Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
From Lawyer to CEO: The Mindset & Skills You Need to Run a Thriving Law Firm | Thomas Tona
Feeling stuck as a lawyer? Drowning in cases and longing for a life beyond the billable hour? Thomas Tona, CEO of Tona Law, gets it. He built a thriving firm from the ground up, and now he's sharing the secrets to his success.
This episode is your roadmap to becoming the legal BOSS you were meant to be. We're talking:
- Lawyer to CEO Mindset Shift: Learn how Tom transformed his practice from a hustle into a well-oiled business machine (and gained time for his family in the process!).
- Unleash Your Inner Rainmaker: Master the art of targeted marketing, identify lucrative legal niches, and build a client base that fuels your growth.
- Turn Liabilities into Assets: Discover how Tom's innovative thinking turned software development and a printing company purchase into strategic advantages.
- The Power of People: From dedicated intake specialists to rockstar leadership teams, Tom reveals how investing in your human capital pays dividends.
- Never Stop Learning: Masterminds, conferences, and continuous education - Tom shares his strategies for staying ahead of the curve.
- Beyond the Billable Hour: Get a taste of the courtroom action and upcoming collaborations that will inspire your legal journey.
Ready to ditch the grind and build the legal empire of your dreams? Tom Tona's your guide. This episode is packed with actionable insights and a healthy dose of inspiration. Grab your headphones and get ready to take notes!
Want to connect with Tom and learn even more? Search for Tona Law on Google or LinkedIn, or connect with Tom directly on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tonalaw/
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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When you own a law firm, you have to figure out if you want to be the doer or you want to be the builder and the scaler. I don't want to try cases anymore. There's guys that are going to be way better because I spent the last 15 years becoming a CEO. I'm the guy that will make it rain no matter where I am. So to me, masterminds are opportunity builders. They bring up and again, I also go with. I'm going to open up doors for people. I'm not asking for anything back. Naturally, if people do well and succeed, they're going to open up opportunities for me.
Speaker 2:Hey guys, welcome back to hustle and the real life woes. Hey guys, welcome back to Life Beyond the Briefs. I'm your host, Brian Glass. Today with me is Tom Tona, the owner of Tona Law up in New York. Tom also hosts the Lead Counsel Podcast. He's a serial entrepreneur. We're going to dive into all of the myriad of businesses that he's started this year alone. Tom, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Hey Brian, how are you? Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2:Hey man, I'm so glad to get to connect with you on here. You and I have been connected on LinkedIn and you post more regularly, I think, than I do so many great tips for young lawyers, law students and young law firm owners. So number one thank you for that service to the community. For people that are listening that don't know your name from the online community, give us a sense of who you are, what you do and what your firm looks like today.
Speaker 1:Sure. So, first and foremost, I'm a CEO of a law firm, right, and I approach the practice of law. It's a business for me. I've set it up like a business. It's highly systematized. My why is my family, and it's one of the things I love so much about. The messaging that both you and your father put out is I had the epiphany. God. It's got to be going back 15 years now that I was either going to run it like a business or I was going to do something else, and it was going to going to be a business. That served me and which is one of the things that I love. Like we found each other because we're like-minded and we put out that content and all of a sudden, I connect with you and.
Speaker 1:I'm now. I'm following your dad, and I think your dad's awesome the way he approaches online content, and so the uh, running it like a business was paramount to me. So then I had to acquire the skills to become the CEO that today I am and the serial entrepreneur that I've, of late, become. How old are your kids now? My daughter is 14. I have one daughter. Running a business is way easier than raising a teenage girl, yeah, and so I've been consumed. You know, I've been married 15 years. My daughter- is 14.
Speaker 1:And so it was really important to me to do things differently than I saw coming up, and so that's why I built it the way it did.
Speaker 2:So that's it. I was going to ask you what happened to you 15 years ago, but got married, learned you were having a daughter maybe, and then decided, okay, if I'm going to, we're going to do this law thing and needs to become a business, probably so that I can spend more time with the family that I'm building. What did your, your life and your firm look like before you had made that decision? So?
Speaker 1:I was probably what would be the definition of hustler, right, like to me, grinding, I love the challenge, right. So when I opened my doors in 2001, I had about 30 or 40 personal injury cases in various stages and I was off to the races. I never really looked back and so, prior to that epiphany of I wanted to be a formalized business, I was off to the races, I never really looked back, and so, prior to that epiphany of I wanted to be a formalized business, I was a grinder. So you know, I put in seven days a week, I'd put in 80 hours. I was high energy, it didn't phase me at all. I also did not have a lot to lose, right, because I was just me. I had a very low mortgage. I had made money in real estate I love real estate, I know we share that as well as an investment vehicle, and so I really didn't have a lot to lose.
