You Read the Letter. 

You Read the Chapter. 

And Now You're Here.

So let me just say Thank You.

You didn’t have to keep going. No one made you read to the end of Chapter 1.

And you certainly didn’t have to come to this page.

But something got your attention.  Whatever it was I want you to know I respect your time. I value your input. And I am sincere when I say, I hope you will accept my invitation to participate in one of the following three “Thank You Alpha Readers” Free Workshops.

But First, The Ask:

The ask is simple. Please fill out this form to get your log-in credentials and begin reading the almost-complete manuscript.

Pull no punches. Use no “hedge words”. Tell me the truth about what works & what doesn’t work so I can make improvements to the book before it goes to print and enters the cold, cruel world.

Seriously, do me the service of telling me what you REALLY think. So I can make improvements, and my publisher can make plans (and plan a budget) for launching the book, hopefully by the middle of next year.

I’m not looking for your flattery. I don’t need any compliments. And there’s no place in the steps that follow which ask you for a testimonial or a fee of any kind.

Just the truth about what you really think, feel, and want to see more of/less of in the story.

- My publisher only asked for 24 Alpha Readers. Please fill out the form above so you don’t miss out -

Now, The Thank You:

Before I tell you what you get to choose from let me just say there are HUNDREDS of very successful law firm owners from start-ups, to law firms that are earning them millions of dollars a year – net, not just gross – who would JUMP at the chance to show-up at any of these events. But they’re for Alpha Readers Only.

So I hope you don’t delay and miss-out.

OK so the way it works is, usually before we will accept an engagement from a law firm owner to get involved in the management of their business, my team conducts a diagnostic to evaluate and better understand the internal strengths, internal weaknesses, external opportunities and external threats related to each of the law firm’s 7 Main Parts.

Sometimes, if the law firm owner has been referred to us by one of our current Members we’ll conduct the diagnostic while that firm is still on the waiting list.

The point is, before we will accept responsibility for helping a law firm owner make the sort of changes to their business and in their life, that normally happen when my team gets involved in the day-to-day management of a law firm, we’ll conduct a series of diagnostics so we can formulate a game plan and know what we’re getting ourselves into.

BUT AS A BIG THANK YOU JUST FOR ALPHA READERS

As a Big Thank You Just For You, Our Alpha Readers, we’ve adapted our diagnostic process to help you “Take A Pause” and think about your law firm differently. The purpose of this thinking exercise is to help you diagnose, analyze, understand, find clarity and make a game plan for the business-side of your law firm.

The outcome of this unique exercise is to find clarity and formulate practical plans for:

  • Shoring-up the most critical operational weaknesses your law firm may have; even the best run law firms have some operational weaknesses.

  • Protecting your business from any external threats that could jeopardize the firm’s ability to honor its professional and financial obligations to its clients, staff, vendors and last but not least. .  .to you and your family!    

  • Maximizing some of the business opportunities all around you that you may not see.  Perhaps because you’re too close to it.  It is not at all uncommon for us to find ways to increase a law firm owner’s personal income while reducing (not increasing) hours spent working “in” the firm pretty-dramatically based on some opportunities that are pretty-obvious, once you see them.   Not because we think we’re so smart – it’s just that when you’ve worked with tens of thousands of small law firm owners over the span of more than 25 years. . .you learn a thing or two.

  • And maximize some of the unique strengths your law firm probably has (every law firm has its own unique strengths) which you may not see - again, because you might be too close to it.

This isn’t a seminar. It’s not a mastermind. It’s not a lecture.

It’s two days to take a real pause and understand what’s really happening in your law firm, why, and perhaps what you can do about it.

Three Sizes To Choose From:

We know you’re busy, so we’ve developed three different version of this exclusive program. They’re each built on the same foundation, using the same tools & methodologies we’ve used to transform thousands of small law firms from practices the owners had to work for, into profitable businesses that now work for their owners.

The only difference between your three choices are that the first requires travel out of town for a fully-immersive “deep dive” into the inner workings of your law firm (this is the one I am most hopeful you will choose); the second will take place within driving distance of your city and it will be hosted by a very capable member of my team (also an excellent choice); and the third is a two day online experience for those who are right now only ready to “dip your toe” into this subject matter (I’ll take what I can get!)

