Law Firm Finances & Mental Health: How to Reduce Stress and Increase Profit

0:00 Introduction to Brian Zapf & Flight Financial

2:03 Why Lawyers Experience High Levels of Mental Health Struggles

5:10 The Link Between Law Firm Finances & Mental Well-Being

8:45 The Trap of the Billable Hour & How It Impacts Lawyers’ Self-Worth

12:19 Shifting Your Mindset from Lawyer to Law Firm CEO

15:38 The 3 Key Financial Pillars Every Law Firm Needs

18:50 How Poor Cash Flow & AR Management Creates Stress

22:47 The Power of Systems: Removing Yourself as the Bottleneck

27:19 The First Steps to Financial Freedom as a Law Firm Owner

30:32 The Long-Term Benefits of Financial Stability in a Law Firm

34:18 Free Financial Assessment: How Brian Can Help Your Firm

Jason Marsh (00:00)
On today's show, Brian Zaff, fractional CFO and founder of Flight Financial. Today, we'll be talking about the connection between law firm financial management and mental health.

Brian (00:13)
you really have to look at the overall financial environment of the firm and if you can alleviate the financial stress and pressure, you often improve the mental health and wellness as well.

Jason Marsh (00:24)
Welcome to the Alpha Lawyer podcast, a show dedicated to exploring what makes law firms thrive. I'm your host, Jason Marsh. Join me as I interview some of the smartest thought leaders and accomplished law firm owners in our space. Together, we'll dive deep into law firm operations, marketing, technology, finance, and everything else you need to build an incredible firm that allows you to live your best life.

Jason (00:52)
Hey there, welcome to Alpha Lawyer podcast. I'm Jason Marsh. More importantly, I'm here with Brian Zaff and Brian, he's a fractional CFO for law firms. He's the founder and chief CFO of Flight Financial. But what he does is he helps all firm owners reduce their stress by improving the financial management and

performance of their firm. But Brian, I wanted to talk to you because you recently wrote a really interesting article.

in the American Bar Association's Law Practice Today publication, which I'll share in the show notes. But you make a really interesting connection between mental health issues and then the financial setup of a law firm. So I'm really interested to talk about that. But before we get into the financial component, I really want to talk

about the mental health aspect because I do see that coming up more frequently. And you highlight that lawyers are

twice as likely as non-lawyers to experience suicidal thoughts, 70 % report, anxiety. I mean, does it seem like this is something new or is the legal profession experiencing some sort of mental health

crisis?

Brian (02:02)
Yeah, I think, and if we look at the recent survey results, over half of the respondents say they believe that mental health is at a crisis level for the industry, but some of it's just

Jason (02:13)
That's a lot.

Brian (02:14)
the way it's always been done, right? Lawyers expect to work long hours to constantly be on call trying to service clients.

And so some of that is natural that it leads to burnout, but I do, it does seem that in recent years that this has kind of escalated.

Jason (02:32)
Yeah, because I know just seeing in other publications, I know a topic that I see just come up, and because I also am an editor of

Law Practice Today. And so I see this topic circulating a lot over

Brian (02:43)
And so I see this topic circulating a lot.

Jason (02:46)
the course of a year. I think there's even sometimes issues dedicated to mental health and the legal profession. it's just, I wonder, is there something about being a lawyer in particular that makes

than more susceptible to these mental health niche. That's different. And I know you work with some other types of entrepreneurs, but is there something inherently different about being a lawyer?

Brian (03:14)
big thing is just the billable hour because for a lot of lawyers it's just their sense of self-worth.

or self-worth is tied up in just how much they're billing, what their hours are. I mean, that's kind of the way these large, you know, the big law firms run it, and then that trickles down to the smaller firms as well. So when you feel like you're only as good as how many hours you're billing, it kind of creates this vicious cycle.

Jason (03:39)
Yeah, it's almost like you're really, really quanti- just, just quantifying

a person's value, professional value, whether it's hours, rates, you know, the combination of those two things, right?

Brian (03:53)
Yeah, exactly. And I do think we're starting to see, I think there's just more mental health awareness going on as well. And the legal industry is seeing that. And the younger generation of lawyers, they don't want to work like the same hours. So we're starting to see more experimentation with value-based pricing models for law firms, kind of fixed fee approaches. But there's still a long way to go with it.

Jason (04:18)
And in terms of this type of stress and burnout and ultimate mental health issues that come out of those things, is it more particular to large firms where the billable hour is everything? Or is it smaller firms where you have like a firm leader that's also has to do billable hours, but also has to run all the admin of the firm in a lot of cases and juggling all of those tasks.

