Don't miss the chance to join MPS and Richard James on our podcast, "Your Practice Mastered." Learn from the best Entrepreneurial Attorneys of the Year about self-replacement strategies, embracing text messaging as a communication method, and planning for the future of your company. This episode packed with priceless insights and strategies to level up your law practice. Tune in to master your journey!

Richard James: Hey, I'm Richard James and like Michael said, we just had the opportunity to spend some time with the winners of the Entrepreneurial Attorney of the Year contest and they unpacked some of the things they're going through.

Now, we're not going to share names with you because that wouldn't be fair to them, but I do want to reveal. Some of the ideas that we just learned the top one today was what, Michael.

MPS: Yeah. So top one today at the top of the page was.

Richard James: Replacing yourself. And that came in a couple of different departments. The first one was replacing yourself doing the initial consultations.

MPS: Right.

Richard James: So if we give them a couple of quick steps, what's the first thing they have to do when they think about replacing themselves during the initial consultation. A time audit.

MPS: You gotta audit your time and figure out. How much time are you currently spending in initial consultations. Right?

And the third thing is you want to pay attention to is.

MPS: You got to figure out, are you going to replace yourself with an attorney or a non attorney salesperson. And I think part of that conversation comes back to doing an audit of your close rate, because depending on where you're at with your close rate, is going to determine that when you bring this next person in.

Are they going to be following the same structure that they were using, or are we going to invest in a structure to put in place so that way we can set this new person up for success?

Richard James: Yeah, and I'm going to just plus one real quick. So the other two things you got to pay attention to in addition to all this is how much capacity you have.

So you like booking a week out or two weeks out because you're the only person available. Or are they having these feast and famine like cycles, right? What do you see there?

Because now we just did all this work to get the deals closed. In comes the famine cycle where now we have to fulfill the work, which means now we don't have the capacity to run more initial consultations that, or we have to dial it back to substantially. So now we're hitting these feasts and famine because we can't add consistent capacity on the calendar and it creates a real issue for cashflow.

Richard James: Yeah. So if you want to create consistency in your firm, one of the first things you want to figure out how to do is get out of the council room. But it brings us to our second point of this feast and famine stage. Maybe they're out of the consult room, but now they're finding themselves doing the legal work at night and they can't keep up with the capacity.

Now we have to ask ourselves, when are we going to replace them with another bar card, with another license, with another attorney, right?

And so, you start to have this moment, probably, where it feels like life is just chaotic. Because you're constantly working. You just did all of this work. You got all these new clients. Now you gotta fulfill all the work for these new clients. Plus, you got X, Y, and Z happening. And so, they have to really look at this.

And this is where a time audit comes into play. And figure out, okay. What is that next step? How do I do that?

Richard James: Yeah. And so I love what he just said. It may not be the bar card. That is the answered. It may be the administrative things that are getting in the way. And you won't know that unless you do a time on it.

You know, a lot of the cycle with a lot of small and solos is that they take off and they learn some of the things we teach and they start to grow and then either plateau or they fall off because they've reached capacity as to what they can do. With running all of the pieces of the firms, all the admin, and they've been trying to patchwork it together.

MPS: And just to be clear, I know it's a tough leap, especially if you went through a phase where you just seem to get things running with the business and you just started hitting new revenue goals and now going and bring on the idea of a full time person seems like a big deal.

But it's also costing you money by not making that leap.

Richard James: There is a fine balance here. I don't want to be careful because it's just a blanket advice. If anybody tells you to give you a blanket advice, you should run, right? You shouldn't walk away. You should run away because the reality is it depends on what's going on in your firm.

You got to watch expenses. You got to have profit first. You got to make sure you have a plan of action of what you're going to do when you replace that person. But more oftentimes than not, when you're in a small and solo situation, we find that. At some point, you're going to need to make that leap into hiring that full time replacement to be able to get you to the next level.

Richard James: Speaking of endless cycles, let's talk about one of the endless cycles we see over and over again, which brings us to our third point today, which is this idea that they, the people that get it finally, they need to convert the unconverted leads and they got to pay attention to their set rate. So that's the number of leads that qualified leads that get set into appointments, right?

That's their set rate. And they finally understand, okay, we got to do it. We got to have humans. At some point they get into this endless cycle of burning through humans, having a struggle with getting humans to do everything they want them to do. And they've been leading with phones, because, hey, let's be honest, I've been leading with phones my whole career.

And recently, you had a revelation that really told the truth today. The one of the, our people in there that, the EAY finalists, that were like, okay, how do I fix my set rate? And your answer was.

And so the answer is texting. Texting and emailing. And it's because we did an audit, right? We looked at there was plenty of dials being made. There was plenty of talk time happening, but there was one text being sent out.

Richard James: Right.

MPS: And it was just an initial. Here's who we are.

Richard James: Right.

