Episode 308 | Making Leadership Work for Your Law Firm with Liz Weber
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Intro:you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more? Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams. Now here's Devina.
Davina:Hello, and welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, attorney Devina Frederick, and my guest today is Liz Weber. Liz is the founder of Weber Business Services, a company that promises to make leadership easy. She serves as a leadership adviser to professional service companies, boards, owners, and C suite teams. Plus, she's a strategic and succession planning consultant, keynote speaker, and author.
Davina:Liz helps her clients focus on the right things at the right time to get the right impact, resulting in enhanced performance, profits, and workplace cultures. Please enjoy our conversation. Hi, Liz. It's good to see you. Well, it's great
Liz:to see you, Davina. I'm happy
Davina:to be with you. Good. I'm so glad you're here. I have introduced you, but if you could tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into leadership consulting. What what led you to this?
Liz:I will give you as abbreviated a version as I possibly can. So what what first even gave me the idea, there was a thing such as leadership consulting or coaching, was in my capstone course in my undergrad. University of Wisconsin, I was getting my undergrad in international business because for some weird reason, I thought I wanted to be a commodities broker. Where I got that idea, I don't know, but that was my that was my train of thought. I just knew I wanted to get out of a small farming town in Wisconsin, and I thought that was gonna be my my outlet.
Liz:And my capstone was taught by this guy, and he was this thing called a management consultant, and I had never heard that before. But what he did and he explained is he would show the examples in our textbook, and he would say, well, this is what the theory says. But I'll tell you, this is how we really handle with a client of mine. And and I just love the practical application, and I love the idea that here was this man that could kind of be like a honeybee, and he could he could go from company to company to company and have an outsider's view of here's what I see. Here's what you've told me, and here are some suggestions I would offer you based upon my experience with other companies and just from an outsider's perspective, how you might wanna do things differently to be more effective.
Liz:And I just thought that sounds like a phenomenal career. So flash forward, I because I'm from small town Wisconsin, had no international experience. I couldn't get a job in international business with my degree. So I took an internship in Washington DC, and luckily, I was with the state department and basically the state department's version of the military commissary system. So it was a business office.
Liz:So, again, as fortune would have it, I was put into a position when I was very young and very inexperienced to travel around American commissaries and consulates around the world and teach non business minded people who were stationed at the embassy or who lived on the embassy compound how to import food, how to import beverages, how to provide activity outside of work on the embassy compound. So by default, I became a consultant with no experience and no training to to help these individuals. But luckily, I also got my graduate degree, but I was also working with outside consultants to our office, law firms and management consultants. And I learned through them how how important the consultant can be by having that outside perspective. So after ten years of doing that, it was a great opportunity, great experience.
Liz:I decided to start my own company, and I initially started it as a training company because, unrightly so, the consultants that I had talked with said, Liz, you're smart, but you you don't have enough experience yet to really advise other people how to run their business and how to be leaders. He said, you know, get your company going. Take some knocks yourself. You've already been a leader within the State Department, but but balance it out so you've got a little bit more credibility behind your name and behind what you say. And so I started a training company.
Liz:And about eight to ten years into my training company, I noticed my clients start pulling in started to pull me into projects and into strategic planning and into coaching conversations and into well, actually, early in my training into comprehensive training curriculum instead of the one off training program, the one off seminar here and there, really looking at what does this leader or what does this team of leaders need sequentially to develop their leadership skills given where they are individually, where they are collectively, and where they are as a company and where they wanna go. And so that really is how I started my overall training business to go deep within the organizations. Because one of the things that I do differently than other training companies at the time also was I would train on all the topics, and I would bring in very rarely other trainers to supplement or to take a whole series themselves. But unlike many other training programs that might have a trainer for this topic and a trainer for that topic and a trainer for this top kind of, I say, hodgepodge it, I had the ability to really go deep with my clients and also say, that's a really great question.
