In this video, Linda Ardesani of Ardesani Accounting and The Proper Trust delivers a comprehensive guide for attorneys on treating their law practice as a business. She begins by urging lawyers to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely) goals for short‑, medium‑, and long‑term horizons, emphasizing the cognitive benefit of writing goals down. She then walks through calculating the firm’s financial baseline: determining the income needed to cover expenses, reach breakeven, and establish a rainy‑day fund, especially in a tightening economy. With that baseline, she advises allocating budgets across marketing, overhead, and wages, and stresses the importance of clear job descriptions, cross‑training, and redundancy planning for staff. Ardesani highlights client‑base development, recommending a strong website, clear contact calls‑to‑action, and ongoing networking via newsletters, social media, and virtual seminars to keep the sales funnel full. She revisits cash‑flow awareness, linking it to hiring decisions, and promotes disciplined time management through time‑blocking to eliminate waste. Finally, she discusses hiring and retention: defining roles, assessing experience, offering competitive compensation and benefits, and fostering a positive work culture to attract and keep talent. The video concludes with an invitation to contact her firm for personalized assistance in moving from point A to point B.
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Hi there. Linda Ardesani, Ardesani Accounting and The Proper Trust. This week I want to speak to all the attorneys and lawyers out there about financial strategies and how you can run your practice like a business. If you're an attorney who wants to run their practice like a business, you need to learn about how to manage your law practice's workflow. And I'm going to get big deep into the weeds of workflow, cash flow next week. But talking about cash flow, we're talking about hiring staff. As you start to find firm growth, how do you manage that? And what does that actually mean? So I mentioned a couple weeks ago setting goals for your practice. That's a great place to start, really putting the blinders on and saying, okay, here's where I want to be at the end of the year. Here's where I want to be a year from now. Here's where I want to be 5 years from now. Write it down. There's plenty of goal journals out there. There's plenty of places that you can actually Even online, create these SMART goals. So a SMART goal is really a great starting point. So remember, a SMART goal is one that you're setting the goal and starting to take every action that you need to take to get to the place that you want to be. I think if you manage your practice like a business, you realize that there's certain things you need to focus on, and having those goals. will help you get that focus as you go along. And assure that those goals— if you have never heard the term SMART goal, you want them to be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. That's really what that means, SMART. So that's the acronym for it. And I'll put an article in the— I'll put a link in the article so that you can see places you can get journals. I really feel that if you can handwrite out your goals, It just kind of helps set it, and I think it works in the brain where it really helps you kind of look down that pathway and really focus on them. There's something about writing. I know that we all like to do everything electronically, but in this case, I think that the writing will really help you get there. Once you— one of the first things I'd like you to do as you set the goals, so set the goals, and then I want you to figure out what does it cost you to run your firm today? What is the income you need to generate to cover the expenses, get to that net zero place? What does it cost if you were just to break even at the end of the year? It's a great place to start so that, you know, every owner, every firm owner should know that number. They should know exactly, especially since the economy is starting to grind down. If you've opened up your 401, you probably have seen where, like, you lost quite a bit of money. So as the economy starts to have that trickle-down effect, you want to really start to look at what's that number? What is the least amount of money? And then if you can figure out where is the— where's the money going to come from, from where's the income side coming from, you want to start to allocate some funds towards savings. And I think that knowing the number that you need to know, and then also knowing that you could put some money aside, we're really recommending to our clients that they Put some money aside for that rainy day fund. A lot of firms don't have that, and it's a really good idea. You don't have to fall back on the partners to come back in and take money out of their personal accounts to cover that rainy day. Starting to put that aside is a smart move. Yes, you're gonna pay taxes on that money and, and as income, but you're putting it into savings for that rainy day. So once you know how much it takes to operate the firm, now you can start to think about how you allocate the funds. And it's, it's actually an option to set the goals for yourself, but also decide, I wanna spend $5,000 on marketing. I wanna spend this much on overhead. Start to think of all those pieces of the overhead together. How much do you wanna spend on wages? Then you can start to really evaluate who works for you. What's their— what is their job description? Have them write down what they do in their day. So you have a really good high-level view of what's happening in their job so you can really evaluate. Maybe somebody's doing the same thing somebody else is and there's crossover or redundancy. You really want to see where those things are happening. You want your staff to be able to pick up where another one left off. If somebody's sick or leaves the firm, you want to have somebody able to step in the shoes. You want to have that backup plan. It's very important. Then you start to check in with your client base. If you work, you know, if you run your practice like a business, a business lawyer, you know, you look at what is the service you provide to your clients. Uh, you want to focus on a very strong client base, and law firms really do run a lot on referrals. So the best way to run your practice like a business is to focus on that solid client base. You want to provide good service. You want to provide good customer service. If you start to see that the funnel is getting smaller of the leads coming in the door and the Qualified leads. You want to track that. You want to see how does somebody come in the door? Do they become a client? If they don't become a client, maybe they weren't supposed to become a client. But you want to know that data. Sometimes law firms can have trouble finding a client or a good client base because the problem can stem from the law practice. So it's important to find a nice strong network to build off of, and building that strong network. Takes time just like anything else. It takes time to find that strong client base. It does start with your website. That's your— it's your billboard. When somebody's looking to find out they need to hire your type of law firm, they go to your— they go to your website. That's their first impression of you. You have to make sure that's a good impression. It's so important, and I've mentioned this so many times. Make sure you have a great logo. Make sure there's contact information on the website, especially that landing page. You want to be able to have them This is a lawyer. We do this. Here's how you contact me. Have that call to action on that, that main page. Very, very important. And then once you have a really good website, you start to, you start to work on building the network. Maybe you do that with a newsletter. Maybe you do that with a Facebook page. However it works, maybe you hold seminars. We see that as very successful sometimes. And, and they can attract people even with online seminars. You don't have to physically go to a conference room and do it. You can do it online. Offer that up for free, but that might get clients in the door. And then you really want to understand your cash flow needs. And this goes back to what I mentioned in the beginning, knowing that number. What is the minimal amount of sales you need to generate, legal income you need to generate to cover the bills? Do you need to hire? You want to start to look at that, and then you want to manage your time effectively, which is what we talked about last week with time management. You want to know what you're doing in a day to really be able to run your firm efficiently. And it's essential, really essential to run, you know, manage your time effectively. There's no wasted time. Time blocking is a great, is a great thing. If you want to look up time blocking, it's very efficient as you start to really super organize your day. I mean, you don't want to be so rigid, but you do want to have that in place where you know what you're doing each day. and how you're spending your day. And is there any place that's being wasted so you can make the most of your time but still have that day off? Like we mentioned last week, you wanna hire your staff wisely, and that all comes down to building a good work culture, offering a good compensation package, offering benefits. Those are the things that are really important to be able to hire. First of all, hire people. It's a really tough job market right now, and then retain them, because retaining a client Retaining a customer, retaining an employee is very difficult, as is retaining a client. So those are very important things you want to really look at and reflect on. Take that time out to do. So if you need to hire staff, know what their tasks are going to be, know what their job description is. And the most important thing when you do reach out to hire somebody, have that time to talk to them, find out their experience and what is their experience in your particular practice area. So I think that those are the main things I wanted to talk about this week. I hope this was helpful. Obviously, if you want to reach out to us, we have the ability to help you shift that mindset into working on your business. We can assist you with all the knowledge we have with working all these different law firms to help you get from point A to point B with your goals. I hope that helps, and we'll see you all on the next video. Bye now.
