Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yeah, we're having a money conversation. And you know, that can feel ick, right? Because some people are like, oh, I did this to serve my clients and make a difference. I don't care about the money as much. It is always and never about the money. Your money and your business is actually a reflection of you.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: Most firms survive the best ones scale.
Welcome to the Managing Partners Podcast, where law firm leaders learn to think bigger. I'm Kevin. Daisy. Let's jump in. What's up, everyone?
Welcome to another episode of the Managing Partners Podcast. And I have a special guest today, someone I met kind of briefly at Max Law Con last year.
She was speaking, actually, and she'll be speaking again this year, and I will be as well. So excited to share the stage with my guests today.
But we're talking about some real stuff today. I got Chelsea Williams here, and we're going to be talking about numbers and profit and cool things like that.
Some, you know, sometimes important for your law firm. So excited to kind of dive in and just chop it up with her today. So, Chelsea, welcome to the show.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Hey, thanks for having me. And before you leave and your eyes glaze over, we're going to make it fun, so don't worry.
[00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah, not too much jargon or technical terms because honestly, I would be lost too.
I like looking at numbers and seeing things and making it work. Not so much the detail guy on that, so. Well, Chelsea, for those that don't know you, introduce yourself, tell us about your background and kind of up to where you are now, and then we'll. We'll kind of dive in from there. As far as, you know, some of the topics we're going to cover today.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
So I am the founder of Core Solutions Group. We do sexy and unsexy things for law firms. Right. So the boring monthly accounting payroll conversation that we have to do, but we hate it. We take care of that stuff. And the sexy things that we do are really help law firm owners make decisions and understand their numbers. It can be confusing, but we really like being a splash of color in a really black and white boring conversation. So I founded that in 2017 after accidentally discovering I liked accounting, which immediately put me in this class of, like, boring nerds. So I was like, I have to figure out how to get out of this.
So when I. When I realized that, you know, most people really avoid this type of stuff like the plague, I'm like, ah, I can do something about this.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's. It's true. I think we're still, you know, we're always working on our finances at our company and down and in. And we just brought on a director of finance and we have a few, few folks now full time on the team just for that department, just to get the numbers right, just to have reports, to make decisions. So it's super important. But it took us many, many, many years to get to where we're at. And I've taught a lot of business owners every day. And even like the marketing side, we say, do you know your numbers, how many leads you got, what's your ever signed case, blah, blah, blah, and immediately know where they're at based on their response. So many just don't even know basic metrics and numbers, not alone what their P and L looks like or how much money they have available or how they can spend their money to have a budget. So it's definitely a massive problem. I think across the solo to, you know, a handful of attorney firms, I could see it being a big problem.
[00:03:42] Speaker A: It is. And there's a number of reasons why it. You know, a lot of people think that you have to be good at math for this job. You don't.
So you can, you can pitch that excuse out of your mind onto the next. So then some people think that, oh, I'm not there yet. I'm not big enough, I don't need it. Well, every single business decision is a financial decision. All of them, they all have residual effects. Right.
So avoidance isn't helping us. And look, we have to give people grace because nobody taught us. School didn't teach us. My finance degree didn't teach me well enough. Law school certainly didn't teach you. And everything that we were taught, it was all the wrong things. You know, you turn 18 and you get all these credit card applications in the mail. My daughter just turned 18 and I. She gets more mail than I do now. And they're all from credit card companies. I'm like, this is predatory, so you have to give yourself a break. You know? And I think the biggest mistake and the biggest thing that people can do that are making this mistake is it's avoiding the numbers. And I love what you said because this is not an overnight fix. This isn't even something you can get a grip on in a year. If I'm being honest, I'm working.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Start when you're small, when you're. We can maybe have a minute to figure some things out.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, because every decision is a financial decision in your business, the sooner you have a line of sight on those numbers, the better you'll be able to make decisions. I mean, they act as a guide. A lot of us are operating from our gut in. In business, from a feeling, from what we think. But you can't argue with data. You know, it's 20, 26. We all understand this by now. Data is the most important and leverageable thing that we can have.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I think something that helped us, and I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but we don't prescribe it anymore because we kind of got beyond it. Um, we kind of. We think it's a great solution for smaller companies in furnace. But Profit first by Mike Mallowitz.
