Speaker 1: In this video right here, I'm going to share with you my number one concern with being a solopreneur who owns his own law firm. And I'm not trying to be overly dramatic here, but like number one is way above number two and number three. In fact, this concern that I have gives me paranoid thoughts. It makes me concerned. It causes me to lose sleep. It gives me so much stress. I don't like it. So we're going to talk about it. We're going to address it. And we're first going to roll that intro. Welcome to Law Venture. My name is Jarrett Stone. I'm the owner of Stone Firm PLC. And today we're going to be talking about my number one concern with being solo, with having my own law firm and not having any employees or anybody else to help carry the load, so to speak. But before we talk about this concern, if you're new here, then consider going down, I think over in that general area, subscribing, hitting the bell. That way you get notified when new content is released. And if you're new here, then consider going down, I think over in that general area, along those lines, I do recommend that you check out the link that's sliding above. That's the ultimate guide to starting your own virtual law firm. It really takes you step by step through the process of keeping your expenses at a minimum. That way you can maximize the profit and overall growth of your law firm. So be sure to check that out above. Okay, so let's talk about my deepest and darkest fears. I don't know if you can tell, but I brought the camera in a little bit closer to where I feel like I can touch you and maybe you can touch the darkness that's in my soul. But let's talk in particular more about the fact that my number one concern as a solopreneur who's solo in the truest sense, meaning I don't have employees, is the fact that because I don't have anybody else to help carry any of the burden, and that's self-imposed, that makes me the bottleneck. If I'm not productive, then my law firm is not productive. And so if I'm having to miss work, or if I can't work, then no work is getting done. And that, is a bad business model. And that is something that scares me to no end. But I have to admit that this fear of mine, this issue of me being the bottleneck, is self-imposed. It's self-inflicted because I could hire an employee, but honestly, I don't really want to at this stage in my law firm and at this stage in my practice, because with an employee, you're most likely going to have to pay that employee. And whenever you have to pay somebody, either every two weeks or maybe once or typically every two weeks, that means your expenses are going up as a business owner. More expenses means more risk. And if you don't have steady income to consistently pay those expenses, that's going to put you in a tough spot. And in my situation, I've honestly have designed my practice at this point to not be a high volume practice. And that way I can focus more on cases that are more high quality, instead of focusing, focusing on. Like the shotgun approach of having the high volume with, you know, some cases being kind of low quality or lower quality, or just to where it's just not really worth my time. Keeping in mind though, the balancing act, I may flush this out in another video, is sometimes whenever you have high volume, and if you can really knock all the high volume out of the park, then you're going to turn those people into fans. And those fans are going to be like walking billboards. And those walking billboards should hopefully bring in more cases. And so the high volume, upside there is, yeah, maybe upfront, you're kind of losing money because your time isn't really being paid back on the low or the low end kind of case there. Kind of ran out of breath for a second, low end kind of case there. But in the back end, if they bring you one or two cases, then you can end up making money on the long run. So it's a little bit of a balancing act of having to figure out, okay, with my personal practice, do I want to bring in higher volume, lower quality to have these billboards? Or do I want to bring in higher volume, lower quality to have these billboards? If I do that, the downside there is that's going to cause me so much more work. And then I'm going to hit that stress point of needing to ultimately hire an employee. And then I'm going to have to train the employee. And then there's going to be maybe potential turnover if the employee is, let's say, wanting to move on, go to law school, become a lawyer, and maybe come back. I don't know. But all of that is one option versus keeping my cases kind of at a smaller amount to where it's going to be a lot of work. And then I'm going to have to train the employee. And then it's more high quality, and I'm able to control the cases and control the workload. But in either situation, to some extent, it all funnels to me, the lawyer, the one who owns the law firm. People go to Stone Firm PLC in order to get Jarrett Stone. And so if I cannot be productive, then work stops. And in my self-inflicted situation of me being the bottleneck, my law firm's practice and productivity has come to a screeching halt. Twice in the last six months. What do I mean? Well, here's what happened. The first story begins with the fact that right now I sound super goofy. And if you can't tell, I'm overdue for a haircut. There's this cowlick that is going on. And my hair doesn't know at this length if it needs to just go up or lie down. There's a lot going on. But the reason why my voice sounds goofy, the reason why my hair looks a little goofy is because I'm on the back end of having COVID. And you know how some people, whenever they get sick, they get sick. And I'm like, whenever they get COVID, they can bounce back within 24 hours and they're good to go. Yeah, not me. In fact, there's been a couple of times where I've had to cut this video awkwardly because I'm having to cough because I'm still getting over COVID. And the reason for the hair, if you haven't really put two and two together, is the fact that I'm isolating myself. So I'm not getting a haircut at this stage. But the point here is that whenever I was going through my five days straight of COVID fevers, I wasn't able to get a haircut. So I'm not getting a haircut. I wasn't able to