Unlock Your Law Firm's Potential with Gimbal Canada

Welcome to Accountants Law Pod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. And today we have special guests, and I'm going to let them give you a little quick intro, but we're calling this one Unlocking Your Law Firm's Potential. So I want you to get on the edge of your seats because we're going to actually share some really good secrets of how to do that. And our— I'm just going to toss it right to David Skinner from Gimbal. He's going to tell us a little about himself, and he's going to pass along to his partner.

Sure. Thank you very much, Linda. So at Gimbal, we do 4 things to significantly improve law firm productivity and profitability. Specifically, we optimize legal processes, we create strong business operating systems, which may be a great bridge to the conversation for today. We also improve time management by teaching everyone to delegate more effectively. And finally, we upgrade writing and communication skills. Now, we do those 4 things in 3 ways. We do them through online and in-person courses. We do them through group and one-to-one coaching. And we also do consulting. Karen, do you wanna give a little context for that?

Yeah, I mean, our goal when we started Gimbal was really to help lawyers build practices that they love. But having been lawyers ourselves for 20 years each, we knew the biggest— Yeah, more than— We knew that the biggest challenge is really having enough time. So you can build this practice that you love and you're doing really well and you're making lots of money, but you never have enough time to actually enjoy it. You're not enjoying the practice because you're working so hard. You're not enjoying your life because you're never in it. You're always in the office. So I know if the lawyers who are listening or accountants who are working with lawyers, I'm sure you know lawyers who really just feel like they're treading water, like they're just doing all they can just to kind of keep the lights on and keep their heads above water. They often feel like their law firms are running them and not really the other way around. They're working really long hours. They're missing dinners with their family. They're on vacation and they're getting like the side eye from their spouse because they're supposed to be watching their kids at the pool and they're actually checking their phones and they really feel kind of ground down. And so what we do is we work with lawyers who want to unlock the real potential in their practice, which is unlocking time, but not time so that they're billing more. We want them to streamline their legal and business workflows so they can actually accomplish more but do less, which is kind of counterintuitive sometimes. But we want to teach them how to delegate effectively. We help them manage their time better so that they are working in these streamlined, these efficient workflows, these efficient processes and systems so that they have more time to do the things that matter. And for some people, they're workaholics, they love it, that's what they want to do. So they can take that more time and they can practice more law, or they can practice the law that's really at what we like to call in their power zone, like the highest revenue-generating work that they can do, knowing that all the other stuff gets done because they have systems in place. So that's, that's essentially what we do.

No, I just want to interrupt. Sorry, Karen. But equally importantly, we want people who aren't driven to work all the time. We want them to have the time to enjoy their success. We want them to be back in their community. We want them to be serving their church if that happens to be their jam. We want them to be able to ski on weekends. We want them to be present in their lives outside of work. And I think one of the challenges for professionals, whether they're accountants, lawyers, architects, engineers, it doesn't matter, is that we tend to live to work as opposed to working to live. And so we try to strike that integration at an optimized level for the professionals we work with, not just lawyers but their staff, including people in finance and marketing and, and leadership.

I love it. It's a lot of good work.

That's something we actually— we went to a conference this past year at TriMerit, and that was the theme of the conference, right, Sarah? Yeah.

It was, it was a balance, but in the sense of, I think, David, you said it, there are workaholics in there. It's reconnecting with that spirit of what was your hobby, or, you know, there's so much shame in some of these areas that people don't want to admit that, that it, it drives them, but you might find something equally. So I'm curious From your own experience, there must have been a switch in your having practiced law to joining this journey of consulting and doing this deeper, meaningful work. Was it like a mutual agreeable moment? Were you on separate planes and kind of like, how did that work?

So, so, so very much, I'll give my version and Karen will give her version because while we've been married for 31 years, we don't see eye to eye all the time and you'll get very different pictures. Or sometimes Karen will finish my sentence and I'll finish hers. We're not interrupting each other. just very much— it's like we share one brain. From my perspective, I've been practicing law for almost 24 years. I was a corporate commercial attorney, a member of the New York Bar, a member of the Massachusetts Bar, a member of the Quebec Bar. I'd lived and worked internationally in large, what we call big law environments. And then I spent half of my practicing career in-house. I was corporate secretary, Vice President, General Counsel of a publicly traded biopharmaceutical company. And somewhere along that journey, I'd been practicing law for, by then, probably 15 years or so. No, probably longer.

More.

19, 20 years. And I really started to understand and appreciate that there had to be a better way to practice law, not only for me as general counsel, but the outside counsel that I was working with. I could pick up the phone and call them at 10 o'clock at night. I was at the office. That was bad enough. But they were also at the office. And And so Karen and I started to talk about the practice of law and what it meant to be in the practice of law and the derivative piece, the business of law. And we looked at each other and said, there has to be a better way for people to be successful without the same intense grind.

Yeah. I mean, at the same time that David was coming to this realization in his practice, I was running a solo practice. And, you know, I'd started in big law and I'd done, you know, the weekends, the sleeping at the office, the eating 3 meals a day at the office. I'd done all of that. And I was running a solo practice, which I loved. But at the same time, I was wearing all the hats, which is the problem that we see in all the small law firms that we start to work with. Our main goal when we start to work with a solo practitioner is to figure out how many hats she's wearing and how many we can get her to take off.

Right.

And they have to do that. Otherwise, you're in that overwhelm, you're in that grind where you're doing all the business development, you're doing all the business and administrative stuff that's kind of on what Dave and I call the bookends of your practice. So everything about sort of business development and intake and conflicts and opening the file, and then you do the legal work, and then you've got all the bookends at the other end, the billing, the collections, the file closing, then your accounting. So we look at people and ask them, are wearing all those hats. And when you're wearing all those hats, you cannot be effective at what is your power zone, which is practicing law. Or for some people, they don't want to practice law. What they actually want to do is build this great business and run the business and have the strategic vision for their practice or their firm, but run the firm and then hire other people to actually practice the law. So they want to be, you know, in a— they want to move somewhere else, but they can't do any of that because they don't have any time. Business and make it more systematized, create processes, and they don't have time to even step back. We had 2 coaching calls today, didn't we, David? And both of them were women running very, very successful firms, both of whom wanted to step back so that they could really focus on the work that they loved. Some of it was client work, but some of it is managing and growing and scaling a thriving business, but they don't have time yet.

