Trembling Less, Achieving More: Brett Trembly’s Secrets to Delegation and Life Mastery!

Brett's here to drop some serious truth bombs about how to escape that grind . We're talking about the power of delegation , the art of active leadership , and why understanding your true intentions can turn your practice around . If you're ready to stop just working hard and start working smart , this episode is your game changer .

Let's get into it and unleash your potential beyond the briefs .

Like their sole purpose is not to come work for us so we can live this great life . And they're going to do all the work .

Now here's your host , Brian Glass .

If you've been listening to this show for a while and you've gotten value out of it , and especially if you've gotten value out of my conversations with other lawyers , this is your chance to get off the podcast show up in person and get in real life one-on-one FaceTime with members of the GLM tribe . Pick up your tickets at glmsummitcom . That's wwwglmsummitcom .

Today's guest , brett Tremblay , is going to be there and you can too . Brett is the co-owner of Get Staffed Up and he's the founder of Tremblay Law Firm in South Florida . Brett , welcome to the show , my man .

Tremblay law firm screwed that up , told you I would Fastest growing law firm from 2016 to 2018 . And the co-founder of Get Staffed Up , which is a staffing agency for overseas offshore VAs . In 2022 , they were number 67 on the Inc 5,000 list . In this year slipped a little bit to number 23, .

But to give you some perspective on what you have to do to get there 2,400% three-year growth to be on that list . In addition to running those two companies , brett is the moderator of his EO Forum in South Florida and he's an American Ninja Warrior alum and he's an author of 24 Months to Freedom .

So somebody who's doing all of that stuff , brett , to then have the audacity to write a book about delegating your way to freedom . How are you getting all of this done ?

But I am to the point , brian , frankly , where , for my law firm , we spent three years building up a leadership team , we use traction and we have appointed a managing partner , so I spend one full day per week on my law firm . The other four days I spend on get staffed up , and because we have a team now of 180 employees , that's just internally .

If you keep pushing things down , eventually , like I found myself this morning and had time to work out , a meeting got pushed and I'm like this is nice , like I don't , I'm not , I don't have something . That's just . There's no fires to put out when you say delegate your way to freedom . Eventually , yeah , you can get there .

And it doesn't mean that I don't work hard and that I don't actually really enjoy working and building the business . We didn't build this business so that we could get to a certain point and then just go out in the boat in Miami all the time . We still work very hard and we're learning constantly from our clients , and that's a new thing .

But your priorities shift and I'm happy to get into that .

But most of the people who have the capability and the capacity to build a business to that certain point would be miserable , sitting there and doing nothing . And so for you , one day in the law firm , the other four days working on Get Staffed Up .

What does the breakdown of that time look like between doing the work , managing people , and then learning from people in other industries or in the same industry as you , in terms of like masterminds and coaching and things like that ?

five years . Right From two of us , it started to 180 . Like I said before you , you just I don't . I think I could sit on the beach for about a week or two weeks with my family . It takes a week to unwind , but I couldn't sit there forever because , like you and like a lot of people , I do need something that drives me .

But when you have a service-based business , that's tough without putting people in place to really step away .

I can see that the value of having a four hour work week where you're just selling products right , like you're selling I don't know like protein powder and then people are just clicking and filling the orders and you're saying , well , don't bother me , but for guys like us in a service-based business for lawyers , that's not possible .

There's still client complaints or problems that have to happen in question . So on the Get Stopped Up side , I think we have a fully staffed client experience department , so being able to build that out and then turn that over . So I don't have to always be the person to handle the complaints , which I did and I say complaints just like issues , right ?

People have questions , they have things . Again , we're providing a service . I did that for three years and I worked very hard . I don't know how much less I work , but I do know that I don't have . I don't wake up thinking , oh my God , there's a thousand emails I have to respond to . I've got deadlines . I got to go down to court .

I got to try to make a networking meeting . That's the life that I lived for a lot of years and I hustled like crazy and I agree with you , like the wake up and grind and hustle . You got to do that for a while .

But what my book is really about is getting off that hamster wheel , because we tend to run really fast and feel good about it for a while , feeling like we're picking up momentum , but it turns out we're in the same place when we go to bed as when we woke up and that can happen for months and months or years and you're just really you're not getting

anywhere , but you are working hard .

Before we know it it's 1 PM and we haven't gotten a thing done on our to-do list . But then maybe you knock out a few things . You're like you know what , I'm going to go home , put my kids to bed and then I'm going to get a few hours of work in . Or Saturday , I'm going to get my billing done . And sometimes you work really hard on that Saturday .

