Part 2 - From Law Firm Layoff To Entrepreneurial Breakthrough

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.

It's the talking in the hallways that are big value for a lot of these conferences. But you got to go out, you got to be, you know, the answer is not going to come to you. You've got to go and stir it up. You've got to ask questions, you got to meet people. And the thing is, now, as you went through that, what was the. I don't know. Why did you go into software anyway? You didn't know anything about it. This had to be the idea of the century.

Got a good answer for you. Okay, so when I graduated law school, I became a lawyer and I was at a big firm. And one day the head of my department came to My Office, 2009, and he shared with me a few words I'll never forget. He said, you're fired. And so I called my wife and she's crying and I'm like, you know, honey, it's okay, don't worry, I have a plan. I'm going to start a business teaching lawyers how to use Twitter and LinkedIn. And she just cried harder. No, she was, she was supportive. And I was the first. I wrote a book on how lawyers could use social media to find clients. And I was the first. And so I got a national reputation. You can't see behind me there's a map with pins all over it. And those are all the.

I did see that when you were talking earlier.

Yeah, it's all the places that I spoke. You know, I flew all over the country. Really? But I was making great money. I paid off my house in the first, like year and a half. I mean, it was an awesome, it was an awesome ride. But I had a three year old son and one day he was getting driven past the airport by our friends and he pointed at the airport and he said, that's where my dad works. And obviously I didn't work at the airport, but, you know, they were always taking me to the airport. Right. And I just realized, like, that's not the life I wanted. Trading my time for money, getting on planes. And so I, the wheels started turning. What could I provide to the same large law firms and accounting firms as a service through software? So they would just pay me every month and I don't have to travel. And so that sparked the idea for the software I bought. I Created.

And so in the software, they would say you would put. Create content and take over the posting this. Yeah.

For what it was actually, let's say a law firm has 100 lawyers. Okay. And a dozen of them, they're already writing articles. They're writing about the Supreme Court. They're writing about changes to property law, they're talking about changes to tax law. They're already writing these articles. And in a perfect world, everyone would get those articles and they'd share it to their LinkedIn accounts and their Twitter accounts. Right. Or Instagram, wherever. Right. Back then, it was mostly LinkedIn, except they're busy, so they wouldn't do it.

Yeah.

So what I did is I create a software that would make it easy. Basically, it was like the easy button for social media. They'd get sent an email digest and they would just click one button and it would schedule their entire week of social media posts to their account. So they were still managing their account. I just gave them automation tools that made it much simpler. And then I created a leaderboard. So it made it into a competition and gave them all the analytics to show them the impact of all the sharing. You know, so.

And so this evolved as you went, and how big did it get to? I mean, you sold this business, right?

Yeah. Yes, I sold to a private equity firm a few years ago. So it got to where it was being used. We had over 50,000 users in 12 countries.

50,000 users and 12.

Yeah. And most of the users were the top of the food chain lawyers of the biggest law firms in the world.

And how would they go about using this on an annual basis? It's not like they're trained now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

And they don't need you. Why do they continue to need that service?

Yeah, it's really just all about. They have a problem. They're so busy that they can't take the time to copy and paste a link into their profile.

Right, right.

And so now they get an email, they click a button, the job is done.

Yeah.

And so anything that you automate to make people's lives easier has a pretty good chance of succeeding. And this one thing about when you say, why did you get into software? Well, in this market, I had a big unfair advantage. I already knew all the people. Right. I knew I had the point of entry. My first year. I hired an assistant, and all she did was call all the people I knew in the legal space, the. All the, you know, CMOs and marketing directors, and said, hey, you know, Adrian, they're like of course we know Adrian well, he wants to show you a software great, right. That's how we got our first, you know, few dozen clients, you know, so I think any entrepreneur, right, like the idea is such a small piece of it, you know, you really shouldn't go into anything unless you have an unfair advantage. Right. And you have some edge that's going to make sure you can win. And I knew I had that edge.

Well, you are. You knew the people, but you also knew the problems.

Right? That's right.

And then the other thing that's important that people need to think about, you knew the language, you know, you knew how, you know, attorneys talked and this, you know, how they look, the mindset, how they looked at things and the.

Yeah, they're very cautious, Right. They have this very conservative mindset. And so I had to show them how this would make them safer because now things would be approved and there's a process and they like, they love that. So, you know, it's interesting, I've had people say to me since, you know, people in private equity or venture capital, they said, oh, you picked the wrong market. And I said, why did I pick the wrong market? They said, oh, it's. The market's too small. It's like, well, maybe it's small, but that's where I had the advantage. So the risk was low, so there was no chance of it being a billion dollar company. But I knew I was going to make millions, you know.

