EPISODE 387 – Profit, Purpose, & Growth: Secrets To Success For Small Law Firms With RJon Robins

In today’s episode, we sit down with RJon Robins, an 8-figure entrepreneur, licensed attorney, and bestselling author. As the founder of How To Manage A Small Law Firm, RJon has achieved 8,000% revenue growth and works alongside 600 of the fastest-growing small law firms in the country. He also helps lawyers identify common obstacles that hold them back by pinpointing the seven distinct stages of law firm growth…

Join the conversation to learn about:

• Why so many attorneys are choosing to leave the profession.
• How to leverage the age-old law firm business model to your advantage.
• The importance of breaking bad patterns and finding new ways to achieve results.
• How to identify productive law firm marketers.

Do you want to discover the true meaning of profit and break free from the mindset that suffering is the only way to thrive? No matter what area of law you practice, this episode is packed with practical insights that are sure to provide you with the tools necessary to grow your firm, make more money – and have fun all along the way.

Stay connected with RJon’s latest updates and insights by following him on LinkedIn, get your hands on his book Profit First For Lawyers: Transform Your Law Firm from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine, and don’t miss his podcast, Profit First for Lawyers!

Richard Jacobs: Hello. This is Richard Jacobs with the secrets of attorney marketing podcast. I have a great guest today, RJon Robins. He was nice enough to send me a whole bunch of cookies, so many cookies that if I ate them all. I’d probably go into diabetic shock, but it was very nice of him. He’s an eight-figure entrepreneur, a licensed attorney. He’s the author of the Automatic Marketing Machine and Profit First for lawyers. We’re going to talk about how to manage a small law firm and listeners may know that Speakeasy Marketing, we’ve been around for 15 years, and that’s who we work with small firms, one to three attorneys. So, I think this will be a great and very relevant call and it does not matter your practice area, so please put that aside. This applies to any and all practice areas. So, if you have that in mind, let’s listen in and welcome RJon, thank you.

RJon Robins: You’re welcome, but none of this is going to apply to your practice area because you’re a special snowflake. We can’t help you. We can only help everyone else.

Richard Jacobs: I just wanted to put that in there because I know working with attorneys for so long that, that may be one of the biggest minds blocks they have to listing, you know estate planning and this sounds like it worked for criminal defense, How’s it different for me? Or I’m in San Francisco and people don’t act like that over here. They don’t search for attorneys or that way. So, that’s why I wanted to just put it up there in the front.

RJon Robins: I’m validating your audience and I’m saying you’re absolutely right. The things that work to market and market and manage a personal injury law firm will absolutely not work for your family law firm. The things that you’ll use to market and sell family law services and definitely the things you’ll do to manage the finances of a family law firm, have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a criminal defense law firm and the things you’ll do to hire, train, manage and get a superstar team of employees working for your criminal defense law firm, have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a litigation firm, intellectual property firm, so you have my permission to excuse yourself from all personal responsibility for doing anything to grow your business because none of it applies to you, because you’re a special snowflake.

Richard Jacobs: Tell listeners about your history. You’ve had a very long history in law and in marketing for law, so what’s that look like for you? What’s some of your background?

RJon Robins: Before I get into my background, could we maybe make a couple of big promises to your listeners so that they can decide whether they care about my background because if all I’m going to do is talk about myself and how great I am and everyone, who thinks I’m so great, they’re probably not going to be very interested, but if I can make some promises that are relevant to them, that can help improve their business and improve their life, then maybe they’ll think to themselves, I should listen to this and then if I like what he says, then I’m interested in knowing more about who he is.

Richard Jacobs: Created to that cynicism, so why should attorneys care to listen to this podcast?

RJon Robins: What you want me to teach your audience? so I’ll teach them anything you want me to teach. Listen, this is all I’ve been doing since August 24, 1999. I have worked with more 1000s and even to the 10s of 1000s of lawyers and small law firm owners than anyone else alive today. That is a documented fact. My company how to manage small law firm, manages over 600 of some of the most successful law firms. They don’t even care. They don’t want to hear this. What they want to hear is what’s in it for me, which is okay because they’re what I like to refer to as a human being and this is how we human beings are wired. We want to know what’s in it for us, so as your audience is your show, I can teach lessons on marketing. We can teach practical lessons on marketing, low cost, no cost, marketing. We can teach lessons on sales, how to convert prospective clients into paying clients consistently, predictably, reliably, or even how to hire non-attorney sales people to meet with your prospective clients and convert them for you. I can teach them all about how to document processes and systems and procedures and create some real infrastructure, so you have a business that works for you, instead of you being a prisoner to your business or your firm. I can teach them all about how to hire, train, manage and make a profit with staff. When to hire staff? Why to hire staff, how to hire staff, how to onboard staff. We can talk all about financial controls, budgets, cash flow projections, how to really make a profit, how to really make sure you’re taking a profit, a financial profit, out of your firm. We can talk about mindset, goal setting. You tell me what you think your audience would be most interested in and we can drill a mile deep on that.

