We Spent Thousands on This System… Then Killed It in 3 Days

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When a major system upgrade fails, what should leaders do — push through or pivot fast? In this episode, Tyson Mutrux shares a candid behind-the-scenes look at a recent technology rollout that didn’t go as planned, and the leadership decision required to protect the team, client experience, and long-term outcomes. Rather than defending a poor decision due to time or money already invested, Tyson explains why quickly pivoting can often be the smartest strategic move.

Tyson explores the concept that failure itself isn’t the problem — hesitation is. Drawing from real-world leadership experience, he discusses the danger of the sunk cost fallacy, the ripple effects a broken system can have on team morale, and why leaders must detach emotionally from decisions and instead focus on desired outcomes. He also shares how feedback loops, communication, and accountability play a key role in maintaining a strong team culture even when things go wrong.

Listen in.

2:12 The real danger is hesitation, not failure itself
5:21 The sunk cost fallacy and knowing when to walk away
7:26 Making leadership decisions that protect the team
8:31 Owning mistakes and removing ego from decisions
10:32 Detaching from decisions and focusing on outcomes
12:33 Opportunity cost and the law of diminishing returns
16:31 Accountability as a leadership responsibility
18:37 Building a company that can pivot quickly
21:20 Why failure provides valuable information for future success

Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 

Creators and Guests

Host

Tyson Mutrux

Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:00 And we are live. Welcome back to Max Miller Live. I am Tyson Matrix. Today we're going to be talking about, kind of a disaster, to be honest with you. We, on Monday we rolled out a new system. We actually launched it on Friday. Technically, at the end of the day, after everyone was, had left. And, it's been a complete failure up to this point. We what we did is we did we had a complete system upgrade. and it's one of those things where everything has been breaking. nothing is working properly. Things aren't where we thought they were going to be. and so, I, I've made the decision. I've not announced it yet to the team, but we. So this would be our third day. Luckily, today is our quarterly meeting day, and we're going to pivot. I mean, I think it's one of those things where the their animal get to get into a lot of this when it comes to, kind of my reasoning, but it's just we had to make a decision.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:12 we can either keep going down this road, or we can pivot and and just go back to what we had before. And until we can get to the point where this one is ready to go. I think we rushed it a little bit. I think that's part of the problem we did. We did do testing and all that, which is kind of weird because a big part of last week was testing and things were going just fine. There were a couple of things that were breaking when we were testing last week, but they were fixed and it's just, the reality is some things do not work the way you expect them to. That's just how it is. it's it's, we will all face some sort of failure in our careers. And if you don't, then you're not trying. You know, so there's. You can do what's easy. You can go along and do what's easy, and that's fine. But really what? You got to push yourself a little bit. And we were pushing ourselves a little bit with this one.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:12 That's. And I think whenever especially, like, there's a system failure, I think a lot of people, what they do is they hesitate and they, they kind of hope it stabilizes. And I think that that's where like that the hesitation is where the damage happens. It's it is not in the actual failure itself. It's in the hesitation to act. All right. And I, I had this sneaking feeling that this might happen. I just I should have gone. Becky and I were talking about, like, we're we're we're picking a place to have Max lock on 2027. Okay. So we're trying to pick a place to do it. And she. She asked me the question about, you know, about this particular place. She just her gut was she's like, I don't know if you believe in intuition, but I just my gut is just is not the right place. And I was like, I'm good with that. Let's go with your gut. I'm completely fine with that. And I kind of my gut.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:15 I kind of, was thinking, this isn't going to go well. I was losing sleep over, to be honest with you, over the weekend because I was from the get go. The signs were not we're not that we're not good. They just weren't. And we have to be really careful about the law of unintended consequences. because actions, they can really have effects on things that are unanticipated, things that you don't really intend. And it's. So it's not just a system failure where, okay, it breaks and maybe, maybe you lose a note. it has bigger effects on the team and in general, it's think of it like as ripple effects throughout the team. And that's kind of what we're seeing. And I want to put a stop to that. the right now is what I want to do. the failure and what's kind of interesting is like the whole thing about, like, failure isn't the surprise. usually it's usually the timing of the failure. So I want to make sure I say that again.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:25 It's usually like failure is not the surprise. Okay. So it's one of those things where, like, we should all expect failure. It's it's usually the timing of it that it is the it's the worst. And I will say this was not the, the best week for this to happen. It really, really was not. I was supposed to have a trial next week. Luckily, the case just settled yesterday. we have the quarterly meeting today, so this is going to be a little bit of a shorter episode because of that. Because it's right after this. And so the timing, I think I think I might have a little bit more patience for it if we didn't have such a a busy trial schedule coming up. but I we don't have the luxury of of waiting and trying to figure out if this thing's going to balance itself out. The best thing to do, because we are so early into it. Pull the plug, pivot, make. Go back to what we had. Okay.