Liz:So do you remember when we talked about this back in March? And in March, we were talking about holding team members accountable because it's the right thing to do for them to make them aware they're starting to veer off track. And this is one of those opportunities where that skill set comes into play. Because I had taught that class, I had had the conversations with you and your team back in March, I could bridge those connections, and we could gain a lot of traction a lot quicker. So long answer to your question, but it was it was kind of a progressive but also an intentional journey.
Davina:That's great. And and I'm glad that you shared the part about your admitor, your adviser saying to you, this is the this is the gap. This is the hole. Go fill that with experience before you can go and and give advice. And I think that's really critical when it comes to, offering coaching or consulting to any sort of business is that you really need to have been in that those shoes yourself to see what it's like to own a business because even until you've really experienced it, you don't really know.
Davina:You know from a theoretical standpoint or from an ed you know, from an educated standpoint. Right? But it's very different from working in a a corporate environment or government environment or whatever. So I'm so glad that you shared that story because I know a lot a lot of people love to hear it. So when you you have worked, you've worked in many industries with, companies in many different industries, but you I've also worked with law firms.
Davina:So tell me what do you think is unique about leadership in law firms? What what sets them apart?
Liz:I know you looked at my profile. I know you looked at my biography, and I tend to be candid. So I'm gonna be candid with you. I'm gonna be candid with your listeners. What I have found in my work with law firms and leaders within law firms is there is no doubt they are incredibly intelligent individuals regardless of their specialty, employment law, family law, whatever it is, estate law.
Liz:One of the challenges that many professionals and law firms have, which in all all fairness is no different than some other industries that has really strong technical expertise, tech technical skills, is though they may have strong expertise in their specialty area, they don't have either the experience of leading others and building a team. They've been self driven. They got themselves through law school. They achieved everything on their own. And suddenly now they're supposed to trust others to help them be as good as they've always been.
Liz:Number one, that's scary. And number two, if they don't innately have those skills, it's not easy to understand what to delegate and how to let go of other things to enable other people to do the jobs you're paying them to do. And so my from my experience, I've come across two common problems. Number one, not delegating appropriately and not delegating clearly, or the opposite end of it, dumping and assuming that team members can somehow figure out by osmosis exactly what you need them to do to help you build your case, to help you build your documentation, and just do everything innately correct without you being clear on what you expect of them.
Davina:Right. Right. I think so this is a this is I'm I'm smiling because this is a common issue, with with we lawyers. First of all, we think we're smarter than the average bear. So we kind of think if we just had enough time, we could do we could figure out everything ourselves.
Davina:But then we come up to a point in our career where we realize there will never be enough time. We really have to get some help. And a lot of them are not afraid of sort of hiring staff, low lower level staff, staff to do a task or or, you know, particular things like answer our phones or paralegals who are trained to be paralegals. But when we start getting into hiring support to help us lead and grow, that really gets to be tricky because we have control issues as attorneys oftentimes. And, also, we have this real seesaw effect going on like you mentioned.
Davina:There's this people are so afraid of being micromanagers that they become too hands off. So the pendulum is swinging too far in one direction or another. And I see this happen a lot where they they say, I just wanna hire somebody I can delegate to, and they can take it and run with it. And we forget, well, you know, I've got two decades of experience in this field. They don't you know, they're or they haven't worked in my firm with me and my team.
Davina:So the that there's that hands off approach of I just wanna turn it over so I could take it off my plate because I'm so busy. Right. And that usually happens as an effect of people saying, I don't wanna be micromanagers. And they don't understand that you have to manage, and manage isn't the same thing as micromanaging. Right?
Liz:Mhmm.
Davina:And, of course, management and leadership are are two different things altogether anyway. But, what is it that give me an idea at what point first of all, give me an idea of the difference between hiring people we could delegate to staff and and and whatnot, those paralegals and those staff, and hiring a leadership team. What does a leadership role look like in a law firm that you wanna maybe hire somebody or elevate somebody who works for you? What would be, like, the first leadership role that you can imagine?
