old gets me up early and on the weekends we go for a run with the pram. Louis loves the downhill part because it's fast and exciting. I like the flat part and sometimes the challenge of the uphill part. If I'm on my game that day and it's the same with my business, well, I had no idea how long the uphill run would be when I started Clemen lawyers in 2019. I just wanted freedom, money and time. Same as you. But after about a year, business side started to eat me alive. It's admin, accounts compliance and then juggling client fulfillment work, marketing and networking. You get some money in, pay your expenses, then get back out there running uphill to get more prospects and do more client work. I knew I needed good help, but I was worried about looking through endless online resumes to try and find good people. Well, stop. Message from the future. It's not like that at all. The only hard part for me after I read John Jonas excellent little book, the outsourcing lever was narrowing down the great people from the very good ones. A nice problem to have, right? We had a lot of applicants, made a rough cut down to 10% and then sent emails back and forth till we found five diamonds. We hired two of those with more to come because we're now free to scale up because 80% of our accounts, onboarding and marketing are handled by our great vas. We're arriving at the lookout on the first business mountain. Now we can already see the next couple of mountains and I can't wait for that challenge because our talent VAs are doing 80% of the business side and also preparing documents for our lawyers to review and add their part in our business conveyancing and rules and estates work. I can find little blocks of time in the morning to focus on figuring out and setting our direction, making sure we're all aligned, finding great prospects who want to work with us so we can scale this business and client work just flows out the door to the client fast and tidy. And our payday arrives earlier too so we can pay our bills. Because it's surprising how much it costs to grow a business instead of surviving the same chaotic day over and over and wondering how long I can keep going putting out fires. These amazing vas from online jobs ph mean that I can put about 15% of my focus on finding the balance between taking care of our clients and playing business by forecasting our business finances monthly and putting an achievable marketing strategy in place, including videos, getting the blogs out every two weeks, keeping track of our Google reviews, seeing our engagement on LinkedIn, and working on training for our great staff and our VAs. That data driven forward focus gives us a fighting chance of choosing and changing direction from client work to marketing to collections or whatever is best right now in a more stable, challenging and rewarding way. It's removed a lot of the volatility from the business. So thank you John, thank you to our amazing VAS and our great staff. And thank you so much for your time today. This is Jamie McDermott from Kliman Lawyers.
