Unlock the full potential of your law practice with our transformative 90-day sprint program! Todd Whatley and Ian Weiner, promise to guide you through the labyrinth of firm management, offering unparalleled insights into financial operations, insurance, and retirement plans that will catapult your legal career to new heights. As attorneys, you're no stranger to the complexities of the legal world, but our dedicated program is tailored to demystify the business side of your practice, equipping you with the practical steps needed to fortify not just your firm's health but your personal wealth as well.
Embark on a journey with us as we dissect the art of strategic financial and retirement planning, emphasizing the power of reinvestment and the mastery of metrics for informed decision-making. Witness the transformation as we help you establish systems for delegation, aligning your professional efforts with your personal values. For those contemplating the longevity of their practice, we delve into the poignant story of a bakery owner, illustrating the critical nature of succession planning for your future and your family's security. Join Todd and me, and let's build a legacy that transcends the courtroom, ensuring your firm thrives for years to come.
Unlock the full potential of your law practice with our transformative 90-day sprint program! Todd Whatley and Ian Weiner, promise to guide you through the labyrinth of firm management, offering unparalleled insights into financial operations, insurance, and retirement plans that will catapult your legal career to new heights. As attorneys, you're no stranger to the complexities of the legal world, but our dedicated program is tailored to demystify the business side of your practice, equipping you with the practical steps needed to fortify not just your firm's health but your personal wealth as well.
Embark on a journey with us as we dissect the art of strategic financial and retirement planning, emphasizing the power of reinvestment and the mastery of metrics for informed decision-making. Witness the transformation as we help you establish systems for delegation, aligning your professional efforts with your personal values. For those contemplating the longevity of their practice, we delve into the poignant story of a bakery owner, illustrating the critical nature of succession planning for your future and your family's security. Join Todd and me, and let's build a legacy that transcends the courtroom, ensuring your firm thrives for years to come.
Welcome to the Lawyer's Money Show with your hosts, todd Whatley and Ian Weiner, where finance meets the legal profession. Here we dive deep into the economics of law practice, from managing your firm's finances to optimizing personal wealth strategies for legal professionals. Every episode we bring you insights, strategies and stories from leading experts to help you navigate the financial landscape of the legal world. Stay tuned as we uncover the tools and tactics needed to help lawyers make the right money moves so they can grow their career, manage their practice and optimize their wealth so they can focus on enjoying the life they've worked so hard to build. For more resources, visit us at wwwlawyerstotalplancom.
Speaker 2:That's right. This is the Lawyer's May Show and my name is Todd Wiley, and we are here today with my co-host, Ian Weiner. Hey man, how are you, Todd, doing? Well, how are you? Great, Great. I'm excited today because we have finally, I think, worked out. We spent weeks to months working this thing out and getting this program down. Really, if you know our story, this started with me. I mean, this started because Ian and I started doing a radio show together. We started spending time together and he started being a little nosy and started asking me questions about my project.
Speaker 3:It's because I care, Todd.
Speaker 2:I know you do and he started asking some questions and I was like, well, and realized that hey, there's some things I need to look at. And I think I ran a pretty good practice and did things okay I've been successful and did things okay I've been successful. But Ian, with his financial brain and tax brain and investments and everything really started helping me look at this. And one day he said I think you've done pretty well, but if you were lacking or not secure in these areas, I bet there's a lot of people out there that are also the very same way and I was like, yeah, you're probably right. And so that's kind of the start of Lawyer's Total Plan is helping lawyers figure out where they're at now, what needs to be improved or maximized or modified, and to help you grow your practice tremendously. And so that's where this started.
Speaker 2:And if you listen to our last episode, we talked about the very basic plan lawyers' money membership. Lawyers' money membership Thank you, money Membership Lawyers Money Membership, thank you. And it's for $79 a month if you pay a year at a time, $99 a month if you do it month by month, and it gives you access to a whole bunch of tools. But today I want to talk about the next level for those of you out there who are serious and really want to have a second set of eyes. Look at your processes, your finances, your insurance, pretty much everything in your practice, and figure out where you are now and where you want to go. Ian, talk about that for just a second, want to go.
Speaker 3:Ian, talk about that for just a second.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so this is a little bit more of an intensive, I think, is the way that I want to put it and the way that we have worked to design this is. The planning world that I live in is adapting and changing quite a bit and doing this kind of fee-for-service planning is relatively niche and relatively new in a lot of ways and there are some things that we're learning as we do this more and more, and so a lot of times what you'll see is folks will have like an annual engagement. It's 12 months, it's a flat rate and they'll cover all this stuff. And I did that for a little while and some clients that still works for. I have a handful of clients that I'm essentially on retainer with them. Anytime a financial matter comes up, we'll deal with it.