But it's basically if. If you boil it down, it's if you have a business with a bank account, one account, and you just have all your money there, businesses make decisions, going, oh, there's a bunch of money there. Let me go do whatever.
And they don't really have any information to back up that decision or how much money is about to come out of there or all those things. So what we did early on was we just divided those bank accounts up to like 12 accounts. And we had. So we could visually see.
Well, this is for payroll. This is for insurances. This is for taxes, owner's taxes, yada, yada. And all the predictable fees every year, like business license, tax, insurance, errors, and emissions, whatever you have. We're like, oh, crap, how do we. Why did our account go down? Well, we have these fees. Well, they're every year. So why don't we just create an account that we put money into and those are taken care of. Profit first helped us with a bucket system. It was basic at the time, but it helped us out a lot.
[00:06:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I swear by Profit first, it's something that we help law firms with. Awesome.
When I first read the book, I forget how many years ago it was, but it blew my mind because I was always already doing that system in my personal finance, which is so.
It's so good to know and understand, by the way, that finance is finance. Law firms aren't unicorns. Accounting firms aren't unicorns. Marketing agencies aren't unicorns. It is so much more simple than we think. It is universal. It moves a little bit different. But when you take the time to learn and understand how to manage your money and how to make good decisions with your money and know how to have a decision framework, that you're learning it for your personal life too. So that's why it's even more relevant to the people listening right now, it's not. This isn't just about your business. This completely seeps over into your. Your personal life as well. And did you say you used 12 accounts for profit first? Did I hear that right?
[00:07:44] Speaker B: We took it a little to the extreme, and our bag was pissed at us. They're like, wait a minute, we're gonna start charging you.
But if you just say, hey, paid the fees, you know, they were fine with it. But yeah, we. We just. We did it for everything and we added some things and, you know, we just dug into it and got sophisticated with it. So again, I think it was about 12 accounts. And I've done this personally as well. Like, it's your grandma. Like, I like to pull it down. Is your grandma's envelope system, right?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: This envelope for the week has your food money. This one has your, you know, expenses or whatever. But it's just a basic understanding of it, I guess, to say, yeah, 100, split it up. And then how. How do you. Dollars of that? A hundred, 10%, and keep it for yourself for profit before you have expenses. And if you can't do that, then there's a. Your business is broken or something's not working properly.
[00:08:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And what it is at its core and why it works so well is because it's a system, and it's a simple system. It really doesn't take that much to manage. You don't. It's like. It's like bank account budgeting. You don't even. Like if you're really avoiding a budget, and you hate budgets and you never want to use them. Okay, fine, do profit first at a minimum. Why? It's a system, and as soon as something goes wrong, you know exactly where to look. But what it does is it basically says, hey, all of this is accounted for based on your plans, and here's what's left for you to do whatever you want. But it forces you to plan, and it forces you to work within your profit equation. And it gives you that visual. Because without a system, without a structure to let you know when your profit equation is out of whack, you will go into debt, have negative cash flow, make great money, keep none of it, and wonder why.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, I didn't want to make this about profit first, obviously, because I didn't even know that if you. If you liked it or not. So. But for everyone listening, my two cents. Anyway, it was very helpful for us. And the problem is you run your firm, and sometimes you might not take any money off the table for yourself. How much can you take? If you do a system like this, you can see what's left that is completely separate from everything else and say this is fine to take. I can take this and it won't affect any of the other things I have going on. And you can be conservative with that if you want. Like we've done 50% of whatever that is every month as owners. Again, being very conservative. We could take all of it if we wanted to. So it's just allowed us to, to feel good about the decisions and say, hey, we can take this off the table and the business is fine.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: Yeah. So do you still use it?