What We'll Cover:

1. Marketing

Attracting the right kinds of prospective new clients is key.  But protecting you & your staff from the wrong kinds of prospective new clients (or even great clients but with the wrong kinds of cases) may be even more important.

We’ll show you how to hold marketing vendors accountable by empowering you to ask REAL questions, how to recognize bullshit answers, analyze marketing data that matters (not just vanity statistics) and be sure you’re getting a good ROI on every marketing dollar spent, and on every hour, you invest in marketing.  

We'll also share some common tricks marketing vendors (and staff) sometimes try to play to "puff up" the appearances of productive marketing.  And depending on who is in the room and what you bring with you, we'll open up our marketing toolbox and share some simple things we find most small law firms (from start-up's to $10MM+++) can usually to do improve the performance of your marketing by 10% or more, without spending another penny. 

“WTF - why didn’t any of my marketing vendors ever tell me about any of this?!?!”

Exactly. 

2. Intake & Sales

You know all those prospective new clients you've spent all that time, energy & money getting them to call your office? In this session we'll share some of the tools we use to figure out what's really going on when those prospects contact your office. Buckle-up because you’re going to see for yourself (perhaps for the first time) what’s really happening in and to your business.

Then we’re going to quantify some of the opportunities that probably exist to improve "throughput” of your firm’s marketing machine by preconditioning prospective new clients to want to engage your firm to help them have a better life; instead of wasting your staff's time, and their own coming in for unproductive meetings.

But of course, we’re not just going to cut your business open and leave it on the operating table. Depending what we find when we open up your firm we’ll share some tools and resources you can use to make immediate improvements to your firm’s intake & sales process without spending another penny.

“So you’re saying my marketing vendors have been taking my money and sending me leads but they haven’t ever bothered to make sure I have a reliable system for converting those leads into paying clients? But why wouldn’t they take an active interest in this important area of my business?!?!

“WAIT A SECOND! Is this just a wind-up to sell me marketing services?”

No. We aren’t a marketing agency. And we don’t sell marketing services. We operate as the C-Suite for more than 500 law firms, and we go to battle with law firm marketing agencies every day for the law firms we help to manage.

In this FREE THANK-YOU-FOR-BEING-AN-ALPHA-READER WORKSHOP we’re just going to share some tips, tricks & tools; and tell you where to look & what to look-out for, so you can avoid being taken for a ride by some of the many, many, many - very, very, very unscrupulous marketing vendors out there preying on law firms and law firm owners who have never been educated about how to avoid getting screeeeewwweeeedddd-over by your marketing vendors. Did we mention, we do battle with these assholes on a daily basis for many of the law firms we help to manage, and so we “may” have a bit of an axe to grind here? ;-)

3. Production

Gross revenue is a pretty-reliable indicator of how much value a law firm is producing & delivering to its clients. Profitability is a function of how efficiently those services are marketed, sold, produced & delivered.

This session of the workshop will help you spot "kinks in the hose", misaligned understandings & unclear instructions that may be jamming up productivity, causing unnecessary stress and creating avoidable inefficiencies that result in you & your staff having to work harder than you'd otherwise have to work to produce the same or more value for clients.

You’ll get to see in real time where unclear communication, workflow friction, and mismatched expectations may be slowing everything down and quietly (or not so quietly) draining profits out of your law firm…and driving you insane.

You’ll gain a better understanding of what’s creating stress in your business, where there’s waste occurring and how to fix it.

“Hold on a second. Are you telling me that there’s a possibility that I might be paying one or more members of my staff to walk around in circles, jump up & down and go through the motions ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’ and no-one has ever spoken up or told me there could be a better way?”

Yes. You know what’s even worse? They’ve probably been waiting for YOU to step-up & do something about it. And after your two days with us you’ll feel empowered, because you’ll know just what to do.

4. People

Getting the right people into the right seats with the right instructions, equipped with the right training, tools & feedback mechanisms isn't rocket science.