Well, you know, we, we see quite often when we look at their productivity metrics in a law firm that they're really not that productive when they're in that environment like that. And being the accounting side of the operation, working remotely for all these different firms, I quite often find that I have to give them permission to slow down because they'll hit you like a tornado. A big bag of rocks comes flying at you. They're just regurgitating hundreds of things and then they're like, okay, what's the answer? And it's like, okay, I've done this before where I say to them, I'm going to give you permission to take your attorney hat off and let's put the business hat on and let's breathe and let's slow down.

Yeah.

Because I'm looking at your numbers and I can see that you're really only about 73% productive with all these hours that you're putting in. Can you tell me what you're doing? The rest of the time, you know, and to your point— no, go ahead.

I was just—

I was going to challenge you on that statistic because we all met at ClioCon in Nashville, and consistently year on year, the people, the small to mid-sized firms that complete the Clio annual report say the same thing over and over again. They're probably doing about 2.5 hours of income-generating work. And I'm not even— forget profitability, just revenue-generating work. Profitability is a completely separate question, which your colleagues, your accountants, will be all over. Lawyers don't always get the connection. Just because I'm making money doesn't mean I'm actually making money. So 2.5 hours a day on revenue-generating work.

Yeah.

The rest is on business and administrative work, which often we, speaking as a lawyer, have zero business doing. I'm not qualified, I'm not capable, I'm not competent, I don't like it, but I do it because I don't trust anybody else to do it. And I think—

Well, yeah, right there you hit the— you hit the nail on the head. I think that they feel like they have to be so in control of every little minutia inside that law firm, and it's hard for them to let go and feel safe in letting go that it's going to get done. So I think that's awesome that you guys are doing what you're doing To help break that mold?

It's hard because lawyers tend to be— to be a really great lawyer, you need to be a perfectionist. You need to be very risk-averse. You need to be extremely good at looking at a situation and picking up all the things that are wrong with it, because that's what you're trained to do. And you're not particularly good at getting things wrong. Lawyers typically score very low on resilience. when they do psychological assessments of lawyers. So high perfectionism, low resilience means you're not really very good at trying something out, failing, and then picking yourself up and starting again.

Are you testing these people out on what you just talked— what you just mentioned?

We don't do psychological testing. We talked about it for a while, but we didn't. It's Larry— I want to say Larry Roberts. Larry— I can't remember Larry's last name, but I will figure it out and send it to you so that you can put it out with the podcast. But he's done a ton of work on psychological assessments of lawyers. And that's what happens is that because of the way that we're trained, and it's not totally clear whether people who have this sort of mindset are more attracted to law or whether people go into law and then they develop the mindset. So it's not really— I don't know which way it falls, but it's—

Prejudice is always—

Maybe. But it really means— it means that it's— that something like innovation is actually really hard because what makes you a really great lawyer doesn't necessarily make you a really great innovator. And it doesn't make you a good delegator at all because, like you say, they want to be in control. When we talk about delegation, and we have a whole program called Delegation Express that is like a DIY little course that people can take on delegation, one of the things we really get people to think about is Is okay, why? What's holding you back from delegating? Well, it's usually oh, you know what? I asked somebody once before to do it, and they made a mistake, and I had to do it myself anyway. Or you know, I'm gonna give it to them, and they're gonna do a terrible job, and I'm gonna have to do it myself anyway. Or it'll take me more time to explain than the task takes. We hear this: it'll only take me a minute. It'll only take me a minute. Well, it does only take you a minute, but you do that minute, you know, 25 times a week, or 50 times a week, or 60 times a week. That's time that if you taught somebody, and it did take you. You would have that time in perpetuity. So that's kind of the mindset shift we push people to is like, if you're going to delegate work, you have to think of it as an investment. And you have to invest the time to create the process that you use.

Yes.

And then to teach that process and to accept that the first few times it won't be perfect. You have to accept it won't be perfect. You make the redirection, not that you do it yourself, but you redirect. And then eventually it is going to be saving you time, but it's going to save you time in perpetuity. It's not saving you just a minute here and there or the extra 5 minutes it took you to train. It's saving you 60, 70, 80 minutes a week or more, depending on what it is.

So can I— I'm thinking about this logically, and I'm curious, depending on the type of person Or the size of the firm sometimes because—

Or the type of law that they practice.

Yeah, exactly. So it— I mean, you could just do high level. I was just thinking like allowing yourself, as if you're the attorney, or it's very similar in the accounting profession too, it's no different, allowing yourself a bandwidth of time. So I know people like to certain— especially in legal, we have to figure out the timelines, right? So When you're doing this new system for yourself or allowing yourself to develop this new system, what does that kind of timeline look like to allow yourself to be able to be confident in this? Because you're learning a new skill while doing it. It sounds weird to say that. It's such a natural thing to do. It's like taking a child and redirecting and redirecting. Well, it's the same thing in our own businesses. At times we have to redirect every single time. So what do you think is a good timeline for someone? Um, to give themselves that space and time to develop this.

Do you mean how long you should invest in training someone?

Or possibly, yeah. Or just even yourself, like, okay, I'm not going to take the minute to take that little action step to do that piece. I'm going to do this little video, or I'm going to redirect it back. I mean, it— from— you're really training the psychology of somebody. You're really retraining them. So it's like, is it— expect yourself— like we tell people, when you're migrating, You've got about 90 days to 6 months to accept the new, the new way of doing this work, because you're not going to turn on like a switch and it's the magic button. You're in a whole new system. You have a whole new practice management system in front of you, and it doesn't work like the last one, so don't expect it to. So it's kind of like that. I mean, it's just like giving them— it's such a psychological piece that you're trying to redirect somebody on. Do you find that they spend— some people pick it up and run with it, or do you find— are you finding like a medium of like, is it 90 days? Is it 6 months?

There can be a huge amount of resistance. And so the inertia is high, and the inertia is greatest in the larger organizations within which we work. And I'm gonna wear my lawyer's hat for a second, my cautious hat, because I don't want you to get a whole pile of letters from irate attorneys who complain about David and Karen Skinner and the comments that we made. We're grossly generalizing when we say lawyers are risk-averse, that lawyers aren't good delegators. There are some fabulous practitioners out there who have all the business and leadership skills and knock it out of the park. But as a gross generalization, we are, generally speaking, trained to be risk-averse, to find the problems, and then to come up with the solutions to overcome the problems. We're not just poking holes.