[00:10:23] Speaker B: We still have a lot of accounts, but we don't, we don't use it. We don't distribute.
Like we were, we were doing like the percentage distributions and all that stuff. We've stopped doing that but.
And now we're going to accrual counting and, and you know, our new finance director is kind of redoing.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Interesting. So do you do it now? I'm taking your brain on this. So have you moved it from like a percentage based movement system to. And I know exactly like a fixed amount. So it's a, instead of percentage, it's no this.
[00:10:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So we've gone from like the whole trying to do a percentage model. Like it. I, we've kind of gotten beyond it, I guess, if you will. My business partner is obviously way more knowledgeable on this side of, of the business.
But yeah, so it, it helped us and worked for quite a while. We're just under a, we're about eight figure business and just the complexity and we have two different companies. Is it just the way it was originally designed? Doesn't work for us any longer, so.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: Everyone should jump on and read that book. Even again, just if it's personal, take your personal life and apply it.
It's just going to help. You know, if you're married and you got, you know, you're paying for all kinds of different things like just help you organize and know what you can and can't do.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: I can see how that would be beneficial. It's almost like you're taking profit first. This very fundamental, easy to use for anybody that just needs a system and discipline. Discipline. And you're evolving it to be a little bit more accurate, a little bit more tailored. It's kind of like, you know, Dave Ramsey is good for some people, but you outgrow Dave Ramsey. Right. Once you learn what he does now you're getting into a Little bit more advanced.
[00:12:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And then you know, you can, I think as you get more advanced, there's, there's most people think are risky things to do or things that you can leverage in a, to your advantage. Right.
You know, just like buying real estate and there's all kinds of things that most people would be like, oh, that's risky. I'm not going to take equity out, take a loan, buy more real estate, roll that in, you know, all the things you can do. So it's just what's your risk tolerance? But if you, if you have clear optics on your finances and what's, what you can use to leverage and reinvest with, those decisions become a lot easier. Most people are just scared because they don't have that information at their fingertips.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly.
[00:12:47] Speaker B: Like a Dave Ramsey. They're just trying to like pay everything off and have zero debt. Rich people have a lot of debt and they leverage it and they have good debt and it's not a bad thing.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah. I think, you know, there's a fit for everybody and some people really need that Dave Ramsey approach. Especially if you're just starting out, if you didn't know any better and you do have a lot of debt, if you have habits that are beyond your income. Dave Ramsey's program is a very good, like cookie cutter reset. If you can get through all of his steps and re evaluate your habits, that puts you in a position to start to do some of these more advanced things. And it can sound really overwhelming. Like we're, we're here talking about like, oh, this isn't an overnight fix. It takes a few years and you gotta start here and that's so small and there's so much beyond, much beyond it. But what, what I like people to hear when we're talking about this is this is a never ending journey. It's, there is no destination. It serves you to understand this piece by piece and it's okay to learn it piece by piece. And better you start now than never.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: 100%. And I think again we're almost at, we're almost eight figures, 60 plus employees.
We've had multiple people working on our finances and now we have, you know, someone that's got way more experience. But we still don't have like a budget, like a true budget where I can say, hey, on the marketing side for my company, I need to go buy all these tickets and the conferences and booths for the whole year because I get the best prices up until last year. It's like, okay, I can buy that booth for this one. But I got the worst booth spot because it's two months away, you know, and it's like just kind of going off the p. L. And going, hey, what's the best month to spend this money? Because we're starting to hit. We're trying to hit certain profit margin percentages, right.
So I'm playing the game of.
Of that now when we're going to accrual. And I can have a $100,000 budget for the year for trade showbiz, and I can spend that all in one month or, you know, whatever I want to do, But I have a budget that I can control. And so if you don't have good finances and you don't have monthly reports that you review those, it's gonna be impossible to have a true budget.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. So what's your opinion on budgets? Overrated. Useful. More annoying than useful. Where do you land?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: I mean, I. I don't love the word budget. I hate hearing it.
