How to Use Your Law Degree to Create a Life That Doesn't Suck

Some people don't make it all the way to the end of the podcast episode , so I'm going to just tell you up front . There's a sales pitch coming at the end . Here's the sales pitch . I'm going to help you personally plan your 2025 . I will take you through a four-week vision planning , quarterly planning and then execution and accountability course .

Price tag on the course is $1,497 . And if you finish the course , meaning if you attend or watch the recaps of all four videos and you do the homework and you participate in the WhatsApp group , I'm going to give you every dollar back .

I would do this shit for free and I do on my podcast all the time , but I will get super discouraged if people stop showing up in the second or the third week week , and so your $1,500 or so deposit is my way of making sure that you show up and you do the work and you kick off your 2025 in the right fashion .

Okay , so the link to that course is going to be in the show description . The other thing that will be in the show description is a link to the video of this webinar . There are slides , there are photos . Sometimes it hits the brain center a little bit differently if you watch the video than if you listen to the podcast .

So this , I think , is worth two listens .

If you're in your car , if you're working out , listen to it on the recording , then go back and watch the video , then come back and buy the course and again , I will give you every penny of your money back if you just finish the course , because I want you to win , but I want you to have some skin in the game also .

Okay , last thing you need to know is that you need to act quickly , because the course kicks off on Monday , november 25th , with a call at 2 pm Eastern . We're going to meet every Monday at 2 pm Eastern . If you can't make a call , or you can't make any of the calls , you will get video recordings .

Just watch the recording afterwards and do the homework and send it back in and then we're going to be off and running in 2025 . I'm excited for you . Let's go . Oh man , everybody's showing up as Jason Barry . Oh , that is a registration fail . Welcome to the webinar . Everybody , everybody in the chat is showing up as my funnel builders names .

We're going to go through today how to use your law degree in 2025 to break out of the drudgery of law and build a legal career that doesn't suck . If you've heard me talk before , you know that this is what I'm absolutely 110% passionate about .

But because I don't actually have anybody's name in this registration field , do me a favor as you're filling out chat fields , just drop your name . First name's fine , just so I know who I'm responding to . It'll make it a little bit easier for everybody else . So , first thing that I'm curious oh , that's better , because I'm actually seeing name .

Oh , there's Charles . So , yeah , drop your first name in anytime you're dropping a chat question and anytime you're responding to something . That'll make it a whole lot easier for me . First thing that I'm curious about is how you got here .

So , if you can just quickly drop in , like you listen to my podcast or you follow me on LinkedIn or you're a GLM member , just so I have a sense of who's in the room and who I'm talking to .

We're going to talk today about how to make 2025 your breakout year , and I am super excited to share with you exactly the process that I'm going through , actually right now , to set myself up for success in 2025 , even though there's still a month and a half left in 24 . Okay , so I see a lot of a good mix of LinkedIn , glm , tribe , email list Awesome .

So we got a good mix of people that are familiar with what Ben and I do and have been for a while , and people that maybe are relatively new . Second thing I'm curious about knowing is like , where is everybody ?

If you could in your career , if you could just drop in like I'm an owner , I'm a lawyer , I'm not an owner , I'm a marketing director , or I'm just curious about something that you're doing and I'm not involved in the law firm at all , just so I have some sense of the size and scope of the audience . I see Lauren from Norfolk , the marketing director .

That's either my marketing director or we got two Lawrence down in Norfolk . All right , owner , licensed lawyer , owner , solo practitioner owner . Okay , cool , most of what we teach in Great Legal Marketing is applicable to the owner .

Today is special because today really is something that you can put into practice if you're an owner , if you're a lawyer , if you're a marketing director or if you're just somebody who's tangential to legal , because this is all about using your skills and the job and the occupation that you're in to live your best life ever . So do me a favor .

Last thing , before we get started grab a pen or a pencil . Whatever you write with on a piece of paper . This is going to be interactive online and in the chat , but also the worst thing would be if you left this and you hadn't learned anything .

One of my lawyers in our firm came back for an event this weekend and she said it was an awesome event and I feel really good , but I don't think I learned anything that I can tactically take away and actually put into practice .

And that would be worse for me than if you said the event just sucked , because I don't want you to sit here for an hour and go through and not actually take anything away .

So I'm going to give you about another minute to grab something to write with For me , always writing with my hand , with a pen or a pencil on a piece of paper something about the way that the nerves connect and the synapses in your brain .

You will retain what you write down much more than you will retain something like you snap a picture of or that you type your notes . It just works that way . So for me , it's like the remarkable tablet and I like to write everything down . So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen .

Get this off of there , and , cammie , if you could just pop in here and let me know that I shared my screen correctly and that you can only see the things that I want people to see . So we're going to be talking today about good , thank you how to make 2025 your breakout year .