Speaker 3:But what I found was it was hard to kind of start and stop. Found was it was hard to kind of start and stop and it's way more effective to say, okay, we're going to take 90 days, we're going to really dig in deep, we're going to build momentum and we're going to keep that momentum, and it's a lot more effective, we get a lot more done, the end client is a lot more engaged and it's just when you're making changes, it's easier to make other changes, and so this is a little bit more okay. It's time. I've been thinking about this for a while. It's time to get this stuff right. It's time to get this stuff taken care of Absolutely. It's really kind of what this is.
Speaker 2:So we're calling this just lack of a better term the 90-day sprint. Because once we start this, you and I both us, the listener who hires us to do this we're going to be asking you for a bunch of stuff. We're going to spend quite a bit of time together, you're going to be telling us stuff, you're going to gather documents, and it's for 90 days and we'll probably meet at least once a month for those three months. You know well, probably four beginning the very beginning and then toward the middle of each month, and then a very comprehensive final and I wrote a blog post on this just to kind of help me figure out exactly what this is and just a segment from that blog post says this is a comprehensive program designed to propel attorneys into a realm of heightened professional and financial achievement.
Speaker 2:This intensive focus period is not just about setting the foundation for success, it's about creating significant immediate impact on your legal and financial health. I mean that sums it up right. There is to say, let us come in as independent third parties me being an attorney knowing how this works, you as a certified financial planner, looking at things a little differently than I do, but with both of our eyes coming in and sitting down with you as the owner of this firm and then looking at the stuff that you share with us, and we're going to ask you for tax returns, we're going to ask you for profit and loss, we're going to ask you for insurance policies, for retirement plans, for pretty much everything in your practice. We're going to ask for that and we're going to go through that in extreme detail.
Speaker 3:And there's a couple of things that happen when you hear that. One is yeah, this is going to be some work. And it's hard to have these conversations sometimes because you're like man, you know I don't want them to think that I should be, you know better than I am or better off than I am Right, and sometimes as business owners we can have a certain facade of things. But the truth is, this is an opportunity to go. Look, I know there are areas of improvement and we can. We will find opportunities for everybody. That's the bad news and the good news. But the good news is if you realize that that means you can get better, the practice can be more efficient, you can make more money, you can buy your time back and you probably will enjoy what you're doing a little bit more once you work through some of those things yeah, and know that it's taken care of.
Speaker 2:So our guarantee and I'll talk about this more at the end our guarantee is we're going to find five times as much benefit as what you pay us, okay. So I guess we could kind of say, hey, how much benefit do you want? That's how much you pay us. One-fifth of that is what you pay us. No, we have a fee in place and the initial fee that we're going to talk about. But we guarantee that if we don't find five times what you paid us in benefits, tax, savings, things like that, we'll give your money back. We are that confident that we're going to come in and look, you're a great attorney. We know that you may be a pretty good business owner and a pretty good entrepreneur, but I can almost guarantee you we're going to help you do things better and find five times what you pay us in savings or adjustments or whatever that's bold.
Speaker 3:However—, what we know is there's just stuff that you've been like ah, I've been putting that off and it's time to address that. And we know there are those areas, so we'll help you work through it. And it's not when we get past the thoughts and feelings about like and really let me use this word, this is an emotional word, but the shame of some of the like oh, I should have done this earlier. When we can get past that and go okay, that's fine, yeah, we could have done this earlier, but let's do it now. It's just so freeing. You're so much more productive, you feel a sense of vision and just being on track. We can't quantify that, frankly, but that is what comes on top of organizing and the actual monetary benefit of getting stuff right.
Speaker 2:And I'm definitely not coming to you as someone who's always done it right. I mean, this was very eye-opening to me when Ian started showing me this stuff and I was a little hesitant to open up my books and show him everything. I was like, you know, I could have done better, I should have done better, and it was very eye-opening. But it's like, okay, we're past that. Yeah, the best time to plant trees is 20 years ago, but the second best is today and so, yeah, we should have done better 20 years ago, but we obviously didn't. So let's start today. I'm 58, okay, so it's like I should be approaching the end of my career, but I'm doing things and kind of starting brand new, and I'm super excited about some of the things we're doing.
