Leah Miller: Run Your Firm Like a CEO

In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Leah Miller discuss:

• Run your law firm like a business, not a hobby
• Use accurate financials to avoid hidden risks and overpayment
• Track key metrics and benchmarks for people, operations, and marketing
• Leverage metrics to make strategic growth decisions

Key Takeaways:

• Long-term growth requires regular attention to financials. Cash in the bank is not a strategy; data should guide hiring, marketing, and operational decisions.
• Bad bookkeeping masks problems and can cost in taxes. Early investment in a bookkeeper or financial team yields high ROI and clarity.
• Monitor payroll, operating costs, and marketing spend as percentages of revenue. Focus on trends over time and adapt to what works for your firm.
• Financial data informs hiring, marketing, and process improvements. Treat new hires as investments, plan for cash gaps, and track time spent on business development for accountability.

“If you’re not paying attention to the dollars and you’re not operational decisions based on the finances, you are not going to have that long-term, sustained growth that you’re looking for as a lawyer in a firm.” —  Leah Miller

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About Leah Miller: Leah N. Miller, MBA, is the founder and CEO of Firmly Profits, a firm providing fractional CFO and bookkeeping services to law firms across the United States. Starting her career as a paralegal, Leah rose to become a firm administrator and CFO at a personal injury law firm in Fort Myers, Florida, where she recognized the need for law firm owners to gain confidence in their finances. Passionate about helping attorneys achieve financial clarity and sustainable growth, she now leads a team dedicated to offering expert financial guidance, process improvement, and strategic planning for firms of all sizes. Outside of work, Leah teaches paralegal courses and enjoys spending time with her husband and three daughters in sunny Southwest Florida.

Connect with Leah Miller:

Website: https://firmlyprofits.com/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LNMFinancialServices/videos

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/firmlyprofits/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/LNM-Financial-Services/100091343407958/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leah_lnm_financial/

Connect with Steve Fretzin:

LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin

Twitter: @stevefretzin

Instagram: @fretzinsteve

Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.

Website: Fretzin.com

Email: Steve@Fretzin.com

Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!

YouTube: Steve Fretzin

Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Leah Miller  [00:00]

If you’re not paying attention to the dollars and you’re not making decisions, operational decisions, based on the finances, you are not going to have that long term, sustained growth that you’re looking for as a lawyer in a firm

 

Narrator  [00:19]

you’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Fretzin, hey everybody.

 

Steve Fretzin  [00:41]

Steve Fretzin, and welcome to the be that lawyer Podcast. I’m so thrilled that you’re with us today. We have a lot to cover, and you know, people are looking at their nickels and their dimes and the Penny’s gone. So okay, ultimately, though, whether you’re at a big firm, a small firm solo, we have to look at the dollars in the cents, and we need to look at how we’re bringing in money and revenue and and then what do we do with all that? How do we reinvest it? So we’re going to have a really robust conversation today to make sure you can be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled Rainmaker. I’ve got Leah waiting in the wings, who’s an absolute expert on this. What’s happening? Leah, how are you? I’m good. How are you? It’s great to be here. Yeah, it’s great to have you. And you know, I think, are you down near Fort? Myers? Is that

 

Leah Miller  [01:25]

your I was, but I’m actually just moved just north of Tampa,

 

Steve Fretzin  [01:29]

North Tampa. Okay, yep, yep. Awesome, awesome. Lots of Florida friends, you guys are having a rough winter, like, not like Chicago, but you are. It’s very cold for us. You wake up and you got three, four layers on, I’m sure? Yep. Well, very cool. Well, fantastic. Let’s start with our quote of the show, and we’ll jump in. So here we go. If you’re not staying on top of your money, you’re putting your financial well being at risk. So welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about that quote.

 

Leah Miller  [01:56]

The biggest thing that I tell firm owners, business owners, anybody in a firm. It doesn’t matter if you own it or not. If you’re not paying attention to the dollars and you’re not making decisions, operational decisions, based on the finances, you are not going to have that long term, sustained growth that you’re looking for as a lawyer in a firm.