And then Sunday you're like I feel pretty good , you worked hard , you're just in the exact same spot as you were before . And that's everyone gets the hamster wheel analogy Like you're just running harder and harder but you haven't gone forward , you haven't done anything to put yourself in a position to reap the rewards from that hard work .

Because if the hamster wheel slows down , then less happens and you're still in the same spot . And I think when I sorry , but when I talk about delegate your way to freedom . It's really about taking time away and , brian , you get this . You mentioned masterminds and you guys , you help people with this and it's you have to step away and think about it .

It's called thinking grow rich , not working grow rich .

We all have the same amount of time in our day , but how we spend our time will dictate what our life looks like in a few years from now . Every choice that we make with our time has a ripple effect on what our future looks like , and that just you can't get away from that fact , and so we have to be very conscious about how we're spending our time .

So for somebody who hasn't . And you graduated the same year that I did 2008 . When did this become your intention ? To be a business owner , an operator , and not to be a practicing lawyer ?

I don't think you have to start from day one , because there is something to be said for not overthinking and just doing . We've all seen those kind of quotes and it's like doing is good . You got to get things moving .

The hamster wheel at the beginning is inevitable , but slowly over time you're going to take 15 minutes off and then 30 minutes off and then 45 and get to the place . My book 24 Months of Freedom is not about being on a beach for the rest of your life while you have this magical business that runs without you .

The other point I was going to make is absentee leadership doesn't work . You can't just disappear for a year and expect your business to continue to flourish . Disappear for a year and expect your business to continue to flourish .

It would be foolish to think that the people you leave in charge are going to take as good of care as your business , as you would . People aren't put on this planet to make our lives better . Like their sole purpose is not to come work for us so we can live this great life , and they're going to do all the work .

That's not what the agreement is with an employee . They want to make money and in exchange , you want them to do all the work . That's not what the agreement is with an employee . They want to make money and in exchange you want them to do a good job . And then you work on building that culture and finding great people and making it better and better .

But anyway , I'll get off that soapbox .

And sometimes I see pictures of myself from that time period and there's one in my house like me , my wife , and my daughter is now 11 . And she was like one or two at the time and it probably looks like , oh , he was young family .

But I can see the stress on myself looking back at those photos and it's actually pretty jarring because then it like it brings up all these memories and you're trying to put on a good face and pretend like everything's great , but it's hard and it's lonely and it's tough and getting help around you and getting that bandwidth to get to the point where you can

say , man , I've got , I've got a business now that at least doing for me financially what I need it to do , and I'm starting to build something . Now , what ? Now , what do I really want to be ? And the reason Brian is , I believe this is because when I was asked early on , what do I want I had some absurdly low number for my law firm .

Like I think I set up my my my ultimate goal in life is to have a law firm that does $300,000 per year because because , because you probably thought three , if it does 300 , I'm taking home 300 .

Join us in Phoenix , arizona , from October 3rd through the 5th and learn how to generate more referrals , effectively use social media and video and improve your client experience and communication . This event is unlike any other legal conference that you've ever been to , and it is certainly not like your local state bar CLEs .

So if your law firm is running your rag and you can't figure out where to spend your next dollar an hour , join a couple hundred of the most successful small firm owners that I know out in Phoenix , arizona , from October 3rd to the 5th . Get your tickets at GLMSummitcom . That's GLMSummitcom , and we'll see you there no-transcript .

Dick ignores the fact that you actually have to be good enough to attract those kinds of clients . Right , it's like that to the Christmas vacation line where he's holding out for a position in upper management .

No , you've got to do the work and you've got to be flooded with shit that you don't like for a while to get good enough number one , but to figure out what it is that you actually do want to take a run at . And so I wanted to ask you a question about as you build that up .

One of the things you said is absentee leadership doesn't work , and here you are managing Get Staffed Up , a company with , I think 180 , you said full-time actual employees of Get Staffed Up , but also 800 or so VAs who are working for somebody else without a physical location .

And so how are you leading people through core values and meetings and company culture and all of that stuff when they're not even physically in the same space . How are you managing that ?

So we're paying a lot of money to people , I think , mostly older than us , with a lot of experience , which is just a unique place to get to in business . But prior to that , just out of necessity , we work with folks , meaning we would hire people and pay them X amount per month to be our VP of whatever , but only in a fractional basis .