It's also not intuitive, easy, or something that's taught in law school or in most CLE's either.

But it's worth it. So very, very worth it!

Because when you put better systems in place you will discover your staff is "suddenly" able to get more done, with less stress and at lower cost to you (financially and emotionally!)

If your law firm already has a staff, please take a moment to imagine the compounding positive effects it might have on your life and business if each member of your staff was just 10% more efficient, just 10% more self-sufficient, just 10% more interested and committed to maintaining your high standards.

What kind of difference might just a 10% improvement make?!?

And if your firm is still in one of the earlier stages of growth and you haven’t many staff yet, then this is a topic you will learn that EVERY SINGLE LAW FIRM OWNER whose firm already has much staff, will all tell you without a single exception they all wish they'd paid more attention to, earlier in their journey.

This isn’t just about hiring the right people. It’s about giving good people great tools, great training, and better structure so they can stand on their own two feet and succeed in your organization, without needing you to hold their hand.

We’ll walk you through a few simple exercises we’ve used to help THOUSANDS of law firm owners get clearer about staff roles & expectations; build simple systems that increase accountability and autonomy; and reduce your own emotional labor and decision fatigue. Even a small shift here can have a compounding effect on your time, your energy, and your firm’s bottom line.

“But I went to a Bar function, and I was talking to some blowhard who told me he (it’s always a ‘he’) did NOT screw this up”.

Well, then you were in the presence of greatness. Or a fool. Because we ALL screw this up. But the good news is, if you participate in this workshop, you’ll get to screw it up less!

5. Physical Plant

Nobody starts a law firm dreaming about the cyber-security, how sinking funds impact the client experience (they do) or why “saving” money on an office could be costing you money at the bottom line. But give it a few years, and suddenly your tech setup, cluttered office, or awkward Zoom culture is quietly eating hours of productivity you didn’t even know you were losing. And even keeping clients away!

This is the stuff that hides in plain sight. The stack of paper someone keeps moving from desk to desk. The client deliverables that get delayed because of poorly considered file naming conventions. The constant ping-pong of “Did you send that?”

Most of it isn’t broken — it’s just misaligned. Which is exactly why it goes unnoticed.

So no, we’re not going to tell you to blow up your systems or gut your space. We’re going to help you see the friction for what it is: a slow, expensive leak in your daily workflow. And then you’ll probably be able to see for yourself where you can apply some patches, at least until you’re ready to solve the problem – eh, who are we kidding. This isn’t the sort of problem you ever get to “solve”. Wouldn’t that be nice!

This is the stuff of maintenance. Unfortunately for too many struggling law firms, a big part of the reason why they’re struggling is that this admittedly not very exciting stuff has become “deferred maintenance”. But just imagine if with a few “eyes wide open” tweaks, your firm’s physical plant could start working for you & your staff, instead of against you.

Whether you’re in a high-rise, a home office, or running a remote team from a beach somewhere, the setup matters. And chances are, there’s more drag in the system than you realize.

NOTE: We really tried. But we just couldn’t think of a single funny thing to say about this very boring (but deceptively important) area of law office management.

What did the funny thing about the physical plant of your law firm say to the other funny thing about the physical plant of your law firm?

Nothing. Because it’s all pretty boring.

See?

6. Financial Controls

“I’m not a numbers person”.

If I had a nickel for every law firm owner who has said this to me, I’d have more than $500 -that’s because I’d have more than 10,000 nickels! Which would weigh a little over 110 pounds, btw.

So before we get into why this is so important and blah, blah, blah let me just say this: I run the largest C-Suite Advisory service for small law firms in the world. With more than $30 million dollars in revenue. 100+ employees. And 500+ law firms under management – which if taken all together would account for more than half-a-billion-dollars in gross revenue. I also run the largest bookkeeping business exclusively for small law firms in the known universe.

And I’m not a “numbers person” either!

But you know what?

You don’t have to be a numbers person to become confident and empowered when it comes to the financial controls of your law firm. And let me just tell you something, learning how to become confident and empowered with regard to my firms’ financials was one of the most amazing “growth experiences” of my life; I’d put it right up there with becoming a parent. Seriously.