Tyson Mutrux 00:05:21 We can still do that. That's still an option. And then fix what we have. And then don't don't don't botch the launch like we did on this one. It's it's going to be a pretty simple thing to do at this point because we are so early on. And that's part of part of my point to I want to pass on to people. If you're going to pivot, pivot quickly, do it fast, because the deeper you get into it, the harder it is to extract yourself from it. Because you you there's the whole sunk cost fallacy. This is this is something I think that, we, should talk more about. Because just because you dumped a bunch of money into something does not mean that you should still do that thing. Okay, if it's not the right thing, right? If it's if it's costing you more in the long run, you should not be doing that thing. Yeah, I and that do also think the same thing should be for people that are unhappy in their careers when it comes to being a lawyer and I.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:28 It's just one of those things where I've, I've never understood the, the unhappy lawyer in that this I understand why some people are unhappy in the, in the role they have. I've just I never understood like sticking with it because you can either stick with your thing that you're doing or you can pivot and be happy, you know, like just because you went to law school and you do all these things and people have these expectations of you, do you really want to go 30, 40 years, 50 years into a career and be unhappy that whole time? Or would you rather pivot? So. So I've never really understood that this is the same concept. just because you invest into us, just because we invested into a system like this wasn't a cheap upgrade for us, by the way, this was something we have spent a ton of time and effort. We have the complete dev team on on standby to fix that, to fix things right now. so this has not been a cheap thing, but that doesn't matter.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:26 What matters more is okay, what is the best thing for the team right now and in the future? The best thing for the team right now is in in the future. Both of those things is pivot is pivot out of it because people are not happy people. Are we on our huddle yesterday, people are freaking out. well, they are freaking. They were freaking out. And we've been we've been working hard to sort of remedy things and just it's not working out. It's just not, It's, And I don't think going back to the old system or it's not even the old system. It's, the system before the upgrade. Okay. Same system. Just this one was an upgrade. I don't think it's failure. I really don't. And I, I think this is the right leadership decision. Is. Okay. Hey, it's one of those things. My bad. Screwed up. Shouldn't have done this. We rushed it. We're gonna pull it back. You okay? Just take a deep breath, everybody.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:31 We're good. we're not going to delay the decision because of ego. We just. I'm going to own it. it doesn't matter how much time we invested in it doesn't matter how much we love the upgrades that we were going to roll out. You know, it's we're going to. Let's just pivot. Let's just get out of this because, extracting ourselves from the situation is the best thing for the for the entire team. so the risk is not making a bad decision, because I want to make sure that people understand, like you need to make take risks like this and you need to make decisions like this, and sometimes you're going to make bad decisions. You also need to realize that you need to build identify whenever it becomes a bad decision, and then get out of it and make another decision. That is that is the key. The the where it becomes a bad choice is whenever you're sticking with the bad decision too long. Otherwise, it's not a bad decision. It's just a it's just a lesson learned.