I see the importance of it again, and just think of myself as an employee in my company versus an owner and going, I need to spend this money, guys, to get an impact on this part of the business or whatever.
Awesome. To have that and say, I can spend this money right now, and it's not going to affect anything else. That's powerful. And it's, like, allotted. Hey, you can go spend this. Go spend it. It was meant to be spent,
[00:15:46] Speaker A: and
[00:15:46] Speaker B: if we can save, great. We can reinvest somewhere else, but. So I'm looking forward to really having access to that across different departments, But I've just operated so long without it, you know? But we've made some dumb decisions, too. Me and my partner are like, oh, let's go, you know, buy this for $200,000 and just have someone come later and be like, why the hell did you guys do that?
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. You know, there are. There are different approaches to. To budget, and I think you're right. I think the word. The word alone is triggering for people because at its root, it implies that you are restricted. Yeah, right. And, you know, I've often thought of, like, what other word can we use for this? Because there is. You know, again, it's just like you said, there is so much. And look, it's so easy to do. Like, if you look at your past year's worth of data and you look at where your money went, it's not hard. Like, it's so predictable. We tell ourselves we procrastinate, and then things happen. We're like, oh, my gosh, how did I not know that my annual insurance premium was coming out? Like, there's not a lot of unpredictability. You push the button every time you spend money. It's completely figureoutable. I think that. And I said this in my talk at Max Lacon, budgets are not cages. They are boundaries that protect your future financial self. Inside of those boundaries, if we can change our perspective, you can spend that money any way you want. And that's the freedom within a budget. It gives you that, you know, $300,000 marketing budget January 1, and says, here you go, do whatever you want with it this year, and you don't have to wait. Right. If you need to book something for next year in January to get a better booth spot, this is your money to do that. There's so much freedom in that, and you're not going to risk hurting the rest of your business. That's the peace of mind.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Yeah. And so I'm excited about having the budgets, in my opinion.
I think, yeah. People are kind of like, oh, what's that mean? And that means you look under the hood and look at all the details. You have to.
You have to look at everything. And if you're a lawyer spending a bunch of money or you're just kind of haphazardly spending, you're gonna have to get a control on that, and someone's gonna have to help you and. And have eyes on it because. Yeah, it's just not gonna work out well for you. But, you know, like, we have a budget for, like, every employee. A thousand dollars a year. I got. I got over 60. Some people like 60 grand plus. Right. For education.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: How many actually use it?
You know, a handful. So it's a line item that we budget for.
Rarely actually gets tapped into, but we can reutilize that at the end of the year.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of ways to do it. And if you can get past the fear and the ick of can actually become fun. I've worked with people who come to us, and they are like, so numbers avoidant. But then they start actually seeing it and getting it and seeing how powerful it is, then start playing with it and having fun with it. It's like, that's what I'm talking about right there. Because there's power in that.
[00:18:51] Speaker B: It's just. I mean, our P and L is just every. Every single month, we do a full financial review.
Every month, we make a change to the P and L. Why does that line out and Say that, oh, let's do this. Because, you know, we've grown, we've added departments, we've added people and staff. And so it just keeps getting more complex. We can always find a way to improve it and we always can point out, hey, what, what was that charge for? I mean, it might be like something stupid, like a hundred bucks. And I'm sitting there, you know, we're doing $800,000 a month and my partner's picking out, you know, $100 charge. What's that for? But it becomes so clear that like that shouldn't be there. Wasn't immediately. Yeah. And so it's just, you get so much information to your fingertips. But you can also see, like, let's say if you're a law firm and you have multiple practice areas, you might have a product series that's completely just losing you money that you didn't know about. And you have other ones that are more profitable that you're not even marketing for or trying to grow. So it's just having all that to be like, where are we going to go? What can we cut? And how can we refocus? That's when it becomes fun for me because, hey, we did this marketing campaign that didn't work, that was a waste of money. But this over here is working very well. So you just start to really dial it in. And we're trying to grow. You got goals and so you're, you're kind of able to dial in the right things and say, okay, every month we're excited to kind of see what, what changes we can make.