Richard Jacobs: I’ll tell you what I’m noticing and I listen to the calls that are sales people and experts make all the time, so what?

RJon Robins: This year I’m seeing record numbers of attorneys leaving the profession, which is very scary to me, for obvious reasons, but someone that’s spent years getting a law degree and dealing with all the aspects of running a firm is now leaving their profession, so that’s one thing I see. The other thing I see is the middle is being squeezed, so I speak to attorneys that are saying, everything’s going great. We don’t need you. We’re so busy we can’t even take it and then I speak to a lot of attorneys that are starving to death. They’re really struggling because they’re in the same city, the same Metro, doesn’t matter where it is in the United States, so I think a helpful thing would be for attorneys that are solos or very small firms that are struggling right now, the avatar I usually deal with as an attorney has been in practice for at least 10 years. What used to work doesn’t work anymore. They’re just seeing their retainer fees being eroded by competition. They’re just having a real hard time getting to a comfortable place where they could do their job and they’re not having to scratch constantly and try to drum up more business. So, the folks that are struggling, I think, would be a good audience for this podcast. 

Richard Jacobs: What specifically do you want me to solve for them, if I could wave a magic wand and tap them on the head and make something go away, or make something better? What would you like me to teach them and give them and that’s what I’ll do?

RJon Robins: Let’s look at it from your perspective again, you work with over 10,000 attorneys. What are some of the commonalities that you see that pauses attorneys to be in this boom and bust cycle. They get a bunch of clients. They’re okay, then the phones go dead. They get some clients, then the phones go dead. They have a marketing company. They promised them all this stuff, but doesn’t manifest now they’re searching for another one that kind.

Richard Jacobs: First off, you want to take a guess how long lawyers have starting marketing, managing, growing, buying, even selling law firms.

RJon Robins: As long as law has been around longer, 1000s of years, lawyers have been starting, marketing, managing, buying, selling, growing law firms for 1000s of years. The point being, this is not a new business model. This is a very well known, proven, well-understood business model that has evolved over 1000s of years to function really well when it’s run the right way. Of course, when you run it backwards, upside down, inside out and with your head up your ass, it doesn’t run so well, but when you manage the business of your law firm the way that the business of the law firm was meant to be managed. It works really well and you don’t have all those problems. So, I want you to just imagine someone driving down the street in a car and there’s smoke coming out the back and there’s steam coming out the front and is making an awful racket and it’s like it’s just the tires are flat. Imagine how bad that experience would be. Can you imagine that for a minute?

Richard Jacobs: It’d be a fear that the car’s going to die completely.

RJon Robins: What if the car in front of you was in the same condition? What if the car next to you was in the same condition? What if every car on the road was in more or less the same condition? Then you wouldn’t think it was so bad. You would think this is just normal. Maybe this is just how cars are supposed to be.

Richard Jacobs: I would think I’m living in Soviet Russia.

RJon Robins: It looks like when I see the state of law firms today. Most of the owners of solo and small law firms have never taken a single class in their entire life on the business of running a law firm. Most of the lawyers have never taken a class or studied marketing. They don’t understand what marketing is. They think that marketing is just throwing money at things and it’s all digital. They don’t understand what marketing really is. They don’t really understand the profession of sales and how professional and ethical and really loving and considerate and generous sales is supposed to be when it’s done the right way. They’ve never taken a class in their life on how to document processes and systems and procedures to build infrastructure so their law firm can function like a real business with proper infrastructure. They’ve never taken a class on how to hire, train, manage, a lead and make a profit with staff. Even the employment lawyers, they can cite the law to you all day long, but they don’t really know how to hire, train, manage and make a profit with staff. Most of the struggling law firm owners out there that you’re describing, are experiencing the effects that they’re experiencing also in part because they’ve never studied financial controls. They don’t really understand what a budget is. They don’t really know how to use financial controls or key performance indicators because no one’s ever taught them and it’s not that they’re stupid. They’re all very smart people. I went to law school. There’s no one that I went to law school with who isn’t smart. We’re all smart. The issue is, if no one has ever taught you how to run the business of a law firm, then your law firm is going to run like is being run by someone, who doesn’t know of how to run the business of a law firm predictably bad and the problem is that if all around you are other law firm owners who are running their businesses equally badly and getting equally bad results. You look around and you think, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed person is king. I’m doing pretty good. Look at me. I’m not as miserable as he is, or as bad off as she is, or having all the same problems that they are, but you don’t even realize how much better things could be if only you started thinking of your law firm like a business and treating it like a business and I don’t know, wrote a business plan, created a marketing plan with a marketing budget, with marketing key performance indicators, with data that you track and measure, so you can track and measure return on investment and yield. Created an actual sales system that work for you systematically, even when you’re away from the office with emergency access only for days, weeks or months at a time, which, yes, that is a very realistic possibility if you get your law firm working for you the right way and I could just go down the line. So, you know.