The thing about annual planning is that if you wait until january 1st to to do it , you're going to be totally screwed , because , number one , january 1st , most of us are hungover anyway , and if you've got kids running around , it's even harder , and if you've got kids running around in college football , it's even more challenging .

And then on the second or the third I forget what day we're coming back to work this year but , like all of the stuff that you neglected to do on the week between Christmas and New Year's lands back on your desk , the phone starts ringing again . If you're in a PI firm , like I am .

That's one of the busiest days of the year for intake because people have put off their problems until January 2nd , 3rd , 4th and they begin calling again and they make their problems your problems . And the way to avoid getting caught in that rush is to begin your annual planning right now .

And what most lawyers get wrong about annual planning is this and I say this as somebody who has been in great legal marketing pretty intensely now for the last two years and has been in these mastermind groups with high level lawyers and I see the same things happening all the time . It's really three or four things .

Number one when we go and we plan , here's what's going to happen in 2025 . We take 2024 and we add somewhere between 10 and 25% . What's your revenue goal for next year ? A bet is somewhere between 10 and 25% greater than it is in 2024 . What's your goal for new signed clients ? It's probably between 10 and 25% greater than it is in 2024 .

Or you'd make the mistake that we make at our annual planning almost every year and you just make a wild-ass guess what's your revenue goal ? I don't know . Like $6 million sounds like it would be pretty cool . And then you spend all your time reverse engineering . What's my average case value ? How many cases do I need ?

How many leads do I need to get Lauren to generate in order to sign those number of cases ?

And the thing is that it's just not thought through , and so what we're going to be doing today is walking through tactically how to , from the top down , take the things that are important in your life not only in your law practice , but in your life and bring them down to the ground and plan for your best year ever in 2025 .

And the last mistake that I see lawyers making is that the answer is always more right .

It's I want more leads , I want more cases , I want more people , and we pile more and more on our plate , because often that's what got us to our level of success that we have right now , and we never think about what can I do to eliminate the bottom 20% of my cases , the bottom 20% of my staff and it might seem to watching this , I'm not thinking of

any of you but the bottom 20% of problems that are taking all of your time and all of your energy , and I want to encourage you really , in 2025 , to think about what can we take away from our life to add more value . Lawyers , the last thing that I'll say is lawyers , like we chase the wrong rabbit all the time . We chase other people's goals .

We see a lawyer in a nice suit or a nice car on a nice vacation . We go . I want that . You remember the movie the Italian Job , like the main characters , they robbed a bank or something and they all had this vision of what they were going to do with the money .

And there was one guy that didn't have any vision at all and he just took everybody else's thing and did that right . That's what I see lawyers doing is chasing other people's goals . And guess what ? It doesn't actually make you happy , because what you're chasing often is a meaningless revenue goal .

Every marketing agency that teaches lawyers how to get more cases is doing some version of becoming a seven-figure law firm or become an eight-figure law firm , and neither of those things actually are meaningful . Right , you could become an eight-figure law firm by running $7 million of Google ads , right , but it wouldn't help you at the end of the day .

And then we chase results-based goals . We set goals like I want to be a seven-figure firm or I want to be an eight-figure firm , without ever spending any time in thought about what is the activity that I need to engage in to get me to the seven-figure or the eight-figure firm .

And so lawyers wind up with this short list of things as goals that , at the end of the day , don't make them any happier .

Like we think we want to move into the corner office , or we think we want to make partner or own a seven-figure firm or an eight-figure firm or retire right , and my suggestion is what you actually want is the way that you think you will feel when you have that thing , and so today's presentation is all about reverse engineering .

What is the thing that you actually want , what is the way that you will feel , or you think you will feel , when you have that thing , and how can we get you there ? I want you to chase your own goals .

One of the things that the personal injury lawyers on this call will know is life is short and life is unpredictable , and you just never know when your time is up . I resolved the case last week or two weeks ago for a high school principal .

He was , by all accounts , the greatest guy ever , and I'm not suggesting that he wasn't living his best life right , but he left his house on Wednesday morning , drove to school , got rear-ended and was in the ICU for about 10 or 14 days and then passed away .

And the point of that is , you just never know what your last trip out of the house is going to be , and if you are waiting for 26 or 27 or 28 to finally be the time when you can live your best life , then you might end up waiting too long , and so the question that I have for you is this the fuck do you want out of your life ?

So , on a pen , on on the paper that you took out , write down your age . Actually , let's do this . That's coming up in the chat . Drop your age , drop your age in the chat . For me , if I could get my chat back up , here we go . All right , wow , wow . Anybody know what the average American lifespan is ?

Anybody know what the average American lifespan is 60 , but people say I look 72 . Right , so average American lifespan for men is somewhere south of 80 . Right , and so there are answers in this chat anywhere from 33 to 67 to 60 , but people say I look 72 . And if you're like me , so I'm . I turned 41 this year .