Speaker 1:I think that a lot of the stuff that people put out has to be situationally aware that you know telling somebody to hang a shingle right out of law school I get people reach out. You probably do too. Like, hey, listen, I can't find a job, I'm going to hang a shingle and I spoke to somebody recently I was on the ferry I was heading up to New England and I was like I don't advise that, I really don't. I think you've got to be an expert at what you do, because otherwise it's it's really disjointed. And how are you going to sell and compete against? Like somebody say, I'm going to hang a shingle, I want to do disability law, how are they going to compete against glass law? Right, you guys are experts. I think you got to be an expert first, then make it a business. That's just my two cents.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's very different. You know, there's there's this rise now of the CEO lawyer and I don't mean like the moniker, like I know Ali has that brand and I don't mean to single him out but this idea that, okay, I'm going to start a law firm as a business, which is what you're doing, but you had the baseline of I'm an excellent practitioner first, and so I do think some people are skipping steps. But I want to get your thoughts on if you have a law license and you are not a great practitioner, right, I think there is a role also for the entrepreneur to step in and say this is my skillset and I'm going to team up with people who are great practitioners, who want nothing to do with the practice or the managing and the running of the business. But I don't think that that's most of the people that you're talking about, who are 25, just out of law school, can't find a job and are going to go hang a shingle, right.
Speaker 1:Right, and I also think that the person you described right like they may have business acumen, but they're not great lawyers. The person you described right Like they may have business acumen, but they're not great lawyers. I think it's rare right that you're going to be that good at something on this on the business side. Can it be done? Yeah, but then you better have a ton of capital, right Like I. I came out I was already a trial lawyer so I could generate money day one. I've talked to two attorneys of late. One you probably had on your podcast already or you know of them Jeff Hughes. You know Jeff Sterling.
Speaker 2:I know, jeff. Yeah, I listened to that episode just a couple of days ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Dude, that's a crazy story. I mean, he sunk two to three million into a business and he started out day one on EOS and saying oh, we're just building to scale.
Speaker 1:He had already scaled a business. So I think that I spoke to another gentleman who's going to be coaching with a coach that I had recommended to him. He came out of big law and he had contacts in finance and he understood the space of personal injury and mass torts. He's going in two to three million deep right. So I just think that I don't know there's something about like. I know you've tried cases right and your law firm is deep in knowledge and expertise in what you do. So you might be even a little susceptible if you don't have that level of expertise because you're so heavily reliant on a partner for that, and I find that partnerships formed at earlier stages carry higher risks.
Speaker 2:A higher risk of blowing up, you mean.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and one of the things the issues with what you did and what I do is that the contingency fee work a client who signs up today might is probably not money, at least for nine months, right. It's very different than family law or business formation or any other kind of hourly work where you can be cashflow positive. It's just you in a you know in your house the next day, right. Um, but the the amount of time that it takes to turn cases into money with what we do, it takes much longer. So it is. So it is harder to from the jump scale because you have to hire on lawyers and staff to manage those cases.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, All reality, though, like just just to touch on that for a second. The practice of personal injury specifically has changed a lot, like when I went out in 2001,. I had a nine month average time on desk from open to close, nine months, and I had various uh settlements pending or trials coming up that the cashflow was almost immediate hanging, hanging a shingle out. Now I think it was Ryan McKean who posted recently is like you're taking on debt with every file unless you're already a mature business with cash flow, that type of thing.
Speaker 1:So, the practice has changed a lot for contingency work.
Speaker 2:And so, but in addition to that contingency firm, you developed a sub niche in this New York. No fault, collect, as I understand it, and I'll let you maybe dive in, but it's collections work for doctor's offices who who were being screwed by insurance companies. Is that about the sum of it, Correct? Correct. When did you?
Speaker 1:develop that practice. Okay, I was standing in my kitchen. It was probably 2004. Was it 2004? Yeah, it was probably around 2004. And I was like I got a family to support and PI cash flow is so unstable and I had always done no-fault collections and I was like I just need to do a lot of this right, not having any awareness of scaling a business or systems or operations or anything. So I started marketing because that is something I'm really good at sales and marketing and that was off to the races. I started with one chiropractor and I'm up to probably 350 institutional clients and we're doing. You know, I yeah I think the guy gave me 10 files to start. This year we're going to file 15,000 files.
Speaker 2:So tell me just back up, cause that's not a practice area, that's in my state. What? What is no fault? New York collection what does that look like?
Speaker 1:Sure, so no fault is a nickname for personal injury protection, pip. And so in New York every auto policy carries $50,000 in basic economic loss. So the theory was, they said, this is going to cover accidents that don't exceed $50,000 in damages. Basic economic loss should cover that, and we'll cover it, regardless of fault.
Speaker 2:In reality.