We weren't big enough , nor could we afford it at the time , and we had three different of those fractional VPs . Tell us that , regardless of in-person or remote setup or structure , we had the best company culture that they'd ever been around .

If you have this great vision but five people have different visions and everybody's rolling in different directions , like how is that helpful ? Right , it's getting people in alignment and we've built a culture of accountability , but in a way that people are just very excited to be around each other . Virtually .

I'm most proud of because you mentioned it we have core values that we hire every quarter , we review based on and we give feedback and then we use those to promote . I don't know if we've ever done a demotion , but technically demote or let go of people . We use that through our long hiring process and it's not just lip service or something on a website .

We really live by those core values . And then we have a more mission driven and we incentivize every time we've had a success , we've celebrated that as a company , we've given bonuses and we reach milestones and everybody . It's just an exciting place to work . Now I will say that when you're growing very quickly .

Of course , it's exciting to work at a company like that and you start attracting people and people want to jump on board .

If you're saying , look guys , it's going to be a tough two years , we're going to lay off half of our workforce and we're going to get back to basics and we're sorry , but that's what we have to do , that's probably not going to be the best company culture someone has been around , but we're a startup culture and we hire people that we know are going to be

fantastic and we hire for attitude and we train for skill and putting all those things together it's really worked for us .

It's a percentage growth basis , not just how big you are and to get even bigger the next year , or we're still in the top 250 , which , to me , was I couldn't believe it . That's really good , but companies slow down over the time or they take cash infusions , but what we haven't done is diluted ourselves .

We don't want to just start taking money and grow just to grow .

What's most important to me is the reputation of our company , and maybe it should be , maybe it shouldn't be , but when people say I work with , get Staffed Up , because they do a great job and they care and their people are amazing , that is so fulfilling to me . When I went again , we've worked with over a thousand people by now .

Some people are not good employers and then they blame it on us for not finding them good people . Right , you know that better than me , right ? But you got to teach people how to be good employers . Teach people how to have a team . Leadership is not something that's just innate in most lawyers .

It's tough when you get that feedback or somebody's not happy , but it hits me harder on the get staffed up side of things than it does on the law firm side of things , because the customer experience that we've tried to build from day one and we were having our early customers like wow , we're blown away with the quality of people you're finding .

That's a high for me and that's something that we really strive to keep .

I think you guys had a little bit of a first mover advantage , because you're the first VA staffing company for lawyers by lawyers that I had heard of , but now there's a couple of other players in your space , but you were going outside the country to remote places like South Africa . I have a VA from Honduras . Mexico , I know , is on your list .

How are you sourcing people from these remote countries while you're working from your home office in Miami ?

Now it seems like every other week someone else is coming into the space and so I think that we got lucky with time . But that doesn't mean that anybody who was first just would be where we are , and I think it's because we just work so hard on our processes .

We were in business for six months before we tried making any sales just to build out the backend process .

So what we do is all of our people , except for our VPs that I mentioned , are based in Latin America and South Africa , and we have a three-week hiring process where we're testing , screening , doing more testing those English proficiencies , actual , are you going to be good at your job ? There's interviews .

I believe that resumes and interviews are way overvalued in the American hiring process . I just think people rely way too much on resumes . I don't do the hiring anymore , but I didn't even look at a resume until the interview , because that's not . It's just not relevant for me until then .

But we've got a really thorough process and then we put people through a week-long academy which is about a year and a half old now . We pay you to go through the academy , whether you pass or fail , and we have about a 60% passage rate , and only then will we start putting people in front of our clients .

When we're getting 8,000 applications per week and then we're getting down to the top 60 to 80 per week , that's truly the top 1% of the applicant workforce . And we just figured out that system and we've worked really hard at making it better and better as we scale . And so far , so good .

And then I asked him to get me a marketing assistant and we were like man , I think we're onto something . So I went to a lawyer convention , told a few people and made the first two sales for the company and we're like man , I think we're really onto something . You can just feel it . We were talking big from day one . This was actually .

I was talking to him day one . We argue about this now . But he was like I think I can help people do some consulting and I was like , actually , I think this is a real , a good business here . What we did is we made those first five sales so that we had some . We had enough revenue to pay for each one of us to have a full-time assistant

. And then I spent six months building out some marketing sort of endeavor and he spent about six months building out very systematic recruiting processes . And then we said , all right , now it's time . It's like you sign a lease but you got to do a build out before you open your doors for business . That's the way we looked at it .