Speaker 3:And it's a clean feeling. It's a clean feeling because we're not coming in to judge you. We're coming in as partners to go. Okay, you're in the trenches every day, all day. Okay, you're in the trenches every day, all day, and there are things that you just can't see from being in the trenches, and having an outside perspective is exceedingly valuable, and that's really what it comes down to, I mean if you think about that as literal terms, if you're in the trenches, we're flying over at 40,000 feet and then 10,000 feet to see exactly what's around you and what you're in store for.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a really good analogy. You're down in the trenches fighting. We're flying over saying OK, it's going to be OK, but here's some things you need to look out for and be aware of, just like you do in war. You know it's like they help you see what you can't see and prepare for.
Speaker 3:It's kind of like what's that saying that you say the lawyer that represents himself?
Speaker 2:Has a fool for a client.
Speaker 3:Look, I'm not calling anybody fools if you don't bring us in, but it's like, OK, let's make sure that you get the second set of eyes that you need so that you don't miss anything. I think that's really the big picture here is we can help you avoid mistakes and avoid missing opportunities. I think that's the big thing is, you don't want to come five years later and go oh man, there was a huge opportunity that I had that I didn't get to take advantage of for five years. I mean, that's massive. So let's talk about some of the areas that we look at and how the actual process works.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going to help solidify your financial foundation, okay, meaning we're going to look at your cash flow, your expenses, try to find Ian has a ton of references, a ton of people that do insurance do things and we can probably save you quite a bit of money in unemployment insurance, disability insurance, life insurance and be able to help you provide the same or better protection for your practice for the same or, hopefully, less money.
Speaker 2:We're going to look at your investment strategy, if you agree to let us look at you personally to say, okay, let's look at your personal financial situation and let's see what's going on. Do you personally have enough insurance for your family and kids and partners that if you were to disappear tomorrow, how is your practice going to continue? Would it function a whole lot better if $2 million were dumped into your practice and now they have the money to hire new people and restructure things and continue the practice and allow the current partners to buy out your wife or your husband from your practice to say, yeah, they've now passed away, we're going to buy this practice from you, and having money in store to do that sure makes that easier.
Speaker 3:It's about thinking through okay, what's the plan for blank, what's the plan for when you leave the plan? And that is a personal thing and we need to talk about that. I mean, estate planning and retirement planning are going to be two of the modules that are included in this, at least in a basic way. One is just a function of your estate planning attorney, and so it's like look, if you've got your estate plan done, great, let's just talk through it.
Speaker 3:And let's take a look at it and just make sure that it works exactly the way that you think it does. I would be willing to bet that eight out of 10 times there's some opportunities there, and if that could save you some money or some heartache, then that's great. And on the retirement planning side, I mean that is a huge, huge, huge opportunity, and so most folks, even very educated folks, don't understand the complexities and the nuances of retirement planning, and so we're going to at least build a foundation of how to think about that and be where you are. Some of the other areas that we'll look at cash flow, like you said. Risk management, like you said.
Speaker 3:Investment is one that I really like and I want to talk about just a little bit deeper here, because investing strategy is different if you're a practice owner, if you're part of a practice, if you're just working for another practice or if you're getting ready to retire.
Speaker 3:Those are all different phases of life that we need to approach things differently, and a lot of financial advisors this is something that I hope that people realize most financial advisors are not incentivized to tell you to reinvest in your practice if that's the best thing for you to do and if that's the best thing for you to do. That's what we'll tell you to do is to reinvest in your practice. We want to have some diversification and that's important, but if we know that if you put $1,000 into your practice, you can make $5,000, that's a good return on investment, absolutely, and we're going to help you to get the metrics and get the data that you need to be able to make those decisions. So investment is more than just stocks and bonds and mutual funds. Investment is okay. Do you have a process for when you put money into the firm, do you know what you get out of it? Do you have the marketing pieces, the KPIs, the data to be able to make that decision and understand that Well?
Speaker 2:and I focus. I still practice law and I do what is known as elder law. And if your practice doesn't do that and it's just purely an example but if your practice doesn't do that, if you could spend $4,000 to send one of your attorneys to an elder law conference or an intensive elder law training and they bring back that ability to not refer out elder law clients as your clients get older, how much would that mean to you? Would $4,000 multiply itself numerous times? Like Ian just said, if you spend $1,000 and can make $5,000, if you spend $4,000 and make $20,000 because you got to keep an elder law client and not refer it out, that's a great investment. You've spent $4,000, but you're going to get $20,000 once and then do it multiple other times, and so it's in financial advisors.