[00:20:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
And what you just said, you have goals. So I find that there's. That is one. And that's where I start. Like I have an eight week program and the week one we focus on. Yeah. Answering two questions.
What do you want? And who do you have to become to get it powerful. So what we're doing is we are setting the North Star. What do you want? What do you want this firm to be? Do, have, produce? And also, what do you want? Not what does society tell you you should want? Not what the legal industry tells you you should want. Not what your mom and dad want. What do you want? And what that does is it gives you a point to make decisions based off of because you can either have more or you can get closer. And that's where people get stuck in spending. Because by nature we just like to have more. But closer is better than more. And if you know where that North Star is, it makes your yeses and Your nose easier. Your decisions become so clear, and you're not guessing and you're not using your gut.
[00:21:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that.
Yeah. So true. Because especially the hard decisions like that, we don't want to make. If you have that goal, especially if you have others in your team that are supporting the same goal, you say, hey, why haven't you done this yet? Well, that's. That's kind of a pain, or, we gotta lay these people off, or I gotta move this person around. Like, well, what's the goal, though? You just go back to that and go, yep. All right. We gotta. We gotta do what we gotta do. And so if you don't have those, then you're just. You can just kind of fade off in a different direction, and you get stuck in the minutiae of the day and just keep on going. And then a year later, you're nowhere closer to where you wanted to be.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: I mean, you just said it all. We. We're having a money conversation. And, you know, that can feel ick, right? Because some people are like, oh, I did this to serve my clients and make a difference. I don't care about the money as much. It is always and never about the money. Your money and your business is actually a reflection of you. And that is why some people avoid the numbers and the data to begin with, because they already know what they're going to find. They know they're avoiding it. They don't want to see it again. Right. So your business will be stuck as much as you choose to continue to be stuck. And it will grow as much as you are willing to look in the mirror and be humble and get curious. Because curious disengage. Curiosity disengages fear. If you can get curious and you're willing to look in the mirror, all of this is going to change for you. If you're struggling.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And you have to. You know, there's going to be other people that have to be involved. You, the owner, the lawyer should not be running your books and setting the budget. So dirty laundry. Whatever money you're spending or whatever you're doing, you have to be comfortable with it all.
[00:23:14] Speaker A: No shame, all of it. We've seen it all, I'm sure.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: So you just got to be comfortable that it's just, you know, something you have to do. And if you don't, then you're just going to stay stuck or stay small and. And stay a mom and pop or whatever. And in some cases, some people just. They don't want to grow. They don't want to have the kind of growth that others do.
[00:23:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. And I have some of those. And that's okay. Just know what you're signing up for. Right. Know that this is the most you can ever make. So your main objective is control, expenses, leverage, technology. At least you know then where the variables are, what you can focus on to change your outcome. There's, there are so many different equations to success. People often ask me for like these cookie cutter answers and I'm like, look, I'll give you the cookie cutter answers because they are absolutely out there. But just be aware, you don't have to go by those. And there are completely justified reasons why people out operate outside of cookie cutter.
[00:24:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And the reality is, and we could talk about all this stuff, if you're trying to grow, you know, have a real business that you, you plan to be around for a long time, which means you have to have some growth. You have to grow and you want to have staff, employees and people that actually want to be there. You need to be improving things. You need to be growing. They need to see a clear path for them to have a career long term. And so if you're doing that properly, then you're constantly growing, the numbers get bigger, you're adding more positions, and then you have to put more things in place.