Liz:That's a that's a big question given everything you just said. I'm gonna answer it in two different ways. So I'm gonna answer it first as if you had said, if you were planning on scaling your practice or your firm, what would be one of your first hires and why? And I would answer that with, I would recommend you hire a business manager, office manager slash talent director. Meaning, someone who is really good and really strong and helping you identify what are the skill sets, what are the attributes, who else do you need on this team to help you take this business to the next level that you wanna go and then the next level you wanna go.
Liz:And I say that because most often, the first hire is like the CFO or something like that. And and that's fine. You need somebody to help with the books, but you can get an outside accounting firm to help with that in the interim. When you're looking to scale, I want you to scale wisely, and that means make good hires. And a person who has an understanding of talent can help you figure out what should the org chart look like given the type of practice or given the type of firm I want to create and that I'm trying to scale to.
Liz:Am I am I a solo for focus? Am I multifocus? You know, do I plan on having a whole cadre of of partners? Do I simply wanna be myself but an entire team? What, you know, what else what do I want my future to look like?
Liz:That first hire will help you create that org chart. Now I'm gonna answer the question in a different way. It should the way that that when you first start started asking it is one of the challenges that I see with initial hires and initial delegating, whether it's with, you know, support staff, whether it's your law clerks, whether it's with with potential, you know, potential team members, higher leadership team members, is getting clear on what you expect of them. And from my perspective, it's it's no different than being very clear in what you expect of the legal project in front of you. Are you are you creating a trust document?
Liz:Are you practicing are you are preparing for court because you got a divorce case you're taking to court? Are you are you looking at some contract that you have to prepare for a merger and acquisition? You know, what is what is the project ahead of you, and what is the expectation for that to be a successful end product? When you talk to your team about that, you're very clear. This is what we need to include.
Liz:This is what we need to make sure we cover. This is what I need you to research. From my perspective, it's no different than when you're looking at your team members. As my receptionist, I need you to be able to deliver this. As as my office manager, I need you to be able to do this for me.
Liz:I need you to be able to handle that for me or for others in the office and get very clear on what the outcome, what the deliverables, what you need of them should look like. And that starts suddenly making their life a lot easier. You don't need to micromanage, and you start better shaping the scope of their role with more clarity as to what you need from them immediately so they don't have to guess and interpret.
Davina:Right. Right. At what point so I have an opinion about this, and I wanna hear your opinion about it. At what point in the growth journey do we start focusing on cultivating that leadership team? So I'm not talking about hiring support staff.
Davina:I'm talking about hiring those leaders that will help us grow the firm. At what point, can be a certain number of people working for us, be revenue, can be whatever whatever however you would define that. What's your what's your thought on that?
Liz:So one of the things that I I do regularly with my clients, and it's it's quite often, it's one of my initial entry points with a client is strategic planning. So I'll facilitate their strategic planning projects. And I'm gonna loop back to what I was just alluding to. Once you are clear yourself into how do I wanna scale this business, how in the next five years, visualize in your mind's eye, vision is a picture. So in your mind's eye, in five years, what would you like your practice to look like?
Liz:Physically, describe it. Is it is it completely virtual? Is it in person? Is it whatever? How many people?
Liz:What types of projects? What types of clients are you working with? What volume of clients are you working with? Get that image clear. And it sounds simple to do, but the work that you do with your clients, that is not easy.
Liz:That that takes some thought, and that takes some real consideration because you might say, I wanna have a team of 20 people. Lovely. You and I know having 20 people is a lot of work. And and you're small enough yet that you just can't be hands off. You're still pretty much hands on at 20 people.
Liz:That's a lot. So you gotta you gotta ask yourself, do I want that type of lifestyle, or do I wanna work that hard? So to answer your question is once you're clear on what you want your business to look like in five years, start start visualizing for it to be like that. Given what I wanna be doing with my company as the primary partner or as the owner of the business, what do I wanna be doing, and what should I be doing given my skill sets and my attributes? And I say that because if you're terribly introverted, business development isn't gonna be your strong suit.