Richard Jacobs: A part of this also is, like, the is a quote from Epictetus from like 2000 years ago, something like a man cannot learn what he thinks he already knows and just honestly, I see a lot of that in my own business of marketing to lawyers and for them. If there’s a problem, I have to assume it’s me. I’m the limiting factor and I have to revisit and go back to the drawing board and say, what do I need to do differently in order to make this work?  but if you’re not willing to do that and you think you know everything, I’ve tried that before or it doesn’t work then it’s that’s what’s going to happen. You got to be stuck. I think that’s a pervasive attitude amongst a lot of attorneys. Unfortunately.

RJon Robins: One of the big challenges we have in our business and I should preface this by saying we’ve had a waiting list for the better part of off and on, mostly on we’ve had a waiting list for the better part of the last three years and so I’m not here, I got nothing to sell. I’ve got a ton of free resources. I’m happy to share with you, to share with anyone in your audience. So, I’m not here to sell anyone on anything. I’m just here to share with you what I know and answer any questions you want, but the problem is, most of the struggling law firm owners, they gravitate to people who are in the same predicament that they’re in, so you go to the average bar function, and all the people with law firms in what I call the first stage of growth, 0 to around $250,000 in revenue. They’re hanging around with everyone with law firms in 0 to $250,000 in revenue and all the people with law firms, 250, to 500-ish tend to be hanging around with everyone hanging around 250 to 500 and the 500 to 1,000,005 lawyers are hanging around together and the 1,000,005 to 3,000,000 lawyers are hanging around together, and the 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 lawyers. The problem is this is like the blind leading the blind. They’re all asking each other for advice based on where they’re all at and no one is looking to someone, who’s been where they want to be, and so if you’re experiencing, feast or famine, cash flow, if cash flow is up and cash flow is down and you talk to everyone at the bar function with you, and you talk to all your friends who are experiencing the same thing. What you end up doing is creating a focus group to workshop your bullshit explanations that actually make no sense, except you think they make sense because all your friends agree that they make sense because they’re the same explanations that your friends have, but I take that owner of the $250,000 law firm. I dropped them into one of our meetings with a bunch of 10, 15 to $20 million law firm owners and their explanations don’t make any sense anymore and this is one of the really cool things that happens every quarter at how to manage a small law firm because we run these live quarterly meetings where we have hundreds of our members getting together and this is a member only event. I’m not trying to sell it. It’s trying to sell it. Your audience is, respectfully not invited, but we have these members only events, and we bring these members in, we put them all in a room together, and you got the $250,000 law firm owner and the $500,000 law firm owner, the million dollars, or the $2 million and the $10 million law firm owner all together, and it’s like, you don’t seem that different than me? I’m not. You don’t seem any smarter than me. Don’t claim to be. You don’t seem to have any more time and everyone’s got the same 24/7 (168 hours a week). I got the same time as you and you’ve got kids and I’ve got kids and you’ve got crazy parents and I’ve got elderly parents and you’ve got a sick cat and I’ve got a sick dog and you’ve got and we’re all human beings and the reason why one of these human beings owns a $10 million law firm and the other human being owns a $250,000 law firm is because the owner of the $10 million law firm is making different choices and tolerating different things and prioritizing different things, whereas the owner of the $250,000 law firm is tolerating a lot of bullshit, mostly because they don’t realize they don’t have to and if you keep tolerating the same bullshit and acting as if that was normal, you’re going to keep reproducing the same results over and over again. You mentioned Epictetus. There’s a story about the ship of thesis and the story of the ship of thesis is that this ship, this Ancient Roman warship, was used to do some sort of big heroic rescue 1000 years ago or whatever it was and every year they’ve maintained this ship and every year they sail it on a commemorative reenactment of the journey and one day someone says, wait a second, this ship was originally built, whatever, 1000 years ago, 500 years ago and we replaced one of the planks and we replaced one of the hinges and we replaced one of the sails and we replaced one of the ropes and now not one single piece of the original ship is still on the ship and yet we still call it the ship of thesis. When does a ship stop being the same ship after you’ve changed enough pieces of it out? It’s like these bands that are still the same band, even though not one single original member of the band is still there. It’s still the same band. So, you know what happens in law firms is every day because the owner of the law firm doesn’t know a better way and isn’t open to a better way and maybe even is afraid of a better way and maybe takes false comfort in the disappointing results of their friends. They keep rebuilding the same ship of thesis over and over again. Why are you doing the marketing the way you’re doing the marketing? We’re doing the marketing the way we’re doing the marketing because that’s the way we’ve always done the marketing. Why are you doing the sales the way you’re doing the sales? We’re doing the sales the way we’re doing the sales because that’s how we’ve always done the sales. Why are you getting where I’m going with this?