I am more than halfway there , statistically speaking , I've begun really thinking about what would I have to do , what would I have to change in my life , health-wise , seeing a doctor-wise , right For men , if I wanted to live to 140 , what would that look like ? So what are those changes that you'd have to put in place ?

But if you've ever seen I love these Memento Mori posters right , it's got the 80 years and 52 rows across , one for each week , and you , just every week , you black out another one because you've lost another week of your life to not taking action .

And so , with your pen and paper I'm really curious about this and I had our members do this at this year's summit but answer this question what would you do if you had $10 million ? And while you're doing that , I'll tell you this is my now six-year-old son .

I'm sure this is what he would do if he had $10 million Sit on the beach , eat cheese puffs and fall asleep .

And the reason that I said $10 million and I don't know whether for you that's the right answer or the wrong answer or whatever , but at $10 million you could just go and buy treasury bills . Million , you could just go and buy treasury bills and you could reproduce with no effort on your own $450,000 of income every single year .

So for me that would be enough . That would be more than enough to spend on all the travel and all the things that I want to do in my life , and then I wouldn't have to do anything else .

And people like us who are running law firms and who have the ability and everybody who , like , can get to the net worth of 10 million does not have the programming switch to then turn it off and sit on the beach and eat cheese puffs , right . And so if you were in that position and you didn't have to work , what would you do ?

Hopefully , I just had a chance to write that down . The next thing that I want you to think about is why would you do that ? Again , I don't think you actually want the 10 million . I think you want the way that you think you will feel when you want it . What kind of things would you be able to do ?

And how would you feel if you didn't have to do things like go to work and produce more leads and spend more money on Google PPC and worry about your intake conversion rate and worry about tort reform and worry about somebody with crappy insurance policies Right , why would you do all of that stuff ? For me , I like getting out and running races and having fun .

I like getting out and running races and having fun . I like sitting on a clear , glassy lake on a cold morning watching on the webinar . But what are the three things that are preventing you from doing whatever it is you would do when you had $10 million ? What are the three things that prevent you from doing that right now ?

Because , at the end of the day , the good news is we don't have to solve for you having $10 million . We only have to solve for those three things that are preventing you from doing whatever the hell it is you would do if you had more money than you needed .

I ran a boot camp back in August and I asked the lawyers who came to that boot camp that question . And here's the answers that I got . And what you'll notice is not one of them not one of them said I would retire and I would go do nothing . They said I would be the lawyer who helps evaluate and guide strategy on cases without doing the actual legwork .

I would focus only on the top 20% of cases in my office . I would work exclusively on strategy and I would become the brand of the firm . Not one of them said I would sell my practice and ride off into the sunset .

And I think for most of the people who are on this call , maybe a handful of you would say some version I would sell my practice and ride off into the sunset .

But having worked with the kinds of lawyers that come to these calls , most of them say things like this when we reach the age that people are in this chat and on this call , this is what we want to do , and so what we want to focus on is how do we solve the problems in your firm to allow you to evaluate cases only , focus on the top 20% , work only

on the strategy and be the brand of your firm . Gay Hendricks , if you haven't read this book , you should pick it up . It's called the Big Leap . It's a quick and easy read and one of the concepts in this is your zone of genius , and you probably heard some variation of this before , but there's really four quadrants right .

On the top right are the things that you love doing and you are excellent or elite at , and on the bottom left are the things that you are no good at and you hate doing . And on the top left are things that you're good at but you don't like doing . Bottom right , things that you are not good at but you like doing .

And the goal of running a law firm the goal of if you're not running a law firm of living your best life as a lawyer in the law is to get into this zone of genius and to spend all of your time , or as much of your time as physically possible , doing the things that you're uniquely suited to do , the things that fit your strengths , your talents , your

passions and give you ultimate success and fulfillment . And if you're able to do that , then we can come back and we can make that $7 million or that eight-figure revenue goal actually meaningful . And for me , it really comes down to this as I sit down and I plan my year , this is what I'm thinking about going into 2025 .

2025 will be successful if it's the year that my firm can blank and it's going to be different for everybody . On this call right , because your firms are at different stages . You may have just launched it and you want like your first 10 clients , right ? You may be transitioning your practice to a younger lawyer and you want to make that transition smooth right ?

Everybody's answer is going to be different , and everybody's answer to the first part is much less important than the answer to the second part , because if I can get my firm to achieve whatever the first goal is , then in my life I will be able to do whatever the second goal is . Take a second and write that out .

Or , if you're not in the space where you can think through that for yourself , take a shot of that , because I think this is the only way to approach annual planning . There's probably one thing , or one to three things that will define success for year 2025 .