 

Steve Fretzin  [02:16]

Yeah, it’s really take that one step further. I mean, why

 

Leah Miller  [02:22]

the biggest thing is, and there’s not any big thing that you’re going to jump out and catch. And I always tell people that when I first start working with them, I’m not going to get into your finances and say, fix this thing. It’s all going to be better. Yeah, it’s being very intentional with the finances. And if you’re looking at it every single month, or, you know, every single week, in some cases, you’re being intentional with your decisions. You’re not just hoping and praying the decision is going to work out. And then that trickles into the operations and the marketing and how you hire people, how you treat your people, and so it’s all of that, those little things that just build on it. And it’s about being intentional with all the decisions you’re making in your firm.

 

Steve Fretzin  [03:02]

Yeah, really, really, great. And everybody you’re going to enjoy this, I’ve got Leah Miller here. She’s the owner of firmly profits, and give us a little background. How did you get into working in finance and then also working with law firms?

 

Leah Miller  [03:15]

So I started out as a paralegal, and my goal one day was I was going to manage a law firm, and I thought it was going to be 20 years down the road, and I was right place, right time. I was 26 I think, and our office manager left. I was working in a personal injury firm as a paralegal. Our office manager left, and I looked at my boss, and I was like, I can manage your firm. And he’s like, All right, so I got a crash course in QuickBooks. I will be forever grateful for him, but I got a crash course in QuickBooks, a crash course in just about everything. And I was at that firm for more than 10 years. During that time, I went to school and got my MBA, and I really started getting into the financial processes. And down the line, I was like, you know, I kind of achieved what I wanted to achieve. And so I started helping some people I knew who were in the law firm space with their finances, and realized that there was a need for law firm owners to just have more confidence in their financials. So that’s why I started working on my own business. I started the business February 2023, and by May 2023, I’d quit my full time job as a firm administrator CFO, and went full time with firmly profits. So now we do bookkeeping and fractional CFO services for only law firms. Yeah, and I have a whole team now.

 

Steve Fretzin  [04:30]

And did you ever think when you were coming up that you would be an entrepreneur and have your own business? Was that a goal for you?

 

Leah Miller  [04:36]

It, you know, I didn’t. I don’t come from a family of entrepreneurs, so it was never, like, in my sphere that I would do that, yeah. But I remember thinking when I was running the firm that I wanted a job where I could, like, come and go and just do the thing, like an entrepreneur, like I would see it from the outside. They’re like, you know, on their phone, while they’re like, running to do this, then they’re, you know. So I always thought it was a cool idea. But I would always. Think of like, okay, what what problem can I solve? What can I do? And it wasn’t until I started doing bookkeeping and financial consulting for other people, and I’m like, here’s the problem I can solve. So it’s been a learning curve becoming an entrepreneur, especially not coming from a family of entrepreneurs. But the funny thing is, my sister now owns a bookstore, so, like my sister and I are both entrepreneurs now, so, yeah, it’s, it was never on the radar, but I always knew that there was something else I wanted to do than what I was doing, yeah.

 

Steve Fretzin  [05:30]

Well, it’s just so interesting how a we get pulled into, you know, legal, and then how we get pulled into entrepreneurship, and then when everything works out even better than we had hoped, right? And we just all feel like I, as a non lawyer, I feel like I’m adopted into this legal industry, in this legal family, maybe similar to you. And it’s in the beauty is, is that, you know, is, everyone’s heard me say ad nauseam, that, you know, they don’t learn the business skills, they don’t learn the finance, they don’t learn the business development, marketing, and so that there’s people like us that can step into this industry and make a really big impact as specialists.

 

Leah Miller  [06:05]

I love it, and it’s funny because when I go to like, conferences for fractional CFOs, people ask, what’s your niche? And I’m like, law firms. And they’re like, ooh, work with lawyers. And I’m like, you know, are there difficult lawyers to work with? Probably yes, I’ve worked with some, but I just love the space. And I’ve always loved the legal space, and at one point I did think about going to law school, but it was kind of, you know, I was at a point where I was getting married and having kids and all of that, and I was like, I don’t know that. I want to do the lawyer part of it. I really like the business part of it. And that was a little bit of a surprise to me, because I didn’t go to business school at first, and so, yeah, I just love that we’re part of the community, and I also love that there’s such a shift in focus to the business side of law firms. And I have a client who’s always talking about how there’s a shift where it’s not a lawyer centric firm anymore, it’s the whole group, and the whole firm is a business that works together and really grows it. And I love where the legal community is going with that. Well, they