Richard Jacobs: I have like, another example for you. You know the company that will pick up your garbage. You don’t think about them. You don’t care. You don’t ask them any questions. You only care if there’s a problem and they haven’t picked up the garbage. Why haven’t they picked up the garbage? You kick over to can you say, we’re going to get a new company to do this and that’s what it seems like some attorneys do when it comes to marketing. I don’t want to deal with this here and they throw it in your lap. You deal with it. I just want to be the attorney. Let me know when it works. Thanks. Bye.

RJon Robins: Let’s talk about marketing and let’s get specific on things. If lawyers understood what marketing actually is or I should say, if lawyers understood what marketing could be, lawyers would be in love with marketing because marketing, when done right the best kind of marketing is evangelism. The best kind of marketing is advocacy and evangelism. It’s getting excited about a message. So, one of the messages that I’m really excited about is this idea of the doctrine of sacrifice and that has been indoctrinated into lawyers because of law school. Law school indoctrinates all of us into this doctrine of sacrifice, where we’re supposed to take pride in how much we suffer and we’re supposed to take pride in how much we sacrifice and we’re supposed to take pride in how much we can endure and how much we can take and at the same time, we’re supposed to apologize for any pecuniary gains that we might enjoy as a result of running a business well, but gross revenue in a law firm is a very reliable indicator of how much value the law firm has produced. All things, being equal $1 million, law firm is going to produce twice as much value in the world as a $500,000 law firm. Profit is a function of how efficiently the business is run. These are two different things, but Law School, which doesn’t teach us anything about the business or in a law firm, conflates everything together and tells you that you should apologize for making too much profit from your law firm and you shouldn’t even take any pride whatsoever in how much value your law firm produces. Instead, you should just take pride in how much you suffer and take pride and how much you sacrifice and take pride in how much you endure. Anyway listen, I built a $30 million business and growing pretty much just standing on stages ranting about the doctrine of sacrifice and how messed up it is and the right people who are in the audience reveal themselves and say, I agree with that. I want to know more about that and that’s how you open up a dialog and end up doing business for a decade or more with some of our members. If lawyers understood that, that is really the key to marketing, is being willing to speak truth to power, being willing to take potentially unpopular opinions, being willing to speak your mind, even when everyone around you wishes you would just shut up. Be the voice of change, be the agent of change, if you’ll just go out and do that in your marketing, if that’s what your marketing is all about, you get to feel good in your soul every day and/or by the way, your marketing will be 10 times more effective than this milk toast let’s not offend anyone. Let’s try to appeal to everyone nonsense that most lawyers settle for and then, of course, they hate marketing because it takes all the soul out of it, takes all the fun out of it, takes all the excitement out of it, and/or by the way, takes all the profit out of it.

Richard Jacobs: I think we may have said it offline, but I’m not saying this to brag. I’m just saying this to show the gravity of the situation. One thing is actually answering the phone.

RJon Robins: Don’t get me started on that. Don’t even get me stuck. Don’t even get me started and I got to tell you the stats. Listen, I was trying to be calm. I was trying to be polite. It’s my first time on your show. I’d like to be invited back, but you’ve waved the flag in front of the bull and now I have to take, don’t even get me started about the fact that you don’t have enough money to train your staff and to hire people to buy yourself some freedom. Meanwhile, if I mystery shop your law firm, no one answers the phone. It just rings and rings. I can’t tell you how many times I talked to a prospective new member over the years and they’re whining about I’m broken off money and my light sucks and I say, look, we’re going to do a little experiment and I say, what’s the phone number of your firm? and I dial the phone, I put out a speaker phone and it rings and it rings and it rings and I’m like, you see the problem? or they answer the phone and like, it sounds like the person is chewing gum while they’re talking on the phone and they don’t know anything.

Richard Jacobs: Let me tell you and listeners how I get legal services when I need them. We have to do this. There’s no choice. I have my guys build a list like, right now I need an elder law attorney for my father. I had them build a list of, like, 140 elder law attorneys in a certain state. I gave them a script to call all of them and see who actually answers the phone and who actually does elder laws, specifically Medicaid type planning. So, they got back to me with a list of, like 7 that out of like 140, then I’ll call the 7 and again, most of them still never call you back because you get all these messages and stuff. So, I’ll get, if I’m lucky one, maybe two that actually can help me and answer the phone and that’s how I get legal services. I don’t care about reviews. I don’t look at anything. I just tell them Google it and just start calling. That’s how bad it is and I’ve had to do this with plumbers, electricians, etc. but with attorneys. It’s the worst we’ve been running an answering service and we did. We looked at 37,000 calls and 83% of the attorneys did not answer after like three attempts, 83%, so if you don’t answer the phone, how they supposed to get business?