Liz:You may be better stepping back and really focusing on some of the meaty cases and intentionally identifying somebody to be your more focal outreach person. That's great. Get comfortable with it and then do that. As you look at your potential organizational structure, it may be if you focus on what do you wanna be doing and what types of clients do you wanna be doing, you may logically need additional talent that supports with complementary skills what you need to go deeper with your cases or take on bigger cases or whatever it might be. So to answer your question, I'm not trying to dance around it, but it it's it's determinant upon what you want your business to become and how you need to sequentially build the foundation to complement what you wanna be doing with your business that will still enable you to grow the business to the level you want it to grow.
Liz:So that may be an office manager. That might be the business development person. That might be some some junior lawyers to supplement what you're doing in addition to a law clerk or two. It it depends upon what company, what type of business you wanna grow.
Davina:So the reason I asked that question in particular is I'm and I'm defining it as hiring, maybe a c suite, hiring people from a leadership team. And I wanna discuss what a leadership team looks like. And I think that's a very different thing than hiring lawyers or hiring staff or hiring. And there is a clear point. I think some people, get confused about that because they hear people talking about hiring leadership team, and they are not there yet.
Davina:And I really think there's a revenue driver to that too. They go, well, how can I afford to hire a a this or that or whatever? And oftentimes, they hear they hear me interview somebody who is a fractional, you know, person or whatever, and then they'll come to me, should I hire this person? And my answer usually is where where people are if they're in that high six figures. Obviously, low six figures, no, but high six figures over a billion dollars, oftentimes, I don't think there's a need for that level of leadership team yet.
Davina:So that's why I was specifically asking that question because I think people get confused about it. If you're into the low millions and now we wanna get into mid millions in revenue, high millions in revenue, this is where we start looking for these type of people as opposed to, you know, I'm I'm a lawyer who's trying to get over the million dollar mark or I'm in 1 or $2,000,000. Do you need a fractional CFOs, fractional CMO, fractional whatever to run to create a a profitable, sustainable, wealth generating law firm. No. You don't.
Davina:Oftentimes, that's gonna just add to your burden, your financial burden without because you're just not there yet. So these things sort of come in into a certain order, in my opinion. That's my opinion. That's why I asked you the question to get your take on what you thought about it. What do you think about that?
Liz:I completely agree. I I I don't think I don't think you have the cash flow and the revenue flow under a million dollars with a law firm practice to to to build what most people consider to be a leadership team. I I would advise, like you, build out your technical legal team to give you the foundation and leverage to start scaling because you need you need a volume of revenue coming in on a consistent basis to not only pay your salary and and and theirs comfortably, but then you're also then positioned to then start adding, I'm just gonna say, the administrative leadership team, you know, your business development, your marketing person, your HR ultimately down the line, your CFO, those types of positions. But I would encourage you to you've gotta have the revenue coming in first. And, you know, again, I don't know your customer base, but but quite often, you can have solo entrepreneurs that are kicking out close to a million dollars on their own.
Liz:Granted, by then, if they're a services industry, they start tapping out because that's about all they they can personally generate. So, you know, to get above that and to start hiring administrative staff, again, it goes back to what type of lifestyle do you want as the owner of the business? How much do you believe to have the quality of life you want should you be able to bill out on a regular basis? And then how much do you believe your your other billable partners and staff should be billing out to get you to the volume of cash flow that you need to then start carrying more overhead type positions. Yeah.
Davina:One of the recommendations I make is for people to start with aspirational org chart just for their first goal. Like, who is the team that's gonna get me to x? Whatever that goal is. Whether you're trying to make your first 500,000 or, you know, million or 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 or whatever it is. Who's what's who's gonna be the team?
Davina:So let's talk about the team because I think people will be you mentioned it briefly just kind of throwing out some different positions, but let's talk about a leadership team and the kind of order of that. I know it depends on whether they whether the law firm owner still wants to be involved in the legal aspect or they just want to run the business or whether they want to just put a leadership team in place and they're out or they're doing legal work or whatever it is. But generally speaking, what are some positions that you would define as members of a leadership team?