MPS: And so texting allows us to take that next step where we're able to generate a campaign in which we can get replies, right?

Because consumers I mean, let's face it, not that they're not answering the phone ever, but spam calls, stuff like that's at an all time high. And so.

Richard James: And text response and delivery is at an all time high.

Richard James: Now, we're dealing with attorneys, so disclaimer. Disclaimer, you always have to have permission. We don't want you to go breaking any federal guidelines or rules about communication. But let's assume you've got community permission to go ahead and text because they've entered into your funnel and you've obtained that permission.

We actually have some data in our world that suggests that this worked. Now, without getting into the tech and all that stuff, just generally speaking, once we started a text campaign, I think we had almost 290 ish unconverted leads that we were working with. And what was our response rate when we started the text campaign?

MPS: Yeah, we had a 62 in a half percent response rate.

Richard James: 62 in a half percent out of the people who we connected with from the initial text messaging system.

MPS: And let me be clear about something. Those were unconverted leads.

Richard James: Right.

Richard James: It's not possible. You couldn't possibly, because if you had 300 leads and you made 300 dials, even if you made 10 dials a day, 10 dials to each one of them over the course of a week, you would likely have maybe a 30 to 40% connect rate tops. That's standard. No way you're getting a 60% connection rate. No way.

MPS: No, I mean, that's, I would say that's generous from a phone but the moral here is that texting is at an all time high. It's effective right now. It works. And you gotta be able to figure out a way to utilize it. Through getting these unconverted leads and even your new leads into some sort of response, reply.

Richard James: So without getting complicated, they could do this with a cell phone.

MPS: Yeah.

Richard James: Right? You could have a company cell phone, you could have somebody manually doing this. So step one is somebody being committed to it, right?

MPS: Correct.

Richard James: Step two would be figuring out what question to ask that's going to get a response. So it's texting. You've got to figure out what works for you and your practice area.

MPS: And don't overcomplicate.

MPS: Yeah, that's a big revelation, right? So many firms think that if you start a text conversation, it has to move over the phone to actually set an appointment, that's.

Richard James: I believe that.

MPS: Yeah.

Richard James: I honest to goodness believe that. Right.

MPS: And for the majority of time in recent times that had been true. But up until more recent developments. That's not the case. People have become more comfortable with setting an appointment over text and showing up to their appointment.

Doesn't mean we don't still confirm, stick the glue, warm hug calls, all those things. Do all of those things. But you can physically set the appointment and get the commitment over text. And move them into that next step.

Richard James: I think this officially comes under the umbrella of the old guy and the young guy, right? The old guy thought the old way to do it was the phone. The young guy was like, hey, there might be a better way. And he came up with a solution that worked. And it's working for us and we're starting to see it work for our clients too. I think that the last thing we wanted to talk about today, talking about old and young, right?

I think you need something to do. Maybe you want to play golf or maybe you want to garden or gotta do something. But for most people, they like some sort of work at all times. I think I will for the rest of my life. And so the question is, what happens when you sunset? And what do we figure out today that the firm we were talking about it with the sun setting concept? What do we figure out with them?

MPS: Well, first and foremost, record everything you need to build a library of training, right? If at some point you're gonna phase yourself out of the firm. You need to have a database of just frequently asked questions with recordings to them just to continue to build that up. And then I think we also discussed one of the main points was a mentoring process.

Right? But it's a training process by he watches me do it. Then I watch him do it, and then he can do it on his own. And that takes time. But if you go through that mentoring process, I think that's really huge. The final thing was or one of the final things was making sure that there's a plan of a visionary replacing that person who's sunsetting, right?

Because that person probably set the tone and set the pace and there has to be somebody that steps in and takes that vision, correct?

MPS: You got to have someone in leadership step up and be the clear figure for how the firm is going to move forward.

Richard James: That's you with me, right? I mean, I'm not planning on retiring anytime soon, but we're having real conversations about, okay, good.

MPS: I think so. There's a lot of fun topics, a lot of value provided today and certainly provided us an outlet to be able to share some of these really big ideas.

Richard James: Hey, we have a gentleman's agreement. Why don't we talk to them about that?

MPS: Yeah, gentleman's agreement around here. Look, we invest our time, money, resources to be able to shoot this type of content for you. All we ask for in return, if this is not your first time listening or watching, depending on the platform you're on, making sure you hit that Subscribe or that Follow Button. Turn those Bell Notifications ON. And if you enjoyed this, don't forget to Like, Comment.

Let us know if you have any questions and share it with a colleague that you might find helpful.

Richard James: Yeah. And of course, if you think that we're somebody you want to work with, whether it's on the idea of the increasing sales conversations or anything that we talked about today or anything that you hear from us, there's always notes in the description or links in the description that go ahead and click on, and you can request all sorts of free information from us or book a consultation with us, right?

MPS: Yeah.

MPS: Likewise.

Richard James: And we look forward to talking to you all again.