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:29 Just a data point. That's all it is. Okay? That part's really, really important. But the whole leadership decision thing to you. We are trained as lawyers to defend positions. And so it is it is almost in us. And I, I kind of find this in our marriage right with. So whenever sometimes I will be in a position where I will know I'm wrong, or I'm pretty sure I'm wrong when I'm whenever Amy and I are having a disagreement and I will, I will kind of dig in because I feel like that's just kind of in our nature, especially when it comes to litigation. And I've, I've had over the years kind of like temper that and be like, okay, come on, dude, you just gotta talk to myself. You're not you're not defending a client here, right? This is your marriage. Leadership's like that, too. I think a lot of people in this same position might dig in. I think the older me probably would have dug in on this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:10:32 No, we're doing this. We're we're going to push through on this. I don't care how long it takes to make this thing right. We're going to push through. And that is not the it's not it's not the right call. Always. Sometimes it is. I think sometimes sticking, staying the course is the right decision. But this is that leadership muscle that you really need to exercise. And it's judgment. Right. It's a complete judgment call. It requires detachment from the decision and attachment to the outcome. Okay, so detach yourself from the decision itself and attach your the whole your whole judgment to this, to the outcome. Okay. What's the outcome here that we're looking for okay. We're looking for a good system that helps us help our clients. It's it's easy for our team to use that. You know, they're not they're not struggling with things yada yada yada. Right. And so, when you when you're looking at that as the outcome, not the decision itself, it makes things a lot easier and allows us to pivot a lot faster.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:34 so if you find in some of your leadership leadership decisions that you're kind of defending a position because of, you know, you are an attorney and so you're kind of trained to that and you're not you're not really focusing on the outcome itself. You're focusing just too much on that. That one point or that one decision might want to step back a little bit. the other part. So part of my analysis on this too, is that, every extra day that we are in this broken system, it compounds the damage. Okay. think about this. It's because it's not just inefficiency. You're talking about lost opportunities when it comes to, a variety of things like opportunity cost is massive. Right. okay, I can do this, or I can do this. It's massive. The team gets frustrated, and because of that, the client experiences degraded. That is a big deal because think about like, okay, imagine you're on a you're happy. Your answer to the phone. You talk to a client.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:33 That's that. That interaction goes one way. You're pissed off and frustrated because your system is not working and you're talking to a client. How's that client experience? Not very good. Like, I'm sure we've all been on that phone call where? Oh, the system is not working or the system slow. We've all had that person on the other side. Okay. and if you haven't, you're. You're not on the phone enough. that is that is a, real thing. And the more you're frustrating the team, the more you're going to be frustrating your clients. Okay. Just how it works. There is also I've thought about this too, and I've kind of wondered if this is a this applies or not, but the the whole idea of the law of diminishing returns and the whole idea about that is that after a certain point, the more you put into something, so the more inputs, the more you put into the inputs, you actually get a decreased outputs at a certain point. So I do I do kind of wonder, okay, are we at is this kind of what we're facing too? so throwing more effort at a broken system, it's not really going to fix it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:35 It's it's really just going to drain the team. So the, the net output is going to be less. So that's that's kind of what I was thinking about. The law of diminishing returns a little bit. that's, that's a, that's a real problem. The whole, the whole whole cultural cost to is a big deal. but I've also culture is one of those things to me is I think it's important, but I think it is a I think the way people view the culture is mistaken, almost like the people, the way people view visionaries and integrators. It's very like they view of visionaries like this unicorn kind of a thing because like, that's what they want to be. And it's not that at all. It is not that at all. which I talk about that in another episode that's going to be coming out with Brook lively soon. So, you'll you'll get my thoughts on that. so I talked a little bit to Chad Burton on an upcoming episode too, about that too, but so you can get my complete thoughts on on that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:37 I think culture is the same way we view cultures like this thing. This is magical thing. But the reality is, is that culture is, it can easily be, created if you have the right systems, the right levels of accountability. Everyone knows what their job is. Everyone knows what the goalposts are all like. All of that can be. That's that creates a good culture. Okay. It's not this magical thing because you have this beer fridge and that you all can, you know, access it on Friday afternoons. Like, that's not culture. Okay. that's something different. That is a nice little perk for benefits that they, that, that, that employees can have. And I think that, that things like that are fun. That's not what makes the culture. Not at all. Okay. it's adds everyone having each other's backs as everyone that's, you know, being with being willing to be accountable to their own roles, their own tasks, their own actions, you know, the firm holding them accountable, you know, everyone willing to, to work together on things as a team.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:39 Like, there's anyone that's been on a team. You kind of you you get what I'm talking about. There's that camaraderie there. But it's all built on a level of, accountability, really. It's built on a whole level of kind of accountability. Because when you don't have that, it turns into the, you know, it can turn into easily a toxic environment because, you know, you know, Jane over here, she is not doing her job. She's not, you know, pulling her weight. And then so Bob, over there he is, you know, having to do more, more work. So he's getting better about it. And then people start talking about things. But when you have the level of accountability, that is the key to everything. Now why why is why am I talking about accountability when it comes to a system failure? If I continue to push through with this system the way it is, they are going to it's going to show to the team. Oh, the firm accepts mediocrity.