I learned best by making mistakes , and I'm sure that you made plenty of mistakes along the way , but the idea for me to sit down and plan out a six month long process before taking on any of the work I can't even fathom what that would have been like .

So did you have mentorship or other models from other industries to learn from as you were building these processes out ? Or was this truly all just you and your business partner , from the back of your heads to a ?

I'm in an organization called Entrepreneurs Organization and I had been an accelerator before EO .

So accelerator is EO's program for people trying to get to the financial mark where you're allowed to join EO , and I just studied businesses and I wrote down one time actually the beginning of 2017 , I wrote down on a piece of paper these are the three things that I want to do for my next business .

Right , like I knew I was going to have a second business someday , not just the law firm .

And then when the staffing , I was actually working on a staff , a company myself called the hiring pros , where I was going to help people learn how to hire , because I was in another program with 30 entrepreneurs and all they did was complain oh , millennials this , millennials that .

And I'm in that room that day thinking like I wouldn't want to work for you either . You have no idea how horrible you would be to work for and I was going to help people through the hiring process and I started building out some white papers in that company and then this thing happened .

We didn't send out a market survey because our goal was to convince people that this is what they needed . It wasn't to ask them what they needed , and I guess I never really stopped to think about that before . But I also think that's the way that I , by default , operate as a human being .

I used to make money as a kid and my parents didn't even know how or why . I just did things . I just tried things and I just I saw a clear path here and I'm like what is what are people not going to love about having really high-end , educated , talented people who are appreciative of the job working for them full-time at a fraction of the cost ?

I couldn't think of what would be better for a business owner when , as you and I know , overhead can crush you . When you're trying to grow in this area , you're going to hire someone and you just start thinking about how am I going to pay these people ? It's tough and I think in the entrepreneur world it's really hard .

In the finance and the private equity , you throw money at problems , but what about the rest of us that don't have money to throw a problem ? Taking on that risk is a lot . I feel like I'm starting to ramble now in answering that question , but I never really thought about it before . But it's fun to explore .

And I do have a couple of questions on the tactical , but I'm interested for you . So you had enough sales to the point where you and your partner could hire your first VA full-time . And then what did that person do for you ? What did they do to free up your time , to let you go work on the higher level stuff ?

We were starting to build lists and we were starting to try to do , if they click on this , if they get this email , not overly sophisticated , but also not just something you can create in a day , especially when I didn't have a lot of time to put into it Because , again , this started as a side hustle with the idea that it would be a full-time thing soon .

It was not supposed to be a side hustle but out of necessity , we both had law firms and I still do . He ended up selling his . His one assistant was working on recruiting forms , recruiting platforms , tests . A lot of it came from my experience and how I hired people , and then that was getting built out on the back end .

How do we accept applications virtually , how do we do the interviews ? There's a whole lot that goes into that part of it . And then my job was the marketing side and I had this idea that if we you can get in Florida , for example , and a lot of States , the email addresses for lawyers are public domains . You just put in a request and ask for it .

So I'm like we're going to get all these email addresses . People are going to say what ? I can hire someone for how much ? And we're going to be just like bajillionaires overnight . That was my big thing , right , the email marketing to this day just doesn't really work . When we launched , it was not an email marketing driven growth , it was all word of mouth .

We could have done no marketing and had about the same size company . It was like wow , I just found somebody who I love . Here's what I pay them . You should call these guys and that's what I pay them . You should call these guys . And that's how we took off .

And then the spam filters and the junk filters are getting better and better at keeping out the stuff that's not from somebody who I know before .

But you're right , anytime somebody and I'm in a couple of groups like EO anytime somebody asks about I'm looking for a VA staffing company , why would you go try to find somebody on Fiverr or any of these kind of fly-by-night I don't know Philippines online , when you can go with an agency that's already vetted somebody ?

And what I love about your process and we'll dive into that maybe here as we wrap up , like before we commit to even interviewing somebody , I get a whole slew of videos from that person . I get a writing sample .

I get them explaining why there are core values , match for your organization , and so you can listen to them , number one , and get the level of like how heavily accented are they ? But then you can also see the writing stamp and you're not then getting involved with somebody who is ultimately a disappointment .

And so how would you advise the lawyer who's thinking about . Maybe I could save money by going to a VA offshore Like where would they start coming up with a list of things that they wanted to delegate ?

Why is that ? Oh , it's because they're all in South America or Latin America . I should say so . To answer your question specifically , though , Brian , people , so many people , want to try part-time , which makes sense , because it's like I want to test drive the car . I don't know what I need .