RJon Robins: Listen, first off offline let me know and I will be happy to get you a really good quality referral, but that’s a different conversation. Awesome, every year we give out an award January of every year, we give out an award for all of our members whose law firms broke the seven-figure barrier for the first time the year before and all of our members whose law firm broke the eight-figure barrier for the first time the year before. We get them a hammer and we get them a sledgehammer. We call it the hammer ceremony for breaking the barrier, you get the idea and you know, one of the things that they learn when they break the seven-figure barrier and certainly one of the things they learn when they break the eight-figure barrier, is a lot of humility and the reason they discover humility on the other side of that barrier is because they realize, like I basically am winning by default because all you have to do is not suck and you pretty much win most of the time like literally, it’s kind of like, it’s a story about you don’t have to outrun the barrier. You just have to outrun the slowest person, who’s trying to outrun the barrier. You don’t have to be the greatest marketer. You don’t have to be the greatest salesperson. You don’t even have to be a particularly good lawyer. All you have to do is create a marketing plan with a compelling message that feels authentic to the market because it is authentic because they can smell bullshit when they see it or smell it right and then you have to put decent. They don’t even have to be great, just decent processes and systems and procedures in place to take the prospect, who raises their hand through an ascension program, to bring them to intake. Give your intake people you know, a little bit of training, a little bit of supervision, a little bit of accountability, and bring that prospect to a meeting where there’s a structured organized sales conversation, which I could teach anyone in 10 minutes or less. I’m happy to teach it out to all your audience. If you want me to, it’s really simple how you do?

Richard Jacobs: Let’s go through a couple elements of it, maybe not the whole thing, but part of it sounds okay.

RJon Robins: First of all, good marketing is supposed to attract the right kind of prospects to your firm and protect your firm and respect the prospect by preventing the wrong kind of prospect. They could be wrong because of, who they are, or they could be wrong because of the kind of case they have, but for whatever reason, it’s not going to be a good use of their time to have a meeting with your firm and marketing should let them know that, so like, what you’re getting here with me. This is what it’s like to work with how to manage a small law firm. I’ve got 100 employees. We manage over 600 law firms, but this is kind of like what it’s like to work with us and if you like this, you probably would really like to work with us and if you don’t like this, no disrespect, but you probably wouldn’t like to work with us and that’s okay. Chocolate doesn’t compete with vanilla and it’s not trying to get everyone to buy it. Chocolate is chocolate. Strawberry is strawberry. Everyone’s different. Let’s back up all the way back off and I can just basically teach you everything you need to know to build a million-dollar law firm right now. So, I’m going to do some simple math and I know we’re all lawyers, so we’re not good at math. We don’t like math, but the math will be super simple. I’ll make it really easy for you. Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that you decide you want to take $200,000 a year out of your law firm as total owner benefits. That’s W2, salary plus K1 profits plus all the benefits that hopefully your tax strategist helps you figure out how to take out of the business. Let’s just say it all together comes to $200,000. So, then you do the math and you build your business plan and you figure out your cost of goods sold, which is all super simple to do. We literally teach this to teenagers every year. I promise you, everyone in this audience can understand how to do this if we teach it to you the right way. It’s not very hard. By the way, if you want Richard, I’ll share a video where we have teenagers on stage teaching Cost of Goods Sold to their parents. That’ll be for your audience as a gift. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that your total owner benefits are 20% and 20% is pretty low, but let’s just call it 20%, $200,000 is 20% of how much, a million dollar, so you need a $1 million law firm. If you’re going to have a $1 million law firm that has 20% total owner benefits and you want to start off. If you want to make $200,000, you need a $1 million law firm. Let’s say your average case value is, give me a number, it doesn’t matter pick any number. Let’s say 5000, so $1 million divided by $5,000 is 200 cases, so you need 200 cases per year. You need to open and close 200 cases at $5,000 a case and you’ll have yourself a million-dollar law firm. So now you need 200 cases a year.

Richard Jacobs: By for effective representation, that would probably be at least two lawyers, but probably two and a half.

RJon Robins: 200 cases a year at $5,000 a case is a million dollars a year at 20% total loan of benefit, this is $200,000 that’s 16 cases a month. Now you figure out your tails conversion rate. Let’s say you convert at give me a conversion rate. It doesn’t matter. We’re just making a point.

Richard Jacobs: From what, I’ve seen the average is 10% the best I’ve ever seen is about 30%.