 

Steve Fretzin  [07:05]

may not have a choice, right? Like things are changing at a rapid speed, more so than the legal industry is used to. And so I think, you know, the ones that are run like a business are gonna, you know, that have systems and process and ways of driving in business every, you know, week in a year, whatever they’re going to be, the ones that end up on top, and then the ones that are still being run like a law firm in five years, may they may not be around, or they may end up getting absorbed by other firms that are run like businesses. This is just, this is the way things need to go. So I have a really important question for you, and it kind of gets to the heart of of this conversation. And jumping in with both feet you step into a firm as a fractional CFO. What are the three biggest financial errors that you find most often? How do they distort a firm’s view of their profitability? And what’s the first tactical step you recommend to fix them and fix those errors? So I

 

Leah Miller  [07:57]

think the biggest errors is number one, just not even looking at the financials and talking about the way a firm used to be run. I’ve met with many law firm owners who, for 2030, years, they’re like, I just checked the bank account. If there’s cash in there, we’re good. And, you know, it works for a point, yeah. But there’s, there’s not the scale of scalability, yeah. So I think that’s number one. Is the biggest thing is just not looking at the financials, yeah. And then number two is not seeking the advice of somebody who can help you understand them. So it’s one thing if you’re looking at a P and L every month, but if you don’t know that, there’s balance sheet items that don’t show up on the P and L and you see, oh, we made $20,000 in net profit last month, but you paid $20,000 back to a loan that shows up on the balance sheet. And you’re like, where’s my cash? Yeah. And so there’s the looking at it part, and then the educating part, and there’s so, you know, yes, you can hire somebody like me, but there’s other ways for you to look into the information and really start to understand and then going with that, the third part is not making operational decisions based on the financials,

 

Steve Fretzin  [09:11]

meaning that they’re not leveraging the financials to make decisions. They’re just going off the cuff. I’m going to hire this. I’m going to hire that. I’m going to, you know, get this agency to do XYZ, and they’re not even looking at their financials, okay? Yes.

 

Leah Miller  [09:23]

And I was telling somebody yesterday that so many times I’m the last piece of the puzzle that the law firm owners bring in. So they’ll have a coach, they’ll have the marketing people, times like four, because you need an agency and this and that, yeah. And then all of a sudden they have, they have no cash, and so their coach is asking them, Hey, what are your plans? And the marketing people are, what is your budget? And they have no idea. And so they bring in the financial help last and that’s where you’re not making the hiring decisions based on the financials. And by that I mean if you pull your P and L for 2025, Five and you see how much of our revenue we spent on our people. So if you spent 50% of your revenue on your people, and then you sit here and you’re like, I need to hire two more people. You’re overspending on the people in your office. There’s an operational problem. And so when you look at the finances, you’re like, Okay, we’re way over the benchmark here. And there’s times you need to be over the benchmark, but not long term. How can we optimize the processes we have so that the people we currently have generating the revenue we’re at can optimize what they’re doing? And so that’s where you start looking at the financials and saying, Okay, how do we change the operations to bring the financials back into like, you know, a balance of some sort, and it’s always up and down. So that’s what I mean about not making like, you have to make your operational decisions based on the financials. So you have to look at them, you have to understand them, and then you have to make decisions based off of those. Yeah.

 

Steve Fretzin  [11:02]

I mean, the first thing I did when I started my business in 2004 I mean, the first thing financially was hire a bookkeeper. Right off the bat, I’m like, I’m not doing this myself. I know how to read a P, L, I’m a businessman, great, but I don’t want to be sending out invoices. I don’t want to have to, like, do all the numbers and figure it out and reconcile the books and, you know, put everything from my Chase, you know, credit card into different kinds like, we need to understand that there are things that we do very well, and there’s other things that need to be delegated to people who enjoy it or that do it better than we do. And is that is that where also a lot of law firm owners, maybe from the beginning, don’t do it soon enough, they just kind of do it for the first number of years and takes up all their time and effort, and maybe they’re not accurate Absolutely.