get any work done. And then on the back end of the fevers, once the fevers kind of like subsided, I dealt with crazy fatigue and mental fog to where I just I couldn't be productive. And that lasted for like a solid 10 days. Yeah, okay, I'll spare you the other coughs. But that's basically like my cough that sounds like a coal miner who's been working the coal mines his whole life and also has a cigarette addiction and a little bit like the blackout. That Zoolander ended up developing. Let's use this 10 days as an example to stop and really stress the importance of being a business owner. With a business, you have expenses that you're having to pay maybe once a month, once a year, maybe every two weeks. But you have bills that need to be paid. You have things that need to be covered. And as a result of that, those bills really don't care if you have COVID. And so whenever you go 10 days without being productive, maybe 10 days without being productive, you're going to have to pay a lot of money. And so without bringing any income, then that can really put your back against the wall if you have a bill coming up. Fortunately for me, that hasn't really been the situation. I haven't had some type of like stressful, I need to pay this, I need to pay that. But there's definitely a scenario in my paranoid mind that I could see, hey, if I'm having to meet this deadline and I'm not able to do what I need to do because I'm KO'd because of a pandemic level virus, then that would put me in a tough spot because I don't have anybody else to help pick up the slack. Whenever I worked for a law firm, if I was ever sick or out, then it's like, hey, attorney so-and-so or hey, paralegal so-and-so, can you let my clients know this? Can you let the court know that? Can you take care of this deposition? Can you pick up the slack? That made life a whole lot easier. But with being solo, you don't really have that luxury. Keeping in mind, I plan on staying solo by myself, for the foreseeable future. But still, this is an eye-opening situation to where maybe I'm going to start kind of transitioning over time to having somebody who can pick up the slack if need be. But first, let's talk about kind of the perfect storm story number two that happened, I don't know, I think six months ago, back in November. And in that situation, like I said, it was the perfect storm. My wife and I, we weren't really looking to move and to buy a house, but, me being the nerdy self I am, I'm always on Zillow. She looked at my phone in November and was like, hey, this house is a really great deal. And it's in another city, it's in Dallas where we wanted to move. And it's basically a perfect house for what we need. So in the moment, we moved on the house. We closed the house and it was sight unseen. We had family and friends come look at the house and we had to move super quick. That took a lot of attention to where I was having in order to make sure I could move quickly on this house, close on it, and ultimately end up getting the house. And oh yeah, this is all happening during Thanksgiving time. And we're apparently hosting Thanksgiving, which was a great idea. And as a result, we're having to make sure not only are we moved in, but we're like settled in. So we're doing that. And on top of that, I had a deadline that was due for a massive motion for certification on one of my class actions. And so it was this unexpected move and trying to get settled in. Everything's just a mess. The entire virtual office is packed up and having to be unpacked. I'm having to put this like huge, massive brief together with thousands of pages and documents and make sure it's going to be as bulletproof for an appeal as possible. And then I found out, oh yeah, it turns out my law firm's website was hacked during this time. And this drove me up. I actually received a notification from Facebook, and this tipped me off, that Facebook had banned my law firm's ads from being delivered to people. I basically got kicked off of Facebook for running ads. And I was like, what in the world is happening? So I did some digging. Turned out somebody had hacked my law firm's website. And with this particular hack, it redirected all the links to my law firm to some spam. And I was like, what the heck? And I was like, what the heck? And I was like, what the heck? And I was like, what the heck? And I was like, what the heck? And I was like, what the heck? I went from spam pages to where it turns out that people make money whenever they get impressions on these spam pages. And as a result, whenever I'm spending money on ads, they click the link. It takes them not to my website, to their spam pages. So I basically was paying for them to make money. So yeah, that wasn't good. So I had to get it sorted out with Facebook, but also had to figure out exactly how to fix the hack. And that required me to learn a lot of potential coding things that I didn't want to learn. And I had to figure out exactly how to fix the hack. And that required me learn as a lawyer, but here we are. And so I'm having to focus on that and eventually have to not only teach myself the coding of it, but how to sure up my law firm's website to where that didn't happen again. Because in my mind, I'm like, okay, I have a very simple one page law firm website. Who is going to want to hack that? And I'll be the first to admit that my law firm website doesn't get a ton of traffic. And I'm like, nobody's going to spend the time to hack it. Turns out, fun fact, that hackers just send all these, you know, I'll say bad crawlers through the internet, the interwebs, and they just basically brute force attack the login to your website to where they try any and every scenario in order to get into your website. And they did that. Shameless plugin. There's a free online course that I'll slide above to building your website fast. And one of the lessons within that course is how to use free online courses to build your website fast. And one of the lessons within that course is how to use free tools and resources in order to protect your website, especially to make sure that this doesn't happen in your situation. My losses and errors are meant to be a learning lesson for you so you can avoid those losses and errors. This is one of them. So I do