Speaker 1:Where that falls short is who's to say what serious injury or not, and a jury will put in excess of 50 grand. They were hoping to, I think, eliminate the lower end of cases in doing this and that didn't work, because every lawyer files on everything. Let a jury talk on it, Right. So I started to look upstream from the injured party. I said, okay, I get one retail B2C client. What's upstream from that? And I'm like, oh, each client has, let's say, five to 10 medical providers. What problem can I solve? Similar to the reach out you do with chiropractors. I thought your reach out was brilliant. So I started reaching out to the doctors and saying, listen, I've done this before, I'll get you paid.
Speaker 1:And at the time a lot of the people in the space were less than forthright in how they were doing it Right. So they would put retainers in front of doctors. They would take 50% of the interest without no doctor was reading the retainer 50% of their interest and a portion of the claim. So I went out and said I'm fully transparent, I don't upcharge, Let me review your retainer and tell you how much you're leaking. And then they just came and came and then they just, you know we're pouring through the doors and it's highly systematized. So it's low dollar, extremely high volume work, which is why I'm going to do 15,000 files this year.
Speaker 2:And well, and the 15,000 files, as I understand it, aided by a software that you developed.
Speaker 1:Correct.
Speaker 2:Right, so tell me about that.
Speaker 1:Sure. So again, I remember where I was. I was watching the Sopranos. It was a Sunday night. I had a bottle of wine at the time because I was a drinker I don't drink anymore and I had my standard Sunday night pizza, which is a reverse pizza. It had sauce on top, cheese on the bottom. Okay, this is how crystal clear it was.
Speaker 2:So both of you and Marco Brown developed practice areas and have this super distinctive memory of where you were when the idea came to you. I love it, but you know why.
Speaker 1:I was drinking a glass of red wine, I had the Sopranos in the background and I was like I got to get software, because software is the only way I can grow this. And I went online on my laptop and I was scouring the internet for off the rack solution and I was like all right, I got to build it. There is nothing and it was only going to start out for personal to the law firm and we completed it about nine years ago and we've been running. We're on like version five, we're about to roll out version six and we ran hundreds and hundreds of medical practices, large institutional practices, very high volume through it. So we were beta testing this and building this and I would go out to my clients and say what else do you want to see? What else do you need to see so they could run it like a business? So it shows outstanding, receive everything that the other law firms don't have.
Speaker 1:So I built it. It gave me a proprietary competitive edge in the space. It allowed me to take business from all sectors of the market and I always knew that there would be sellability down the road. And, sure enough, this year I got a bunch of different opportunities to start selling the software. So I spun off the software company I assigned the IP over, spun off the software company I assigned the IP over. I take on a partner and now I've got a SaaS company that's in its infancy stages, but again, you know, I was spending the money anyway to develop it, Right.
Speaker 2:So there's this principle that I I've been thinking about deeply in in my firm, which is how can you identify something that's a liability to your business and turn it into an asset? So that looks like in some firms, like if you're sending a monthly physical mail newsletter what if I just acquired a printing company and then I sold other people the subscription? And that's exactly what you've done by creating, at your own cost and your own time, this software and now turning it into an asset. Are you licensing it to anybody else in your state or are you keeping New York for you?
Speaker 1:So right now I'm the only one in New York that has it. Um, we're going to, we're in the process of one. I've got a, a friendly uh attorney in New Jersey. He does the same kind of practice got personal injuries, got no fault collections. Their firm's going to be one of the beta tests to have it multi-tenant, multi-user, and then I have a big deal cooking that could easily open it up to New York. At that point it's going to be so lucrative.
Speaker 1:At that point I'm also so far ahead of the curve in terms of my client base and everything else that it's not going to really hurt me. It's kind of like the guys that develop Smart Advocate they're right in Long Island, in Melville I think, or Port Washington, and they started selling the software to other long. Like I'm on Smart Advocate for my personal injury space Because you reach a certain critical mass with the law firm that you kind of like look, I'm competing, and like I don't ever look at it like, oh, this person's my competitor, I'm just doing my thing Right. So if somebody is like copying me good, I'm still ahead of the curve it doesn't matter. And as far as the software, everybody who knows me knows me for no fault collections or PI in Long Island, and so I don't know at this point that it's going to matter one way or the other.
Speaker 2:I'm not necessarily going to keep it as proprietary New York. I imagine you also have the ability to cross-sell the clientele. You're servicing all these doctor's claims, but it's like and there's probably some non-solicitation stuff in New York where you can't then go to the patient and say do you have an auto accident case that you want to help with?
Speaker 1:I don't do any of that. We don't take any of that data and utilize it for that, but a lot of the staff because they know us and they know the way we litigate. They do send us personal injury cases where they're like, hey, this client needs an attorney, we're sending them over to you. There's no mixing of the two, but the two right. But of course, if they're sending us a case, we're going to take it.
