Are you ready to learn valuable lessons? Join Richard James, Michael Strauch (MPS) and special guests Will and Kelly Grafton - founders of Grafton Firm, a thriving bankruptcy practice - THIS WEEK on Your Practice Mastered podcast! Grafton Firm discusses scaling a law firm from a basement office to a business with 15+ staff. They'll share insights on staff turnover, revenue dips, prioritizing growth while juggling responsibilities, and the moment that made them fully commit to scaling their firm.

Richard James: I'm Richard James. Welcome to today's show.

Michael Strauch: And today we're joined by attorneys Will and Kelly Grafton. Super excited to have you on the show. Super excited to learn a little bit more about your journey. Will and Kelly, welcome.

Kelly Grafton: Thanks for having us.

William Grafton: Thank you for having us.

Michael Strauch: Absolutely.

Kelly Grafton: 19.

Richard James: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard James: That's right 2019. So right before everybody went through a little bit of hell, so here we are on the other side of that story.

I can't wait to hear about what's going on. So, Michael, you wanna lead us off?

William Grafton: Something that somebody doesn't know about.

Kelly Grafton: Well, I'll go while you think of them.

I used to work in professional sports before becoming a lawyer. I worked for the Baltimore Orioles for six years and then after that I was with Ticketmaster and I used to run around the country to all the professional sports teams and universities and theaters and teach them how to run their businesses better.

So I was a little bit, kind of like you guys do, but totally different world before law school.

Richard James: Are there perks? Like do you get great seats or get to meet any of the players or.

Kelly Grafton: Well, sure. When I worked for the team. Absolutely, and I still have a lot of friends that work in a lot of ballparks and stadiums across country. I'm not one for calling in favors too often, but I think I could.

William Grafton: Let's put it this way, we didn't have any trouble getting playoff tickets for the Orioles when they were having their playoff runs. We didn't have any trouble getting World Series Tickets when it was in Philadelphia or, you know, other nearby areas, right? So some of the harder to get tickets some of those favors came in handy.

Richard James: How about you Will?

Richard James: But look at what you have today.

Wow. Super exciting. I'm curious, so, obviously we talk about entrepreneurial, the journey of the year 2019. Here we are, we talk about the journey from Katrina to now, but talk a little bit about that journey. So, as a law firm owner, what did your entrepreneurial journey look like?

William Grafton: Well, we could go back to the beginning. When we were sharing a desk in a small basement office facing each other for several years. You know, as husband and wife and partners, you know, it was either going to make us really close or drive us crazy. And it did a little bit of both.

And then from there to expanding our business and connecting with this network of attorneys and really from there just exploding our growth.

Again, the stable income, the somebody else has to worry about the rainmaking and I just get my salary and bill out a thousand dollars an hour and life is good. But we were building our family at the same time and I knew I couldn't do that in a big law firm.

And will presented us with this opportunity cause I said to him. I said, I wanna learn something that I can be an expert at. I was a litigator, I'm an appellate attorney, but I said, I want a subject matter that I could become an expert in. And he says, well, why not bankruptcy? That's what I've been doing for however many years it had been at that point.

So we hung a shingle and said, yeah, let's be a bankruptcy firm. But for a couple of years we were still only had our toe in there. We weren't sure we wanted to do it. It wasn't.

Richard James: You kept your job for a while, right? Kelly?

So we were able to sort of replace my income that I was getting elsewhere as well with just this bankruptcy practice.

Richard James: So I've got a plus one on that. Michael, if you don't mind. You know, I think a lot of small business owners or business owners in general hope for this. I dream of genie moment, you know. Nod your head and it's all there. Right? And it's instant. What's the truth about the length of that journey?

How long did this take from sharing a desk and you know, still having a job to pay the bills while you're trying to figure it out till now? Or, I know you're still figuring things out. There's always things that change, but, you know, revenue's steady growth that is heavy and you know, you made it through the dark times of the pandemic.

How long did that whole thing take?

Richard James: About to the point that you felt like you okay we can do this? That's, I guess that's the real question.

Kelly Grafton: Yeah, so I would say it was a good four years, you know, of us sharing that basement office literally kneecap the kneecap. He had the side of the desk with no leg room. I had the side with the leg room cause I'm, you know, the female I guess.