Right.

But as one of our friends says, you know, often the accounting department Accounting and finance and/or the lawyers are the crushers of innovation and dreams because our job is to go, well, you can't do that because you don't have the budget, or you can't do that because the law doesn't provide, or otherwise. So that's my caveat there. We do love lawyers. We are lawyers ourselves, but we have our hangups and our problems. Answering the question about how long does it take, the inertia is greatest in larger law firms. And there's a reason why recently Karen and I have increasingly decided to focus on smaller organizational structures. We will not walk into a large institution and say, you need to change this from stem to stern and everybody has to change. But rather, we will work with a practice group, or we'll work with a business and administrative department, the conflicts clerks, accounting, collections, billing, and we'll try to work with a smaller group where the inertia is smaller. Translate that into working with solos and smalls. Those that see the urgency or feel the urgency and understand the negative impact on their mental health and wellness of wearing all the hats, they're the easiest to convert. We then provide them with simple tools, simple frameworks, simple methodologies that they can easily understand and translate to their day-to-day.

Mm-hmm.

And part of that, when we're talking about, you know, maybe I'll just run a little video here or I'll create some sort of cheat sheet. The greatest way that we help people understand to systematize what they do before they delegate it is to keep a sheet of paper beside their desk or open a note on their screen. And when they're doing a task that they want to delegate, start off simply by enumerating each step they do as they do it. So then they're not taking time other than a microsecond To say, you know, need to call Linda to discuss. So it's like, need to call Linda. She's most available on Mondays and Tuesdays between 1 and 4 PM Eastern. And here's the telephone number. Assuming Linda works outside the organization, I need to call her for some information. Write it all down. And once you've written it down, then you can go back and start at the beginning again and go, well, what'd I miss? And then with that in mind, you then turn around and say, well, the next time I'm gonna do it, this task that involves Linda, I'm gonna pull out my list. I'm gonna forget what I know, and I'm gonna pull out my list and start at 1 and end up at 23. And if I don't get the result, then my process, my cheat sheet, my checklist is missing something. Well, what am I missing? Oh, I didn't write that down because it's obvious. Well, if it's obvious to me, it's likely not going to be obvious. to my delegate. And so that's how we encourage people from a practical perspective to systematize things that they ultimately want to delegate. Karen, I'm sure you've got something you wanna add.

I do.

What I wanted to just jump in, I think you're right. The idea is really to start small and kind of build that muscle memory of, of A, creating the little processes as you go for all these things. Um, and, but the other thing too is to figure out who could do the work. And so one of the tricks that we used with people is what we call our delegation quadrant. So we— if we've got a lawyer comes to us who says, you know what, I'm overwhelmed, I can't, I've got too much to do, I'm wearing all these hats, we get them to really enumerate what it is that they actually do. And so we say, okay, for the next week, every time you do something in your practice, whether it's phone calls they have to make to, I don't know, land transfer office or whatever it is, whatever you're doing, grab a sticky note, write that thing on a sticky note. And throw it up on the wall beside you so that they start to create a list of everything that they're doing, all the hats that they're wearing, the legal work too. You know, if it's drafting, then, you know, draft contract X, draft, you know, agreement Y, whatever that is. If it's intake, then it's, you know, had a consultation with so-and-so, did a follow-up, chased a client who didn't give us the right financial information, all of those tasks. And we get them all up on the wall at the end of a week and we say, okay, you got to put them in 4 categories. Category 1 is the work that you absolutely have to do because you're the business owner or you're the lawyer and it takes somebody with the qualifications at the bar to do it, or there— or you have very specific expertise that nobody else can do. So those are the things in quadrant 1, the stuff that you have to keep and continue to do. And then in quadrant 4 is all the stuff that you look at and you say to yourself, there is no way anybody in this firm should be doing that at all. Like, we have to stop doing it. It's ridiculous. Whatever. That's your quadrant.

Are such things?

Oh, yeah.

I'm sure there's a list.

Only one or two.

Only one or two.

Oh, wow.

Then you've got, you've got these other two quadrants, quadrant 2 and quadrant 3, which is all the stuff that has to get done. Quadrant 2 is all the stuff that has to get done in your firm. You don't have to do it because it doesn't take a lawyer to do it. And you absolutely Absolutely hate doing it. It grinds you down every second that you have to do that task. You're just thinking to yourself, I wish I could die. Like, I just can't. I can't do this anymore. The stuff you really hate, that goes in quadrant 2. Quadrant 3 is the stuff that has to get done. You kind of like doing it. Maybe you're not very good at it, so you probably shouldn't do it because it takes you, you know, because you break the website every time or whatever. Whatever it is, the stuff in quadrant 3 is the stuff that somebody else in the firm should be doing, or that somebody else should be doing. Maybe they're not in your firm now, but you could outsource it. So it's the stuff that somebody else other than you could do, and you, you kind of like it. And then we say, okay, you're going to start by delegating small things that are in quadrant 2. Quadrant 2 is the stuff that you don't have to do and you hate. And we want them to always start with quadrant 2 to develop the practice of Creating a little process the next time they do it, teaching somebody, looking at that and deciding who they should teach, right? Deciding who they have and do they have that person on staff and could they outsource it for less money? But start always with quadrant 2 because the first instinct that all of us have when we delegate a task and somebody makes a mistake is to take that task back. However, if it's a task you really, really hate, you're not gonna be so keen to take it back. So it's really just a bit of a tricking yourself into saying, okay, there's no way I'm going back to calling clients on collection matters. I've got to find a better way to do it. So you start with those things. So David's right, you start by, you know, creating that small process as you do, as you go along, testing it out, looking at it, deciding who should do the work other than you. And then you start with some small things that are in that quadrant 2, and you practice delegating, and you learn to delegate. With the things that you really never wanna have to do again.

And by the way, this, this method for delegation applies regardless of who you are. It applies to accounting clients. It applies to engineers. Anybody who's trying to get somebody else to do something should follow the methodology that Karen's just described and that we set out in Delegation Express. It's, it's foolproof. It's simple.

Yeah.

And it's kind of ingenious. Not that we developed it.

But it makes sense. I mean, I can't tell you how many times Linda, Sarah, and I have talked about, oh, I'm just going to take that back and do it myself because it didn't work and I can get it done quicker. And we're always catching ourselves on that.

Yeah.

You know, end up working on Saturday or into the evening or whatever. We're all guilty of that.