Brian (04:44)
And I think it depends. Like if you look at the recent reports on this, mean, definitely the large firms, there's a well-known just kind of...

crisis level of burnout, but then at the small firm, you add on not only the billable hour pressures, but also, yeah, right? A lot of these owners feel like it's on their shoulders that everything rests with them, and maybe they've got other lawyers who are partners, but those lawyers might not be business partners. So it's kind of additional challenges that they're taking on.

Jason (05:14)
Yeah, it's interesting when you look at that. so what typically, when

you see the manifestation of someone that's experiencing all of the whatever, whether it's mental health

challenges, burnout, how does that actually impact their work and professionally? And then the follow-up is then how could that possibly impact their personal

life and overall wellbeing?

Brian (05:39)
That's a great question and the answer really is that it has a negative effect and they've actually done studies on this as well that you know your professionalism takes a significant hit, you're less able to respond to client demands, you're less adaptable, just it takes you longer to get work done. So it has a quantifiable impact if they took the time to see how many billable hours were at risk with this. It does affect the professionalism which

affects the industry as a whole. And then a lot of lawyers will take that stress home with them too, so it's obviously affecting their personal relationships as well.

Jason (06:18)
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, and I certainly can relate to this as an entrepreneur, just having all the hats you have to wear and you're responsible entirely for your income and have to, sometimes you can feel like you're on a treadmill, especially those early days, right, before you've

built out a team and processes and support and, know, things we're going to talk about that make that transition. just in reading your article, it was talking about how

lot of the current solutions, and again, I see this like in other articles that are written, the real focus when it comes to mental health,

solving that stuff is just really on wellness and self care. And obviously those are important things, not saying they're not.

Brian (07:02)
Yeah, yeah, mean, it really is. Wellness and self-care are definitely important, but it's almost like putting a band-aid on the injury because you still have the same stressful environment that created that stress in the first place. So...

It's like, kinda, and what I talked about in the article is just you really have to look at the overall financial environment of the firm and if you can alleviate the financial stress and pressure, you often improve the mental health and wellness as well.

Jason (07:34)
Yeah, and it makes so much sense. make a great point. It is like putting a bandaid on it. Obviously working on wellness and self care is important really no matter what you're doing or level of

stress. But if you have this incredibly stressful job and you're not fixing the root causes of that, well, that stuff isn't going to change. Now, maybe you can handle those things better, but there is a better path, right? Wouldn't it be much nicer? And you point out, and I think this is like for anyone that's ever read

like the E-Myth, right? It's like lawyers start out, they start law firms because they're good at practicing right? Or good at practicing law, not because they understand financial strategy or how to run a business or what investing in a business or any

of those things. And honestly, I look at my, started a business 15 years ago. I probably would have never done it if I actually knew what was involved. Fortunately, I was just too dumb to know that there's a lot to it, but

But yeah, you start a law firm, you're good at practice in law, that's what you want to focus on. But all of a sudden you find out, well, how do you get clients? How do you manage those clients? Then you got to do the work, you got to

bill for the work, you've got to follow your tout, you got to do all these things. so, yeah, I mean, they're just, they're not set for it.

Brian (08:51)
No, it's like a completely different skill set that you're not trained on and you the public school system definitely doesn't educate you and you don't learn about it in law school so...

Jason (09:02)
Yeah, you would think at some point law schools,

I don't know what the mission of a law school is. Obviously, it should teach you about the substance of the law, but it seems like there maybe could be some electives on how to start a law firm, things you should know. it's like you tell a story about a lawyer named David in the article. And what jumped out at me is you talk about, he's got the brand new Mercedes, he's taken the exotic vacations and so forth.

And

by all accounts, you look at that and you're like, that is a very successful practice. But what you don't realize is in the background is, there's a lot of plates in the air, feeling a lot of like weight on his shoulders. That this could all fall apart at any time if, his marketing stops working as well. You've got a couple unhappy clients, some bad reviews. And, and so can, yeah, can you speak, I don't know if that was like a an example of someone that you've actually worked with.