Liz:I would I would look at your business manager, office manager, business manager as a as a position to run the the operations of your law business. So and and from from a responsibility perspective, that is a position that is quite often managing your administrative staff. They are coordinating with, you know, vendors and things like that. They are initially handling the accounting, and it they might have some of it outsourced. They might be handling it themselves.
Liz:They're kinda handling the operations of your business. As the as the business grows, then either under that umbrella position or that including in that umbrella position, the the position that I like to see, I mentioned it before, is your business development person because that position is gonna be your revenue driver. They're they're the position and it doesn't need to be full time. This this can be part time person initially or part time, you know, virtual even. But they're they're gonna help you identify and target customers, but also potentially bring some into you and get you exposure into you know, if you're a local local marketplace, local chamber, local communities, local banks, local CPA firms, whatever, your network, they're gonna help you get your name out and get your specialty out so people know why they should come to you versus why they should go to ABC Law Firm down the road.
Liz:And and that that differentiation also is really important because that's what also sets you up for you to be able to market yourself clearer going forward, but also to re be able to recruit smarter going forward because they're gonna be amplifying the messaging of the type of firm you want to be, maybe not necessarily the firm you are right now. So that I think That would be my number two hire.
Davina:Your number let's talk about your number two hire because I wanna make sure that we're clear on you've used the term business developer. And I think that to a lot of law firm owners who haven't had any management or background working for other law firms and no such thing exist, there's also there's often a lot of confusion among lawyers about marketing, my marketing coordinator, my marketing manager, business developer, rainmaker, all of these terms sort of lumped together, and they're very distinct and different Mhmm. Jobs. So if you are a smaller firm, you may start out with a marketing coordinator, just somebody to coordinate with all your vendors doing all of your marketing and then elevate to a marketing director or something. But a business developer is somebody who is tasked with bringing you business, bringing you work much in the same way that you think of lawyer rainmakers.
Davina:So that is a very different thing. They're not the ones who are gonna be sitting there making your brochures, communicating with your social media company, that kind of thing. They're gonna be people who are actively out there creating relationships for you and the law firm. Is that how you define that? That's been my understanding from my experience working in a law firm as in marketing.
Liz:Yeah. The way you just described it, that is the black and white differentiation. For smaller firms, it can be one and the same. But to your point, they're very different skill sets.
Davina:Very different. Yeah.
Liz:Because marketing is just the messaging going out. You know? What what do you have on social media? What do you have in any other advertising? What do you have on your your, you know, your your, excuse me, your stationary, your business cards, whatever?
Liz:What does it look like? In order to know what to message, you need to know what you want to be known for in the marketplace, what types of clients you want to serve. That's important for messaging, but also for bringing in business. And most smaller firms don't have the cash flow to have real strong messaging and a separate social media team and all that type of stuff and a business development person. It's quite often one and the same, which is a challenge because, stereotypically, individuals in that role are stronger on one side of it or the other.
Liz:Right. And my recommendation is I would lean more strongly on the business development side because the marketing side, if you basically can can project your name, your practice, your specialty area, your phone number, your website, here's here's how you help your clients, That can hold you for a while. You need the cash flow. You need the client portfolio to grow to really start your practice to to grow.
Davina:Right. Right. And I think there's so many vendors out there, services that are able to provide a lot of what we need in terms of marketing and advertising and that kind of thing that helps us sort of start growing those
Liz:Right.
Davina:Growing those leads. So talk to me about the first step. You you mentioned the step of sort of getting an idea of what your vision is for your firm. And it's it's really interesting for me because a lot of the people that I work with, they don't have a strong vision. They start out just they open, they hang their shingle, they start working.
Davina:They're high achieving women and they just start working and then they get to a certain point and they have some idea of what they don't want and maybe not a great idea. I think a lot of them feel intimidated by you mentioned 20 people in your firm, and I'm inside, I'm chuckling because the there's so many women law firm owners I talk to that that would be huge to them. Yeah. They say to me, I don't want 20 people working for me. And in the context of working with larger law firms, that's small.