 

Leah Miller  [11:50]

And you know, not even the problem of your books need to be accurate, because I see people overspend on taxes all the time because, like, we’re working on a cleanup right now, the income is double what it should have been, and the law firm owner’s like, Hey, I know I didn’t make 1.5 million last year. I made 800,000 but the books are saying 1.5 if that person just gave the P and L to their tax preparer, they’re overpaying on taxes. So that’s one of the problems. The other problem is, if you are basing your operational decisions off of bad books, again, you’re not making decisions that are going to help you grow so very like I agree, the very first thing you need to do when you start generating revenue is have somebody set up your books, especially if you have a trust account. If you’re a law firm owner with a trust account like that can just go wrong in a ton of ways. Yeah. So yes, you need to do that right off the bat. It all goes back to, what is your time worth? Your time is worth a whole lot more than what you pay a bookkeeper, yeah. And so just having that person doing Yes, it’s simple, yes, QuickBooks AI may or may not be able to do what you want it to do. That’s all debatable. It is worth 10 times more than what you pay to have accurate books from day one.

 

Steve Fretzin  [13:12]

And something you said earlier, Leah, struck me too, that, you know, hey, I’m looking at my, you know, bank account, and I see that I’ve got 100 grand just sitting in there, and I’m meeting all these interesting people, and they’re all trying to sell me stuff on everything like so most law firm owners, you know, they track the revenue, but they don’t, but they still feel constrained when the books look good. So the books, but then what specific metrics beyond revenue do you insist every firm must monitor kind of monthly and how do you turn those metrics into actions that move the profit needle.

 

Leah Miller  [13:42]

So the what I do is I look at everything in three categories. So the first one is your people. How much are you paying your people? And again, I can sit here and tell you benchmarks. You know you want to spend between 25 and 35% of your revenue on your people, that can go up and down based on how your firm is set up. So it’s not always a exact thing. And then operating costs. So you know, your rent, your utilities, your software, all of those costs that you want to be between 10 and 15% of your revenue. Obviously, it’s going to be on the higher end. If you are in a building downtown with a very high rent, it’s going to be on the lower end, if you are all remote and you know, and obviously software goes into that. And then the third bucket is going to be your marketing expenses. So for long term, sustained growth, most law firms, and again, it can vary. Most law firms need to be spending between 1015, up to 20% of revenue on marketing. So the more you spend on marketing, the more your revenue goes up, the more you spend on your operating costs, the more your profit goes down. And so yes, there’s benchmarks that I just gave you, but what I really like to focus on are the trends and what it looks like month to month. Then start making those operational decisions. So again, if your personnel expenses, they have to go up some you know you’re getting ready to invest a lot of money in marketing. You need to hire another attorney associate, because you have to have somebody to handle the cases your personnel expenses, especially if you’re a personal injury firm or something like that, your personnel expenses are going to be on the higher side until that attorney starts generating revenue, that’s fine. So for six months, you know, we’re hanging out about 45 50% of revenue. After six months to a year, that needs to come back down. And then when we are going through so, like, it goes up and down. So it’s more about looking at the trends and understanding what works for your firm that you need to look at now. Hey

 

Steve Fretzin  [15:43]

everybody. Steve Fretzin, here and@lawyer.com They don’t just market law firms. They help them grow from connecting millions of consumers to trusted lawyers, to smarter intake and industry leading events, they’re building stronger connections across legal visibility, intake, events, growth. That’s lawyer.com Check them out today with proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm. Rankings.io. Prides itself on proof, not promises. Mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io. When they want rankings, traffic and cases, other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get more rankings, get cases and schedule a free consultation@rankings.io today. Hey everybody, it’s Steve Fretzin as the you know, I’m the host of the be that lawyer podcast, and if you’re serious about growing your law practice, let’s talk. I’ve coached hundreds of attorneys to build bigger books of business without selling chasing or wasting time. This isn’t a sales pitch, it’s a real 30 minute strategy session to explore what’s possible for you in your practice. Just head over to fretzin.com and grab a time that works for you. And let’s make this your breakout year. And does it matter in your professional experience? What kind of firm it is on their marketing expense? I mean, 1020, or 10 to 15, 20% you know, is that for personal injury? Is that for estate planning? Is that for, you know, a mid market, you know, M and a firm like, how do you, how do you weigh that out?