Brian (09:58)
It was and it's a common kind of stressor that I hear when I talk to law firm owners is that Success doesn't feel like success right like they're profitable on paper But they feel like it's like you said it's all on their shoulders like if they step away to take a vacation when they come back They feel like things are chaotic They they always feel like they have to accept all these maybe more demanding or lower paying clients because they worry the worst

will dry up so there's a lot of stressors you don't just see by seeing this is a profitable firm on paper

Jason (10:33)
Yeah, and has all the trappings around it, nice office, nice car, know, all nice home. Yeah, but you know what struck me as I was reading that? I mean, because it is kind of a classic case of not just for lawyers, but how

a lot of people, even entrepreneurs, as their income increases, they also increase their lifestyle and their lifestyle expenses. And so the weight of all of that, whether, I don't know if you read

Robert Kiyosaki or other people. It's like the idea that financial freedom and a path to wealth is all about living below your means or even in some cases, well below your means so that you don't have that pressure to make the house payment, the car payment, go on the expensive vacation, but rather you have a buffer financially. You don't have the stress, right? Like

Brian (11:25)
Yeah, exactly. And I think the other thing that Robert Kiyosaki talks about is just accumulating assets that generate income for you. And that's part of the challenge with being a law firm owner too, right? Is that a lot of the income is tied to your ability to deliver that work. And a lot of law firm owners, they don't feel like they can delegate and trust. mean,

Maybe they can trust their team to do certain things but at the back of their mind they feel like they've got to keep their hands on everything and When you do that it kind of limits where you can scale to right? Yeah, there's only so many hours and so much energy in a day So part of what I sorry, go ahead

Jason (12:05)
Yeah, I was just going to say it could be, because that is a thing and any entrepreneur, you read about the founder in this case. And

here's one thing that I do find, I don't know if you've come across this, but in line with what we talked about before is a lot of lawyers, they start practices because they enjoy it and they see themselves as practitioners and forget about the fact that you're a business,

a small business owner now. You are an entrepreneur above all, even before you're a lawyer.

legal services is what you offer, but, but people don't realize and then they get very stuck working in the business. Right. And yeah, there's always working in the business, working on the business, working above the business, all these different ways of removing yourself. Because even before we

started this recording, we were talking a little bit about small business M and A and, one of the things is obviously, you know, the saying goes the more dependent, the more your business

The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. So you've got to find a way to begin to build a process and a system that can work independently of you. and of course, when you do that, I think stress levels can come down

quite a bit.

Brian (13:16)
a hundred percent, because then you don't feel like you're tied to whatever the outputs are. It's like your inputs get magnified. And especially for a firm like a law firm, right? Key man risk is a very real problem, because if something happened to you, like in the David case study, right? If he had a heart attack, he was worried that the leads would dry up, that the business would dry up, and then what's he leaving for himself or for his family?

So you know like like you were saying you've got to figure out a way to build a financial machine that can make money to support your lifestyle and be a sellable asset Even if you're not actually doing the legal delivery work

Jason (13:58)
Yeah. it's unbelievable. Yeah. And I want to get into that before, in terms of the biggest thing I took from David and just to back up, like,

I don't know where, maybe this is Robert Keat, but, you mentioned this in your article and that's why I want to emphasize it. Cause we're to get into how you can start to address these things, but it really isn't about how much money you make. It's how much money you keep. Right. And so it's like, I think.

You talk about the idea that to start to create some stability and to find growth that

law firm owners, have to change your mindset. You have to start to think about your law firm as an investment or like it's a machine that can have a process that can produce results consistently and efficiently.

Brian (14:45)
Exactly, and on that mindset point, like your job really isn't chief lawyer, right? It's CEO of your law firm and it's just a different kind of set of skills that you need to bring to that role.

Jason (15:00)
Yeah. And I guess, so then the question becomes how do you move from that from being the legal practitioner to getting to being that CEO type level that's providing, vision and strategic direction and overseeing,

the moving parts of the business. I love the analogy that you use as a law firm

as a machine. And it

has these, three parts, revenue, profit and cashflow. But

Before we get into those, can you talk about how this mindset shift really can make a difference for law firm? Because I think this is in a nutshell,

what we're talking about here today.

Brian (15:38)
Yeah, and it's really like kind of your self identity like, okay, you're you're a lawyer, but now you're also a business owner and it's I love the saying that it's you can't read the label when you're stuck inside the jar. So you really have to find it and whether that's carving out dedicated time, maybe even just an hour a week to start to kind of start to see, okay, where is my business today? Where do I want it to go? And then backing into

what's that roadmap look like? honestly, if you're okay being stressed and with your firm where it is, okay, you don't need to change, but if you wanna be able to make your firm less reliant on you, you've gotta figure out kind of where are you the key bottleneck in some of these processes and how do you start backing out of that? And it starts with creating, sorry, go ahead.

