Show Notes:

Stop coaching effort. “If I have to coach someone to work hard or harder, they’re probably not the right person for us. I can coach somebody in terms of skills and strategy, and we can talk about that stuff all day long. But we’re not going to say, ‘Hey, you need to work harder or you need to wake up earlier.’ That’s just not an adult conversation I want to have with somebody.”

The middle of the market is the danger zone. “I would do everything in my power over the next five years to make my firm as valuable as possible. We talked about the self-managing thing to give myself optionality, which can mean either private equity buys into my firm, or as an opportunity to potentially sell in the future.”

Build a brand that can’t be duplicated. “Run that James Sexton playbook of put out a great book, start to really build strong PR and get on some of these national type podcasts and be seen as the go-to person. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there because everything else is going to be very transactional. That’s also very difficult to duplicate and copy by somebody else.”

Think abundance, not reduction. “If you can have somebody who’s a great paralegal that can now do the job of five paralegals and can have that level of output, you can look at it and say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t need four other paralegals,’ or you look at it and say, ‘I do like five of this person, because now they can do the job of 25 paralegals.’ I’d much rather always focus on growth than strictly how do we cut as many expenses as possible. That tends to be more of a scarcity type strategy.”

Run your own race. “Having worked with so many firms, I can tell you with certainty there’s what you see on social media and then what is happening in real life, in their life. And you can’t just assume that person is happy and fulfilled just based on this one thing that you see.”