recommend that you click that link, see exactly what you need to do in order to build an awesome website, but more importantly, to make sure that your website is safe and secure. And using free tools is an added bonus to where you're not having to pay anything. In order to add this level of security to your website. Quick little side note right there. Okay, so we got off track. Now let's get back on track with a quick recap of this perfect storm that was November. Unexpectedly moving into a new house that was in a different city, having to host Thanksgiving, having to get re-approved by Facebook in order to run ads, having to basically learn how to fix a hack and then ultimately protect from that hack, which again, check out the free lessons. That was sliding above earlier. And then having to meet my filing deadline for my motion for certification. The only thing that was planned and all that maybe minus the potential hosting of Thanksgiving, like, you know, there was going to be a Thanksgiving celebration of some sort was that motion for certification deadline that I had to hit everything else not planned. And that's kind of the point here, which is that when you're the bottleneck, something unexpected is most likely going to happen at some point in your career at some point. So that's the point of owning your law firm, whether it's COVID, whether it's just like the perfect storm that was my November or whether it's some crazy other paranoid situation that may end up playing out in the future. So go ahead and say that with the COVID situation and me being KO'd for 10 days, the work productivity could have been worse. It actually wasn't as bad as it potentially could have been because of the perfect storm that happened in November. That was very eye opening to me. And it put me in a very difficult position. Perspective that I needed to have kind of some systems in place and some, you know, fall backs to be able to minimize some of the damage if I'm KO'd or if I can't work or if I'm in trial for a period of time. And so based off of the experience in November, I decided to do three things in order to help keep the wheels kind of turning, you know, not coming to a screeching halt if I can't work. And I recommend that you kind of self analyze your situation and see what you can do with these particular three things. And the first is automate what you can automate. In my situation, I automate, you know, payments being made, but also to some degree, automate, for example, my intake. And so with the intake, it's like somebody signs up through the website. Again, I talk about automating my intake on the free course, talking about how to build your website. So you can, again, check that out. Speaking of which, now that I'm thinking and talking out loud, if you want some more content related to automation, let me know in the comment section. Down below, I'm thinking and I kind of have it tentatively posted on LawVenture of posting a course that's solely devoted to automating your law firm. Let me know. That'll help me kind of prioritize the content that needs to be released. Just that quick heads up there. So the second thing that I started implementing after this perfect storm in November was making sure that I stay ahead of the work. Again, I'm OCD. I really try to over deliver with my clients to where, you know, things are done. As fast as possible. And in doing so, that allows me to kind of have a little bit of a safety net if work kind of, you know, piles on top of itself and has that snowball effect to where, you know, I'm not already dragging my feet on the case. And then if it gets extended even more, the client's like, hey, what is happening? It's been way too long. It hasn't been the case. I think that made sense. If it didn't, maybe replay the last 15 seconds. The point is, if you stay on top of your work, if you end up having to miss some time, the damage isn't going to be near you. I think that made sense. If it didn't, maybe replay the last 15 seconds. The point is, if you stay on top of your work, if you end up having to miss some time, the damage isn't going to be near you. the damage isn't going to be near you. nearly as bad as if you were behind on your work already. nearly as bad as if you were behind on your work already. And then the third thing is if you have a big case that requires your day-to-day attention. And then the third thing is if you have a big case that requires your day-to-day attention. It requires a lot of attention. It requires a lot of attention. Then I would consider having a co-counsel on your big case. Then I would consider having a co-counsel on your big case. With all of my class actions, I have a particular co-counsel. It's where we team up. We both, you know, bring the best out of one another. And it's really great to know that. If I were to be KO'd... cc'd on any emails or any correspondence, and he can step in if need be. So that right there is my biggest fear, my biggest concern as a solopreneur who owns his own law firm. I hate being the bottleneck. And so if you're a solopreneur who owns their own law firm, do you have this similar fear? Do you have this similar concern? Do you have a similar experience? Or do you have a solution that you're holding out on us? If you have the solution, be sure to leave it in the comment section down below. And for those that have their own law firm and maybe have employees, then is it worth having the extra expenses, meaning the extra risks as well, to help lighten the load from maybe your plate? Again, leave those in the comment section down below. I'm always welcoming different perspectives, different ideas, because myself, I'm still trying to get a feel of exactly what I plan on doing with my own law firm. But the most important thing is I'll keep you in tuned every step of the way. That way, you can learn from my experiences, my mistakes, and that way you can potentially avoid my pitfalls and you can build upon my success. With all that said, again, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, leave those in the comment section down below. You also know the drill with hitting the like button, because if you're still watching at this point, I hope that means you like the video. And again, don't forget to subscribe over there.