Jason (16:32)
It's interesting. Have you

met lawyers that are like, I'm perfectly happy with the stress. I'm good to just continue on as is just in in the David approach. It's like, hey, we're going to keep on this treadmill, making money, spending a lot of money. But I'm happy with that.

Brian (16:49)
I feel like that's what a lot of lawyers, at least the old school mentality will say, right? It's like working long hours, having those trappings of success. That's a badge of honor for a certain type

Jason (17:00)
It's like the grind.

Brian (17:01)
of lawyer. And then I feel like there's a lot of lawyers today, though, especially after like COVID and the pandemic, right? Who did a lot of soul searching and they realize, I don't wanna be that 49 year old or the 50 something lawyer who still has to

hustle and keep going to court and doing all this kind grinding legal work and not necessarily having anything to show for it at the end of the day.

Jason (17:27)
Right. And having a life. so, yeah, because in

terms of that, like you talk about, like most lawyers, they weight their financial success with revenue and that's it, right? And we're talking about it's not how much you make, it's how much you

keep. So why is it so important? It's okay. Revenue is important. You need that. But why is

it so important to shift the focus to profit and cashflow?

Brian (17:51)
Yeah, because, you know, like you said, right? Like a lot of lawyers focus on their revenue and how much are we billing, but...

You can be billing tens of millions of dollars, but if you're only keeping a couple hundred thousand dollars of that, you've got a problem. That's not sustainable. Whereas you could bill a lot less, but if you're monitoring the expenses and where you're kind of allocating your funds, you can keep a lot more, which means you can do less work and have more time for the things that matter.

Jason (18:23)
Yeah, I mean, isn't that the thing? Like, can you imagine a scenario where you have a business that can generate 10 million or more in revenue, but you're only taking for yourself a few hundred, like the amount of work and stress to manage what it takes to generate $10 million. And then that's all you can bring home. And that's that's a nice, if anybody can bring home a few hundred thousand dollars, listen, that's an excellent income. No question about it, but just in terms of.

the what you're actually dealing with and that you could have probably, would imagine. mean, I want to talk about profit. I do have a question. of what

is a good net profit margin? We'll get to that in a second, but you also talk about how

lawyers often as they just don't have the financial, they don't have any financial strategy whatsoever. And as a result, that's why all they can do is look at the top line revenue. And that's an indicator of how we're doing.

This year, last year, that's a number we can look at, it's not the only metric. And the reality is it's not the most important metric.

Brian (19:25)
Well,

it's not and you really have to start with figuring out like what's most important to you? Like what what do you value? What do you want out of life? if what you want is to work a whole bunch of hours and just bill as much as possible, okay, but if you want to do meaningful legal work, but also have time for other pursuits, maybe travel or for family or whatever, that's a different type of firm you need to think of how you design.

Jason (19:53)
Yeah. so, so, okay.

So let's talk about the machine and the three key parts, right? The three pillars of a successful firm, you put it, revenue, profit

and cashflow. Can you just talk about each one of those

what each one is, why those, why that individual one is important?

Brian (20:13)
Sure,

yeah. And revenue, that's what you're billing out. That's kind of the money that comes into your firm from client payments or referral sources. And then your profit's what you're keeping, at least on paper, after you cover all the expenses to pay your team, pay for marketing, pay for your operations and overhead. And then obviously profit on paper is not necessarily the same thing as cash in the bank, right?

Collections are a huge problem. There's a lot of law firms that have these long-standing accounts receivable and that hurts your cash flow or you know, if you're a prompt payer on paying your suppliers, you know, that's great for them, but that's also hurting your cash flow or you know, if you're taking on debt or you're buying a lot of assets, you've got, you know, expensive real estate that you're making improvements to all that impacts what you're able to actually take home.

Jason (21:08)
in terms of you're

describing people who have big accounts receivables, but they're

real on time with their payable. So there's a mismatch there. You're paying your bills on time. Yours aren't getting paid. And so your cash is getting depleted. And so

all of the aspects of the business that are hungry for cash, payroll, other, SG &A expenses. It's like, you have to have the money. And I, you can absolutely see how that one in particular can be very stressful for

Any business owner, certainly a law firm, when you just have these pile of bills, but the money that you're owed, it hasn't hit the bank account to actually pay those bills.