Davina:Right? But for solos who are bootstrapping and growing their business,
Liz:that they go, oh, I
Davina:don't want 20 people working for me. I just want you know but tell me next steps sort of of what do they need to take? What are the next steps that they need to take in terms of a a leadership team? Should they, for instance, get more training and leadership for themselves to really understand what it is so they can get clarity on what they want? Or should they, just take a figure out which person and make a leap and hire that person and try to figure it out.
Davina:What should they do?
Liz:I'm gonna go back to what you just said, you know, in your work with your with your clients. I don't want 20 people. And my question to them is, that's great. That's fine. You know you don't want that.
Liz:So so what do you want? Is do you want a team of just you and two other people, maybe two, you know, support staff, clerical staff, and maybe one other legal person, or would you be comfortable with maybe three attorneys in your practice? What does that look like? And if let's say that you you're visualizing your your business and you've got three practicing attorneys, then then who are you the lead? Are you the owner?
Liz:And or are you gonna be partners? Because that's that dynamic in law firms, the partnership dynamic in and of itself is different than a solo entrepreneur or, you know, a solo practice. And so you need to get clear on what what do I want there. And let's assume that he's like, well, I don't really don't want partners. I I want it to be my firm.
Liz:Well, then that's great. So then what attributes do you do you need in your practice, in your business, to allow you to serve the types of customers you wanna serve at the scale you want to serve them to cover where you can't do it or don't wanna do it on your own? So is that some tangent legal expertise? Is that potentially not technically a legal expertise, but is it some other support service or tangent service that might be helpful? And and from a leadership perspective, is that is that maybe somebody that has I I'm just gonna completely make something up here.
Liz:I don't know. You know, an expertise in, I don't know, financial management. I don't know. It depends upon, again, what type of practice, what type of business you want to create, the types of customers you wanna serve, what do they need? And that helps drive the type of team you need to build.
Liz:And I'll if if you don't mind, I'll share something with you that I share with my clients when it comes to clarifying the types of clients that you want, and it's called a client portfolio analysis. So ask your clients to to think about the the clients they've served in the last three years. Create a spreadsheet. List them all. And then in front of them, you're gonna rank order one, two, three, or four.
Liz:You're gonna put a four in front of those that between you and I and your listeners, you don't ever wanna work with them again because you lost money, and they were a nightmare to work with. Because they have no loyalty to you, you are just a commodity that they needed you to help them get out of a bind. Put a three in front of all those clients that you broke even. You maybe made a little bit of money with it, but, man, they were a nightmare to work with.
Davina:Mhmm.
Liz:That's a three. Put a two in front of any client that it was like bread and butter. This this is like your perfect client. They're easy. They brought you an issue.
Liz:You go, okay. Yes. I can handle it. We'll take care of it. And and you you do the work.
Liz:They pay their bills. They love you. You love them. But then you go through your list and you put a one in front of any of the clients that you provided your core services to. But they also came back to you and they said, can you also do x for me?
Liz:X is it's part of your area of expertise, but it's a slightly elevated version of that service. And when you think about this client, you're like, I wanna do more of that. That's gonna really help my business, or that's just fascinating to me. I wanna go deeper in this area. They help you expand your portfolio of services or your expertise.
Liz:They're your tier ones. And so when you do this client analysis, what it starts to pop up is quite often, most of us who start are starting out our businesses, where do you think we spend most of our time? We're spending time on our twos and threes and fours, and that's why our margins are so small and we're so exhausted. Mhmm. But when we get clear on who we wanna serve and we start marketing to our twos and our ones, our margins start getting bigger.
Liz:We start enjoying the work that we do more. We start enjoying our clients more, and we have much more profitable businesses because we're much more laser focused on the right types of clients for my business and that are unright for them. And it can completely start changing your business. So when you do that activity, you now have bigger margin, which means bigger profit percentage, that you can then hire your business development manager, marketing person, more office staff, additional legal support staff, additional legal staff, additional experts to take you deeper, take you wider, wherever you wanna go.