RJon Robins: Now, you use those numbers because that’s then I can help a lot of your clients. Let’s say we have a 50% conversion rate, so 16 a month at a 50% conversion rate means you need 32 what we’ve referred to as at-bats. If you get up to bat, 32 times with a 50% conversion rate, you’re going to get 16 new clients a month with an average case, value of $5,000 is going to give you a million dollars a year, a million dollars a year at a 20% total owner benefit margin is going to get you the $200,000 that we started off with as our start off goal. Are you following me? This is just math. These are all very simple numbers to figure out in a law firm. Really, really simple numbers to figure out a law firm. This is just math. This is what’s called a financial model. The problem is, you ask 100 lawyers, what is your total owner benefit goal? How much are we trying to take out of this firm next year? And they don’t give you an answer because they don’t know because they won’t sit down and figure it out. Usually, because no one ever told them that they were permitted to do so and no one ever showed them how, but if you don’t start off by knowing what your total owner benefit goal is, then there’s no point in figuring out what your total owner benefit margin is and if you don’t know what your total owner benefit margin is, then you have no idea what your gross revenue goal should be and if you don’t know what your gross revenue goal should be, then you really have no idea how you need to staff your firm. You have no idea how much physical plant, how much space you need, you have no idea how many cases you need, and you’re basically just groping your way through life in the dark, hoping to somehow stumble upon a nut, which is a pretty sad way to go through life. It doesn’t have to be that way. A much better way to go through life is you get clear on how much financial income you need to take out of the firm so you can live the way you want to live, not what you’ll settle for, not what you can do without, not what you don’t need, but honestly, how do you really want to live if price were no object, what house would you be living in if price were no object? What car would you be driving if price were no object? What kind of domestic services would you employ if price were no object? What kind of education would you really provide for your children? What kind of financial support might you provide for your parents or for charity or for whatever else? How much does it cost to live the way you really want to live? That’s got to be at the root of every marketing plan because it drives the marketing plan. It gives purpose to the marketing plan. It creates a consequence if the marketing plan isn’t working, which is why it becomes relevant to look at that data and look at the metrics and look at the numbers that most lawyers don’t want to look at because if it’s not tied to a financial goal that matters to you, then what difference does.

Richard Jacobs: Otherwise, you’re just making up numbers that you think will work and that’s about it.

RJon Robins: You wanted to know how to make the marketing plan work better and how to get out of the feast and famine. It starts with getting clear and getting honest with yourself about how do you really want to be living your life? I know this is counterintuitive. I know that most people aren’t going around talking about this or thinking about this and I know for sure that if you’re hanging around with a bunch of people who are struggling financially. They’re definitely not having this conversation, but you get together with a bunch of our members with the eight-figure law firm, the 10 million the $20 million law firms, even the people with the $1 million law firms, the $2 million law firms, who are taking 30 consecutive days off with emergency access only every year. The people who are taking their extended maternity and paternity leaves. The people who have got their law firm working for them so they’re not a prisoner to their law firm and these are the conversations they’re having and it’s not that they’re having these conversations because they have the seven-figure or the eight-figure law firm. They have the seven-figure and the eight-figure law firm precisely because they’re willing to have these conversations and set the root of the problem with every marketing with all the marketing that you’re describing to me.

Richard Jacobs: What have you seen firms do, instead of figuring out their numbers, and their goals and, their lifestyle requirements, etc. what do they do? How do they operate?

RJon Robins: They do like an Alice in Wonderland where Alice was lost and she asked to share a cat. You know, which way do I go? and he said, Where do you want to go? Or she said, I’m lost and he said, Where do you want to go? And she says, I have no idea and he said, the any direction we’ll do? They don’t start off with a North Star. The total owner benefits is the North Star. That number drives the marketing plan. That number drives the sales strategies. That number drives the policies, drives the procedures. That number is how we determine whether we’re making progress or not, against an objective metric. That number is at the root of everything good in the business of a law firm and that number is usually missing when you see a law firm that’s struggling.

Richard Jacobs: With the math cascade you did, you could see. In order to get this many at bats, we need to do this much marketing and once we get this many at bats, is our conversion rate following the number sequence, and if it’s not, how do we improve that?

RJon Robins: You talked about the self-imposed cash flow roller coaster, so what happens is, let’s suppose you have no idea how much total owner benefits you want to take out of your firm and let’s suppose therefore you have no idea what your gross revenues need to be and let’s say you have no idea, therefore, how many cases you really are engineering the firm to be able to handle in a given month. So, you just say to your marketer, get me as much as you can, and the more the better, please and the marketer dutifully comes along and brings you instead of bringing you 32 at bats. Let’s say they bring you 64 at bats, twice as many or let’s say the marketer really knocks it out of the park and brings you 30, 60, 96 at bats, three times as many as you need.

Richard Jacobs: Then you complain, you say your leads are garbage, if you can’t convert properly or you blame the marketer.