 

Leah Miller  [17:14]

For the most part, it’s pretty accurate for straight across, yeah, pretty straight across. You know, are there firms that are spending way less than that? Yes, I rarely see them spending a whole lot more than that. But it’s pretty, pretty accurate across. It’s what do you spend the marketing dollars on? That changes. So obviously, if you are a firm that does B to B, you know, business to business, and you’re trying to get other law firms to be your client or other business to be your client. You may not do as much Google as a family law firm that’s trying to get, you know, people on the street. Yeah. So that’s where the differences come in. Sometimes, there are some firms where the marketing expense really becomes the law firm owner or the lawyers in the firm. It doesn’t have to be the owner doing the like networking. They’re getting referral sources and things like that. So in that situation, for that firm, your Payroll Expense may be a little bit higher because you essentially hire somebody to be or you as the owner or the network, you know, the person that’s doing the networking, and then your marketing costs are a little bit lower. And so that’s, that’s where I said, you know, the benchmarks are the benchmarks, until, like, you get into your specific firm, then it might be slightly different, and you have to figure out what works for your firm.

 

Steve Fretzin  [18:37]

So yeah. And I think, you know, when we talk about marketing, you know, business development is right there with it. So again, if you’re not someone that needs to spend a lot on Google and on, you know, having an agency represent you, and it is B to B, and you need people out networking, well then, you know, invest in conferences, invest in networking groups, invest in lunches and dinners. And things that can be can be written off as a marketing expense. But it’s, it’s not the same, you know, it’s there just, it’s a different way to to angle it than, than just, you know, straight up paying Google,

 

Leah Miller  [19:09]

yeah, yep. And that’s where you have to be willing and able to kind of do things out of the norm and not always follow, like, okay, you know, I went to a conference, a business conference, and this guy’s doing this, and I want to be like he is. You have to figure out what works for your firm, and also, like make changes as needed, especially on the marketing front, you know. And when you’re increasing marketing dollars, I’m always saying, do it incrementally. We want to get to 40,000 right now you’re spending 20,000 let’s, you know, spend another five or 10, see where it’s working and increase it, and then you have to make sure. And this goes back to a question you asked about mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes firm owners make is like, we’ll set a budget, and we’ll say we’re spending all this, and then we don’t go back to, like, check the budget or see if it’s working.

 

Steve Fretzin  [19:57]

Well, Ry was gonna say, yeah. So you have the budget. And you’ve increased the budget, but you’re not looking at the data, the stats. You’re not getting feedback from the agency, like, these are these? Are you just letting things ride? And that’s where there can be a massive amount of waste in lost revenue, because you’re not making strategic changes. And by the way, if you’re doing that right now, everybody and your agency isn’t giving you regular feedback, and you’re not getting, you’re not seeing your like your website analytics, or you’re not getting like data from them about it. I would be very concerned with with them with that money, and how it’s how it’s working for you.

 

Leah Miller  [20:33]

And don’t be afraid to ask them, Hey, I increased the budget and I’m not seeing good qualified leads come in. Now, if you’re getting the good qualified leads, and you’re not signing the cases up, then we’ve got an intake problem. So that’s where we go back to. We want to bring all this data together. Of, you know, is it an intake problem? Is it a case, you know, process problem? We’re we’re in the pipeline. Are we having issues? Because if you’re putting the money into the marketing, and it’s if you’re putting the money in, you should be seeing a result. And then we need to make sure that the result is, you know, flowing through the entire firm. And so that’s where, when you’re looking at all of this data on a, you know, weekly, monthly basis, you can then pivot and make changes. I’m just

 