And I still count on my fingers.

So even if you never learn a single thing from me beyond this, please allow me to help you understand:

There isn’t just one way to read a set of financials.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the accountants took control over financial analysis in the universities and ever since, the only way to read, interpret, analyze, make sense of, understand and make confident decisions based on a set of financials has been dictated by the way accountants prefer to read a set of financials.

But there isn’t just one way to read a set of financials.

In fact, the things that probably make you a very effective lawyer – your ability to read and make sense of the English language, your analytic abilities and all the skills you learned in law school related to taking depositions, conducting discovery and drafting legally binding agreements... these skills and abilities and ways of seeing the world equip you to be far MORE effective at reading, interpreting, analyzing, making sense of, TRULY understanding and making confident decisions based on a set of financials, than are most accountants.

Here's the thing. There are two different parts of a financial statement. One that’s filled with numbers. The other that’s filled with representations and assumptions that are expressed in words. If the assumptions are valid, if the representations are honored and if the explanations make sense, then the numbers are supposed to add-up; but just because the numbers add-up doesn’t mean any of the assumptions can necessarily hold-up to a vigorous cross examination, or that the representations will necessarily be honored or that the explanations are defensible.

“So what does any of this have to do with your book? Or my law firm?”

Nothing. And everything.

You see, “The Lie” I wrote about in the first chapter you already read isn’t the only lie you were told in law school that might be making a mess out of your law firm and creating all sorts of other problems for you in your life. There are lots of lies about the business of a law firm we are fed in law school, in most CLE programs we attend, and which get repeated so often in Bar association meetings and by our mentors and colleagues that we just begin to accept it as “the way it is”. But that doesn’t mean that’s the way it has to be. You have the option to upgrade your operating system and live a very different kind of life as the owner of a highly successful law firm that works for you.

OK so back to this FREE THANK-YOU-FOR-BEING-AN-ALPHA-READER workshop I’m hoping to meet you at. . .

You’re going to learn, in plain English, what the key financial reports your bookkeeper should be giving you by the 7th of each month, are. You’re going to gain a pretty big appreciation for why it should matter so much to you if you get these financial statements by the 7th, the 14th or even by the end of the following month. You’re going to learn some simple questions you can ask your bookkeeper that will give you a better handle on what’s really going on in your business. So you can make more confident, more empowered and ultimately much more profitable decisions that will better serve your family and your life.

7. YOU: a sneak preview…

Chapter 2:

The Operating System That’s Running You

He thought things would change once he hired his first associate.

And for a while, it looked like they had. He was finally able to leave the office before dark some days. He even took a long weekend with his family — first time in years. His team seemed to be handling things well.

Until the calls started coming in.

Clients asking for him, not “the new guy.”

Deadlines slipping.

Errors showing up in simple work that used to be second nature.

And just like that, the brief freedom evaporated. He was back in the chair, back in the middle of every decision, every task, every fire.

That weekend getaway became just another story he half-told at networking lunches, like a lawyer’s version of the fish that got away.

It wasn’t that he didn’t have good people.

He just didn’t have a system they could succeed in. . .

Is your law firm helping you build the life you actually want?

Personal goals. Professional goals. Financial goals. Most law firm owners keep these locked in separate boxes — and then wonder why none of it quite adds up.

During our two days together we’re going to help you open the boxes. Ask the hard questions. And reconnect your firm to you. Because the truth is, a business that doesn’t serve its owner eventually turns into a burden — no matter how profitable or prestigious it may be.

And you didn’t read this far because you’re the sort of person who will be content to live in a cage. Not even one that’s gilded. You came this far because you know you’re capable of building something that sets you free.

Choose a Free

Thank You Gift

A Live

Workshop

with RJon

(Travel Required)

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Vestibulum eget lorem vitae nisl fermentum vestibulum. Nullam fringilla, ligula non porttitor finibus, odio erat eleifend justo, in ultricies nulla urna in ex. Integer blandit, nunc sed viverra facilisis, nunc felis interdum mauris, nec finibus eros nunc ut justo.