RJon Robins: Let’s say you do convert properly. Let’s say you are crushing it and you are converting and now you’re buried in work because you didn’t engineer the firm to handle that much volume, as we you say to the marketer, turn off the marketing. I’m drowning. Turn it off and so you’re in feast mode, so you turn off the marketing and of course, you work your way out of the backlog, and then you work your way to sanity, and then you work your way into back into a famine, sounding familiar and then, of course, because you’re now in famine, now you’re desperate, so now you call the marketer, except you can’t call the marketer that you fired before for bringing you too much business. So now you got to start with someone all over again, and start the whole roller coaster all over again, or maybe you go back to the original person, either way, but now you’re in famine mode, at which point you’re now desperate, and you start dropping your standards, and you start taking less than A and B clients, and now you start, maybe even dropping your fees to try to get some business in a sad, pathetic, self-defeating effort to try to get business because that’s the worst way to get business, is by lowering your fees, but this is what you do when you’re desperate. This is what you do when you’re in famine mode and you’re in famine mode, because while you were in feast mode, while you’re while you were having a bumper crop and you had abundance, you didn’t invest to create the processes and the systems and the procedures, and so you’re just going up and down and up and down your whole life and it’s because, sorry to sound like a broken record, but it’s because you didn’t start off by having a real, honest, authentic, meaningful financial goal to drive everything else because if you had that financial goal when you got the 32 at bats and those 32 at bats produced your 16 cases and you saw that the average case was producing $5,000 per case and that you’re tracking to your million dollars in revenue and your $200,000 in total owner benefits. At that point, you would say to the marketer, okay, great. Even this out, this is stable. Let’s stay here until I go around and improve my other processes and procedures and build the infrastructure to be able to handle more business and then when you got that in place, you go back to your marketer and you say, I’ve got my infrastructure built up. I can take 50% more business now and the marketer clicks the dial 50% up and then you build the infrastructure some more, and you build out the staff some more, and you provide more staff training and everything else and you go to your market and you say, I’m ready for the next growth spurt and so the marker clicks it up, ratchets it up to the next level. This is how stable, predictable, consistent, year after year, decade after decade of consistent growth, law firms get built. It’s not sexy. That’s the problem is. It’s not the big adrenaline rush. It’s not, I want a big case. I had a big windfall lottery ticket case. That’s not how winning gets done in the real world of running successful profitable law firms.

Richard Jacobs: You know, just for a moment, can you address the fact that many attorneys have been burned over, over and over again by their perception is that by marketing firms. Many attorneys tell me that we tried that before we’ve been burned and they’re hesitant about doing anything.

RJon Robins: Let’s just unpack the word, their perception of, because the fact of the matter is, most marketers suck. Most lost child marketers are terrible. You’re not terrible. You don’t suck, but most marketers do suck, and they are terrible, and they are burning law firm owners and so, when law firm owners are coming to you and saying, I’ve been burned by the last three marketers I talked to or worked with, there’s a very good chance that they were, it wasn’t just in their head.

Richard Jacobs: No, I believe it. we could even say 80% of the fault is with the marketing firms, but there is some fault with the attorneys. You know, what I’ve seen personally is when we have clients and they don’t want to do anything to be a part of the marketing. It doesn’t work. They have to do it.

RJon Robins: I’m still laying that on the marketer that’s still a marketer’s fault. The 100% the marketer’s fault why because the marketer should have had a better education system to pre-educate, precondition, pre-screen their prospective law firm marketing clients and if you have a better front end marketing, which is particularly ironic that marketers don’t have a better front end marketing, if you have a good front end marketing, you screen out all of those help rejecting complainers, who aren’t going to do anything with all the leads you get for them and so you know, who’s the professional marketer. The law firm owner isn’t the professional marketer. The professional marketer is the professional marketer and they should know better than to take low quality clients. Just like they should be telling their law firm clients don’t take low quality clients. The marketer shouldn’t be taking low quality clients either. So, the marketer who isn’t asking you anything about how much total owner benefits you want to take out of your firm, the marketer, who isn’t asking you anything about your average case value, the marketer, who isn’t asking you anything about your historical conversion rates, the marketer, who isn’t taking those numbers and cascading them into okay, this is how many at-bats we really need to get you. We don’t need to get you more than that because we’re just going to bury you and we can’t get you less than that because then you’re going to starve to death. The marketer, who isn’t asking those kinds of questions, the marketer, who isn’t saying before I’ll accept an engagement from you, I’m going to mystery shop your firm, just to make sure that you’re not going to squander all of the great leads that I get for you. You know, the marketer, who takes on a law firm when they could have easily found out that this law firm was going to be a terrible client just by picking up the phone and mystery shopping the firm. You know, I think the marketers bear a lot of responsibility in that. If a client comes into a law firm and the client is flying every flag of being an F client nightmare, and the law firm owner takes that client anyway, maybe because they’re financially desperate and they wind up with a bar grievance or they wind up with a bad Google review or they wind up with just a real pain client. What? You couldn’t see all the warning signs. They were all there, but you didn’t do anything to test. You didn’t do anything to evaluate. You didn’t do anything to pre-screen or screen out the person, who ought not be a client of your firm and now here you are sitting with this miserable client, who drives your staff off, and now you’re stuck working by yourself again. So, look, I’m not saying that it’s not the law firm owner’s responsibility. Also, the law firm owner is responsible for. Look in every relationship, there’s 200% responsibility to go around. You are 100% responsible for your half of our relationship, and I’m 100% responsible for my half of our relationship. So, when I have a bad experience with one of our members, which we do, sometimes not everyone’s perfect, not everyone’s a good fit, but when I have a bad experience with one of our members, I let them take 100% responsibility for their part of the problem and I take 100% responsibility for my part of the problem and part of my 100% responsibility is the things that I would have, could have, and should have done. I should say that in a different order, all the things that I should have, could have and would have done, had I been paying more attention, including but not limited, to not take the person on as a client in the first place and if I don’t take that responsibility, then I’m never going to learn anything and if I don’t learn anything, then I’m never going to get any better and I’m just going to be rebuilding the ship of Theseus over and over again.