Speaker 2:It is the exact same thing I love that term going upstream and figuring out who else has clients and who else already has a herd of people, you know, with problems that I could solve. And how can I not thinking not thinking only about how can I solve, like the client, the end clients problem, but how can I solve the problem of the referral source, which is I'm having trouble with all these collections or I'm getting screwed by other lawyers or or everything you know, everything else that's going on. So that's one of the businesses that you spun off and you started. This year You're also spinning off a coaching business and you're coaching lawyers and uh and law firm vendors. I have very long said that everybody who posts regularly on LinkedIn is either selling something or is about to sell something. So I'm happy to see you.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So, believe it or not, I don't go on LinkedIn to necessarily sell. I mean, I had a three-prong strategy for LinkedIn, which I've said earlier on other places, but basically one was for marketing just general brand awareness. For B2C referrals, I get those now from attorneys who are like hey, I need, I need a New York attorney. They know me, I get two PI cases referred right, and I pay, you know, referral fees in every jurisdiction where you're allowed, you know referral fees in every jurisdiction where you're allowed, and in new york it's one third right.
Speaker 1:And then I was taking it a step further. I said well, I also want marketing brand awareness for the b2b silo, the nofollow collections which I do get, those accounts on linkedin too. And then the last piece was really I wanted for recruiting and retention A. My team can always know what they're thinking. If they want to listen to my podcast or watch my LinkedIn, they don't have to ask, they don't have to wonder. I'm pretty much an open book. But for people that aren't yet working with me inside my firm as a team member, I wanted people to know, like and trust me so that when I run an ad and it speaks to them, they already know what I stand for and I will tell you that, and you probably hear this too when you're interviewing. I've listened to all your podcasts and I've seen your LinkedIn and I really want to be a part of what you do.
Speaker 2:And I'm still here, right Right, because it either attracts people or repels them. At least it should.
Speaker 1:I wanted to do both. I wanted to attract the right people, and if it's not a good alignment, I want people to be like this guy's a madman. I don't want to work with him.
Speaker 2:No, that's exactly what I mean, Right? So, so that saves you a ton of time on the back end, because now those people aren't interviewing interviewing with you. Bill Hauser and Andy Stickle do something similar in hiring. One of their phases is we take the three-year vision of SMB team and we give it to them. We say, before you come back, read this and see if it aligns with you. I think it's just so important to tell people who are coming to work for you and are putting their own financial security in many ways in your hands. Here's the plan. Is this a plan that you're interested in, or is it not? You know, one of the other things that I've heard you say this year is that you are working on bringing all of your marketing in-house.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So tell me about that.
Speaker 1:Sure. So, like everybody you know, you hire SEO companies. You don't know a lot about SEO, and that can be very dangerous, right? So I've had to become an expert in SEO and understand you know what I'm paying for. And then I was like you know, everybody's got this magic thing they say they can do and there's no magic to it. Right, it's about reps, it's about doing the right things, and so I have a great SEO vendor that I'm content with right now. We switched recently, but I am adopting a page out of Bill Umansky's book. I don't put a stamp of approval to have somebody on my podcast until I actually A know what it is they're doing and, b I feel comfortable that other people are going to listen to that and then reach out to people.
Speaker 1:But as far as what I realize is I don't want to manage the vendors anymore. I did the accountability chart in EOS and I was like I'm still in marketing, I need to be out of it. So I'm hiring a marketing manager who's going to help me build a marketing department. I don't see myself taking an SEO yet down the road. Maybe, who knows? I don't. I don't know if I'll ever want to do that, but knowing me, maybe I would you know. So I want a marketing manager to build a marketing department for me.
Speaker 1:We have a ton of channels and I've gone so wide probably too wide at this point I need to chop some of the channels that we're in and focus on other channels this point I need to chop some of the channels that we're in and focus on other channels.
Speaker 2:So not necessarily bringing all of the collateral building in-house, but offloading from you the duty to market or to manage the marketing vendors. Is that right?
Speaker 1:Correct, correct and listen, I'm not adverse to it as we grow. But again I have coaches that are telling me look, you don't hire a marketing director until you're at X level of revenue, okay. And then I talk to guys that are doing multiple eight figures and they don't even have marketing directors yet, like that C-suite level marketing director that you would traditionally think of. So you can fill a lot of things fractionally. I do want the management piece in house because I also need full transparency.
Speaker 1:One of the I don't know if you find this one of the hardest things for me with the marketing space in general is a complete lack of transparency in billing. Right, you, you, somebody? Oh, I charge five, I charge seven grand a month. Okay, what do you charge for? Break it down. Oh, it's just what I charge. You'll know, you'll see, listen, listen. If you want my business, I need to understand a line item breakdown of $7,500. If you're going to spend $100,000 a month, you're not going to tell me how you're breaking it down, how many hours go into $10,000 a month. So that lack of transparency has been maddening for me and I insist upon it. And if they don't want to do it, that's fine, we're just not going to work together. But that's one of the reasons I want the management piece in-house, because I don't mind paying a salary. I just want somebody that's got legit training, that says yeah man, I understand SEO, no one's bullshitting me, you know that type of stuff. So that's why I want to bring that piece in-house.