And there's a cost to that, right? There is. And that's the other thing that we talk about a lot with people is that Yes, it's going to cost you because a lot of pushback that we get from lawyers, especially in smaller firms, is they don't have the budget to hire somebody.

Mm-hmm.

And so we talk about the fact that if you can hire an assistant to do work for you for $40 an hour and you could take that hour and charge $200, $300, $400, there's no reason why you can't hire that assistant. And you don't have to hire someone full-time. You can hire a remote assistant. You can hire somebody for 10 hours a week or 10 hours a month. One of our coaching clients started off with someone for, I think, 5 hours a month doing one small task. Now she has a full-time assistant and she's hired somebody else because she makes more money because all those hours that she was doing, you know, you said at the beginning, Stephen, people have, they have very low productivity and they're only— and David, you said, you know, people are working for 2.5, 3 hours a day on billable work. All the rest of that time they could be working on billable work. And that would earn them $400 an hour, and all that would cost them is $40 an hour for a remote assistant.

That's like a no-brainer when you think about it. We have these conversations with our clients, and one of the areas we do that with is accounts receivable. They might have it. None of them want to pick up a phone and call a client, the former client that hasn't paid them. And that's an easy grab for us to get them to start to think about, well, we've got this other solution, CoolBox, that you might want to look into professionally. professional calls. And it's kind of funny when it comes to delegation, and Sarah and I went through this in the beginning because we did everything from the beginning. And then a dear friend of ours, one of our mentors, Seth David, said to us, if they can do it 85% of how you do it, then that's good enough. And you have to let go of the 100% because that's the problem is you're just sitting with that, I know I can do it better. And then it comes back. But he said the 85% rule, just keep thinking the 85% rule. And And for sure, that is a true thing.

So if you're watching the dollars walk out the back door and you're not managing the front end, you've got your priorities wrong. And I hate to be so blunt about it, but really, we see that in the transactional relationships. We're not having a transactional relationship as an accounting firm with you. We're having a business relationship to help you flourish. It's to help you move forward. And so you build those financial team partnerships and to your point, you build this administrative support so you do the work that you want to do and we're learning it ourselves. So it's not like we have it all figured out.

We're business owners too. That's the thing we get. Sarah started using that when we talk to the attorneys, like, we're business owners too. You can almost see it on their face like that never occurred to them. And then they're like, oh, that's right. You're kind of going through the same things we are with employing, picking, hiring people and things like that. And it's just interesting to see that, that whole conversation changed. But we have that conversation with attorneys over software. We might have a way of using software that will save the time, like hiring somebody, and then they're hesitant to put the money out. And you're like, wait a minute, we're going to get you improvement in speed. Technology is going to just drive things. It's going to be more accurate. Why wouldn't you want to invest in the firm that way? And then usually we can get them to understand. It's so true that a lot of them think that they're billing out that 40 hours a week. Like, I work 40 hours, I bill out 40 hours. And then that's when we hop in with our reports and show them utilization and realization rates. And here's—

Utilization rates are in the toilet. And that's where that, that's where, you know, that 2.5 hours of billable time on average for, you know, solos and smalls, because they're wearing all the hats, it decimates their utilization. And that has a direct impact on their revenue and also because they're a high-cost resource, their profitability.

And their—

Too many people focus on revenue and, and historically partners that bill by the hour are compensated in part on the revenue they generate. You know, who's the biggest fish in the pond? Who brings in the most revenue? Well, that's kind of irrelevant. Who brings in the most revenue the most profitably? That's the question we should focus on. Because if I'm generating a dollar and the firm is making 99 cents, that's a whole lot better than someone who's generating $500 and it's costing $499 to generate the $500.

Well, and you know, so many attorneys go to work in the big firms when they get out of law school, and they are handed a plate, and it's on that plate it says, this is how many hours You have to bill this year. They burn them out and then they end up as a solo and sometimes they end up going back to the firm because they can't make it as a solo. And you're— and that's, that's the sweet spot right there. If you can get a hold of them and say, okay, wait a minute, you left because you were burned out. Don't do that to yourself again. Get your SOP set up, get your, get your correct software. Don't, don't just call your friend down the street and ask what he's using. Really investigate, um, you know, what you want to use in your firm and the type of staff you want to hire and if you want to outsource. And, and to your point, you know, looking at all the things in the quadrants of what do I do every day and, and feel safe in letting go and making more money because you did.

Yeah.

You know, we want people— we were, when we met at ClioCon, you know, we were wearing our Work in Your Power Zone t-shirts. And we're actually Thursday, tomorrow, I guess that is, we're giving another webinar on how to work in your power zone because it's such a useful concept to think about. That stuff in delegate in that quadrant 1, that's the power zone stuff. That's the stuff that you can do as a lawyer and you're making the most money you can make for the firm. And sometimes that's business development and that's okay. Like that doesn't— and we're not talking, it doesn't have to all be legal work. It could be the business development. And that's hugely valuable to the firm. And you're— that's paying you. That's an ROI. You're getting an ROI from that. But we want people to look at their lives and their practices and know that they're spending most of their day in their power zone, which is the work that pays the most money that they love to do, because then they're not going to feel burnt out. And if they are starting to feel burnt out because they've got too much work in their power zone, then they can hire somebody else who's got the same power zone as them. to do more of that high revenue generating work. You can make a lot more money as a solo if you develop workflows and systems and processes where you've got everybody on your team. I mean, solo and team, I'm talking about maybe 1 or 2 lawyers and a paralegal and an assistant and an intake specialist. That's your team. If you've got every single person on that team working in their power zone, They're doing the work they love that adds the most value to the firm, whether that's being absolutely fantastic answering the phone when potential clients call, which is hugely valuable and also means the lawyer is not answering the phones when the clients call. Um, you know, all of that generates bigger bottom line for the firm.

So I want to just— I want to, I want to riff on that for a second because I think here's a great place to introduce 2 concepts which I think are important And then I apply equally to accountants and also to lawyers because accountants also sometimes bill by the hour for certain types of projects. First, you can make more money if you move away from the billable hour into flat rate or fixed fee billing, provided you've got the systems, the processes in place that allow you to do the work efficiently. And I want to come back to the definition of efficiency as Karen and I view it in a knowledge-based business like the law.

Mm-hmm.

