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What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team and systems, mastering money issues, and more; then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth-generating law firm? That’s what we do each week on the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast. Hosted by Davina Frederick, founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer –– every episode is an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve (and will pay you on time), and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. The goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund, and still have time to enjoy, the lifestyle of your dreams.
Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
Intro:Now here's to Vina.
Davina:If you are a woman law firm owner on a mission to scale your law firm business, you are probably getting bombarded with messages from marketing gurus about what you need to do to get there. Generate more leads or better leads. Fix your intake systems so you convert more of those leads into clients. Hire them to improve your SEO, run your ads, and handle your intake. Oh, and get you to show up in AI.
Davina:I get it. All those things are important, particularly as your law firm grows and shifts from solo to 7 figures. However, scaling your firm is about so much more than lead generation. In many conversations I've had with solos or 6 figure firm owners, a shortage of clients is almost never the problem. If you've been at it for a while, you probably have plenty of clients.
Davina:You may even have more clients than you can comfortably handle right now. And I'm guessing most of those clients were referred to you. One day, you will need a more robust marketing and intake system, but there's a bigger issue that needs to be addressed before you get to that level, and that's a capacity issue. If you are like most solos or 6 figure firm owners I've met, you're likely doing most everything yourself with the help of one, maybe two other staffers. But if you want to scale your firm to 7 figures, something more is needed, and it's not just lead generation.
Davina:Welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I am your host, attorney Davina Frederick, two time author of books on law firm marketing and management and founder of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a company that guides women law firm owners in cultivating the mindset, the strategies, and the systems needed to scale your firm to a multimillion dollar wealth generating business without burning you out in the process. I am so glad you are here with me today because this is one of the most important topics for you to understand. Today, we are going to talk about capacity, not just your firm's capacity to take on more cases, although we will get to that. We'll also talk about your capacity as a business owner, specifically about the kinds of capacity that are required to scale.
Davina:I'll also share a rather embarrassing story about the time I had a firm that was making good money with attorneys and staff and systems, and I walked away from it anyway, and why I did. So let's get into it. Let me start with the message you probably hear often. Marketing companies and gurus will tell you that to scale your law firm, what you need is a lot more leads, better leads, and an intake system that converts those leads into clients more easily. And at some point, with almost every law firm, that is true.
Davina:Client attraction and conversion is one of the seven essential systems every law firm needs to scale. I've written about this in my book on law firm systems and discussed it many times in the past. It's not that marketing and conversion do not matter. They do. However, the more common problem for solo or small firms is that you don't have the capacity to serve more clients if you get them.
Davina:Most solos or six figure firms handle a rush of new clients by stopping their marketing efforts for a while so they can catch up on the work. They worry that if they don't turn their full attention to getting the legal work done, something important will fall through the cracks. And they are not wrong in thinking that way. This is what we call the feast or famine cycle, a term you've probably heard many times before. We market, market to get the work in, then we stop marketing to focus on the work.
Davina:We get all the work done and realize we do not have more cases. So we start marketing heavily again, and the cycle repeats. When I use the word scale, I am not talking about marketing more. I'm talking about growing your law firm to break out of this feast or famine cycle. I am talking about the requirement for you to expand your own personal capacity before you can expand your law firm's capacity.
Davina:I'm talking about expanding your capacity for wealth, for leadership, for judgment, and much more. When you expand your mental and emotional capacity for all these, it shows up in things like your attitude about work, resources, and options, and how those are furthered by wealth. Ability to understand your financial reports well enough to make good business decisions Willingness to hire and manage good lawyers Leadership behaviors and decisions ability to think systematically about your firm's processes and procedures priorities and how you protect and invest your time. Here is the pattern I see repeatedly. A woman law firm owner comes to me, her firm is sitting at about $400,000 or $600,000 in gross revenue.
Davina:She's working all the time to get there, but she's grown the firm as far as she can by herself. She knows at some level that the next step is to expand her team, expand her resources, expand her options, but something is holding her back. Sometimes what holds her back is a knowledge gap. She doesn't know how to hire an associate, structure compensation, or read a profit and loss statement, so she overthinks it and gets stuck in analysis paralysis. More often than not, she already knows she needs to hire, set up better systems, or do a million other things a business owner must do, but she's just not doing it.
