What time is it? Time for another newsletter!
Time.
We kill it. We save it. It’s money. And if you drive like me, we make good time.
But also, we waste it. We waste a ton of it. And unlike that Justin Timberlake movie, we can’t buy it back or win it in a weird arm wrestling game.
When we start a firm, for 95 percent of us (this is anecdotal, but I’ve talked to a LOT of lawyers), we have no money. All we have is time. And we should work to make our time more and more valuable so that eventually we can spend money to have more time.
Easier said than done, I know.
Because I have to live with the fact that when my wife told me she was pregnant with our child, my first thought was how happy I was. But my second thought was, how were we going to do this?
We both co-own our firm. Back then, we were $200,000 in debt just on the firm. We were both working 60 to 70 to 80 hour weeks. And honestly, we were making way too little money for us, let alone to bring another person into this.
And while this story has a super happy ending (or at least I’m very happy currently), it was a struggle to get there. Here. Now. Thankfully, I’m a lawyer and not a writer.
But in those moments, I knew it was easier to get time back to spend with my kid than it would be to fix the money issues. So we cut our entire marketing budget. Like $120,000 to $150,000 a year going into 2018.
And while you don’t get the benefit of Greg giving you a lot of free advice and help to turn things around (but you are more than welcome to pay for that help!), I am going to go deep. Like weird Kristen Stewart movie or James Cameron’s normal life deep. Into the major steps I took to get my time back.
Because now, I drive across the country working two to three days a week while my firm runs itself. I literally run a modified EOS Level 10 meeting every Monday, usually one other one-hour meeting, and that’s it for my firm.
I get to spend a lot more time chatting with y’all during our consults, which is always the highlight of my work week.
And my firm is better and more profitable than when I was pouring every spare minute and every last nerve into it.
We are going to frame this around how you, too, can work 24 hours a week (instead of 24 hours a day, feels familiar, amirite?).
But really, you don’t have to follow that specific number. This is about getting a firm that gives you the flexibility and freedom to have a life.
See your kids.
Travel.
Sit on the couch and binge-watch Netflix (You, Red Notice, Cobra Kai. What more do you need?).
I don’t really care what you do with the time. I care that you have it while still solving your clients’ problems.