Brian (21:43)
Well, and the other thing too is that that creates it's an extra job and often the law firm owner is the one who ends up falling up on that and then it can hurt client relationships because you're constantly chasing them about hey we need you to pay on this we need you to pay and then it's a back-and-forth like do we have to negotiate an extra discount for them to get them to pay something and it just adds extra stress

Jason (22:07)
And what do you recommend

there? Is it best to use a buffer, have an admin or an office manager, fractional CFO, somebody that's being the bad guy so you can continue to be focused on maintaining positivity of the client relationship and not

getting into the weeds on money, right? Because that can be difficult and weird for people at times.

Brian (22:28)
and I would say that law firm owners really should not be the ones having to chase after AR. So if they've got somebody on their team or they have a third party who can handle that, that's great. But really, I prefer to take a preventative approach. So to the extent that you can collect cash upfront at the start of the engagement, and there's different ways to do that, but that prevents a lot of the problems that you're not billing out a bunch of work and then worrying if

when you're going to get paid.

Jason (22:58)
Yeah, I'll bet.

And I've heard of attorneys that are like, forget AR, they're like months behind and even sending the bills out for work they've done. And to me, that's insane, right? Like the whole idea is that you make money if you're not going to actually go out and

In that scenario, you've got to offload that

probably. That's got to be the first thing you offload, just get the bills out the door, ideally upfront, like you're saying.

Brian (23:25)
Well, yeah, and it does become a problem, and it also can affect your relationship with your team, because if you have other attorneys and they're incentivized based off of hitting certain billable hour targets, then maybe they're billing a lot, but if they're not...

if they're involved in collections and falling up, I've seen law firms who, they've got millions of dollars and they are sitting out because the team hasn't done the collections work on it either.

Jason (23:53)
Yeah, that's unbelievable. I mean, that amount of AR on the balance sheet. So let me ask you, if a lawyer, okay, they hear what you're saying, they're open to a mind-set shift and saying, okay, I need to look at my firm more like a business, more like an investment. What are the biggest challenges they actually face in the execution of all of this and these various parts of their financial machine,

as you put it?

Brian (24:19)
I

mean, the first thing, like you said, is just having that mindset shift to start thinking of it as a machine that's got parts. And then from that, it's finding the time. Like if you're tied up on the legal work and then you're just trying to keep the wheels on the bus, so to speak, right? It's hard to get into that mindset of, I need to carve out a block of time where I'm not going to be doing that to focus on this instead.

And then from that, it's just knowing what to look at. Lawyers, right, they're great at practicing law. They might not know a lot about finance and how to read their P &L and their balance sheet, or even if they know how to read it, they're not thinking strategically about how do I use these numbers to improve the reality of my day to day.

Jason (25:07)
Yeah, because there's so much information there. was talking to an accountant

a while back and he was telling me he has clients that they judge the performance of their business just based on how much money is currently in the banking and the checking account. They have no idea what their revenue or expenses are. They could actually, in many cases, are losing money or taking distributions beyond what the business can support. So I think that's just incredible when you think

But again, it just goes back to the mindset shift that yeah, you're an attorney and you can be a very good one, but now you're a business owner and you have to act like one and you have to think like one and do all of the things. And it's a challenge, no question, even with the best of intentions, but there is a path to doing it properly.

Brian (25:52)
properly.

Yeah,

and the big thing is just having a good financial management process installed in your firm and that it's a mix of factors, right? It's understanding where you want to go and having clear financial targets. It's understanding kind of your current financial health in the business, where you are today, and then putting together a financial roadmap to get you from where you are to where you want to be. And then it's just consistently each month at least checking in,

reviewing

your numbers, comparing that to the targets you set, and then figuring out what are the kind of one to three key areas we need to focus on and what can we do to improve things.

Jason (26:34)
Yeah, that makes so much sense. And realistically, if somebody is considering, I'm open to this, even on the low end to do what you just described, right? You set some targets, you measure those targets and you check in on

them period. Like how much time are we talking to start making this shift?

Brian (26:51)
It's really not much, even if it was like an hour a month that they were spending, they would be ahead of the majority of small law firm owners with this.

Jason (27:01)
Yeah, right. An hour a month. Like who can't find an hour a month? Now, I don't know. Maybe some of these folks we're talking about here are so stressed out. They've got so many plates in the air. They literally can't find the hour a month, but realistically anyone can find an hour a month, especially if they're trying to get on a path to offloading some of the actual tasks and stress that come with those things.