Speaker 2:I think I knew this a little bit, but a lot of them get paid by what's called a UM Assets under management. They charge a percentage of how much money they have under their management and so, just like Ian said, for you to spend $100,000 on your practice to pull it out of savings under their management and put it into your practice. They lose money by doing that and so they're very reluctant to give advice that's going to cost money, but we don't. We don't work that way. We're gonna look at your practice and say you know, looking at everything, this is going to be very good for you and it is typically not your typical investment advisor advice.
Speaker 3:The thing that people just are so amazed by is we can do all that stuff, everything that you think of that a financial advisor can do. We can do all of that stuff, but those are the basics. That's the basics we're talking about. How do we make your practice and your life, how do we make that work together so that really you can buy back your time? That's the biggest thing that we're talking about is buying back your time, and I think something that I am excited about working with more attorneys with is attorneys really understand the value of their time, because in some cases that's how they bill.
Speaker 3:Let's make this simple and if you bill $1,000 an hour, you shouldn't be doing $20 an hour tasks, absolutely. It is very inefficient and you shouldn't be doing things that you don't enjoy doing and things that are not beneath you is not the right word. People twist this. That's not the right way, but are just under your billing rate. And what we? What we do is help you to build systems and processes and build a team so that you can delegate those things, so that you can spend your time in a way that is consistent with your values and you can be present when it's important to be present.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, talk about real. Briefly, I think this is important for people to understand and it's one thing I'm coming around on is positioning your practice to sell. Yeah, even if you don't plan on selling, it's a good practice to sell, and I didn't know there was a specialty out there based just on that. But one of our not partners, but a consultant to the business is a certified exit planner or something.
Speaker 3:Yep, certified exit planning advisor. Thank you. This is becoming more and more common Law firms are tricky, always simply because non-competes don't really happen in law. It's a little bit different, but I see this as actually an opportunity, and so what a certified exit planning advisor does is they come in and they help the business owner build a good business. What a lot of folks don't realize is and I think attorneys are in many cases fall into this camp, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just happens to be true. Most people that get into business small, medium-sized businesses it's because they were good at selling something. You know, we have a client who we're working with that has a bakery.
Speaker 2:Huge bakery.
Speaker 3:He's good at making baked goods. He didn't go to school for business that I'm aware of Right and so what they're good at is doing their thing building their product or selling their product For attorneys. That's their time and expertise, but that doesn't always mean that they're good at building and operating businesses.
Speaker 2:It is. It's honestly and hopefully they don't listen to this episode but it's honestly shocking how unsophisticated they are in the financial stuff and how exposed they are and just underutilizing things. Yes, it's shocking. Before he came in, I knew him as the creator of this big, huge bakery that has multiple retail stores, sales to Walmart, all kinds of stuff, and to realize how exposed they were it was quite surprising.
Speaker 3:It is not uncommon, and so if you're listening going, you know, yeah, that's kind of me Like I practice law but I don't really run a business. The opportunity is if you treat your practice as a business and build in systems and processes that would enable you to be able to sell it, whether or not you have a strong non-compete, whether or not you want to sell it. So what the certified exit planning advisor's process is is what's called the value builder process. How do we build enterprise value in the company so that, whether you want to sell it or not, it is built as a business, not just as a bigger kind of extension of you? And so that's a big piece and that's an area where you know whether you want to expand, whether you want to sell.
Speaker 3:We can come in and put in simple, good business practices that make the company worth more, simply by doing those. And some of that is what's the succession plan. How do we build that out? I think that's a huge piece for attorneys and it's a challenge. There's no silver bullet here. I want to just be clear. But we've got to think through this.
Speaker 2:But I am shocked at the attorneys who die and the state bar comes in and just hands out their cases and they sell the furniture and walk out the door and lock the door and it's done. There's no money changes hands. These other attorneys take these files, kind of hoping they can make some money from it, but with a succession plan, at the time of your death there's a plan in place that your family can benefit from this practice that you've worked on and built for 30, 40, 50 years. It's shocking.
Speaker 3:Even if it's just a difference of half a million bucks. Yeah, Isn't that better? It just is. Yeah, Half a million is better than zero For those and I know there's jokes about attorneys or doctors who don't do math and I'm not making that joke.
Speaker 2:But I'm just telling you, but yeah, your family don't do math, and I'm not making that joke, but I'm just telling you that half a million is better than zero. Yeah, half a million to your family is not small change. Okay, it's substantial.
Speaker 3:And so when we bring all these pieces together, that's what we're really doing. It's helping to build enterprise value in your business. And so it's a 90-day sprint. We're going to cover, you know, four to six main areas and think of it as kind of, okay, what is presenting right now, what are the presenting issues and how do we make sure that we address these? And then what happens at the end of that period?
