Speaker 1: My name is Michael Reed. My firm is M. Reed Legal Solutions, and my magic statement is my team help regular people who may have made a terrible, terrible mistake keep driving, stay out of jail by pointing out every flaw, lie, and mistake in the state's case. I do DUI in criminal practice. That's the entire extent of my practice. I do it in the Midwest, predominantly St. Louis and Illinois. Emotional story, so forgive me. We talked about it. My wife had passed in 2016, and I was ungodly complacent. Please forgive me. I was ungodly complacent. I had basically stagnated. I'd lost her. She was my partner in crime. She was my best friend. I'd actually known her and been with her for over 30 years. When she passed, it's like, why am I still doing this? I literally didn't have a why. I didn't have a purpose anymore. We were supposed to grow old together. I was going to build my practice and go from there. We were going to retire and travel and grow old, bald, and toothless, sitting in the rocking chair on the porch. And then, she had the audacity to go and die on me. At that point, I didn't know what to do. I didn't have a reason. A good friend of mine, Kim Benjamin, had been trying to get me to come to a small law firm for well over three or four years. And I finally, due to a very good friend of mine, I decided. She basically called me on the carpet. She's like, you're going. I've paid for it. You're going. And I came, and I reconnected with James, who I'd known from St. Louis, and a couple other people that I really knew. And I started to get that fire again. I had been at a quarter of a million dollars, and I'd been grunting it through. When I lost my wife, I lost the paralegal who had been with us for over 15 years. And it was me. It was down to just me, and I was doing everything. I was the chief cook and bottle washer and busboy and the bartender and the owner, and I did it all. And I was just running in circles with one toe nailed to the floor. When I got here, and I told everybody just this past that these guys helped with a mind shift, and that's the biggest thing. I mean, they'll give you the policies and procedures, and they'll give you the blueprint, which is one of the other things I needed. But they helped me reshift my focus. They helped me reshift my mind to it's possible. When these people stand up on the first day, and they're going over their 90-day look backs, and you see 100 people who are in the double comma club going, yeah, I did it, and I still have time for this. Today, there was the one gentleman who just bought a $10 million home. And he's like, I did it, and these guys helped me. It lit a fire under me of it's possible. I forgot to even believe in that part of myself. I mean, I write the book on DUIs in Missouri. And there are attorneys there, but I'm the guy that they come to. I'm the guy they refer to. And it's a situation where it's like I lost that fire and belief in me. That's what they give you here. They tell you, and our John tells you, it's possible. And if you don't live up to your potential, you're not just selling yourself short, you're selling everybody short. You're selling your potential staff. You're selling clients short. You are denying, okay, forgive me for the metaphysical here. You are denying the universe your God-given gift because you have this complex of I'm not worth it. Or, well, I can be comfortable in this small house driving a Ford Prius and writing to do this and working 80 hours a week and not spending time with my family and all of that. It's all BS. The only limitations you truly have is what you put on yourself. If you can grow up like we do through law school, reading thousands of pages a day, doing stuff we don't understand, doing stuff we don't get, you can do this. You got this. But you've just got to refocus your mindset, and that's what they do here. And then they also give you the blueprints. They give you the coursework. They give you the motivation as well because you see all these people who've done it before you. It's not BS. You actually see the cold, hard facts. Small law firm university, and I was blessed, and I'm going to give him every shout-out I can. James actually brought me into it, and he's like, you're going to feel overwhelmed. You're going to feel like somebody's shooting you with a fire hose. And I get that first course. I teach a lot of CLEs, and I cram 90 minutes of material into a 30-minute session, and I'm told I'm a fire hose. I'll tell you, nothing you have ever done or had is going to prepare you for that 12 weeks of that small law firm. You're going to get more material than you've read in law school, and it's not reading. It's just stuff you've got to do to work on yourself. It's getting your SKUs. It's getting your business plan. It's doing the stuff we know we should do, but we don't. Why? Because we are so busy living work that we're not working the life. We're not working the dream. We're going through doing a case. We're going through meeting with a client. We're going through the grunt work. We're going through the motions, and we're not building. We're just doing. Small law firm, university, what they teach you is you're going to go through this grunt work, but it's working on doing. It's working