Richard Jacobs: Moving on for a while, I know you’re not looking for any business, but attorneys that are like, Okay, this is really resonating with me. How can I work with RJon? How can they like? How can they either get on the waiting list or what resources do you have for them to get them started?

RJon Robins: Thank you for saying that. We have a waiting list, like you said, and so what we do is we take kind of a unique approach, I think and what we do is we give away lots and lots of free stuff. We give away free recordings. We give away free webinars. We give away free live workshops. We actually have live workshops so people can come to and it’s free, and we’ll give you coffee, and we’ll buy you lunch, and we’ll give you a workbook, and you’re just welcome to come and partake, because we’re doing it anyway and the incremental cost to us is so little that it’s no big deal and by being there, we get to know you. You get to know us. You get value. You get to know our members. Our members get to know you, and you’ll get even more value. You get to meet members of our team. Members of our team get to know you, and you get even more value and then by the time, your spot in the waiting list comes open. You’ve already made money, and so you’re now playing with the house’s money, so to speak. Because if I can help you make an extra 10, 20, 30, $50,000 while you’re on the waiting list, when it comes time for your turn on the waiting list to be open for you, and we tell you the fees involved. You’re like, basically free because you’ve already helped me make the money. Anyway, so the answer is, go to the website, download anything that you want for free, sign up for a webinar, listen to the podcast. We got podcast Profit First for lawyers and others, coming up soon, and I’m going to share with you, Richard some things to put in the show notes. The thing about the cost of goods sold lessons, so the lawyers at all understand what it really, truly cost them to deliver the services they’re delivering to the members. Yes, your personal injury lawyers. This is so easy to do for a personal injury law firm. It’s easy. It’s simple, literally. The children can teach you how to figure out your firm’s cost of goods sold and they’ll get on the list and we’ll just keep sharing more and more free stuff until we wind up doing business together someday or not, which is okay.

Richard Jacobs: The website is?

RJon Robins: howtomanageasmalllawfirm.com. You can also go to howtomanage.com because I bought the domain name how to manage, which is easier for people, sometimes than howtomanageasmalllawfirm.com. By the way, that’s one more tip for everyone. Use a trade name. If you’re in a state where trade names are permissible, use a trade name. You know the law firm of Jones Smith and Brown, no one knows what that is. No one knows what that firm stands for, but you know, pick a name like men’s rights divorce and you know exactly what the firm does pick a name like how to manage a small law firm and everyone knows what you do. Make the name of your firm speak for itself. That alone will make your marketing work better. Anyway, the website is howtomanageasmalllawfirm.com and like I said, we’ll put some stuff in the show notes or we’ll give you some stuff to put in the show notes with links to download. So, what do we say? We’re going to give you the lesson on how to figure out your cost of goods sold. I’m also going to give the lesson on how to train a non-attorney salesperson? how to meet with prospective new clients? and they will be able to convert the prospective new clients at a better conversion rate, and the clients will be happier with the whole thing. In the end, then having a lawyer meet with prospective new clients. I’ll share that also and I’ll share if you want also, just to round things out some goodies on financial literacy and how to predict profitability?

Richard Jacobs: Excellent. RJon, it’s been a great call, and I really appreciate your honesty and you know, I’m sure some will be offended and repulsed, but others will be attracted. So, I really appreciate again your brutal honesty and sharing your experience. Thank you.

RJon Robins: Look, you know, the people who are repulsed, that’s okay. I don’t take it personally. It doesn’t offend me. I’m not for everyone. Everyone doesn’t necessarily like pistachio flavor ice cream. Everyone doesn’t have to like the same things and here’s the big idea. Your law firm probably can help anyone, who has the kind of problem your law firm is designed to help, but your law firm can’t help everyone, who has that problem, not even everyone in your local market, not even everyone in your local market, who has that problem today and since your law firm can’t help everyone, even though it can’t help anyone, since it can’t help everyone, that means you can afford to be selective and make your law firm really exciting and really cater to the right kind of people and by the right kind of people, I mean the right kind of people for you, the kind of people, who you and your staff are going to look forward to working with and enjoy working with, and they’re going to enjoy working with you because you share the same core values, the same sense of humor, you have the same view of the world. You can build a multimillion dollars law firm with a group of Misfit Weirdos just like you, who are Misfit Weirdos in exactly the same way you’re a Misfit Weirdos and you and your clients and your staff and your vendors and your referral sources can be the Misfit Weirdos, who are just like you, and you could be really good friends with the group of Misfit Weirdos across the street, who are completely different than you, and you can both have multimillion dollars businesses. It’s only when you start trying to appeal to everyone that everything goes wrong.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, very good.

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