And if you can achieve them , it will allow you , outside of your law firm , to do whatever it is in your life that you want to do . So on a high level . That's how I approach 2025 . And now I'm going to take you down to the tactical level and tell you exactly what I'm walking through in the next 42 days before the year is over .

This is the very first thing that I'm going to do is define for myself what a 10 out of 10 life is , because I think , if you ask , if I came up to you and I said how's your practice doing scale of one to 10 , right , and my rule is you can't use seven because seven is safe and everybody says seven right .

So you either got to go one through six or eight through ten . Eight through ten . Things are pretty good . You can make some tweaks , but things are pretty good and you're probably happy . Six and below , like that's a failing grade and I think we can , um , off the top of our head , assign a number to that .

But the much harder part is defining exactly what a 10 out of 10 is . And we're living our lives in all of these different arenas . Right , health , dollar , productive activities . That means like when you're at work actually producing money . Right , it's not necessarily the high-level thinking , certainly not the admin stuff .

It's your production on cases , how much you love work , personal finance , travel , hobbies , spiritual and religion , relationship with kids , relationship with spouse , and not all of these are going to be important to everybody .

You might not have kids , you might not be married , you might not be spiritual , right , and not all of these are important to you in every stage of your life . Right , you might be in a position where you have a bunch of young kids and you aren't traveling . Right , so that's okay .

That's not where you are right now , but I go through for each one of these categories and actually write out , like for the next three months or for the next 12 months , what would it mean to fire on 10 out of 10 ? And I'll just take you through a couple of them .

I've done this for each of these personally and then for a handful of other categories that aren't on here that I think are important . So for me , my dollar productive activities , I only want to be doing casework on six-figure cases . I'm at my best when I'm touching things .

Once , if a case is sitting on my desk for three weeks , it's because I'm not confronting something either with the client or with the case . That's a bad sign .

10 out of 10 is we are getting together as a personal injury section and having a top 20% case review and then my time is split kind of four ways Mentoring the team , casework , working on the business you could tell I did this slide because business is misspelled and then finding and cultivating new business .

And this way when I come in and I complain about something , I've got something concrete to look back at and say , no , it feels like work is heavy right now because I'm doing way too much casework and we've got to bring that back into what for Brian , would be a 10 out of 10 . Now , for you , 10 out of 10 might be completely different .

You might not want to do any casework at all , but I think defining for yourself is critically important , and I'll take you through a couple of other ones . Travel is really important to us . These are all pictures from things that we did this year . Right , it's important that I always have a week trip on the calendar to look forward to .

It's important to me that the family is participating . Hey , what do you guys want to do next ? So when we went to mexico , the kids picked out the dolphin adventure , right . When I went on a different trip to Mexico with my group of guy friends , that is like a bucket list thing to jump into the cenote like the Mexican sinkhole .

And it's important to me that we take at least four week-long trips as a family a year . And so , knowing that's 10 out of 10 , I've got to plan around that . I've got to get that stuff on the calendar first , and then I've got to create the kind of firm that can support that . Last one just to give you an outside of work example is health .

So for me , 10 out of 10 , and I'll tell you , the long run one a couple of years ago was 10 miles . That would be 15 out of 10 . Right now I want to be able to run five miles without feeling super tired .

But there's tactical stuff in here also , like I need to be able to max out my heart rate once a week , get the five workouts a week , and if I can consistently hit 10,000 steps and get good protein in , then that's 10 out of 10 health for me .

And so going through each of these things and writing out very particularly hey , what actually is 10 out of 10 ? And only then one more , coming back through and rating right , how far am I from 10 out of 10?

, and that will help you and we'll talk later about quarterly planning , but that'll help you quarter by quarter , going through and saying this is what I need to focus on . I've got eight , nine , eight , nine over here . But this health is a three right Doesn't do me any good to take my cases , which are already at eight , and do 10% more of that .

I got to take some time and address this . Three over here . I got to take some time and address this . Three over here and so taking again subjectively what you want in your life and grading it one out of 10 and focusing on increasing the things that really suck on a quarter to quarter basis is going to be incredibly impactful . The next part of that .

So I take those 10 out of 10s and I craft from there Vivid Vision . How many people in the chat give me a ? Yes , you read Vivid Vision . Wow , there we go . There's one , all right . So Vivid Vision is this book by Cameron Harrell .

I didn't understand it actually the first time that I read it , and I didn't understand it until I started searching out other people's visions and reading those and I go okay , now I get it . So the yes didn't finish it that I see in the chat , that was me the first time that I read it . I'm not somebody who often learns things by reading .

I learned by doing and screwing up . I didn't get vivid vision . I tried to write it myself , screwed it up and then went out and sought out a bunch of other people's . Okay , now I get what that's supposed to look like . But here's the idea . It's a detailed description of the way that your life and your law practice .