on laying a foundation on bedrock rather than on sand. And it's going to be the hardest effing work you do. I promise. But it's going to be the most rewarding work you do. So many people want to hear the dollars. We as lawyers focus on finances. I want to be in the double-comma club, and don't get me wrong. I have ambitions, as I've told James and Nicole both. I want to hit the double-comma club by December. We're now in 2021. I want to hit the double-comma club by December of 2022, so I've got a tad over 15, 16 months. That's the financial aspirations. In the past three weeks, I've put in the bank over $25K each week. Don't ask me how, and that's my frustration because one of the things they teach us here, and I'm in the process of learning it, is how to replicate it again and again and again. They'll talk about turn the faucet up, turn the faucet down, take a small sampling, tweak it, make it right, and then turn the faucet on full bore. I'm working on that. We're working on the marketing. When I came in, I didn't have SKUs. I didn't have a budget. I didn't have any of the stuff that makes sense for running a business as an entrepreneur. All I had was hard work, and so what we're doing now is we're taking it a step at a time. We're doing, okay, here's a marketing plan. Here's a funnel plan. You'll hear a bunch of people here saying, and as we're here today, it's all on building a referral machine that is no cost, low cost, filling your pipeline with money. And a number of the people here actually talked about, no, I don't do pay-per-click. I don't do Google AdWords. I just write thank you notes. I just actually connect with my client, and I stay connected with them. And that's it also. We have to go back to the basics of why did we do this? And again, I keep harping on this. It's a mindset. Why are we doing what we're doing? Why are we lawyers? We didn't get in lawyers, well, some of us didn't, to make the butt ton of money. I got in it because when I was a young kid, I grew up in a little town that doesn't exist anymore called Times Beach. And one lawyer showed me you can make a difference. One person can make a difference. And that's why I did it. That's why I came into it. I initially wanted to be a personal injury attorney. Not anymore. I do criminal practice because people come to me at the worst time of their life, and I make a difference. I can't always fix it, but I make it better. And I help them get past that, as my magic statement says. And that's it, going back to what's been that major shift. What have I learned? How has it changed? And that's one of the things that some of the people here noticed about me from July to now is my mindset. When I came into it, I was frustrated. I was down on myself. I was beating up on myself. It's like, this sucks. I can't do it. I don't even know where to begin. I was overwhelmed. But now what's really cool is, oh yeah, I'm still overwhelmed. I'm sitting here going, oh my God. But it's a different overwhelm. I'm in a position where I'm sitting here going, I want to do all of this now. I want to be 12 months down the road now. And my overwhelm, my frustration is, I'm not there. I see it now, and I know it's going to happen now. And my frustration is getting from here to there. That's the biggest change that these guys help with, is they give you permission to dream big. Not only do they give you permission to dream big, they tell you you have an obligation to dream big. And more important than that, you have an obligation to then work your ass off and make it happen. As Arjan will tell you, cut all the excuses, get your head out of your ass, and grunt the work. Because at the end of the day, you're going to grunt the work to make $100,000. And there's not a difference between grunting the work to make $100,000 or grunting the work to make $1 million or grunting the work to make $10 million. The difference is, and it's literally, after you make that first goal, whatever it is, and I don't care if you're at $100,000 shooting for a half a million, or shooting for $200,000, or you're at a half a million shooting for a million. Once you hit that goal, what you will feel, what you will learn, is it's all rinse and repeat. That's it. That's the magic statement that if I could convey anything, it's believe you can get from where you're at to that first goal. And don't set that goal small. Set it big. Tony Robbins has a saying, small dreams do not ignite passion in men. Dream big. Because guess what? If you dream big, there's a saying, if you shoot for the stars, the worst you're going to do is maybe hit the moon. And you're going to be so much further than anybody else anyway, because they stopped dreaming a long time ago. But the amazing thing is, what if you hit it? What if you make it? Then you've got the faith and belief of the next one you can make. And you've just reaffirmed yourself of, I'm here, I did this, damn, what happens if I shoot now, set up for a half a million, five million. Or what if I want to set up that nonprofit to help people go from here to there? The only limits are what you put on it. And from there, anything's possible. It's literally rinse and repeat. Set the next goal, set the next goal. And pretty soon, it's like anything's possible.