In a moment. But first, on the question of flat rate versus billable hour, just because it takes— I bill $100 an hour. Just because it takes me 15 minutes doesn't mean I'm limited to billing $25 for that piece of work. Quite the contrary. The only reason I can do that piece of work in 20— in 15 minutes is because I've got 25 years of practical experience behind me, because I'm an expert in the field. Because I know what the courts have decided previously, and so on down the line. So what I should do is I should bill you based on the value that you've received out of the 15 minutes that I have worked for you. And so if you get it right, if you are good at what you do, and you can bring to bear great quality, efficient processes and systems, twin that with great experience. Then my 15 minutes is worth a whole lot more than $25 for a quarter of an hour.

And clients will pay.

And clients will pay. So that, that's point number 1. That hinges on being efficient. Karen and I define efficiency in the practice of law and any other knowledge-based service as having the right people doing the right work the right way at the right time. And using the right resources. And I want to come back to technology because right resources doesn't necessarily mean technology. It can be something so simple as a checklist, a practice guide, an aide-mémoire, a standard form precedent. All of those are resources. But so too then is how do I leverage technology to automate And systematize some of what I have in terms of resources, make it easier to find, make it easier to generate, use AI. So efficiency is right people, right, doing the right work the right way at the right time using the right resources. And we fall down all too often when we try to wear too many hats because we utterly fail at being efficient.

Oh, it's so true because you can't even lead a team sometimes when you're falling down on your own stuff, you know, and then keeping them and keeping them moving, right? Steve, you and I talked about this, and Linda as well, um, from experience. But what we're—

Well, and if you, if you do all these things, David, I— your, your staff's going to appreciate it that much more. I bet you have less turnover.

Oh my goodness.

Karen, go ahead. That's all core to onboarding effectively.

Exactly. Like, if you've got systems in place and you've got people that you're hiring in to work in their power zone, so they're going to be excited because they're doing work that they like, and you've got a written process, you are going to make more money and you're going to have an easier time onboarding your staff. You're going to have less turnover. We've been hired in to work with large law firms that have major turnover issues in different practice groups. And when you really drill down, so much of the time it's because they don't have— the firm doesn't have a system for allocating work. It's totally ad hoc. So, you know, a partner works with an associate once, that associate makes a tiny mistake because he hasn't received enough training or he never got any training.

And then—

Or the information he was provided was inadequate.

Yeah, exactly. And then that person never gets any more work from the partner because the partner thinks they're unreliable. And then so there were all these things that were kind of building out. Around the fact that they didn't have a work allocation system. They didn't have a process for looking at their different associates and saying, you know what, Sarah needs training in this area and Linda needs training in this area and Steven needs training in this area. And then we bring them all up to this level. So much of it came down to the fact that they didn't have processes. One of our friends likes to say, if you don't have a written process for anything that you do more than once in your practice, you're working too hard and you're leaving money on the table. Every time.

That's fascinating. That's fascinating to me because there are so many little things that you do. Like if I like look at my desk right now, because we're at the beginning of our season, I've got these little notes to make sure, okay, don't forget this so I can rip them off and like you said, get rid of them. But if I thought in the process of the quadrants and what, and then understanding how repetitive, because you forget what you've done, you forget where you were. I forgot what I did at Clio Con. Oh, you're gonna totally remember this. Heck no, I don't.

And that's the thing. Like, even if it is a process that's in your quadrant 1, even if it's something that's in your first quadrant that you know you have to do yourself, you have to have a written process for it. I do the same thing over and over again in our practice, and I just grab my Trello board, I open the card that has my process on it, and I work through the process because otherwise I will forget. It's something I do regularly. But not often. And because I do it regularly but not often, I will forget things.

Mm-hmm.

And so, that's this idea of, you know, when you're working through something, write it down, write it down as you go. We, one of the books we've been recommending a lot to people is a book by Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time. And I like, every time I recommend the book, I kick myself that we didn't write it because it's the same thing that we've been telling people for For so long. But the whole idea is look at all the things that you do, decide what you can hire somebody to do for less so that you've got that hour to do something that's more important to you. And, and as you go, like, he does the same thing we do. He creates his process every single time he does something. He's like, oh, somebody else could do this for me. So he writes it down or he makes a video. We use a program called Searchie, and we create video screen captures of everything that we do. And that becomes this library of processes. And that's what we get our law firms to do. The lawyers in our coaching programs are starting to use and build out this whole library of SOPs that they're building themselves. And then because they're getting really good at delegating, because they've been working with us for a while now, they get the people on their teams to make their own processes to improve the SOPs, all of that.

Yeah.

Becomes this like self-perpetuating cycle of process.

I feel like it's— so it's a blanket thing, like we're talking about all these types of law firms, but really what you're taking is tangible pieces and it's tailored to your firm because no one is the same. People like to compare, oh, you're doing this, I'm going to try that. Well, hold on, don't, don't just like start moving knobs and wheels if you don't have a foundation or understanding your numbers in the way that you might need to. It goes back to that kind of stage of like You're investing in yourself by joining groups like yourselves, like working with a consultant like yourself, so that way you can build to this more peaceful balance. I'm not a big work-life balance kind of thought. I've never been. I don't like the phrase. It's just wherever that peace is, whatever that is for you, and that works for you and supports your team for their growth. It's funny too. I wanted to tell you, because as you were talking earlier, David, it came to my— came to me. We were watching Ryan Reynolds as our keynote at our QuickBooks convention for accountants, and he said the accountants are the smartest ones in the room. They're the adults. They're the ones that are funny too. He couldn't believe how funny the accounting department was. But it was between that and legal were like almost equal professional moments that he was commenting on. It was just the best because it wasn't— we were trying Yeah, sure, we're risk-averse. He's a visionary. But at the same time, he's like, yeah, you're the adults in the room. You're going to take care of me.

That's why we say— that's why we say there, we collectively, attorneys and accountants, are, you know, crushers of dreams because we do reasonably and rationally sometimes rein in the enthusiasm and go, yeah, that's a great idea, but not for your firm or not for you or not for I get it, but that's going to cost you $1 billion and you're only generating $1 million of revenue. So how are you going to pay for it? It's like, no, it's a great idea.

Well, it's like that in my house. My husband's like, oh, ask your mom because she knows what she's talking about. Then it's like, oh, I'm sorry, I crushed you.