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:31 The firm is okay with dealing with this, garbage system. And so what else would they put up with? I part of this is demonstrating to them that I'm not willing to do that. Okay? And I'm not willing to sacrifice the team just because of my ego. That's part of this, too. So that's why accountability. I mean, I've got to hold myself accountable to the decisions we've made when it comes to this system rollout and show the team. Hey, I gotta hold myself accountable to. And because of that, we gotta pivot. Okay. I do want to say this to, I really wish some of the stuff we're hoping to implement has to do with AI and all that. And we have a a training today with the Swans guys, Martin and Max. they're going to be doing a training in the association at noon. I really wish I could make it, but we got a quarterly meeting, so I have to record that. But if, if you're watching live in the Association, make sure you're going to want to hit that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:29 well, we've got some other announcements coming soon when it comes to the conference itself. So we'll talk about that. But I want to make sure I just mention that because, I think some of the things that we that are, that are breaking are, that maybe I may be able to get solved today if I were at that trading. But anyways, I digress a little bit. so there's nothing part of this too is, You gotta, you gotta. Pivoting quickly is part of part of what the firm should be. is have that ability. It needs to sort of be built into the DNA of the firm. so, you know, through communication, testing, decision making frameworks, all of that feedback loops, all that is really, really super important. It reminds me of this article or not an article. It's a chapter of Malcolm Gladwell's books about, this, it's the it's a girls basketball team. And this guy had never coached before, and he never I think he was more of a soccer fan.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:37 And he didn't understand why they didn't do full court press. I'm going to tell the story improperly, I'm sure, but I'll do my best. It's been a while since I've read this chapter, but but what he did is, and there was no rule against he has to ask them, is there a rule against full court press? And no. And they they know either winning their league championship or like a state or national championship or something like that. It was they end up going really far because they were like the whole they just they weren't following the normal rules. Right. And like I kind of relate that to like almost feel like the culture, not the culture, the DNA you prefer more like a startup than anything else where like you're moving quickly, like the bigger you are, the harder for you. Not not not the the bigger your mindset is about it. Where, like you are, you are this big ship trying to turn right. You want to be able to maneuver more like a speedboat when it comes to your decision, becomes your firm.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:31 You don't want to get too bogged down with red tape and all that, so you really want to have that kind of built into the DNA of your firm, so you can make these quick decisions and not get stuck in this in a bad decision and not be able to pivot for several weeks because, you know, because you got to run it through all the different channels. You got to have this communication going on really, really quickly. I think that that's a big part of what with this rollout. The big part of what Amy did in the firm, amazing was like in the huddle. Hey, how are we feeling? What's going on? Like, just constantly getting feedback whenever the rollout was coming. Hey, here's what's coming. Here's what we're going to do here are these training sessions, all that kind of stuff. that allowed us to get the feedback very, very quickly and then, okay, this isn't working. We need to make a decision. Let's, let's, let's do something else.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:22 So, but so what's going to change after this? I'm going to start to kind of wrap things up. because, I want to talk about, you know, what, what we're going to do a little bit differently. But then you have the quarterly meeting. So I want to again, get a few minutes before I get off a few minutes before that. But the I think what we're going to do is we're gonna probably do some more controlled rollouts to maybe select teams the next time, maybe do some, different test groups than what we did before. Have maybe more of a clear rollout plan for the for the team, though not super clear for them. It was clear for us, but not for the team. and then I think we could probably still, even though we had some pretty fast feedback loops, maybe have be a little bit more tapped into it. And so that's another thing we could probably do a little bit better. But I think one of the big lessons here is this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:20 It's a data point. Failure is a data point. Okay. it gave us this failure, gave us something extremely valuable information. Okay. it told us what's breaking, where it breaks, and then how the team responds to it. That's really good data. Okay. That's some of the best data you can get. It really, really is. So we're learning from our lessons. We're going to make our decisions when it comes to pivoting. We're going to make our improvements when it comes to the system, and we'll be fine. Okay. It's going to be just fine. So that's all I have today. if you have something going on in your firm, you need a pivot. Make the pivot, make the decision. The longer you wait, the harder it is to pivot. So, Remember, if you are interested in the association, if you're listening to this as a recording, not live, check us out at Maximum Comm. We'd love to have you in the association. We have, this is a live episode every Wednesday.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:20 We also have live trainings with awesome experts. Like, for example, today we got the Swans guys coming in to teach about Claude, which is going to be just absolutely amazing. I'm sad I'm going to miss it, but I'll I'll be there for the recording. and then check out Becky's list for the best vendors. Becky's Co, it's a great place to go to find out who the best and the worst vendors are. Hopefully you're looking for the best, but you can avoid the worst by going to Beck's list to go. But thanks for watching and thanks for listening and have a wonderful day. See you buddy!