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How to get started with your law firm's strategic plan. Alright, this is obviously a much bigger conversation than we have time for in just a few minutes so I'm just going to tell you Step Number 1, the A plus number one don't fuck this up step for your strategic plan. Here's what you do. You call a meeting of your shareholders; those are your family, your husband or your wife or your grown kids or whoever has a vested interested in the success of your business. You call a meeting of those people and you say, where do we want this business to take us in the next 36, 48, 60 months? Don’t worry about ten years. Go two years, three years, four years at most, don’t go that much further than that. Where and how do we want to be living our life?
Don't worry about how much it costs, don’t do that, don’t make that mistake, how do we want to be living our lives? What kind of house do we want to be living in, what area do we want to be living in? What kind of vacations do we want to be taking? What kind of insurance do we want to provide for our children and our future? What kind of domestic help do we want to employ? How many hours do we want to be giving the business in the average week? Some weeks will be more, some weeks will be less, but on average how many hours do we want to be giving to this business so that the business gives us the life that we want to live because your law firm should be a vehicle that gives you the life you want to live. Your law firm should be working for you. Your life shouldn't be all about you working for your law firm.
So Step Number 1, I promise you this is the foundation, this is what makes the difference. Call the meeting of your shareholders and talk about how do we want to be living our life? And what does the law firm need to accomplish not some fairy tale pie in the sky, we need to win a gigantic judgment or settlement or whatever lottery ticket strategy. What does the law firm need to accomplish? How much predictable revenue does a law firm need to produce for us every month, every quarter, every year? What kind of support staff, what kind of systems, what kind of procedures do we need to have in place so that we're not coming home miserable and burnt out and grouchy and stressed out about the law firm.
And what kind of business do we want to have? You know, if you get off on helping people get out of unhappy relationships so they can start a new life then don’t go and be a personal injury lawyer just because someone you went to law school with makes a bunch of money as a personal injury lawyer. Happy lawyers make more money. You don’t make a bunch of money doing stuff that doesn’t turn you on and excite you and then suddenly make you happy. You'll never be able to muster the stick-to-itiveness and the commitment if you don't – if there isn't something about the work that really excites you and I just use family law and personal injury because it was the first example. I could use a thousand different examples that we've seen where lawyers go and try and chase the buck rather than building a firm that makes them happy.
So Step Number 1 on building your strategic plan is a meeting of the shareholders, that’s your family, those are the people who are financially invested in your business. They give you access to financial resources to invest in your business. They give you access to emotional resources to invest in your business. They give you access to their time and their patience because they've got to listen to you everyday when you come home complaining about what's going on in your business. They're your shareholders, they're your investors. You know what we call it? In law there's a cause of action. We all know this cause of action when you take assets and resources that are entrusted to you by your shareholders and you misappropriate them. It's called embezzlement, don't be a financial emotional embezzler of your families resources. Involve them in your strategic plan because it's their strategic plan. The rest of it is very, very simple to do; it's mechanical, it's predictable, lawyers have been doing this for hundreds of years, you can do it too.