You know, one of the best law firms I ever worked in, we had nap time every day and the managing partner had a lounge in his office with a blanket and nice music and the whole bit. And we knew when he shut his door, it was quiet time in the law firm. And it was such a nice time of the day to regroup, refocus. We got so much more productivity out of having, having that 1 hour to stop every day. I couldn't believe the difference that that made.

Wait a minute, nap time, not for the staff, just for the owner?

Well, for him. And then we knew that he was going to leave us alone for that hour.

So, you know, think of Mad Men.

Like, we're going to go take a nap now.

We know, we know one of the partners in the large firm that we worked for, he did the same thing. He had a nap every afternoon and you couldn't contact him at that time. But it's, it, it's just—

I do that. I do that. I do that every day. I just stop for about 45 minutes and take a little snooze, and I can— I'm so refreshed then. I'm refocused. I love it.

That's a great lesson, Stephen, because mental health and wellness is a huge issue in the practice, in the profession of law and accounting, and we're all working way too hard. We're not Smart. We're working hard. We're working harder and not smarter. And this fits in well with that notion of efficiency and the economy of effort. And I do believe— I applaud you. It is so important to take time to just kind of recharge your battery. Churchill was a huge catnapper. Karen slept through most of law school. She'd study something for 45 minutes and sleep for 20, and then she'd study something else.

And yeah.

He did brilliantly well in law school, whereas I just chiseled away at the whole thing. And, you know, yeah.

Well, you know what, you know, one of the other, one of the other things, David, too, that— and Sarah and Linda have heard me talk about this many times— but I like to coach my law firm clients on the year-end bonus structure because it makes me so sad, really truly sad in my heart, when I know that year-end is coming and they're just They haven't put any structure to why they're giving Karen a $20,000 bonus. And I already know that Karen's going to quit right after she gets the bonus. And what good does that do? And so if you can tie the successes and the productivity and all of those things to that bonus you're going to hand out and celebrate it that way and find out What makes that person tick? You don't necessarily have to give them $20,000. Send them to Santiago, Chile, if that's their thing. You know what I mean? Oh, I don't think— And it's life. It's about living your life, taking your nap, having your pause, going to the beach. What really turns you on? Does that $20,000 really mean that much to you? And there's this scenario that comes into play where they all compare the bonuses then. Well, how come you got $10,000 and I only got $2,000? And I just—

I—

it makes me so sad when I see a firm struggling like that.

I'm gonna let you talk about that because we talked about this on a coaching call today. It's like, how do you—

oh, did you?

For the terms for— so go ahead.

Yeah, but it was really— it came down to like, how are you going to incentivize people and how are you going to reward them? And, and this one lawyer in in our one-to-one coaching was saying, well, I'm going to talk to this new assistant that I'm bringing on to see what it is that— how they were incentivized in their previous firm. But we said, but you've already said you've got a few business development or firm investment type tasks that you want her to take on. There are some processes that you want her to develop, and there are some systems that you want her to start putting in place. So why don't you tie her bonus to that? So how many of these types of new processes did you manage to develop this year? I can't remember off the top of my head what the one particular one was, but it was tied in with knowledge management. And so how many of these knowledge management advances are you going to make? And when we do that, what part of it was developing a new way of getting financial disclosures for clients? And she had some good— the lawyer had some good ideas, but she wanted the ideas from the other assistant. And he said, well, why don't you tie the bonus to that? So when she accomplishes this task by the end of the year, you can celebrate that she created this and it has this huge impact for the firm and this huge impact for the clients.

And then that's—

then she gets a bonus based on that.

And she's proud of what she's accomplished instead of just having her hand out. Yeah, yeah.

And so often these bonuses are just tied to the number of billable hours, which just makes my skin crawl anyway.

Yeah, yeah.

Then you're basically saying, okay, you're gonna work like, work like crazy, and I'm gonna give you a bonus, but you're not gonna have enough time to actually take a holiday to Santiago, Chile with your $20,000 because you still have to bill, you know, immediately for next year, or you're not gonna get your $20,000 next year that you still won't be able to use because you don't have time.

And what's it cost to replace them if they leave?

Oh, a huge—

a mid-level associate. Go ahead, Dave.

Well, I was gonna say it is a huge hot-button topic because this ties back into—

Amen.

The mergers and acquisitions group that was losing mid-level associates because they didn't have a process to look after the professional development of the different levels of associates within their department by ensuring they were getting equally trained. Someone made a mistake once, they were blackmarked. Someone was really good at a particular kind of work and all they got was that kind of work when they were—

And how fair is that? I mean—

Exactly. So, so in that context, we actually asked the firm— this is an AMLA 100 firm— we said, how much does it cost you to replace a 5th, 6th year associate? I knew it was gonna be a lot, but I was floored by the number. The number was approximately $350,000.

Why?

Because there's all the time, energy, and effort that went into training that individual. Probably started when they were in law school, then came up through— now they're 5th, 6th year associate. They've been getting a salary also, plus benefits. And you're going to have to replace someone at the same level who's going to have training by someone else. But don't forget, there's the headhunting firm and their fee. There's the fact that partners at X dollars an hour have to read the CVs and whittle it down to a shortlist. Then there's the lawyers, usually partners, who have to meet with each candidate. Multiple lawyers.

Right.

Multiple dollars an hour. Then after every interview, they have to sit down and have a meeting to discuss the individual. That's more time.

Yeah.

All of that adds up to ballpark figure, $350,000 for this West Coast AmLaw 100 firm to replace a 5th or 6th-year associate. That's a lot of money.

It's sad.

Yeah, that's a lot of—

It doesn't have to be that way.

No. And it isn't now because they've developed a new system. We put in what we call a— it's essentially Kanban for lawyers, but we put in a matter management system so that they could actually look at all the different matters that they had open at any given time. And the partners had a list and you could also see who was working on them so they could see that, Yes, you know, associate Alicia associate might have three files, but two of them were at this particular point in time, and she was absolutely swamped with her three files. But you know Marcus had five files, but they were a little farther along, and so Marcus had bandwidth, and so we could give it to Marcus. Oh, we can see that Alicia's done this kind of work, and Marcus has done this kind of work, and let's swap them next time so that they can actually improve. So they've built out this very visual system that the partners are using and that the associates are using. And they have significantly reduced their journey.

I love that. I love the idea of that so that you can see it at a bird's eye view.