Steve Fretzin  [21:19]

going to add one thing, and then I’ve got, I want to move on to move on to another subject, that money is part of what you’re tracking when you’re talking about business development and marketing. The other piece that you want to track is your time. So if you’re out doing a conference, if you’re speaking, if you’re if you’re running around a network, you’ve been in this networking group for three years, you’ve never gotten a darn thing out of it. Either. You need to know that and then make some changes, make some strategic changes to how you’re working and doing that, that thing, or you need to figure out a way to bail out of there, because, you know, there’s other things you could be investing your time in, not just the money, that are going to get you a better outcome, a better result. So I think time is money, and so we look at just the money, but we don’t look at the time. That’s, you know, that they’re best friends, they’re best buddies. So you want to make sure you’re doing both. Let’s talk. And again, I don’t, I didn’t prepare you for this. So I’m just putting out there, like tax strategies, like, what should people be thinking about, entering into a new year to, you know, pay the proper tax, but also look at ways to, you know, avoid paying tax that you don’t have to pay.

 

Leah Miller  [22:26]

Yeah, so I don’t, I don’t file taxes, but I obviously have those conversations. My biggest tax thing that I talk about is making sure your strategy matches your cash flow. So again, you can look at your P and L and on paper, you’ve made a large net profit that you’re going to have to pay taxes on. So, you know, we can go prepay some marketing stuff, or, you know, we need to hire somebody and kind of like, get them going before the end of the year. Or, like, there’s all those strategies. There’s other strategies about putting money into your retirement and maxify My maximizing that, doing a defined benefits plan. You know, all the different things where you can pull some money out and do it personally. You know, there’s the Augusta rule, all of those things for taxes, all great things to do, but in the end, you need to think about the cash flow, and so that’s where I come in. And I work with tax preparers, because their only thought is, how do I save money for you on taxes? Your financial advisors, their thought is, how do I save you money on taxes and get you money put away for the future. My thought is, we need money to run the firm in January. So that’s where having all of these financial people work together, we and I have run into the problem where somebody says, you know, my tax guy told me to move this amount of money over here. And then I’m like, but you’re a personal injury firm, and you’re not expecting any cases to settle in January, and you’re about to wipe your cash out. Like, what? How do we bridge the gap for cash? And so my tax strategy is, we look at it all year long. We put money away for taxes. We make decisions of like, you know, do we need to start spending down money in September, not like December 31 we don’t want to think about that and so that we have, like, a holistic view of, okay, we want to save on taxes, but we want to be super intentional about that savings, not just throwing money places on December 31

 

Steve Fretzin  [24:40]

Yeah, one of the biggest challenges that small solos and small firms have is, and in some cases others, is just they have a cash flow. They’ve got to have cash. They’ve got to they’re putting things away and all that. And sometimes they think about, Oh, I gotta, I gotta hire an associate. It’s going to be $150,000 plus. Plus I don’t have $150,000 plus I have 100 right, and I got other things to do. But how should they be thinking about that investment in the short term, as far as getting them in and then in the long term as an investment in the future?

 

Leah Miller  [25:14]

So the biggest thing that I always say when making these large decisions, and when you’re moving from solo to hiring is first, you need to have a really clear idea of what you personally need, the minimum you need. Like, I mean, we can all walk around and say, like, yeah, I need $25,000 a month. But like, what do you actually need to survive? Can you survive on 10,000 a month for the next six months? So you can bring in that person and make the investment into yourself in the future. So you need to know that if you’re like bottom line is you have to bring home 25,000 a month. Then that is what it is, and you’re going to have to keep grinding away until you have the extra money or somehow to bridge the cash flow. But I think it’s really important to think of it as an investment into the firm, and map that out. Something else I’ve been doing recently is, you know, we sit down and we put together a pretty budget. I have this whole thing that I do for budget, and we’re like, we’re going to make, you know, a million dollars this year, and we divide the million by 12, and this is how much we’re going to make every month. And it never in reality, like, comes to that. So what I like to do is, it’s a little bit diamond dynamic, okay, quarter one, this is what we’re projecting out. We’re going to be bringing in 100,000 a month. By quarter two, we should have been able to build up the marketing build, you know, I’ve got this new attorney. They’re going to be up to their billable hours. Our goal then is 150,000 a month. And so by the end of quarter four, we are going to, you know, be doing 250,000 a month, and then we’re good with this attorney. And so just looking at those dynamic like making it a dynamic budget and projecting out the cash flow as best as you can, I will say, you know, it’s obviously easy. If it’s a billable hours firm, you know, you’re hiring an attorney. They can bill 30 hours a week. That’s how much money they’re going to be or bring in that. That’s pretty easy for personal injury or other contingency fee firms. You can look at the case inventory, look at what you think is settling. You know, do we have any bigger cases in the future, things like that, and project out the cash to see, like, Okay, this is where we need to get. But those are all things that you should do prior to making those hires, because you don’t ever want to get to the point where you can’t make payroll. And then I would say, you know, I don’t love jumping to the line of credit thing, but it’s a useful tool at times for bridging the gap with the growth.