Speaker 2:I haven't had the transparency problem. I think the problem that I have is, you know, historically we've been pretty quick to hire on a company and we've done a poor job of vetting and interviewing and making sure that both of us have really our arms around what success looks like. And agreement on the terms of you know six months from now, like where should we be? And it's not first page of Google, it's not improved number of impressions that could be any number of things. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how many more clients did you sign? That's right At the sub-8 figure mark. Yeah, it could be anything. The spike in clients could be because two of the crashes that you signed up had five people in the car. Right, and you look around and you go, oh, we're up 25% month over month. Well, no, you just happen to have more people in the car. It's the same event, but it wasn't anything that anybody did, and so I find that that attribution on what is the thing that we did that actually caused the increase is so hard to pin down.
Speaker 2:And then to your point about having a director who's responsible for all of it, like the three levers to me are number of people coming into the top of the funnel.
Speaker 2:How many of those cases did we actually want? And then, when they got there, did we do a good enough job of getting back to them quickly enough and convincing them to hire us? Did we do a good enough job of getting back to them quickly enough and convincing them to hire us? And I think that third one for most law firms is, is the highest value lever to pull right, cause if you're spending all this money but 75% of the people you're not getting back to, or 25% of the people you're not getting back to quickly enough, and then another 25% of those people are, you're not doing a good enough job selling to.
Speaker 2:Well, man, if you could just increase either of those by half, like what would that do to your bottom line? And then, when you don't have it all integrated with one person responsible for watching it, the marketing blames the sales and the sales blames the marketing. Right, they're not sending good leads, you're not signing the leads. So I think I think that's really smart to have one person, who's not you, in charge of all that. The difficulty is finding that person.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:So do you have somebody? Have you brought somebody on or you're still looking?
Speaker 1:No, no, no. We, we literally are in the process of running the ad right now. I'm going to go to LMA, I'm going to go to LinkedIn and Indeed, because I think you can find somebody and really I'm just I'm looking for, like you said, somebody that gets it and is able to do the job in a way that so you talk about all the time. Don't spend money on marketing until you fix your intake right. Sales Can they close them? Are they responding? And I had the same epiphany about I don't know a year ago, and I've been blessed I hired a remote intake person.
Speaker 1:I was like let a secretarial or I'm sorry, a paralegal pool, let a pool of the workers take the calls. Horrific, horrific from a business standpoint. They don't want it. They view it as interruptive, distractive, so subconsciously they want off that call. They don't even want to take the call. I will never go back to not having a dedicated intake person.
Speaker 2:Is your dedicated intake person remote? She's fully remote. Is she VA or is she US based?
Speaker 1:She's US based full-time employee. What I looked for again, I don't know. Covid had a weird effect on me because I was a control freak, Right. So I was like you know, you can't trust anybody and I was like, no, that's, that's not the case. Right Like you can trust people if you create accountability.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And you? You just said that I made that same mistake. I think everybody does. I think it's an iteration that you go through with EOS.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, and I don't have to trust you. If I have a good software, like we use lead docket, that I, you know, that's not like you can't fail to put in the bad phone calls, because all the phone calls are coming through the same pipe, so it's going into the system. Right, there has to be some notes and the phone calls recorded so every once in a while you can go back and spot check. You know, was, was that actually a crazy person calling, or did we just fail to make the sale and mark it down as somebody that we didn't want? Um, yeah, that, that piece man.
Speaker 2:When so we moved from a offshore VA who was slow to get to the phone, didn't really care and and apart from those those poor culture fit issues, like also didn't know the roads around here, right? So, like somebody in, I'm in Fairfax County. If somebody is in a crash in Centerville, which is a city in Fairfax County, and they say right across the street from the sweet water, and that doesn't register, you know, even though it's two miles from my office, with the person who's answering the phone, like that's it's a trust clue for your, for your person who thinks you're, you're nearby, and so I don't know, there's all these things that get saw. Who thinks you're nearby and so I don't know, there's all these things that get saw. And so we ultimately brought it back in house to a physical person in the office, because I wanted somebody who, when there's a good case on the line, can run screaming down the hallway to find somebody to take the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, I get hit up all the time. I mean, my intake person is so lightning fast that if she has a question she's in the Google chat and she's getting an answer while that person's live. But I'll tell you what. So she's young, she is unbelievable, and what I saw after I finally got over the fear and learned my lesson of you can't be afraid to do the dedicated intake person. I saw like a 30% increase in signed retainers Paid for bill.