Yeah, the 3 of us are working with a new software that does some of that. And what I like about it is the tagging that we're doing in there. So when one of our people says— it's called Financial Sense. Okay. And when they're stuck, They can do a stuck tag in there and I can jump right in and see what's going on and help them out or move, like you said, move it to somebody else or have that somebody else help coach them or whatever. And, you know, I like to see what's in process, what we're waiting on the client for, you know, are we bugging them in enough frequencies that they're going to answer us and get us what we need? Or, you know, I love systems like that.

We're huge advocates of visual matter management systems. Toyota calls it the, you know, the Kanban system.

Yes. Yeah.

And, and, and, and we're, we're platform agnostic. It doesn't matter whether you're a Microsoft 365 organization because you've got Planner, or if you use Jira or Asana, or use Haiku Collaborate. If you're an attorney, you might use LegalBoard, which is built by lawyers for lawyers. We use Trello. But, but the idea of being able to look at something and in an instant in time see someone's got a stuck tag up. Let's figure out why the stuck tag is up. And let's get them unstuck because I'm the senior-most person. I can go, I can fix it for you. Or you know what? I know that Linda is the expert in this area. Go ask Linda. She'll get you unstuck. You'll be able to get back on board. And tomorrow, did you open it up and go, oh, the unstuck tag or the stuck tag is gone?

Or did you look at your video and half the time they're like, no. And it's like, go look at it and then let me know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We, we get law firms to set this up for all their work in progress. So they have, let's say, Let's say it's their family law matters and we have the main phases that their family law matters go through and every single client gets a card on there and they can then look and say, oh, wow, we've got like 5 files right now in intake, but we've got 25 in pretrial prep and we're going to have to add some bodies to pretrial. Or they can see that files are piling up in a certain area. So maybe they're always piling up in the waiting for client feedback phase. And then you got to figure out why. Or in the financial disclosure phase where a lot of people bog down and get overwhelmed, why is that happening? Oh, you know, all of our files are getting stuck there. Why are the files getting stuck there? So it gives the firm owners and the partners a really, like, a one place to look to see all of their open files and see where each of them stands and make strategic decisions about where to add people, about where to focus efforts. who has to call the client, where they need reminders, how to improve their process. So we're huge advocates of setting up what we call work in progress boards using the same sort of Kanban framework.

Where do you guys find— I'm sorry, go ahead.

So I was just going to ask, for an ideal client or for any firm owner that wants to do this, do you start with— I mean, do you like to do it like start with the firm owner and then move into team to support them? So it's not the— because sometimes the burden of just being the conduit of information is a lot of work as an owner, knowing that you've got— you really want to do the legal work. Like, your love and passion is legal. That's what you want to do. You're the steward of this business. Where do you— how do you balance that when they're coming to you? Do you help them identify it? What does it look like?

So I think the answer to your question is I would encourage the managing partner to have insight and input, but not to be the one who is doing the updating or the actual managing. And this then gets us into a derivative field. Karen and I spend an awful lot of time training people in legal project management, which is like project management from the Project Management Institute, but from the lawyer's perspective. Anything within a firm is in and of itself a project. It has a start, a middle, and an end. And so we're advocates of saying, you know, you might want someone on this project. Let's say it's buy-side M&A transaction, $350 million to acquire a bunch of manufacturing space in 4 cities across the Midwest. So that's a pretty big law firm project.

Yeah.

Well, let's designate one of our team to be the air traffic controller to keep track of who's doing what, how, when, and why, and make sure that our project is on time and on budget. And their key will be the matter management, the Kanban board, and they will every day go in and look at it. They will have an expectation through simple standup meetings that the board is being kept up to date on time. So they have in real time a real understanding of what's going on. They can then create the reports that the managing partner, the director of finance, the chief operating officer, the chief administrative officer, the reports that they need on a daily, weekly, monthly basis can be extracted from that one person who's responsible for that one point of truth, which is the up-to-date matter management board.

And, and you don't have to have that larger firm to do this. You can have the firm owner and you can have a paralegal or a junior It's a really great way to train juniors, actually. So if you've got an associate, if you've got one partner and an associate in a small firm, then you can have the partner and associate work together to figure out what the phases are for their typical type of work. And then the associate can take over managing that board, and they really get to understand the flow of the work, what has to happen, what the key points are, where the sticking points are, and then they report back to the partner. So it's a really— it can be a really great learning tool as well.

Where do you find your clients? How do they find you?

Clio. No. So we do speak. We do a lot of speaking engagements. We do things like this. We have quite a loyal following. We put out a tip of the week every week. And through that, we've developed a mailing list of lawyers who get our tips of the week every week. And we have a really great open rate, which is exciting for us. We try to keep that up. So we are reaching out and we are in contact with sort of small firms and solo firms and then these larger firms that we've had decades of contact with. So really, it really comes that way.

We also write and publish regularly too, right? We've got a column in Attorney at Work.

Yes.

The target audience of Attorney at Work happens to be solos and smalls, and they're always looking for ideas on how to do things differently. That is, is it— Attorney at Work is not focused on process improvement and legal project management. It's about running a business.

Yeah.

There's one guy who loves to write and give tips on old-school analog stuff. Yeah, so he's the analog lawyer. He's always telling people what, what analog trip tip or trick He has, what's his favorite fountain pen, and the joys of writing a thank you note to a client on pen, with pen on paper. That's going to get opened faster than the email will, which seems antiseptic. And anyway, we do a lot of writing for—

Yeah, we do. We do a lot of writing.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we do a lot of writing and we do our tip of the week and, and regular webinars. And we do, we do webinars regularly, which, you know, people find, people find us in the craziest ways, but we do regular Regularly, almost once a month, we do a free webinar on something related to process improvement or practice management. So tomorrow's is all about how to create workflows where everybody's working in their power zone. If people are on our mailing list, then they will get invitations to all of our free webinars.

That's wonderful. That's a great way to get the, get the groundswell for your, for what you're doing, because it's really needed, especially with the smaller law firms. They're the ones that seem to need most help because they, they get— you do feel like you're treading water and you're never ever going to be able to get out of that loop and you're on the hamster wheel and you can't get off. Um, and I think that's where people need the most help.