But I do this first for my life , right Is going to look , act and feel on December 1st or 31st , three years from now . Right , it's a three-year time horizon because in one year you can't make very large changes .

You can make changes in a year , but not super , super incredible changes and 10 years like there's just too much external stuff that you don't control that might impact your ability to hit the 10-year goal .

So the three-year time horizon is perfect , but the key part is don't limit what you're writing in a vision to your current status , because your job as the CEO of your law firm , but also the CEO of your life , is not actually to solve all the problems within this document .

Right , your job is to cast a vision that's compelling enough to attract clients , vendors , employees and partners who will help you achieve that vision .

Right , surrounding yourself with people for whom their zone of excellence and zone of genius is different than yours , to help solve the problems , to get to the compelling place where you want to be , place where you want to be .

And then the critical piece is this does no good if you write it and you put it in your desk , just like all of your 2024 resolutions . You have to actually share it with other people .

And the tactical way to go about doing this , after you've read the book , is to take a , take some paper , take the pen that you've got and go and sit somewhere peaceful to you , right . Might be a beach , might be a lake , might be your back porch , might be a coffee shop and just go through . And it's the same thing as the 10 out of 10 exercise .

But just go through . What kind of things do you want in your life three years from now ? And number two is how can you make those things bigger ? People underestimate what they can do in 10 years , overestimate what they can do in one year . Three years , again , is the sweet spot .

But I think people underestimate because they are limited so much by thinking that they have to be the one that solves the problem the scope that you can shoot for three years from now . Scope that you can shoot for three years from now . And then the third pass is you take all these notes and you put it into some kind of compelling narrative form , right ?

Or you can ask ChatGPT to do . And so once every three years , I sit down and I write this , compelling to me a vision of where I want my life to go . I'm in the middle of my rock . My EOS rock in the firm for this quarter is to do that for the PI section . Notice , we're doing that in the fourth quarter of the year . Why ?

So that when we show up at our annual retreat our annual planning retreat in January of 2025 , I've already got the vision right . We're not going back and reversing . Okay , what if we added 10% ? What if we thought about bringing in a new marketing source ? What if we thought about bringing in another associate ?

The what if we thought about bringing in another associate ? The vision is already created outside of that , and then the annual planning is for implementing and problem solving around that . The other thing that's been just super helpful in my life is this is getting around people who will reset your thermostat .

So something happens to us after our mid-30s Life beats us down and we just start accepting as normal things that aren't actually normal or things that are lower than you are capable of . And I think this is actually why people go out and start running marathons for the first time because we look for this challenge , for can I accomplish the thing ?

And so getting around people who have a higher level of normal than you do is incredibly impactful . So in 2020 , I got back into running and in a former life I ran ultra marath , right , I ran marathons , and I wasn't getting any faster . My sister kept beating me in races and and I decided , if I can't run faster , I'm just going to run longer .

So I started running 50 Ks and 50 milers and I eventually I ran a hundred mile race , which , if you pay any attention to that sport , the participants are barbelled right . There's people who are under 30 and there's people who are over 55 .

And there's not a lot of people in the middle , because it's very hard to train and finish those kinds of races when you have kids , and so my last race was a 70 mile race .

It was right before our third was born , and then , after he was born , my wife was like you can't leave the house at four in the morning and come back at noon and want to take a nap . That's not fair . So I'm looking for other things to do and in 2022 , I discovered Spartan races and this is my first Spartan race . It was a 20K .

I showed up at the starting line 20 pounds overweight and I finished in this group of guys dead last . If you've never run a Spartan race before . Just like the ante , to get to the starting line you have to jump over this four foot fence behind us . And the guys in this picture the guy in the front is an ultra marathon runner .

The guy in the middle with the beard , he's an Air Force special operator . Two of the guys are pretty high level biohackers , one is a downhill and cross country skier , and then there's me .

So I finished dead last and at the time and I think they're bringing it back the Spartan races are races usually across mountains and they have a bunch of obstacles Things like monkey bars , rope climbs , mud pits , things like monkey bars , rope climbs , mud pits , things like that and if you fail an obstacle , you've got to do 30 burpees .

And so this is a 14 mile race and I probably did 300 burpees because I failed obstacle and so I finished that and you could do one or two things . You'd be like all right , that's cool , check the box on that , or start thinking about what can I do to do that a little bit better . I started thinking about what can I do to do that a little bit better .

How can I lose the 20 pounds ? How can I learn how to do the obstacles and how can I put these kind of tactical things in place ? And so I started to make progress . I'd lost probably 15 pounds by this point . I smoked this race . I didn't fail a single thing . All the monkey bars , all the rope climbs , all the I don't know ring swing obstacles .

I even hit the spear throw Like I was Spartan God in this race . And we were thinking like , wow , what else could we do ? How can we make this goal , this like this race thing that's fun . How can we make it a little bit bigger ? So we decided to go to Greece and we ran in the Spartan Race World Championships in Sparta , greece .