Speaker 1:Right, it paid for itself. She's amazing and she makes plenty of money. You know she's for a young woman. The two most valuable positions that people will tend to relegate to let me see how cheap I can get it is reception Big mistake, big, big mistake. And then intake because they don't want to pay a lot of money without realizing one lost case. One lost case, I mean, think about your average legal fee.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I mean our. So our average fee is 18,000. So one. So? So here's like I could pay you 60 all in. Yeah, I pay you a hundred thousand. Right, all in benefits. All you got to do is find me five cases throughout the course of the year. Right, that's right. And then everything beyond that that we sign is net profit to the business. So I think that's awesome. Yeah, I want to ask you this because I I regard you lovingly as a mastermind junkie.
Speaker 1:I am.
Speaker 2:How do you split your time between masterminds, conferences, coaching and then actually doing any work on the business?
Speaker 1:Okay, so I to me at the, at the level that I want to play at and I am playing at right now, I don't think I've ever been as comfortable in my own skin in the role that I'm in as I am today. Right, I feel like I finally figured out a lot of moving pieces, because I was at some masterminds recently. I was like, oh my God, the lights are going off still. So I think to quote, and I can't even take credit for the quote, but to quote Seth Price.
Speaker 1:I know you know, seth, nothing good ever happens from behind your desk, right, so you're either out marketing. So I took the same approach with masterminds as I did with LinkedIn. I wanted brand awareness in all 50 states and I knew the podcast, linkedin and masterminds would reinforce everything. I also figure out a lot of things. I get stuck on at masterminds just by being out of the office, right, people asking the hard questions in hot seats, like you guys do. I was.
Speaker 1:I sat in on that uh mastermind luncheon, like I was at uh at Pilma last week for four days First time I ever went and I heard a guy speaking who was the COO at the time of Waffle House. Right, guy was brilliant. I couldn't write fast enough the nuggets of gold. This guy was spitting in a keynote speech where I'm at the point now keynote speeches I'm going to pick up five or 10 things from somebody who's a legit assassin and I'm going to take that back and it changes me, it changes my approach, it changes all of it. So you know, I bought the guy's books. I thought the guy was brilliant.
Speaker 1:So how I split my time, I don't really have to anymore because I built leaders in my firm I've got a really strong leadership team that starts with Janira, who's my integrator in EOS parlance. She's like a COO level. I mean, this girl, this woman just is. She moves heaven and earth Like she. She runs things right. So I hire really good attorneys so that I know that legal strategy and ethics are always maintained at the highest level and really like I've adopted EOS just unwaveringly like I, I really got crystal clear. So I have a lot of time, freedom, relationship freedom all the things that Dan Sullivan talks about in his book who, not how by investing a lot of money and a lot of time into my team. And now I'm seeing the fruits of that, where you know, I want to be on a plane once a month because no one else is going to get me PI cases from Arkansas, but I'm going to get cases from Arkansas, right.
Speaker 2:That kind of thing. How many times in the last month has Janira told you no?
Speaker 1:All the time. So you know, because you do EOS, the integrator rules, the roost right, which is challenging in a law firm setting, because you have ethics and you have legal standards and stuff like that.
Speaker 2:And because you're the lawyer and she's not, and you're the owner and she's not.
Speaker 1:But I did what EOS told us to do. She has the final say if there's a debate on anything. I'll be honest with you, brian. I'll tell you something else. Janir and I went to EOS out in San Diego for a week. It was a great conference. We were joking around over dinner and this is the value of these things. Right, there's a ton that goes on in the masterminds, but it's the dinners, the lunches, the breakfast, all the stuff that you see happening with your company, right?
Speaker 1:I mean the money that gets made over dinners. I went to your summit. I'm doing business with John Hawkins, who's part of great, great, uh, you know your your mastermind, uh, great, legal marketing. And I'm doing business with another guy that was at your mastermind, eric shore. Okay, he was at your at your summit. So, like, if you put me in a room with really smart people, I'm doing business, when I leave, with those really smart people.
Speaker 2:I think the dirty secret with conferences and ours included, but with most conferences is that actually most of the value is not on the stage. The the stage is is good, but really if you are showing up and going only to the programming and then going back to your room and ordering room service, you're doing yourself an incredible disservice. So how do you approach events like that? And and make sure that you're maximizing your time outside of the scheduled programming and meeting all the people that you want to meet.
Speaker 1:I have breakfast, lunches and dinners whenever I'm there. So if I can get anybody who wants to talk about anything, I'll say let's go out to dinner, Right, and I'm kind of like from the J Ruane school where I'm like I'll pick up the tab.
Speaker 2:I don't care.
Speaker 1:I'm not worried about four or five hundred dollar dinner check. You know John Hawkins is my attorney for that SAS deal. He's doing all the paperwork, all the transactional stuff. He's got a New York licensed attorney. That would have never happened if I wasn't at your summit.