You know, we're talking about the book Traction, which I've mentioned many times on the show. But right people, right seats, organizational charts, all these things. Right. The culture, core values, all the things that you have to do that a growing business needs to have in place without having your numbers and finance and check, all that stuff is going to fall apart.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Because what's going to happen is when people aren't aware of their numbers and their finances and where they're at and they go to grow, their profit goes like this as they grow. And that should not. Something is wrong if you are making more and not keeping at least the same or more.
[00:25:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And what's your percentage that, that you, your industry, whatever it is that you should be, you know, what's your profit margin? Where is it now and where does it need to be?
What's your goal to get there? You know, back to like the people part. They need to, to know, like for us, like our thing is unlimited opportunity. Like that's, that's like our, our mission for our people, like, which means we have to fit their dreams and goals inside. If we're not growing constantly, there's no room for growth. They can't manage people, they can't lead, they can't get paid more. They can't get more benefits. So it's a machine. Like, it's a constant growth machine, and that's what people are looking for. They're looking for somewhere to be that they can see themselves at for a long time. So if you're a law firm, that's just like, you're just going to show up here every day for 20 years and. And we're not going to grow. It's not really giving them much, you know, back to disservice to the. To the people you have on the team, which you are paying. But then it's just a job.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's why, you know, one of the things that you have to be willing to do, which, from what I've seen, it's kind of hard for lawyers to do specifically, is let go of that and find people that are better at the thing than we are. There's this control.
And it's not just lawyers. Don't get me wrong. The E. Myth talks about it. The book. The E. Myth.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Great book.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: One of the hardest things for us to do is to let go and trust. And, like, here's the. Here's the fact of the matter, and I tell my cohorts this, too. This is not a matter of if somebody messes up or make a mistake. It's when they mess up and make a mistake. You're not perfect. Neither are they. And we have to have a culture of learning from our mistakes, not repeating them or hiding them.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. You gotta. You gotta have people that you can trust to put in place for this. Delegate this out.
That's what we've. We've done. And again, it's taking time. For sure.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: No, for sure.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: But if I could go back and we have gotten this stuff together right out the gate, for sure.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: We have core values for the first decade. You know, if I could have gone back and done that, I would. You just learn these things as you go.
[00:27:33] Speaker A: You just go.
[00:27:35] Speaker B: And that, you know, that's kind of reason I started this podcast. It's. Everything we've ever learned is because of Mastermind groups, podcasts, and listen to other people that have already done it. Like, the answers are out there, you know, so anything we talk about on this show, it's like, listen to it. Because, you know, this. We've done it. It's. It works. It's not bullshit.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: There are no unicorns. There truly are not. I mean, you think about it. The Richard Branson's of the world, the Tony Robbins. I was just listening to a podcast. It was actually Tony Robbins accountant. And he said, you know, Tony will look at his monthly reports and he looks at one number. Now, if you could run your entire business off of one number, like, would you believe me if I said that? Let's say, right, one number. He just wants his net income to be 20%.
If it's.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: I was gonna say profit.
[00:28:28] Speaker A: He moves on. He moves on. So, I mean, that right there tells you how much we overcomplicate this stuff.
[00:28:34] Speaker B: Yeah. We have this massive P and L, and the bottom is just net profit for each company. And it's color coded. It turns red if it's under 20%.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: If it's 20% or more, it's green.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: But yes. Yeah. Now, what Tony has done, you can
[00:28:47] Speaker B: zip right down and go, boop.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:28:50] Speaker B: I don't care about the rest.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: What he's done is he's hired people to do that before he ever gets them. So it's not that that function isn't happening. Let me just make sure that's clear. It's that he has delegated that function to where he is in a position to only have to look at one number.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: That. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, just like anything, if you. You get a proposal or anything, you zoom right down to the price. Kind of same thing that we definitely do with the P and L during the review day. It's like, I just want to see that real quick. And then if we want to get into all the details, that's cool. But where are we? Last month, what did we do? So.