Davina:And the reason she isn't doing it is that she has feelings around those decisions that she's not really examining closely. At the root of those feelings is fear, fear of failure, fear of making the wrong decisions, fear of looking foolish. It could be anything. How do I know? Because before I coached hundreds of women lawyers through similar fears, I experienced them myself.
Davina:So now it's story time. Let me tell you about my first law firm because I did almost everything right, and still I failed. I started my own law firm straight out of law school. I was 42 years old. I had a whole career in marketing behind me before I ever went to law school.
Davina:So getting business was never the problem. That part was easy for me. I also had wonderful support in my professional community of judges, mentors, and other attorneys. The first issue was that I didn't know what I didn't know. I'd never been a business owner before.
Davina:Despite that, I worked hard to figure it out because I'm scrappy that way. Within the first year or two of my business, I'd brought in a couple more attorneys to work with me. We hired staff. We began to set up systems. Everything was rocking and rolling, and we were making good money.
Davina:But the real problem was just about to rear its ugly head. I was terrified that I was doing everything wrong that I'd be found out or that I'd make such a catastrophic mistake that I'd lose my bar license. Maybe it was impostor syndrome. My therapist diagnosed it as generalized anxiety disorder. Certainly, there were people in my life at the time who were actively working to undermine me because they weren't sure I was doing the right thing or basically what they wanted me to do.
Davina:Upon reflection, I realized that I was so uncomfortable with all the potential, the responsibility, and people looking to me for answers that I couldn't handle it. I did not grow up in a wealthy household. In fact, I'd never had much money until I became an attorney. I had no leadership experience. Nobody had ever counted on me before to make sure they got a paycheck.
Davina:On top of all that, I was still learning how to be a good lawyer. I was doing something I had never seen anyone in my life do, with no model for how to do it, and with other people's livelihoods now sitting in my hands. And I did what I have since watched many other women do, and what I want to help you not do. I sabotaged myself, my dreams, and my business. My anxiety and my fear got so big that between that and some things going on in my personal life at the time, I decided I needed to take a step back.
Davina:I left everything in my partner's hands, and I walked away from the firm I had built. For about a year after, I took a sabbatical of sorts, working in a fitness business I own with my husband. During that time, I began to heal my body and my nervous system. I also worked on getting clarity about what I wanted for myself and my life. And to be clear, the law firm wasn't failing when I walked away.
Davina:My partner kept growing it. The clients were there. The revenue was there. The team was there. What I didn't have yet was the capacity to be responsible for it all.
Davina:I had built something bigger than the version of me who was running it. And instead of growing into it, I shrank from it. During that year off, I also started reaching out for help. I read books, listened to podcasts, and hired several different general business and mindset coaches. At the time, nobody coached solo lawyers, at least not that I could find.
Davina:Social media hadn't taken off the way it ultimately did, so the coaching industry wasn't as big as it is now. Law firm specific coaching companies were typically for large to mid sized firms, so I found general business coaches, people working in the broader business world, and I hired several of them over time. Some of what I learned was practical. The systems I needed to operate a business, the strategy behind it, how to feel more confident in my decisions as a business owner All of that mattered. But the most important thing I did in that season was expand my mental and emotional capacity to hold greater wealth and abundance thanks to the very first private coach I hired.
Davina:Up until then, nobody in my life was doing what I was doing. I did not grow up in a family of entrepreneurs. I did not grow up in a family of lawyers. I did not even grow up in a family of people who had gone to college or graduate school. My youngest sister and I were the first.
Davina:Being an attorney and a business owner were new to me. Wealth building was new to me, and the people closest to me could not relate to my experiences. It became critical for me to surround myself with people who had experience in this world. I did that and it was life altering. It set me on a path to building a second firm, scaling it, and eventually to the work I do now helping other women law firm owners build wealth generating businesses without fear and anxiety or at least being supported through it.
Davina:My specific goal was to build an organization that would support women lawyers in particular because I felt there was a real gap. The traditional law firm business model has never been designed to support women lawyers. It's traditionally been a man's world. That's changed in my lifetime. And today, we see more women lawyers than ever starting and scaling their own law firm businesses and building the kinds of firms where they'd want to work.