And we did that for pretty much four or five years now. We had our kids at that time, so I had some time off here and there, but. Yeah, it was several years and then we decided to move out of that basement and get our own place, put our name on the wall. And when we did that, that's when things became official, I think.

Michael Strauch: I'd say so, I'd say so. I think an early tagline of this show. I like that Rich revenue steady, growth heavy. I like that.

Richard James: All right. Good.

Michael Strauch: Yeah.

Well, so look, obviously in any journey, it's a journey. So there's high points, there's low points for you guys. What was one of those low points that you learned something from, that you were able to take from and adapt.

William Grafton: I think we might have different answers here. I would say it was just this prior year where we came really, really close to, you know, I think we're just at a million dollars in revenue. But then you look at the bottom line and you, there's nothing there, right? And so you all this explosive growth, explosive growth, explosive growth.

Richard James: By the way, I need to comment on that. I mean, it's real, you know what I mean? When you're growing that fast, it's so hard to pay attention to everything. I mean, we have to, right? But it's so hard to pay attention to everything. Which is why it's really important that we build in our salaries to at least make sure we're paid and we're getting paid out of the business.

And then, you know, if we're investing monies back in for growth, that's a conscious decision. If we're not making money to the bottom line because our eye is off the ball, that's an unconscious decision and the good news is we can fix it. We can do something about it.

Kelly, do you have a different answer?

We had about of staff turnover. Early summer, late spring of last year where we switched over basically an entire department. But unfortunately it was our revenue generating department. It was our pre-filing department. That's where we get our revenue from. If we don't file cases, we don't get to keep the money.

You know, we keep our money in trust. It's great it's there, but I can't use it. And so we had a dip in our filings for two or three months and. Although we ended up, of course, filing more cases last year than we ever had before, and all that was well, just that short brief dip was enough from a bottom line standpoint that there really wasn't the profitability numbers that we wanted.

Same reasons folks going off to law school, getting married, having babies, whatever. But we're treating it differently this time. We're paying more attention this time. We're not letting our filings slide by saying, okay, well yeah, of course we're short staffed. It's gonna happen. We're not letting it happen. I'm jumping in that department. I'm, you know, rebuilding things, building even more systems as we go along to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Richard James: Now I've got a question. So you guys are intelligent people. It's not like you didn't hear, maybe other people go through similar scenarios where there was a lagging indicator based on current events, right? So cashflow lagging based on what happened now getting cases filed in this particular case.

Is that a fair statement? And when you do experience it yourself, like you're gonna make sure this never happens again? Are those two fair statements? Will Kelly, whoever wants to take that.

Kelly Grafton: Yeah, I'd say that's fair. But I would also say that, at least for me, sometimes it's hard to notice in the moment. There's so much going on. Being a business owner, being an attorney, being a, you know, a mother and a wife, and we've got so many people in so many moving parts, it's very easy to lose track of that and not really realize the impact of it until later because your brain doesn't have time to process it.

Richard James: Don't wanna wear the should hat, that's for sure. We don't wanna, should all over ourselves. But I do have a question. Will, like, what do you think? So what's the solution?

So is the solution just realizing it's going to happen? You learn from it and you fix it so you don't ever let it happen again? Or is there another solution you think?

William Grafton: So I think the solution. At least the solution for us, and it's probably the solution for most businesses, is to focus less on the people in the seat, but focus on what that seat's responsible for. And so after we went through that turnover last year, after we turned over that entire department, when we brought these new people in, we really focused on the role of the seat instead of the role of the person.

Let's figure it out, how to do it for you. Right? And I think the way we went about creating systems out of that, and matter of fact it was we had you and our pip call.

Richard James: Which for everybody who's listening it's a weekly call that you're on so that I jumped on in your peers.

William Grafton: Yeah. So yeah, so a weekly meeting that we do with other entrepreneurial attorneys and you were a guest on that call with us and went through the processes of collections and document collections and I mean, I just remember we were actually on vacation at the time.

That we wouldn't run into that problem of having to just completely rebuilt. Right? It's plug and play as opposed to completely rebuilding the whole thing.

Richard James: Michael, it's like they're relying on the system rather than relying on the people, so the people to run the system rather than the other way around. Right?