[00:29:26] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:29:27] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's so important and, you know, unlawful. Yeah. New unicorns. But, you know, depending on what your law firm is, you got fixed fees, flat rates, or you can have beacon tendency where you might get massive checks or subscriptions.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: That's a huge thing nowadays.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Yes. You mentioned that to me earlier and you were saying something about how there's ways that any firm can be on a subscription model.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So, I mean, this is something that's still very hard for most people to wrap their mind around. And that's okay. Think of it as like, when flat fees hit the scene and we still have some firms on the bill of Lauer. Right. So if you. Let's think about it in terms of progression. And so this, this conversation is to open up your mind around how you can make money. Again, not what the legal industry, how they say you should make money, but what people are Actually doing that is new and working and appropriate. We started with the hourly fee. Then we moved on to the flat fee. Now, the whole point of the flat fee is to make sure that you are making at least as much as if you were billing hourly. That's the whole point. That's how we come up with the flat fee. So it's kind of the same thing, except for streamlined, simple, and it allows you to focus on being more efficient rather than. Did I clock my time card correctly this week? Right. So now what? A huge thing that we're seeing are subscription models that took it from a flat fee to.
It's kind of almost the same depending on the practice area, because, for example, PI and how you structure it in a PI firm is a little different, but the goal is ultimately the same. And actually, if you do it right, you are making quantum leaps in how much you make per hour if you do it right.
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Well, I know that would be a longer conversation.
[00:31:25] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:25] Speaker B: Maybe another. Maybe another podcast episode.
But, yeah, it just. I know we. We kind of covered a couple different things and jumped around. I might have stole the show with the profit first kind of comment, but it's all right.
[00:31:40] Speaker A: People need to know it works.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Get your stuff together. I mean, you know, obviously, I know very sophisticated law firms and owners. If you're listening, you're probably going, this is basic stuff, and that's fine. Most of the listeners are starting out. They're smaller firms. They are just trying to figure out doing the legal work and maybe getting some new leads and things, things like that. So. But if you're in that spot, start getting familiar with the numbers, start to get help and start to. To work towards it. Because what Chelsea was saying, it's a forever thing.
Like, we get better every month, but it's taken us years to get to where we're at. It's.
It's not just someone can flip a switch and you got everything in order. Right. So get to work on it, understand it, because it's important. And then one day, you could be a Tony Robbins where you just. They send you a.
A screenshot of your profit, and that's all you need to know.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: Yep. One number onto the next.
[00:32:41] Speaker B: So, Chelsea, before we wrap up, so what's the best way for folks to connect with you, learn about you? If law firms are listening right now that kind of need some. Some help initially, how can you help them?
[00:32:55] Speaker A: Yeah, so Our website is YourCoresolution.com. we're about to undergo a complete rebranding. So that'll change, but it'll be a redirect, so it'll work. But if you go to our website, all of our socials are on there. We are all about giving away the secret sauce. So check out our free tools and resources.
We just launched a YouTube series. We have a lot on our YouTube channel that's incredibly helpful. We just launched a new series where I actually do the things in my business and I share it with everybody. So it's like, do it with me. This is what I do every month as a cfo and I show you my numbers and all that.
[00:33:31] Speaker B: I love that.
I love people that just share and open about it versus, like, you know, sign up for this webinar and then you gotta hire us to, you know, to get the information. So I could appreciate that.
So, yeah, go check Chelsea out if you want to connect with her personally. She's got so much more to share. We'll probably do more episodes.
We just kind of touched on some stuff today. So me and Chelsea will also be speaking, both of us, at Max Law Con, which is in October. It's October, what, like 6 to 8? I think, like, something like that. But if you don't have tickets, make sure you get them.
Just Google Max Law. Max Law Con.
And we hope to see you there. But thanks so much for sharing. And again, I know we could talk about this stuff all day, so. Absolutely.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: This was fun.
[00:34:21] Speaker B: We'll cut it at that. And thanks again, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. And if you got any questions about anything that we touched on today, reach out to me or Chelsea. If you want her contact or connection, let me know and I'll make it happen.