Well, then you can always expand out.

That's right. That's right. And we made attempts at that and it worked somewhat. We expanded to three or four different industries, but we never got to the massive scale. And the total addressable market wasn't large enough for us to get the big checks from the VCs, which was just as well because I got to keep a lot more of the company and, you know, had a great outcome.

Yeah, like the biggest music retailer in the world is called Guitar center and they sell more than guitars, let's just say. But they started with guitars. And so you can start in a niche and organically expand a lot of times.

Yeah, that's right. In fact. Yeah.

But a lot of times that main thing, the thing you start with stays, you know, the big profit center. Sometimes it's not that great to be in all these different markets. You know, if you get, you tap into one vein of gold, you've got a gold mine. You only need one vein. Not everybody has to be Google and do you.

You know, that's the nice thing. With large law firms, it's really hard to get in, but they're creatures of habit, so once you get in, as long as they like it, they'll use it forever almost, you know?

And so how did the idea of putting entrepreneur operating system into your business, how did it change things, and how fast did it change things?

The biggest thing was, was it just gave me a framework.

It seems to me, from the outside, it was at a revolutionary impact on you because then you wound up doing it yourself, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest change was probably the way we ran our meetings. Okay, so there's a concept, and if you haven't read Traction, I'll send you a copy. It's a fantastic business book, but there's a concept in it that's called the level 10 meeting. Okay. And over the years, I'm sure you've attended a lot of meetings and a lot of bad meetings. Okay? So if you were to average out all the meetings you've ever been to on a scale of 1 to 10, what grade would you give them? Larry?

Now, I have to confess. 98% of the meetings that I've been to over the last 40 years, I. I've run. So.

Okay, so you might.

You might be an easy grader, and I have exp. I have excelled at avoiding the meetings that I don't run.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good for you. Good for you. All right. Or.

Or. Or I'm in there for the smallest. I go to meetings that I don't run, just like I went to Georgia Tech. And that is as few classes for as many. Many absences as possible, as short a period of time I could be in there, but that's. You have a little time invested.

You've minimized your time in meetings.

Okay?

So when I asked this question, the average answer I get is a 4 out of 10. Right. And can you imagine if you went to a restaurant and you rated it a 4 out of 10? Would you ever go back to.

No, no.

Right. And so. So this is just one really powerful concept in the operating system is it's called the Level 10 meeting. So the goal of the meeting is, at the end of the meeting, everybody rates the meeting, and the goal is that everyone would rate it a 10 out of 10.

Oh, okay.

So what makes a meeting a 10 out of 10? Well, and we're talking about. This is the weekly executive meeting you have with your company, with your leadership. Okay.

Your leadership.

Yeah. So. And this is like, just. I'll just give you, like, the agenda really quickly. You start with a segue, right? Everyone shares, I don't know, something good to happen in their business and their life. In the last week. You look at the scorecard for the week, what are the key metrics for the company? You look at the quarterly priorities. They're called rocks in the US world. And then after you share any announcements, the lion's share of the meeting is spent on issues, but not issues chosen by the CEO. You have the entire leadership team vote on the three most important issues and you tackle those first.

Yeah.

So in the design of this meeting, suddenly the power is taken away from the CEO and it's given to the team to say, how do we make this meeting the best possible? So the reason, after doing this, after following this agenda for a month or two, meeting scores usually go from before to, you know, nine and a half on average. So like the level 10 meeting is a powerful concept. And then, you know, the weekly scorecard is great. And then just this rhythm of every quarter, you have a full day of planning to set the next quarter. Every year you have a two day annual planning. And here's the agenda and here's what you do. So just, you don't have to think about it. It's like, it's almost like in a box, right? Just open it up like salad in a bag, right? Like, here's how you run your company. And it's all just very simple. And I think it's like human nature for us to complexify things. Right, right. Complicate things, I think is the word. And so EOS just says, okay, your structure you can make very simple. And then if you want to be fancy with your product or whatever, do that. But this works great for scaling your business.

Now lots of times when the top guy comes in, you know, Moses marches down from the mountain with the ten commandments of our new system of how can operate not always receive with great joy from the team. So how did you implement this to your team and get them to, you know, how receptive were they and how long to take to win a mobile?

Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question. And so I can share with you about my company and then with the dozens of companies that I've helped with since. Yeah, and the bottleneck in every company, bottleneck is always at the top. Right. And so what EOS does is it creates greater accountability, not just for the members of the team, but for the team towards the CEO. And so my team loved it because I am a, what they'd call A flaming visionary. I can be all over the place, but it helped me have structure. So they knew where we were going and how we were going to get there, you know, and so typically, the team is more on board with eos than the leader because the leader sometimes sees it as a threat to their power, you know?

Well, it's obvious that if you're letting them have their voice in it, whatever the program is, they're going to be more. Take more ownership because they've had a chance to express. You know, people like to be heard. They don't always have to be. They don't have to win the day, but they like to know that they've been heard and they've been respected at its heart.

Look, this is not really us, but this is my feeling. Companies desperately need to evolve from being CEO and founder led to being leadership team led.

Thank you.

Yeah. And making that leap is challenging because it requires. It requires the CEO to let go and to share power. Right.

Yeah. Now, the advantages for a leader to push that go all the way from the fact that if you ever want to have an exit strategy, the people that are going to come in and buy, they're going to look at what's going to be left behind. And that's the management team, it's the client base, it's the management team. Right. You know, when they came in, when you sold that thing, what were they looking at?

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, the private equity company that came in to look at our company and they're kicking the tires. What they loved more than anything is we had clear processes in place. And the main drivers of business, our sales teams and our customer success teams, they were extremely well trained and they weren't overpaid. We had training that was good enough that our customer success team could be run by recent college graduates. They could run our model because it wasn't about me as a personality. It was about the model we had built, you know, and that went all the way down to our financials. Right. Like, we had our financials built out. In a way, they were clean. They were done in the way SaaS companies should do them. And it was organized in a way that they could easily say, oh, this is a portable business. We can buy this business and just start running it without making too many changes. In fact, when they bought our company, you know, you always hear about companies being purchased and then these mass layoffs. Right, right. They bought our company in the next 12 months. They didn't make a single change because it was a well run organization.

And then the thing is that a leader should realize the reason to structure your company that way is that it frees, it takes the guesswork and the anxiety and the so many companies or you go through in the startup so much of it is putting out fires.

Yes.

You need the fire alarm going all the time, you know, and as you mature, you want to get to the point where you're in front of the fires. You know, you put out the fires before they start as much as possible. But by having it a well run and systems in place, trained leaders in place running those systems and monitoring it, reporting systems in place, what that allows you to do as the leader is to do other things to think of, see hundred percent, you know, you could have stayed there. You were not forced to sell, I would imagine, you know, if you had stayed, I'm sure you would have used that freedom to let your mind start thinking about other possibilities and where you could take that organization. And that can only happen, you know, somebody down level is not going to think of the things, the possibilities that you would think of.

And so yeah, and if you're operationally in the weeds every day.

Right.

Can I think those big ideas. Right.

It's destructive to a company for the leader to allow things to be run in a way where they are stuck in the weeds every day.

Yeah.

You know, and so because now look what you're all able to get out of that situation and now you've gone and been able to take that information, get some more training, you decide you sold out. How long before you went in and got yourself trained? Because you went in and got certified in this EOS system.

So there's one other kind of part to the story I want to share with you. Okay. So two years before I left my company, actually almost three years, I was asked to volunteer at an accelerator. So there's an organization called the Entrepreneur Organization eo. I don't know if you're familiar with EO and EO has their own accelerator and so they basically use volunteers like myself to spend a half day each month with a group of companies trying to grow from $250,000 a year to a million dollars a year. So I just got asked to volunteer and my business was well run at this point. So I was like, oh, I could give a half day a month. And I tell you that half day a month. It was my favorite day each month because these young entrepreneurs, they were just hungry and they were just like I was five years before they needed to know the way to go to grow their business. And as hard as it was for me to get to a million, my first million dollars in revenue, showing them the way was easy, right? It was just so clear to me. And so after three years of that, I ended up running the whole program and we tripled it in size. And this is all just as a volunteer. So when I sold my company, I just said to myself, that's my favorite day each month and I'm not getting paid anything for it. That's my favorite day of the month and I don't get paid anything for it. What if I could make every day like that? Like what if the work I did was always just helping entrepreneurs grow, helping them kind of make the leap from a struggling CEO to a leadership team led company? And I remembered the good experience I had with eos. And look, I read every book I didn't just read, but EOS had a big impact on me. And so I went and got. I decided to go and get. It's not really certified, it's trained. And then once you hit a certain number of sessions, you're officially certified.

Thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video@widelawinning.com and thanks for being part of our community.