Michael Strauch: Great right, and we gotta have a system and then we can plug the people in to run the system. And that's the formula right there. So you guys obviously experienced that point of recent times, but you did discuss being in a basement kneecap to kneecap together at a desk.

Kelly Grafton: I gotta give it to Rich. Rich, you were our breakthrough aha moment. We had joined your world, sort of, you were sending us stuff on a monthly basis that we weren't even opening. We weren't committed. We still weren't sure if we were wanting to do this or not. And then we came out to one of your events and it happened to be your entrepreneurial attorney of the year contest event where everybody was presenting, you know, what they had achieved in that year.

And I was just, blown away. And I looked at a particular firm and I said, I wanna be them when I grow up. You know, none of it was rocket science. I mean, I have an MBA before law school. This you weren't telling me anything I didn't already know necessarily, but I didn't buy it. I didn't commit to it.

I'll send you my stuff. Oh gosh. Yeah, you know, and fast forward a couple of years, they're, that firm is one of our biggest sounding boards and we pass ideas back and forth and they seem to appreciate our ideas as much as we do theirs.

And that was really the turning point for us was coming to that event and realizing, yeah, we can do this. Let's do this. And we did.

Richard James: You're not alone. What one man or woman can do, another man or woman can do. I love it.

Kelly Grafton: Yep.

William Grafton: I think my answer is a little bit similar, but also different.

Michael Strauch: Sure.

William Grafton: As attorneys we're never taught that The Practice of Law can be an entrepreneurial venture, right? It's, you go to law school and you come outta law school and it's, you know, crusades, right? It's, you know, zealous representation of your clients and it's all about the practice of law and the you know, the execution of law.

Michael Strauch: Nice.

William Grafton: But you know, I never saw that in the law. And then suddenly here we were surrounded by people who were, you know, entrepreneurs and they're growing a business, a thriving business.

And that business just happened to be a law firm. Right? And so it was almost like permission, right? And so I think at that point I was like, you know what? That's who I am and that's who I should be. But that's not who I've been in this business, in this law firm. And, books like Michael Gerber, e Myth you know what really hit me with that book is he talks about you, you're a technician or you're a manager, or you are a leader, right?

Richard James: Michael, I think we got a new headline.

Michael Strauch: I seriously.

Richard James: Permission yourself to be a business owner even though you're a lawyer, right? By the way, thanks for the kudos guys. I appreciate you giving it to me. You know how I feel about this cause you've been around me long enough that I've talked to thousands attorneys through the years and most of them don't do anything with the information.

Michael Strauch: No, you're great. I thought that was fantastic. Both very excellent breakthrough stories as far as how we got from out of the basement and up to where we're at today. And Kelly, one of the things you had mentioned as part of the journey was the balance of everything, right? Of being a wife, a mom, a business owner, an attorney.

So I'm curious on, and Will and Kelly, this is both you, but on a daily basis, what are some of the habits that you guys take to set yourself up for success during the day?

Kelly Grafton: I'm not sure that we're very good at this part yet. I know I'm personally still working on it, on trying to figure out the best way to not be reactionary throughout my day and to stop dealing with fires and being more proactive.

I feel like I need to know that the firm is still, you know, going how many cases do we file? That kind of thing. I can see that all at a glance at my dashboard. So that is the first thing that I do in the day is log into that and see what's going on. I also have, you know, for each of our departments, I have sort of their key indicators on my dashboard as well, so I can see if there's a problem going in with one or the other department.

I still end up putting out fires and dealing with whatever pops up all day long and I gotta get better at that. I've been working with some folks talking with Blaine, you guys know of course.

Richard James: He hasn't been on here yet, but he'll be here. Everybody will get introduced to Blaine for.

Kelly Grafton: He's definitely.

The daily habits you know, you want to get better at it. I think that's a, I think we're all striving to continually getting better at it. I appreciate the honesty in that and the transparency. Will, did have you been developed any hab? Like are you more habitual?

William Grafton: Yes. But it had to be forced on me. And here's what I mean by that, about. Three years ago, I think, no, four years ago I started blocking off time on my calendar, right? Not just for me, but for staff and for other things. So, you know, for instance, it's grown now to three times a day.

So it was just, it was losing so much time. So that's where I started, was just blocking off this time for that, right? And then I discovered, hey, this is powerful, right? So I started blocking off time for other things. I actually have my brakes blocked into my calendar now because if I didn't have them in there, I wouldn't take them. I would just keep going.