We took a group of probably 12 people over there and got our picture with the Spartan hoplite . And you might be thinking what the hell does this have to do with the practice of law ? Now , on the one hand , nothing . On the other hand , absolutely everything , because I never would have done this by myself , right ?

My wife never , ever would have come to Greece with me . And let me run a 20K race in Sparta , which , by the way , nobody goes to Sparta . We got back to Athens and we said we're from America , where'd you go ? What island did you go to ? We went to Sparta . They said why did you go to Sparta ?

I never , ever would have done this in my normal life had I not had the influence of these people around me . And it's very much the same for lawyers right around me . And it's very much the same for lawyers , right ? If we the book that I mentioned was Vivid Vision and the Big Leap by Gay Hendricks it's very much the same for lawyers , right ?

If we hang out with the same people all the time , we end up doing the same thing that we've always done .

As you're doing your annual plan and this was the thing that scared me in 2023 when we did this but as you're doing your annual planning I think you need to have one thing at least one thing on your calendar that scares the shit out of you , right ?

It's scary to fly to greece and run a big race that you don't know whether you can finish and take your family there and go . I don't know what if dad doesn't finish this thing .

You should have something on your calendar that scares you , whether it's a big case , whether it's bringing on the associate , whether it's moving into larger space , whether it's over-investing in a marketing channel . That scares you a little bit .

Right , you should have something on there that scares you , because if they don't , then you are not stretching and you're not growing .

So one of the things that I do in my annual planning is I create my bucket list not for what am I going to do before I die , because , again , you never know when you're going to die , right , what are all of the things that are on my list that I can compress into 2025 and check off my list and check off my list .

So in 24 , and I'll show you exactly what my kind of to-do list looked like in 2024 in a second but in 2024 , we did exactly that Like , one of the things was I've never sat front row at a sporting event . So we did Caps games , we did a DC United game , we did a Nationals game .

It turns out actually sitting in the front row at a hockey game in the corner is not a good seat . Same thing for soccer , right , you can't see very much . It's a cool experience , the kids love it , but I actually don't recommend it if you're a fan of the sport . Another thing on my list getting on other people's stages .

So I was trying to grow , grow my influence , grow my audience , selfishly or otherwise , and made a point to try to get on . I wanted to get on two other people's stages . I ended up getting on five through the course of the year and again it turns out like I just wear the same jacket . Those are , in fact , two different events .

And then , lastly , my other big thing for 2024 was publish a book . So we finished the Renegade Lawyer Marketing , the revised second edition , got that published just before the summit . But having those big things and having the stretch goals to hit is critically important to your annual planning .

This is what my sheet looked like my targets for 2024 , the ones in green I finished , the ones in yellow I probably will before the end of the year , and the ones in red have fallen off and I'm not hitting 100 , right , the goal is not actually to hit 100 . The goal is to stretch yourself and hit more than you did last year .

And so once you've got your own 10 out of 10 and your own goals for the year and all of the things that you want to accomplish , then the next challenge is how do we prioritize all this stuff ? First thing to think about is what's the one goal on the list that , if you accomplish it , it makes everything else easy .

What's the lead domino that you can knock down ? That will make everything else a little bit easier , and it could be the lead domino in each category , or it could be a lead domino to a year . Second thing to think about is what has to happen in a certain season .

Right , you only play baseball for so long , so we have to go and sit first row in an ass game sometime in that season . Might be your kid's spring break is the only time that you can go and travel , right , so that week has got to get blocked off for that . What I think gets underappreciated in all of this is the power of compounding gains .

So my marketing director , lauren , is on the call . The challenge for her , she will remember , was to double our number of leads . How am I going to double the leads from 2024 to 2025 ? So we don't have to think about how am I going to double the leads from 2024 to 2025 ? So we don't have to think about , like , how am I going to double the leads ?

You just got to add 10% seven times , no big deal . Just figure out seven different ways for us to get 10% more and with the compounding gains . Now we'll have double , and in our auto practice , we are on pace to sign 60 to 70% more cases in 2024 than we did in 2023 . Now that hit double ? No , but it's 60 to 70% more than we did in 2023 .

And so there is incredible power in compounding gains . And then the last thing that I'll say about prioritizing your list and setting these goals is I avoid goals with the words every and never in there . So people will set goals that are things like I'm going to read the Bible every day or I want to never . What's a good example ?

I'm going to never be under 6,000 steps for the 8,000 steps for the day . I want to go on a date with my wife every week .

As soon as you miss that one time , you've failed your goal for the entire year , and that can happen in the first two weeks , and then you go screw it , I'm off track , and so , rather than setting the always or never goals , I set goals around how many times , right ?

