Choose Wisely When You Hire

When it comes to hiring for your law firm there are three elements you need to consider: when to hire, who to hire and how to hire. Today we are going to be looking at all three elements and some ways you can take the chaos out of the hiring process.  In this episode we discuss:   Considering your business model before you hire. Knowing when it makes sense for your business to hire. Weighing monetizing versus convenience when making your hiring decision. How your mindset about money will dictate your level of comfort dealing with it. The importance of systems and having someone to run those systems. Removing yourself from the epicenter of your business. Optimizing the performance of key team members and empowering them. Knowing that bringing on a new hire takes an investment, an expense in training. Recognizing your zone of genius and spending your time there. Contact Info: SOCIAL LINKS & Contact Info -  Scheduler:  https://meetme.so/LawFirmMentor  Thrive Tribe Tactics January 2021: http://lawfirmmentor.net/thrive-tribe-tactics/ Bio: Allison Williams Bio Allison C. Williams, Esq., is Founder and Owner of the Williams Law Group, LLC, with offices in Short Hills and Wall Township, New Jersey.  She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is Certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney, and is the first attorney in New Jersey to become Board-Certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in the field of Family Law. Ms. Williams is a member of the New Jersey Board on Attorney Certification (NJBAC) – Matrimonial Committee, a New Jersey Supreme Court committee that determines eligibility of candidates to be certified as a recognized practitioner in the field of matrimonial law. Ms. Williams has been named a Rising Star Attorney by the New Jersey Super Lawyers franchise continuously from 2008 – 2013, and has been named a Super Lawyer by that organization for 2014 – 2019. In 2016, she was featured in the Super Lawyers publication (Williams v. The Rubber Stamp), she has been named one of the Top 50 Women Super Lawyers in New Jersey from 2017-2019 and in 2019, was voted in the Top 100 Super Lawyers in the State of New Jersey. Ms. Williams is an accomplished businesswoman. In 2017, the Williams Law Group won the LawFirm500 award, ranking 14th of the fastest growing law firms in the nation, as Ms. Williams grew the firm 581% in three years. Ms. Williams won the Silver Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017.  In 2018, Ms. Williams was voted as NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business and was designated one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. In 2019, Ms. Williams won the Seminole 100 Award for founding one of the fastest growing companies among graduates of Florida State University. In 2018, Ms. Williams created Law Firm Mentor, a business coaching service for lawyers.  She helps solo and small law firm attorneys grow their business revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money.  Through multi-day intensive business retreats, group and one-to-one coaching, and strategic planning sessions, Ms. Williams advises lawyers on all aspects of creating, sustaining and scaling a law firm business – and specifically, she teaches them the core foundational principles of marketing, sales, personnel management, communications and money management in law firms.  She received her B.S., magna cum laude, and her M.S., summa cum laude, from Florida State University. She received her J.D., cum laude, from Syracuse University College of Law. Snip-Its: 00:11:36 How much do we expect this person to bring into the business based on the work that they do and then, of that stream of revenue, a certain portion goes to the lawyer. So if you think about it, there are three primary expenses that you're going to have in a law firm. You're going to have compensation to the person doing the work. You're going to have the overhead to do the work. And that's the stuff of the files, right. The the ink, the paper, the machines, the licenses, all of the stuff of running the business. And then you're going to have the profit. And you need to have profit, even if you're not planning to take that profit and stick it in your pocket. You need to have profit in order to reinvest in the business and also to weather the economic storms of unexpected expenses, downturns and market. 00:18:21 We either get convenience over money too soon, i.e. we're tired of working so hard. So we work harder to the point where we feel like we can't work any harder. And then we go out and get an employee, whether we have properly monetized that person or not or whether we can actually afford that person or not. And then we have added to our stress, because now we've taken away the stress of having too much do. But we've added the stress of hustling to pay somebody. That is not a wise choice. 00:31:10 But the goal is to look at how you can monetize work upward. OK. That means from the bottom up, you want every person that comes into the business to create more billing opportunity or more collecting opportunity or more monetizing opportunity or more selling opportunity for people that are higher up the food chain. So that may very well mean that when you hire someone that that person isn't going to be a biller. They're not going to be directly working with clients, that they're going to create economic space for others that are.