Davina:Shifting gears a little bit, I wanna talk about, how we what characteristics we should be looking for in leadership team. So we can look at firm administrator or the business developer because these are the two that you sort of talked about, either that COO or firm administrator, business and manager, or that business developer because they're they're different. Mhmm. But what are the key characteristics you would look for in the hiring process? And what are there any tools that you use to help people figure out if people are a good fit for those positions?
Liz:So figuring out if a person is a good fit, I'm a firm believer in behavioral interviewing. So really asking questions about their their current and previous experience with specific examples of tell me about a time when you helped someone with X, Y, Z. That that just works so well. It you you can't beat it. The other positions like COO, CFO, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, chief marketing officer, whatever it is, again, is what is the technical expertise you need them to bring to your business that, a, either you don't have or, b, you don't have time for because you make more money doing things that are in your sweet spot.
Liz:So for instance, first off, so you and your you know, so your listeners are clear. A chief financial officer is different than an accountant. So an accounting person is going to keep track of your accounts. They're gonna tell you what bills to pay. They're gonna tell you what money is owed.
Liz:They're gonna tell you who hasn't paid an invoice. All very important. But a chief financial officer is going to tell you where you could invest or how you could use your money differently to make more money or to enable you to buy the office building down the street or build the extension onto your current office or project how you're going to be able to add the three new team members and leadership that you wanna add over the next eighteen months? What salaries could you pay them? When you should bring them in given the intended cash cash flow of the cases you're currently working?
Liz:That's what a that's what a financial person is going to do for you. So, again, it goes back to what are you looking to do with your business, and what skill sets do you need to complement what you don't already have yourself that you need to get you and your business to where you want it to be.
Davina:Do you think personality and personality characteristics matter when we're hiring? Because there are a lot of people who have skill sets that might not be a good fit. Sort of how do you so are there certain things that you recommend for, to help law firm owners who haven't hired at that level before what they should be looking for beyond just skills or expertise?
Liz:So bottom line answer, oh my gosh. Yes. Personality matters. Oh my gosh. Yes.
Liz:Because we've all experienced individuals who are technically magnificent but are a nightmare to work with. So absolutely personality matters. What I recommend when you are looking to bring somebody on your team, particularly in a key position, a a trick that I learned from a client of mine many, many years ago is, obviously, you wanna do in person interviews if at all possible, unless you can only do virtual. But if you are the the firm owner, you have other team members interview them first. I know.
Liz:That's great advice. You have You have one you know, you may have let's say you're looking to hire your a new you're gonna hire a a financial person to help you start advising you on how to build a new office building or add on to your current office building. I would encourage you to have your, like, business development person interview them first. Now the prospective CFO may not like that because they don't wanna talk to this person. They just wanna talk to you.
Liz:But what I have found in the client I learned this from a client, it's proven itself true in my experience too. Candidates will say things to team members that they won't say to you. They'll ask questions of team members they won't ask of you. And so when you and your team members who have also interviewed them can debrief afterwards, you get a much better picture of who this person is. And so I I encourage your listeners to consider that as an option.
Liz:If if they can have somebody else pre interview, particularly if the person is gonna work with them as a colleague, absolutely have peers be the first line interview. Because when you know, if they're like, do not hire that person, and then I hire them, they have every right to be irritated with me if that person turns out to be a nightmare. So
Davina:I think that's a great tip, and we see that a lot with as people are moving away from being the main hirer because as a law firm owner, we're first starting out we're the main one hiring and interviewing there's nobody else right then when we get to a certain point even if it's you're bringing in that paralegal that's your right hand person or other people on the team that are spending a little time with this new hire, whatever position they're going to be in, to get a sense of who they are as a person and get that different perspective from somebody who does something different within your business is a huge thing. And also going back earlier, we've talked a lot about being so clear on what your vision is for your firm. I think a huge piece of that, and I'm sure you agree with me, is culture. When you're thinking about what I want my firm to look like, it's not just growth and size and the number of attorneys and the number of revenue and all that. It's culture for most of us because we start our own businesses because we want to create a workplace that we love to be a part of, and we want other people to love to be a part of it.