 

Steve Fretzin  [27:40]

Yeah, well, just a wealth of information. Lee, I so appreciate that you may know where I’m heading. It’s what’s Leah’s big mistake.

 

Leah Miller  [27:49]

My biggest mistake as a business owner was not hiring help early enough. Yeah, and that goes back to the question you just had. It’s uncomfortable to hire a team. I have a team of six now. It was scary. I should have done it six months before I did. And again, you just have to figure out, you know, the budget and what makes you comfortable. And then sometimes there’s a little bit of leap of faith mixed in. So, yeah, I did not hire a team fast enough. I definitely was not putting out, you know, two years ago, not putting out the product that I’m proud of today, for a month or two, couple months, because I didn’t hire and then giving up the control I’m I’ve done a lot of work on myself in the last six months of it’s not my face, necessarily. I’ve got this amazing team. They’re all trained by me. They’re, you know, putting out my product, and I can have the confidence in doing that and not have as much control over everything so well,

 

Steve Fretzin  [28:49]

that’s every, every, you know, manager and entrepreneurs sort of dream is to have not only a team, but a team that, when trained properly, can kind of run with it, right? And you don’t have to micromanage anymore. And I think there’s an evolution of, you know, micromanage to start, because you’re training them, and then maybe getting a little bit of, you know, does that work? Is that, you know, little consent before something gets done, and then eventually the trust is there, the work product is there, and they’re, you know, they’re just running free in the in the field, but that takes effort and time, but I’m happy that you made that transition. And to your point, that is one of the scariest things. I totally agree.

 

Speaker 2  [29:26]

Yeah, it freaks people out. Yep, it definitely does.

 

Steve Fretzin  [29:29]

Well, fantastic. Well, let’s take a moment. Thank our amazing sponsors, legal Broadcasting Company, syndicating this podcast and others. So check that out. We’ve got rankings. Io also puts on PIM con, the top personal injury mastermind event of the year. We’ve got lawyer.com Fantastic directory. And of course, if you haven’t checked out my other podcast, future rainmakers, don’t be shy. I bring in some clients to kind of share their stories and their expertise, as well as giving you very direct advice. Answer. And questions on all kinds of business development, things that I know you’re going to want to hear. So check out future rainmakers. Leah, people are very interested in hearing more about what you do. They want to contact you. They’ve done enough of this bookkeeping on their own. They need a CFO. Best digits for you

 

Leah Miller  [30:16]

firmly profits.com. I offer a free consultation. I’ll even look at your books and let you know what’s wrong before you even hire me. And then I’m on LinkedIn and posting on LinkedIn all the time, just trying to educate and help as much as I can. Yeah.

 

Steve Fretzin  [30:29]

Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate you and everybody. I’ve got my usual page of notes. Gonna put out three, four amazing video clips on YouTube. Steve Fretzin, YouTube channel, as well as some of the other places we are above the law and Attorney at work. So check us out all there. And hey, I just want to take a moment to thank you, Leah, amazing job. And I want to thank you everybody for hanging out with us for the last 30 and again, you know, there’s so many different things that they didn’t teach you in law school, finance being one of them, business development, marketing, and so you know this is hopefully your opportunity to either get some advice that will help you get on the right track, or know that you’ve got resources out in the field that can help you to be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled Rainmaker. Take care. Everybody. Be safe. Be well. We will talk again soon.

 

Narrator  [31:20]

Thanks for listening to be that loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fredson.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode check out today’s show notes.