Richard James: They fill them up with consults.

William Grafton: Yeah, and, you know, I also block out, you know, I have a weekly call at three o'clock on Fridays with my peers. And so that time is invaluable to me. So that's blocked off the sacrosanct, you know?

No, and that's the thing. Everybody knows it, right? Everybody knows not to violate that time on my calendar.

Richard James: On my version of that is golf on Fridays. Just saying I love my peers, but I tend to like golf.

You're surrounded by people, you know, employees and clients and other things, but. They're not necessarily your tribe. They're not necessarily the people who feed you as far as motivation and energy and things like that. So that time is valuable. I've got a, you know, three o'clock on Monday now, boom, blocked off, right?

These things that are just valuable to me as a business owner and as an individual. You know same thing with my Wednesday nights, right? I've got that time. It's sacrosanct, but it all started with, because I'm not good at habits, right? I would love to be Blaine Ested when I grow.

Richard James: Wouldn't we all?

William Grafton: I would love to have that.

Michael Strauch: We all, yeah.

Richard James: Michael, what's yours? I never asked you what's your daily habit that keeps you going?

Michael Strauch: Well, to be honest with you, similar to Will, I've gotta block the calendar. Cause if I don't block the calendar, I'm very similar in the fact that I'll just kind of keep going until I run out of things to do. So I'd say blocking the calendar is a super important habit of mine and I try to do it a week ahead of time.

So I'll try to block the calendar a week ahead of time for what I know I need to block out for on that week. To avoid anything getting booked up because obviously, you know, we have sales calls and right now those go onto my calendar, so if it doesn't get blocked.

Richard James: By the way, I too forgot to block lunch today, so I'm not eating.

Michael Strauch: I'm not either.

So, and there's not, it's not one of those days where I'm gonna have cancellations, so it's just one of the, you know, sometimes it happens, but I remember my. So we had a, Michael had a family gathering at the house this last week for his bachelor and bachelorette party with him in Delaney, and everybody was over.

Anyway, I'd stopped over and I just happened to be looking at my calendar and my goddaughter looked at my calendar, was like, oh my gosh, that's the most beautiful calendar I've ever seen. And I'm like, what do you mean? She just like, look all the colors. I go, yeah, but do you notice there's no spaces between anything.

There's no spaces at all. She goes, yeah. And then Justin walks upstairs and he sees my calendar up on the, he goes, you can I take a picture of that? I'm like, sure why. He goes, cause I just wanna show everybody how crazy you are. Like that's insane. Like my calendar is.

And so it's been calendar blocking that has been able to help me, so I'm addicted to it. Sorry, Michael. I took us down a train there. I just, I thought we never actually had that question asked of us, and so I figured I would dive in.

Michael Strauch: Yeah. Well, and once Will said that, I was like, yeah, that, I mean, blocking the calendar is so important. Because if you block it, and you build rules of engagement in place for the rest of your team to understand. If it's blocked, it's blocked, then it's blocked. And so now that time is your time to do whatever you blocked it for, and that helps set you up for success throughout the day.

Kelly Grafton: I'm gonna say it's that we have another year of 50% growth over the year before. I mean, we're halfway through the year and we're already, you know, done more than we did in the prior year. It's just, it feels really good. I keep, you know, I feel like freedom is on the horizon. Again, I mean, we go up, we go down.

And I think once we get this next batch of staff in you know, things are really going to start picking up. I'm trying to talk will into some more vacations this fall and early next year. Trying to get a few of those on the calendar, cause that's what freedom means to me, is going out and taking our kids and doing things.

I'm staying home with them. This summer we decided not to put them in camp because they didn't love all the camps we've tried the last few years and you know what, they're only young for a short period. So I'm staying home most of the summer and working from here because I can, I don't have a calendar like Will has.

So I just enrolled him in the half day camp, both in the morning and the afternoon. So he went to a half day camp. Then he had lunch with the counselors, and then they did the same half day camp in the afternoon.

Michael Strauch: It was always weird seeing all the other kids leave and we're still there and it's like, why are we still here?

Kelly Grafton: Oh, I feel that though. I get that completely.

William Grafton: But the thing is you were great at those afternoon exercises and activities.