Davina:I'm proud of Wealthy Woman Lawyer's contribution to the growth of women owned law firm businesses. Over the past thirteen, almost fourteen years, we've helped hundreds of other women lawyers become seven figure business owners and do it with confidence. So before we end today, I want to dig a little deeper into what I mean by expanding your capacity. Because others may assign a different meaning to this term, you can expand your capacity for many things including relationships, leadership, wealth, a specific kind of knowledge, intelligence, world travel, you name it. The expansion we recognize the most is usually some physical manifested version.
Davina:For example, we can go off to college and by the time we get through three or four years, not only has our knowledge expanded, but so has our credibility and likely our worldview. This is not an absolute, but an example. What most people probably think when I'm talking about expanding your capacity is the physical, tangible aspect basically, physically expanding your law firm's capacity to serve more clients and put more money in your bank account. If you are at mid 6 figures and doing most of the legal work yourself, you have very likely hit a revenue and profit ceiling. No doubt you have heard me say this many times by now, there's no version of a 7 figure law firm that runs through only one person's hands.
Davina:Expanding your law firm's physical capacity to 7 plus figures typically requires hiring lawyers, not just staff. It means documenting how the work gets done so someone else can do it. It means building an intake and conversion system that does not depend on you personally answering the phone or signing up clients. It means putting all seven essential systems in place. The issue with expanding your firm's physical capacity usually comes down to you being too busy working in the business to do it.
Davina:You generally know what to do, but you aren't sure how to do it when you are already working as hard as you can. It feels like there's never enough time to grow your firm, but growing your firm is the only solution to getting your time and life back. Here's the part people don't talk about as much. If you want to expand your firm's physical capacity, you first need to start expanding your own mental and emotional capacity as a law firm leader of a wealth generating law firm business. So how do you do that?
Davina:Usually, it's a combination of educating yourself, putting what you learn into practice, and then identifying and examining the thoughts and feelings that come up when you do. It's even better if you have someone who has been there, done that, and come out on the other side to support you through the process. And other people experiencing something similar. This is a deep concept, I know, and I can't get into all my thoughts on this topic in one episode. But I did want to share a couple of examples.
Davina:So, let's talk about other people's judgment and your capacity to receive it. To be a 7 figure, multi 7 figure, or 8 figure business owner, You must have a greater capacity to hold other people's judgment. Consider the most famous people you know and think about how much judgment is heaped upon them, deservedly so or not, and how they handle it. Even if they act out or speak out, they still have a high level of tolerance for other people's judgment of their visibility. As you become more visible to the world as an influencer, leader, and law firm owner, you too will be opening yourself up to more judgment from strangers and even worse, from people you know.
Davina:For example, your cousin may ask, Who do you think you are? When you drive up to the family reunion in your Mercedes. Or a stranger online may say, no one wants to hear what you have to say, or your team may start thinking that as you become more successful, you think you are better than them. Judgment can also come in the form of someone else's beliefs trapped in your mind, like a parent or sibling who always put you in your place when you got too big for your britches or a grandparent who always said to you money doesn't grow on trees. Your money stories may be different.
Davina:Your life experiences may be different. These are just examples. Fear of judgment is a big reason why many women hold themselves back from going after what they want. It may not be that anyone else is actually judging you, but you may believe they will, or you may just be judging yourself. Regardless, anytime you step out of your comfort zone, you are going to feel challenged.
Davina:You may even have experiences that don't feel good in the moment, and you could worry that you are not doing things the right way, that you are not as perfect as you should be. You may feel that people are watching and judging, and you may worry that you'll let them down. Let's make it more concrete. Let's say you hire an associate, and someone in your bar association raises an eyebrow and says you are too new yourself to be hiring another lawyer. Or maybe you are going to raise your fees, and you imagine other lawyers who've been practicing longer than you will feel some kind of way about it.
Davina:As you grow your firm, your visibility will likely expand as you put yourself out there with content, speaking, or advertising, and you may worry you'll look foolish. Keyboard warriors may make noise in the comments. Some people may talk about you behind your back. It's certainly happened to several of my clients, attorney colleagues, and me. And every time you let that stop you from showing up, it only hurts you and your business.