And here comes—

Yeah, the only, the only, the only codicil I would add— great legal word— the only codicil I would add to that, to Karen's comment, is we can always have more clients. And, and the challenge for us, speaking as an attorney with more than 24 years of practical experience, hubris is high. Part of our failing is we are often Type A personalities who love to be in control, who believe that we have the right answer to almost every question and that we know more than many other people. And that is in part our failing and why Karen and I work so hard to help people to identify their power zone and So what it is they really want to do. We do a lot of strategic planning work, but it's not enough to just have a strategic plan or to have a strategic goal. You actually have to have a plan to execute, implement, and achieve your goal. So we've spent a lot of time talking with people, and the focus is always on why are you, 55-year-old managing partner of this firm, why are you doing that? Why isn't an associate learning to do what you do and charging an appropriate rate for proofreading or drafting or negotiating and liberating you to do this other more complicated, more strategic piece of the work? My point is we tend to believe that we are masters of the universe and can do everything. So our ability— Karen's My ability to bring in new clients depends on their willingness to look at the universe— well, first, to recognize they have a problem. Therein lies the issue of hubris. I don't have a problem. I can do it all. Then, then to look at their world differently, to change their mindset from, I can't do that because— which is the lawyer's initial reflex. Sarah, you can't do that because— and then list all of the legal impediments. As opposed to saying, well, we could do that if, if we filed this application here and got special dispensation under that piece of legislation. It'll take some time, but I'm pretty sure we could. So we need to get them to get away from the we can't do that because in favor of the we could do that if mentality. And so this is an open appeal. We love working with lawyers. And we've got a great client base and we love what we do, but there are more lawyers who turn away and go, don't need your services, than there are who say, that sounds really interesting, let's work together and see what we can accomplish together. Our goal is to help lawyers be as great at the business of law as they are at the practice of law and to have the time and the freedom to enjoy their success.

So in all the time that you've done this, Can you share one of your most favorite aha moments that one of your clients had that really just spoke to you? You're like, we did it, we did it, we got through.

Karen, you share one, and if you don't share the one I want to share, then I'll share it afterwards.

So we have a group coaching program called Practice Accelerator, and one of our Practice Accelerator clients was talking about his intake process. And we believe that lawyers shouldn't really be involved in much of the intake until the very end. And he said, you know, I'm approaching everything now and I'm saying to myself, what would Karen and David do? What would Karen and David do? And we're like, okay, great. He said, so then I was thinking about my intake process and I was thinking, you know, maybe I'm assuming that my new clients are only going to have a decent experience if I'm the one making the call. If they're talking to me, but maybe, just maybe, they could have just as good or better an intake experience if it was somebody else taking the call. And that was huge because that saved him a ton of time. But it, it was that epiphany for him. And that was, that's the shift we like to see, this idea that maybe they could have just as good or better an experience if somebody else did that task, whether it's intake or anything else. So that was— that for me—

I like that.

That's the transition we like to see in our clients.

So I'm going to give a slightly different one, which is less of an aha moment and almost a sort of, um, see, I told you so. We were working with a very large Canadian law firm, and we were working to help them improve the efficiency and lower the cost of the work that was deemed being done by the corporate services department. The corporate services department was responsible for, on request, incorporating new companies, special purpose vehicles that may have a life of a week or 2 or a couple of hours. They're a tool from an accounting and a finance perspective to achieve a particular result in an M&A transaction or otherwise. But these companies need to be constituted. They need to have, you know, They need filings, they need to have bylaws, they need to have directors, all of this stuff. Well, they were charging more money than clients were willing to pay for that piece of mechanical work because the lawyers were doing too much of the work and the— The muscle work. Weren't doing enough of the work. So the wrong— so right people doing the right work the right way. They had the wrong people doing the right work the wrong way. And, and part of what we do when we engage as consultants on process optimization and, and, uh, improving workflows is to actually encourage people to look at what they do and how they do it. So we asked for a tour of the corporate services department. We're gonna be working with the corporate services people. Let's see where they work and how they work. And we're touring the floor, and an individual, very experienced corporate paralegal gave us a great example of the inefficiency inherent in her work. The printer that she had access to wasn't the one that was 20 feet away. That was dedicated to litigation. So on pain of death, you can't print there. Her printer was 75 yards away. So every time she printed something, she had to get up from her desk, walk 75 yards, not feet, pick the item up, and 75 yards back. Now, this is going back a little ways when there was less digital and more paper. Share certificates are printed on special paper. So she'd have a share certificate she needed to print. She'd walk down, she'd put it in the tray, she'd walk back, she'd press print, and hope that in the intervening time someone else hadn't printed a 45-page factum or some other document and her special piece of paper had been sucked up. But she wouldn't know that until she walked 75 yards down and realized that her paper wasn't there. And then imagine all of the interruptions. Hey, did you see the Boston Bruins game on Saturday? What did you think about, you know, Taylor Swift's concert? Whatever happens, that's a valuable interruption, or it's a valuable— a waste of valuable time to be interrupted. But that 75-yard journey back and forth, anyway, she was making that journey no less than 50 times a day.

Wow. Yes.

Right beside the litigation printer was a port for another printer. So just by opening your eyes and seeing what you're doing, how you're doing it, and why you're doing it a particular way allowed them literally in a 5-sentence email to make the business case to the chief executive officer or the chief finance officer or whoever it was to go out to Kinko's and rent a printer or buy a printer for $250 and install it there and save a huge amount of inefficiency and waste. So from our— we love to tell that story because from our perspective, it's a great example of if you want to optimize how you work, if you want to become more efficient, it starts by sitting down, taking a deep breath, Reflecting before reacting and just understanding who is doing what.

How.

How, with what resources, and why are they doing it that way? And then is there a better way that it could be done? Better for me, better for the client, better for the firm, better for my colleagues? That's the question that everybody should ask all the time. I finish something. After action review. What could what what could I have done differently? What could I have done better?

Linda has a great story about that with paralegal and the number of keystrokes she was.

Yeah, that was using.

We have we have so many.

Yeah, they were on an old software and and she just kept going back to it even though we had put them in a new software. And we just I said let's count the clicks for a deposit, and it was like eleven. And then we did it with Cleo and or no, I think it was Lean Law, and it was like three.

It's like oh.

Oh, that's been the light bulb moment. But sometimes it's those little things that you do that seem so obvious, but when you're showing somebody like that, that's why, you know, why are you doing this, it makes a lot of sense. And this has really been a fantastic talk and conversation with all of you. And I think that we're going to definitely have ways that people can reach out. I wish this was airing today so they could note about the webinars, but since you do them every month, that's great. And, um, thank you for, for joining us. And Tierra, you want to take it? Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

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Thank you, everybody.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It was a real pleasure.