Michael Strauch: Yes, true, true. We had him down path. We knew where to run, where to throw, where to kick, and we want everything.

William Grafton: I, you know what I'm really excited about the growth. I'm really excited about. You know, that I feel like even with the turnover we're having this time, it's not setting that panic in here, right? Like, oh no, right? It's okay, well, let's just bring somebody else in. Now, finding people is a challenge.

You know, that's we're still in a kind of a challenging hiring market and. You know, it is what it is. But you know, it's not a point in our growth we're actually having to redevelop our systems yet again, right? Because we got new people coming in, right?

And that's what we've been doing. And just getting over that hump and having this foundation in place now, it's just such a relief. And then,

I mean, bankruptcy numbers and filings were decimated across the country throughout the pandemic. And while I know that profitability was challenging for you through that period for different reasons that you've mentioned before. There was a lot of bankruptcy firms that almost went away or did go away because the business was literally gone down to nothing.

I don't know that you necessarily grew through that period, or maybe you did, but you certainly held fast during that period, and then now you're on the other side of it. Where we're seeing growth go rapidly, is that accurate?

William Grafton: Oh, we've more than doubled.

Richard James: Through that period. So your market went down and you just gained more market share by using the same systems over and over again. Is that accurate?

I mean, the growth has just been, you know, hand over hand every single year, which is fantastic and I don't know. I don't know what to say. We'd be on these listservs or threads or whatever facebook with other bankruptcy attorneys and they're talking about how their phones are not ringing at all.

And you know, we're getting 300 leads a month in the beginning of the pandemic. We were struggling to process them all to actually get back and get in touch with people. So we had a different problem. We had more work than we could handle. So I don't know what the secret sauce was necessarily, but I think it was just building up all those years, getting those systems in place, having our numbers, knowing what we needed to do so that we could react.

Richard James: Hmm. [00:32:00]

William Grafton: Yeah.

Richard James: Michael, where you want to go from here?

Michael Strauch: Yeah. No, I want to just ask for other attorneys, law firm owners that would like to get in touch with you, connect with you in any way, shape or form, what's the best way for them to do that?

Richard James: It's not that you have to make yourself wildly available to every law firm in the world. Right, right, right, right, right. But, if they, cause everybody's busy.

William Grafton: I don't mind at all.

Richard James: But if you prefer them to reach out to you on social or do you want to give a general email or something like that?

Let's not put out our cellphone. That wouldn't be a.

Kelly Grafton: Yeah, I.

William Grafton: Yeah, no, just reach out to us through our Facebook.

Kelly Grafton: Yeah. Grafton Firm fast on Facebook.

Info@GraftonFirm.com is a good email as well. You know, we have really, really good gatekeepers. So that's why we both kind of chuckled when you know, how do you get ahold of us? I don't know. We got 16 people that stand between you and us, and they're not gonna let you through.

So yeah, give us a try and stand firm with our gatekeepers, and I'm sure they'll let you through.

Richard James: One of the best ways for everybody to do it is to comment on this, and we can always get those comments or questions. Well, Michael, why don't you talk about the gentleman's agreement real quick. Speaking of these comments.

And while I'm at it, I just want to personally thank Will and Kelly, thank you guys very much for coming on. I think this was super helpful, very insightful, and a lot of value bombs drop from us.

Richard James: Yeah, I agree. I mean, obviously I've been watching your journey from the very beginning. I remember meeting you at that event when you saw that EAY finalist on stage and having Will and Kelly say, we're gonna be them someday. And you were, and it's been a real journey to watch your, a real joy to watch your journey.

And yeah, will, you're right. It's never over. We're always in this game. I'm back to working more hours before I did on Wednesday and a whole week, and I'm doing it on purpose.

Kelly Grafton: You heard it Will direct from Rich and I know that you do not second guess Rich. So I'm booking Disney World. I'm just saying for our son's birthday in January.

Richard James: I love it. I love it.

William Grafton: All right.

Michael Strauch: Perfect.

Richard James: Guys. Thank you so much.

William Grafton: Make it happen. I'll be there.

Richard James: I appreciate you.

Kelly Grafton: Thank you guys.

Michael Strauch: Thank you very much.

William Grafton: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Kelly Grafton: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Thanks.

Richard James: Thanks for sharing. Good.