So if you have a week like I want to go on a date every week with my wife might become I'm going to go on 48 dates , right , because you can double stack them at the end of the year . If you're behind , you , build in a little bit of leeway for yourself and as you're planning out your year .

Dan Sullivan writes about having three different types of days , and this is again . If you're in the business 100% of the time , maybe this slide isn't for you without talking to your boss a little bit more , but if you're running the business 100% , this is for you , right .

Having focused days where you're working on the business and where you're not taking interruptions from client phone calls , client emails and things like that . Buffer days is a little bit of a misnomer , because those are the days when you're actually working in the business .

Those are the days where you're creating the buffer that you can go outside and do the important work of focusing , where you can go outside and take your free days when you're totally off .

Buffer is making sure that everything happens the way that it's supposed to be happening , so that you can free up your space to do the high level strategy , to do the high level thinking and the management of the firm that needs to happen .

And then you've got to build in your travel and your clarity days now , because the thing that happens if you don't block those off the calendar is that they get eaten by time vultures . They get eaten by clients or by marketing calls or by bar activities . You have to block those off and you have to be very meticulous about guarding that time .

So one of the things that I'm known for is I don't do anything in the spring or the fall after four o'clock , monday through Friday , because I'm out coaching soccer . That's it's time , it's inviolable time . And then when we plan ahead our travel stuff like it goes on the calendar and it is not coming off and people just know that . All right .

Last I think it's the last section and this is a highly tactical section All right , how do we take these results-based activities ? How do we take one assigned X number more clients and bring it back to actual activity-based goals ? Because you don't have control over the result . As much as we think we control the result , we don't .

What we control is our activity . Smart , goal setting right . What is smart , specific , measurable , something reasonable and time-bound right . How do you define your goals really well ? So bad goal is sign up more cases .

A better goal is to sign up 20% more cases next year , right , time bound , at the same average case value , because there's a lot of ways to sign up more cases .

If I told Lauren , go and find us some more cases , right , she could go and find a whole bunch of low dollar value cases we could be scraping the bottom of the barrel and not actually come out the other end with any more profit or any more money to distribute to the rest of the team . That's a bad goal . Make more money also a bad goal . Right .

Better goal increase revenue by a quarter million dollars while maintaining or increasing the operating margin , and again putting that 2025 time bound limitation on it . Last bad goal lose weight . Right , lose weight is an ambitious thing , but if you don't time bound it , you don't quantify how much you're trying to lose , then it doesn't matter .

Maybe I'll just lose weight later , right ? No , the better goal is to lose 10 pounds by the end of Q1 . And so if these were my three goals , here's how I would set activity goals around meeting them . If I wanted to sign up 20% more clients at the same average case value , here's maybe what I would track and you could track any of these .

You could track all of these . I would do 50 lunches over the course of the year with referral sources of mine . Again , it's not every week , right , because by February , if I'm on vacation now , I've missed my weekly goal 50 lunches with referral sources . I would send the ultimate referral letter twice a year .

And if you don't know what that is , if you haven't gotten that as part of one of our great legal marketing giveaways , send me an email . After this I'll get you a copy of it and how you can implement it and increase your number of referral sources . The last one is upgrade intake . Man . Upgrade intake that is not a well-articulated goal , right ?

The way to articulate the activity around that would be something like review two intake calls per month with the intake coordinator and grade them on the metric that we have the grading metric .

And if you did all the three of those things , I can guarantee you would have 20 more cases , 20% more cases of the average case value next year and you won't be looking at your numbers in October going shit . How am I going to make up the next 20% ?

Because you will have been checking off all of the activity that you or somebody on your team needs to engage in . That will move you closer to that goal . If I wanted to add $250,000 in revenue and maintain the same margin . I would do everything we just talked about in the last slide and that might be enough .

The other things I would do is make sure that we review every process that we have in our firm , all of our case flow , and I would solve for the inefficiencies . If you're running an auto accident firm or PI firm , time is money and the more that you can compress time , the more money you will make .

Right , if you can compress the amount of time from a client finishing medical care to a demand package going out , you're going to speed up the velocity of money . If I'm running an hourly firm , I might think about raising my fees . Right , work on the same number of cases with the same number of inbound phone calls and I would make more money .

And the other thing that we've done this year that's been really impactful is instituting a top 20% case meeting . So once a month we sit down and we go through at a deep level the top 20% by value of cases in the firm and we try to figure out how can I take a case that's worth $150,000 and make it worth $250,000 ?

Doesn't require me to get the phone to ring anymore , doesn't require us to get any better at intake . But it does require us to think deeply about how do we add value to the client's life ? And , by the way , if you spend a lot of time doing that , your phone is going to ring more and you're going to get better at intake . It just happens .