Speaker 3:We will have another strategy session and say, hey, this is the stuff that we did. Here's the value that we're quantifying, here's what happened. Did here's what the value that we're quantifying, here's what happened. Inevitably, when I do these with other types of folks and attorneys, are included in this inevitably the things that we thought were the main important things that the end of that period we found a whole bunch of other things and we found other stuff has come up over that time. And so then we go, ok, does it make sense to reengage now or do we, you know, just be on your radar when stuff comes up? And either way, we can work through that and we can part friends if we need to, and that's no big deal, but we will leave your practice better than we found it and we can guarantee that we do guarantee that.
Speaker 2:And so if you've been quote meaning to do this for the last 30 years, this is the way you do it. We're going to make you do this. Okay, we're going to stay on your case. We're going to remind you continuously because we're under the gun to prove we can save you five times what you pay us, okay. So the price of this, okay, our ongoing fee and I've helped contribute to this significantly to say, look, I think this is a very realistic price, is to say, look for us to work with you for 90 days very intently, to come in and honestly come up with a game plan of how you can change your practice. Our fee for this is $12,000.
Speaker 3:Starts at $12,000. If you've got like 500 attorneys, it's going to be a little more than that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's going to be a little more than that, but the standard run of the mill you know two, three, four, five attorneys maybe to look at certain things for 90 days is going to be $12,000. Starting out, we've just developed this plan and we need some people who will give us a chance and let us do this for someone other than my practice, to look at your practice and do this. For the first five people who call us and say, yes, I want you to do this. We're going to cut that fee by 75 percent for three thousand dollars and that basically just covers our expenses. We we want to work with five people who are willing to do this. Let us develop some stories and some experience in doing this.
Speaker 2:And so for the first five people who call or email us and say I want to do the 90-day sprint, we're going to do it for $3,000. And we are serious. It's the first five people. We can't do this past that because, honestly, we're probably going to lose money. I mean the number of hours that we spend on this. We are literally losing money by doing this. But that gets you involved, gets you serious, and we are looking for the first five people to do this After those five are done, it's 12,000, and it will probably go up from there after a year or two.
Speaker 3:Let's be clear Todd had to twist my arm to do this. I'm going, I'm like, okay, no, we can do 12 all day long. It's reasonable, it's fair, we're going to find a ton of value for folks. And he goes let's get some folks that's kind of the case studies here and get some folks comfortable with this. And so, look, I lean on Todd's wisdom in a lot of these things.
Speaker 1:The old guy.
Speaker 3:We're going to do it. We're going to do it, we're going to have a good time. So we've, you know, I've worked with folks in a number of different industries and done very similar things, but doing specific. You know, we're trying to make this specific lawyers focused stuff, and so we're building out the lawyers focused process even more.
Speaker 2:So phone number.
Speaker 3:The phone number is 479-485-1911. That's 479-485-1911. And then email Email. You can email ian at lawyerstotalplancom. Or.
Speaker 2:Todd at lawyerstotalplancom. If you have questions or concerns or you want to tell me, yeah, todd, let's do it. Let's jump on this and it's anywhere in the country. Okay, I would love to come see you for $3,000. We're probably not going to come see you, but we will do it by video conference.
Speaker 3:If you want us to come see you, we'll do the $3,000 for the first five, but you've got to pay for us to come out there. How's that?
Speaker 2:We'd love to come see you, but we can't pay for that for the three. So, yes, give us a call or email us, or if you know anyone else who just starting out, almost about to quit and wanting to sell and increase their value, or someone smack dab in the middle to say, hey, let's make this thing more valuable, let's ease up some things. I want to do things. Just that I want to do. That's me right now.
Speaker 2:I work two days a week. I dress up. Right now, I work two days a week. I dress up and come into the office two days a week. I spend a lot of time doing exactly what I want to do and, with Ian's help, knowing things are now taken care of and things are progressing the way I want without me spending time on it, it gives me the time to do exactly what I want to do. We're going to I'm going to Cancun first of May, going to Italy in September and I'm enjoying life OK and part of it's because Ian has stepped in and made me aware of things and we, we truly want to share this with you.
Speaker 2:So give us a call, email us $3,000, only for the first five, and we would love to work with you. Okay, anything else? Any final thoughts? No, that's it. We'll see you next time. Okay, thank y'all, and please subscribe, please share this and, like you said, we'll see you next time. Bye.
Speaker 1:Please share this and, like Ian said, welawyerstotalplancom, we look forward to guiding you through your financial journey. You can give us a call at 479-485-1911. Until next time, keep striving for excellence in both law and finance.