Speaker 2:Awesome, you know, I guess you're a group.
Speaker 1:So the? To me, when you own a law firm, you have to figure out if you want to be the doer or you want to be the builder and the scaler. Right, like I don't want to try cases anymore, right? There's guys that are going to be way better because I spent the last 15 years becoming a CEO. I'm the guy that will make it rain, no matter where I am. So to me, masterminds are opportunity builders. They bring up and again, I also go with. I'm going to open up doors for people. I'm not asking for anything back. Naturally, if people do well and succeed, they're going to open up opportunities for me. So I'll give you one.
Speaker 1:For instance, I was at a mastermind dinner with a buddy of mine and he's like this is what I'm working on. I'm like cool, this is what I'm working on. I was telling him about mass torts and he's like tell me about mass torts? I said well, I'm a feeder firm, I advertise, we do a lot of handholding with clients, but we're partnered up with the operational arm and it's really, really lucrative the way I do it. It's trust-driven and I really laid out a lot of the current space that I'm in with that.
Speaker 1:So he's like would you mind making an introduction? I said no, of course not. It's a fantastically profitable venture. Why wouldn't I want to help somebody else? And it helps the guy who's doing it because he's just getting more inventory. So I've done that for a dozen people at masterminds and then what ends up happening is they are like well, what are you working on? And they'll help me with stuff that I'm not doing it to get that. I'm just very value driven in in the way I approach relationships, like I want to provide value before I ask for anything.
Speaker 2:I do think that's unique to lawyers that go to masterminds, right, and I think the lawyer community writ large is probably not like that, but the people who are going to masterminds with the intention of meeting people outside of the room and connecting with them on a deeper level outside, I think, are like that. Here's something that I think is missing from that space and, as I have more bandwidth when I have more bandwidth, something that I'm I'm looking to develop, but I'm curious whether you have a like a non-owner mastermind that you've sent Janira to.
Speaker 1:I've sent Janira. Yes, I'll tell you a very powerful one for Janira. I'll tell you a very powerful one for Janira. Eos runs something called the Integrator Mastery Forum, so she had the class where you get certified. She came back she was 10 levels above her already advanced level. I signed her up. I didn't even ask her how much it was, I was like sign up for the year. So she did. It was like five grand for the year. She's on her second year with it. Your second in command will be growing at a level she did. It was like five grand for the year. She's on her second year with it. Your second in command will be growing at a level.
Speaker 1:And I do believe Patrick Wilson said this to me one time. I think that the growth of a business can be handicapped by one of two things One, the emotional intelligence of the founder or the limitation of the second in command. So if you want to grow exponentially, you got to work on yourself and you got to make sure you're at your. Uh, second in command is growing just as exponentially. So I I told you near you're always going to be in that I've paid for other coaching for her too. She's done.
Speaker 1:She's done coaching for about as long as I have, but with, like you asked about programs, I have an industrial psych that's kind of on retainer with my office. She's there for mindset issues, right. You know somebody's got potential. You know they could perform. They're a rock star in the making and they're bumping up against that ceiling. You know it's mindset. My favorite phrase when I talk to them is look, this is above my pay grade. It's not something I can do, nor do I want to. I will pay for 50% of your work with this industrial site coach. It's all mindset coaching, right? Transformational. For any of my leaders that have done it Transformational, I highly recommend it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's really hard to work with second in command that don't want to grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, it's really hard to work with.
Speaker 2:Second, in command, as I don't want to grow, yeah, yeah. And the difficult thing about that is, you know, many times owners hit an inflection point where we discover mastermind or coaching or you know, or conferences, and you want the person who's been with you for a long time to feel that same growth and they're just not interested. And then you have to make a decision about okay, who do I want along on this ride with me? So if you were to think back, what was the inflection point for you? What was? Do you remember the first conference, the first mastermind, or what was it?
Speaker 1:So I was making at the time God, I'm going back a long time now Uh, we had just crossed about $750,000. And it was me, I didn't have any partners, and it was intensely stressful. I knew nothing about where I was going or how I got to where I was, and I was like I never even thought I was going to make this much money. So I was sitting in my office, I went to lunch with a guy named James Joseph you probably know James, right and he's like dude, you got to try out this Atticus thing, right. So we were at lunch and they were having a four day intro course where they touched on the four touchstones of building a law firm like a business. So I remember calling my wife from Florida. I was at the Orlando hotel and I'm like, look, it's a lot of money. It's like it's $12,000. And but I'm telling you, this is the secret sauce.