And then taking it outside the law , like if you want to lose 10 pounds formula , is pretty easy . Let me say that again . The formula is pretty simple . Right , just hit 10 to 12,000 steps six days a week , your strength train four days a week , you get a 500 calorie deficit and you hit protein goals . It's really simple .

It's not easy and for years I knew all of that and I didn't do it . So in 2024 , I stopped making that my goal . I stopped making 10,000 steps four days a week . 500 calorie deficit hit the protein goal is my goal , and I made hire a coach my goal and it worked . If you are tracking activity , this is a . This is a resource I would commend to you .

It's the best self journal . It's got these habit trackers and this is from the beginning of 2023 , where I was trying to . Actually it was 2024 . I was trying to reverse engineer .

What are the things that I would need to do if I wanted to get on more stages this year right Post on LinkedIn once a day , comment five times a day to expand my reach , and then having an accountability partner or partners to report this stuff to to make sure it's actually getting done .

And again , if you like , if that doesn't work , then just pay a fitness coach . The ways that I built accountability into my life have been regular check-ins . So one of the things that I've been doing I keep talking about Lauren a lot on this call Lauren I hope you're still here . You're still here .

Lauren and I have regular Monday check-ins where we go through what is your priority ? Is that aligned with what I think the priority is ? And then , what activities did we complete each week ? And it goes both ways .

Right , if I'm the one who's not producing and for a while we weren't the content for her or the videos for her , she can hold me accountable for not doing it . Right it she . It's fair for lauren to say , hey , you can't ask me to give you a 200 increase or 100 increase in leads if you guys aren't going out and having lunches with doctors .

You can't expect me to increase the leads if you guys aren't sitting down in your studio and shooting video for us to edit and put up on youtube , right ?

So having regular check-ins and having clear expectations for what's expected every single week and then having people who will challenge you when you fall short of that , all right , we are coming up on about 11 minutes left . If you have questions or there's something I can help you with , drop it in here and I will get to it .

Drop it into the chat and I'll get to it before we break here . But I want to run you through an opportunity that I have , and that is my . 2025 will be my year course .

You may have seen it may actually be at a different name on the website and a link that I'm going to share with you in a second but if you want to make 2025 your year , I'm here to help you . Here's what you can expect . It's a four-week course . We're going to meet every Monday at two o'clock , starting next Monday and going through December 16th .

We're going to meet for about an hour in a cohort , and you're going to leave this course with clearly defined goals for 2025 , and one of those goals is going to scare the shit out of you and if it doesn't , I'm going to rewrite it for you . You will have simple but not easy steps that you can execute on .

In the first quarter , you will learn how to hold yourself accountable for doing the work and you'll experience the power some of you for the first time of having group accountability right , having a group of people that you need to check in with and say I either did or I didn't do the thing I said I was going to do next week .

Live training modules every Monday for four weeks . It's going to be homework to get you thinking deeply about your personal 10 out of 10 . Because , again , the last thing that I would want for you is to leave this call and feel like you didn't get anything tactical . This would be a highly tactical course .

We're going to be engaging with each other in a WhatsApp accountability group . Whatsapp is like text messaging , where there will be check-ins , there will be questions fielded for the group about what you need help with , and you're going to get personalized feedback on your goals from me .

And here's the best part I would teach this for free , but if I taught it for free , I don't think people would show up for the second or the third week . You need to have some skin in the game , and so the course is $14.97 .

But if you show up every week for four weeks and you attend the calls or you tell me afterwards that you watched the video , you respond to the homework and you participate in the WhatsApp group , I'm going to refund every dollar of that at the end of the four weeks .

I would do this for free , but I don't think people would show up on the second or the third call If it were free . You need to have some skin in the game . If that's interesting to you , here's the link . Here's a QR code . I want to help you make 2025 your best week , best year ever , and it starts now or it starts next Monday .

Any questions , any comments ? Anything I can help people with . I'll give you another couple minutes with the QR code and then I'm going to pop my screen back down . It's awesome . We still got 49 people on the call . I always worry when I do these that people are not going to show up .

Spend all this time making a PowerPoint and I'm worried that people are not going to show up . Spend all this time making a PowerPoint and I'm worried that people are not going to show up . So congratulations to you for showing up for yourself .

Yes , the calls will be recorded If you are playing in , if you choose to play in the accountability group and in the program . If you can't make a call because listen , we got stuff that's on our calendar already you're going to get .

Everybody will get recordings of all of the calls and my deal with you on the refund piece is you just have to raise your hand and say , yeah , I did actually watch the call and I did do the homework . So the calls will be recorded and they'll be distributed to the people that are in the group . All right , I'm excited to get this group underway .

You have the QR code . You're going to get a replay of this call , probably within the next couple of hours with a link , and I hope as many of you as we can fit into the group will come and play and have your best 2025 ever . Thanks , guys . Have a great rest of your Monday .