Let me find you're just not going to find anybody who will blow you away who's working part-time , because really good people want full-time employment .

The people you're finding on Fiverr , on Upwork , they're part-timers , they're project-based , they're mostly just people that are taking on , trying to get some money , do some design projects and move to their next thing , and so I say that because I haven't ever met an attorney that when they really sit down and think about how they spend their time which again , I

go back to how we spend our time is what our lives look like that doesn't have 40 hours of work to get to one person . I will die on this hill . You should never , ever be a true solo . You should have at least an executive assistant who is managing your email , your calendar , protecting your time .

It is just so impossible to be good at anything when you're trying to do everything to run any business , any business . I used the hot dog guy on a corner . He hitches his hot dog , stands in his truck , pulls his truck upright . He's had to do all the preparation .

He is so limited to what happens in those few hours in terms of his financial well-being , and that's true for anyone that's running their own business . We just don't think about it that way and that's why law firm owners average about one , just over one hour per day in the billable hour world and obviously you and others are MPI .

It's not really the same , but it's still productive work .

When you get off the hamster wheel and you feel right down everything you do for a two or three day period , like everything or put it in your phone , you'll start to see all this time that you didn't realize you were spending on things .

It's like when you start tracking your food , when you're on a diet right or like Weight Watchers , or you're like I ate these three things , but then you start tracking your food and you're like , oh my gosh , I ate these 25 , I didn't even realize . I never stopped to think how all those things add up . The same thing is true with their time .

So if the owner will write down how they're spending their time instead of just thinking about it , live for two or three days straight . Then you start to highlight all the things you hate doing , all the things that aren't necessary , and you either kill them , get rid of them or delegate them .

But you have to have somebody good to delegate to , and that's why I come back to having a high quality experience with somebody that works for you , because a good person will change your life and a bad person will make you think maybe that's not for me or I don't want to do that anymore . And then you run into all kinds of other issues .

Right , Because for the first month , two months , it is a cost , but then all of a sudden you get this kind of hockey stick growth where you're leveraged up to go do higher value things and that person becomes an asset to you .

And so I'm wondering what you've seen in this onboarding and training phase for somebody who is a true solo or is operating at a small firm , maybe has some staff , like how much training and management of the VA is required in the first four weeks , six weeks , eight weeks before they can go off and operate on a more limited management basis .

You get that better than anybody , but that would take a ton of time . So if you're hiring someone just to be answer the phones , which is still so important as a first impression for a law firm there's some training videos , there's some feedback .

That's less time than training a legal assistant to do e-filing , do some corrections , email your clients certain templates . That's a little more hands on . So it's interesting that the seven positions that I advocate for and , by the way , this is my book , thank God , I have a copy right here for me , for us but 24 months of freedom .

We go through the time in which you should hire and when you should hire , but how much time it's going to take to train that person , cause it's different for every position , but you'll get better at training and then you'll , and then eventually you'll hand training over to someone else . Which man ?

Talk about freedom when you get to the point where somebody else in your firm is doing the onboarding and training . Oh wow , that's a life changer , because I admit that training is a little bit of a daunting and a lot of it . I don't have time to train is what a lot of attorneys say .

And then , as you build out these whole manuals and offload it to somebody else , that really and I'm with you , that's the real unlock .

When you have somebody else who can do the training and do a little bit of the management because you're exactly right with the marketing assistant position and certainly for the intake and the phones , it's not just trained and then go as a law firm owner .

You still got to manage that person , you still got to go back and QA the phone calls and all of that stuff , because what happens is you get frustrated and you stop listening and then the relationship is just a downward spiral and then you're like VAs don't work , no , it's because you didn't manage the person .

You gotta learn how to ride the thing first , right , and the quality of bike matters , the terrain you're riding on matters , the weather matter All those things come into play and that's where you , as a business owner , get to differentiate yourself and learn how to do better and better .

A few hours , two hours per day , the first week , training your executive assistant , and then less and less as long as you're just okay . Here's what I want done with this type of email . Here's what I want you got to put in the time and once you do , it's an investment .

People can pick up 24 Months to Freedom on Amazon , can check you out at GetStaffedUpcom , and they can come and see you speak live at our event in October in Orlando . Check it out . Check it out . It's at GLMSummitcom . Brent , where else do you want to send ?

So if you go to getstaffedupcom slash timefreedompodcast , there's a link to our book , there's more information about us , there's a discount on working with us for your listeners and I just wanted to do that for you and anyone who's in your part of your team .