Davina:What works for me is to remind myself, A, other people's opinions of me are none of my business. B, if someone talks about me in a negative way because I'm showing up to promote my business, it really says more about them than it does me. The more judgment I have the capacity to let exist without bothering me, the more successful I will become. For me, and for many I have this conversation with, self judgment, the feeling of coming up short compared to others, causes the most harm. When you allow self doubt to hold you back from going after your goals, you will do more harm to yourself than any keyboard warrior ever could.
Davina:Three things help me. One, a good therapist. Two, realizing I don't know what goes on behind other people's closed doors, there's no need to compare myself to them because I really don't know what their life is like. And three, minimizing contact with people who don't believe in me or don't get what I'm doing. Essentially distancing myself from the naysayers.
Davina:Surrounding yourself with a community of people on a similar journey helps too. I am not telling you to grow a thick skin and stop caring what anyone thinks, though that may naturally happen the more you push the limits of what you can do. I am telling you that the ability to feel the discomfort of being judged and take the next step anyway is the secret to achieving the success you desire. This leads me to a third capacity worth building. This is the one that took me the longest to understand, and it's a capacity I try to help my clients grow, the capacity to hold space for a different version of you, one that is already living the life you desire.
Davina:That may be a version of you who is wealthier, or a version of you who is living a more exciting lifestyle, or a version of you who is more at ease in her own skin, who is not worried all the time about making a mistake or doing something wrong, who has simply risen to a different level. I know that can sound abstract, so let's look at an example. When I had my first firm, the version of me running it was a woman who had never made much money, had never led anyone, and deep down wasn't sure she was allowed to have what she was building or that she could manage it. So when the firm grew past what that version of me could hold, instead of leaning into the discomfort, I sabotaged it. I walked away.
Davina:Not because anything was wrong with the business. In fact, we'd done a great job building a profitable, sustainable law firm, but because something felt wrong with me having it. That is what I mean by capacity. Your firm can only grow as large as the version of you who is running it. If you are still, on the inside, the woman who is scared of too much payroll, scared of being seen, scared of being the one everyone counts on, then you will find ways to keep the firm at a size that woman can tolerate.
Davina:You will delegate and then take it back. You will hire and then micromanage. You will get a flood of new clients and then find a reason not to run the ads again or create the content. You will know exactly what to do and not do it. This is very, very normal.
Davina:Please hear me on that. There is nothing broken in you if this is you. It's just what growth requires. The work is to become the person who can comfortably and easily run a multi 7 figure law firm. If you are at 6 figures right now, and I handed you the keys to a multiple 7 figure law firm, as much as you may think you'd want it, there likely is a part of you that would be totally freaked out about it because you've not yet become the person who can run a 7 figure law firm.
Davina:But here is the good news. You absolutely can become that person. Ask me how I know. In our Wealthy Woman Lawyer programs, we not only help you fill in the knowledge gaps and grow your firm's physical capacity, but we also hold space for you to expand your mental and emotional capacity to evolve into a multimillion dollar law firm leader. We also have created a place that is very supportive where you are surrounded by other women who are expanding their capacity right alongside you, and where nobody is going to judge you for the feelings that come up when you send your first associate offer letter, or try to understand how AI fits into your firm, or myriad other challenging moments.
Davina:Instead, in Wealthy Woman Lawyer, you'll be celebrated. I created Wealthy Woman Lawyer because it did not exist when I needed it, and I knew other women law firm owners after me would need it. If today's episode resonated with you and you want to know more about Wealthy Woman Lawyer programs and how we may be able to help you scale your law firm and expand your capacity, go to our website, www.wealthywomanlawyer.com, and click on the Apply button. That will take you to our practice growth needs assessment, a short form that tells us a little about you, your law firm, and your goals. Once you complete it, you can book a call with a member of my team or me.
Davina:On that call, we will talk about what is going on in your business, what you are struggling with, what you want most, and how we may be able to help you get it. If you feel like you need support, but you are scared and you are telling yourself you are not ready yet, schedule the call anyway. You might be surprised about how ready you are. If you have not yet left a review for The Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, I would be so grateful if you would take a moment to do that. Your reviews help us reach more women attorneys who are sitting at 6 figures right now wondering why the next level feels so far away.
Davina:And please share this episode with another woman lawyer who needs to hear it. I am Devina Frederick, and this has been the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. I hope you've enjoyed it. I will see you back here next week.
Intro:If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.