Speaker 1:And I had just finished listening to the book when I was working out, uh, e-myth by Michael Gerber. I'm like I said, jen, that's my wife. I said I'm telling you it's a secret sauce, go talk to Janira, I know it's a lot. And again, $12,000. At that point you know like I never wrote a check that big. So I was like go talk to her. I want the. I already made up my mind I was doing it, to be honest with you, but I got them to sign off on it and it was just a fantastic journey. And I'm just a hyper implementer. When I know something works, why do I need to question it? Right, like you know, if you see those people, that if they're in you, you gotta see it, cause you run a mastermind right, you'll see somebody and you're like I'm telling you this works.
Speaker 2:They will figure out a reason to tell you why it doesn't, even though you're doing it and you're making money doing it. Yeah Right, I'm not that guy. Or they'll ghost you or they'll hang out around, you know, for three years and I'll maybe this year. I have a friend who, who's been talking for five years about hiring an associate. Right, I'm like, dude, you need to learn a little bit about running a business, because as soon as you hire an associate, it's going to pay for itself and and you will be freed up to see your kids and not work 60 hours a week. And he's like I'm waking up at two in the morning with sweats and I will hire a fucking associate, Get some help.
Speaker 1:I was thinking about that yesterday. I'm like if I was going to give because a lot of people don't give hard metrics of like you should do this when right. So I remember one of the epiphanies I had. I was under so much stress and I realized why is that? I had 10 people reporting to me. I didn't have an office manager, right, so I had listened to what would then be considered a podcast. It was on Atticus's website and it was you need an office manager at seven people.
Speaker 1:So, holy shit. Now I had a benchmark. I was thinking yesterday, like if you're making $200,000 as a sole practitioner and you're doing your own typing, you're doing your own postage, you need to hire an associate and pay them and take less money in the beginning. Once you hit the $200,000 mark, you have the bandwidth to start hiring. People just want to keep all the money for themselves and yet they're doing $5 an hour work.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, that's Dan Martell's buy back your time, right, I'm sure, which I'm sure you've read is you know, if you're a CEO or an entrepreneur, you shouldn't be doing anything that you can outsource for less than 25% of your hourly rate, right? So there's so many people that just want to hold on to everything, and really that's back to the mindset of the founder, like it's back to your belief that if you do that, you won't be able to go out and find more revenue. Right, but what if you spent all of your time looking for more revenue and much less of your time stapling and licking and stamping envelopes, can you?
Speaker 1:imagine, could you imagine? Like it's maddening. But you know to me and I think that that's where you and what top man I'm a ready succession planning. I don't want to be a freaking cautionary tale. I saw it coming up at one of the law firms I worked at. They walked around like they were hot shit. They were top heavy, no leverage, no partnership track. They used to use partnership as a carrot to kind of abuse the associates and I was like one guy died penniless. The other guy died no forethought of succession planning whatsoever. The other two couldn't even afford to be bought out because the practice started to fail.
Speaker 1:And I was like everything I don't want to be, I just learned about so I'm going to do everything differently. Right, you don't? No one lives forever. No one lives forever. And it's just. I don't know if it's hubris, I don't know what it is that stops people from saying like my brother owned the landscaping route, my brother sold it and made a lot of money. Like every other profession you build to sell law firms. Everybody's like I'm going to die at my desk, I'm just going to die and let my wife take care of it. I'm like that's a mess man.
Speaker 2:Well, part of that is this mental block that you can't sell a law firm, right? Because, number one, the market is smaller because it has to be sold to a lawyer. And number two, if you were to sell Tona Law, well, you'd probably need another Tona to sell it. Well, no, you just need a couple of years to rebrand the thing and you would stick around for a while to make sure that it was successful on the other end. But many people don't ever get to that second level of thinking. But well, if I really wanted to do this, how would I? But that's to your point earlier about not hanging a shingle directly out of law school, like the ability to learn from other people's mistakes exactly what you don't want your life to look like. There's a not insignificant value to that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, figuring what you do want, figuring what you don't want. I mean, marco Brown says it all the time Go get a job out of law school to figure out what you hate doing, so you can figure out what you want to do. Right, like you know, marco, he's wild with that, but you know, marco, he's he's. He's wild with that, but you know he's not wrong, he is not wrong.
Speaker 2:Let somebody else pay you to figure out what you don't want to do.
Speaker 1:And I was like look, I got paid to learn how to try cases. 1% of attorneys in America try cases. Now I can set up systems across my law firms built around trial work. So that was an awesome education that I didn't have to pay for, Right.
Speaker 2:All right. So, tom, this has been so much fun. Uh, and I'm coming on your podcast. I think in a couple of we're recording in a couple of weeks. We had um got that scheduled at some point. Your podcast is lead counsel podcast. Where else do you want people to find you?
Speaker 1:LinkedIn is probably the easiest place. You just put in tonal law. I mean you could put in Tonal Law anywhere in Google or in LinkedIn, and everything will pop up online. All right, man, thanks for hanging on, dude. Thanks for having me on, man, I appreciate it.