Davina:And so I think that understanding where somebody fits in that culture is very important in the interview process too and really seeing you can have the skills, but are you gonna fit in here with us in the way that we work and and how we function as a as a team? Absolutely. Has seen that, with some of your clients go through that experience?
Liz:Oh, absolutely. And and I can tell you my work with clients right now, culture is everything. Culture is everything. And, you know, when with your listeners, when they are when they are, you know, building their own business, as you just said, one of the reasons, because they want to work in an environment they want to work in. They may have horror stories from corporate law firm or someplace else.
Liz:But again, it's what type of business do I wanna create? And it's not just that physical, as you said, but how do I want people to feel and treat me, treat each other, and treat our clients in a way that we can do the best work possible together. And it it's not gonna be that we're gonna be blowing up balloons and blowing bubbles every day. But how do I create that environment where we like coming to work every day? We like working with each other.
Liz:We actually like each other. We may not be best friends, but we actually like each other. But we also are are able to provide helpful, candid feedback to one another with the intent that this is gonna help you get better and allow us to do better work for our clients. Or you're gonna provide me feedback to help me be better, not only as an attorney, but as a business owner so that I can also do better by my clients and better by you. And if and if you can create that kind of environment, that's that's really special.
Liz:That's really special.
Davina:Have you, what impact have you seen with remote law firms? I have some clients that have fully remote law firms. They have large teams that are locally remote or some are even more far flung. And how do you think that affects? What have you seen with your clients in terms of the effect that that has on culture, whether that's law firms or other types of businesses?
Liz:I was just with a client, not a law firm, but I was with a client yesterday, and they're pulling more of their people back in the office. Just because in most situations, even though productivity has stayed high and has oftentimes gotten higher, What has happened is shared knowledge has dropped. Collaboration has dropped. Sense of community has dropped. Teamwork has dropped.
Liz:Effective communication has dropped. There are there are too many inefficiencies that are causing them to now kind of sputter and not keep growing. And the solution looks to be we need to pull, maybe not everybody, but certain positions for sure, certain teams that make sense, back into a physical environment, not five days a week, maybe two, maybe three. And we need to get very intentional that when they are physically together, they are doing things physically together. We're not just bringing everybody together, and they're sitting in cubes or private offices doing their work individually.
Liz:That's pointless.
Davina:Mhmm.
Liz:So it's it's it's coming around to not just I'm gonna pull people back because I don't like managing like this. It's it's it's turning around because the inefficiencies in some organizations are starting to peak out.
Davina:Yeah, think it depends a lot on the organization. And also, think there's a bringing in people and understanding there are that we may need to do things in a different way to create that sense of community even though people are remote and to create that sense of collaboration even though people are remote. Finding I think there's a systemic issue that most times if we can look at our systems, we can say, well, our systems are set up this way if that's what's causing that that problem. But I know a lot of, companies are doing that. They're starting to change back.
Davina:And some of that, there's been some interesting, articles written about the different generations wanting different things, like the younger generations wanting more of the office environment because they haven't had it. Whereas the older generation, I'm a Gen X, have had plenty of office environment, and we and we don't need, the discipline of other people to do work or whatever. You know? Mhmm. So or we don't want that camaraderie in that way.
Davina:We wanna get work done. And
Liz:Right.
Davina:It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out. Further we get away from COVID, how this continues to play out, and how AI starts to figure into what happens in businesses, including law firms. Yeah. Liz, it's been wonderful talking with you today. Tell us how we can connect with you and learn more about you and what you do.
Liz:Sure. I would I would suggest two main ways. Number one, my website, which is my business name, the abbreviation wbsllc.com. That's wbsllc.com. Or my LinkedIn, profile is Liz Weber CMC.
Davina:Wonderful. Thank you. We'll include those in the show notes for anybody looking for that. Liz, I appreciate you being here and having this conversation with me. It's been so fun.
Liz:It has been. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
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