Brian (27:25)
Yeah, exactly. Right. And I don't know if you're familiar with James Clear's Atomic Habits, but that's how you build a sustainable practice. Right. You start small and then you'll figure out what your actual needs are.

Jason (27:38)
Yeah, it's like, so in terms of like coming, putting together, getting some financial

stability within your firm, it's not just about the firm owner,

right? There's like a trickle down or a ripple effect that happens, employees, clients, even the profession as a whole. Like, can you elaborate on that a little bit and how that can really affect the firm as a whole?

Brian (28:01)
Yeah,

I mean, and obviously it has to start with you as the firm owner changing your mindset, but once you do that and you start taking the small steps to look at where you are today, review your numbers, have a plan in place, you start to realize, okay, here's kind of where the gaps are, here's the systems we need to install.

And then you start to get your team on board. They'll start to buy into, here's the vision. Here's how it helps me personally because I'm at a firm with a more stable financial environment. There's growth opportunities. We get to work with better clients. I can probably work less too, because the owner's less worried about where the revenues and the money's coming from.

And then from there, that has an impact on client delivery, because the team's happier, so the clients are going to be happier. It's probably a better mix of clients. And then from there, if you spread that across all these firms kind of taking cues on this, that benefits the profession as a whole.

Jason (29:05)
Yeah, no doubt. And you really could see how this can really like do it starting to do this, how it makes such an impact on the team and how, I mean,

ultimately when you're moving from being the one that does all the work and, being the, the face of the, to having a team that can do the work, you find out that there's people that can do a lot of little things a lot better than you would ever be able to do them. And they are, and they feel rewarded.

And I guess you can start to move into like the phase of where, you hear like maybe Dan Martel talking about,

you want to identify the very things that only you can do, but essentially the things you love to do and that are going to have the greatest impact on the business. And then you can have all the other people doing those other things and they really enjoy those tasks that you can't stand and actually do them a lot better than you. And you could see how that creates the system

that you're talking about.

Brian (30:01)
exactly right everybody's got the things that they're good at and that they love to do and that the world will reward them for doing so Let people do that, know set them up for success with the resources they need and then get out of their way so they can do it

Jason (30:17)
So what's a good actionable first step that someone can just on their own, they're feeling overwhelmed and

firm, know, the management ops, finances, they're not fully managed. Well, what's a good way to get started on this?

Brian (30:31)
I

mean I would say step one is just commit to blocking off a specific time on your calendar and and maybe right now if you're really busy maybe it's not during the week right maybe it is like a weekend day like a Saturday or a Sunday block off an hour and just kind of sit down and you know if you've got access to your financials pull it out take a look at where your firm is

But more importantly, kind of do those soul searching questions like, am I happy with the type of work I'm doing? Am I happy with where I'm spending my time? What's sucking my energy away? Where do I get energy from my business? And figure out if this was easy, what would it look like?

Jason (31:13)
Yeah.

Brian (31:14)
that'll plant that seed and get you thinking about ways to improve.

Jason (31:19)
Yeah, I think that's such good advice. And are there any specific tools or frameworks or professionals such as yourself that you recommend to start getting on a path to improving the financial and operational

health and overall performance of your business so you can start to enjoy life and your work?

Brian (31:37)
I

mean, there's a lot of tools and a lot of resources out there and part of the challenge is that there's an abundance or an overabundance of information and if a lack of information was the only problem, everybody would have a financially successful firm.

Jason (31:51)
Right.

Brian (31:52)
And I suppose this is a little bit biased but I do think it helps to have a call with a professional who's worked with law firms and can kind of...

really quickly on a free 30 minute call, take a look at your financials, where your business is, and where you wanna go, and can start to give you kind of suggestions to improve things.

Jason (32:13)
Yeah, there's no question.

I mean, over the years I've had a lot of coaching, different types of coaching for my businesses. you initially it was like, I really need, is this something I can't, and you can figure it all out yourself, right? There's

books, but the thing I realized is you figuring out it's going all over here, working with a coach, it's a much more direct process. And I want to tell people how they can get in contact with you.

we're talking here with Brian Zaff.

You can reach him at his website, [www.flight.financial](https://www.flight.financial).

Okay. So there's no dot com there, [www.flight.financial](https://www.flight.financial), but Brian offers, you can book

a call with him, like a right fit call. And he also offers you a free financial assessment. So what, does that look like?

Brian (32:59)
Yeah, so with the financial assessment, I'll take a look at your past couple of years of financial data and I'll, you know, examine the trends and put together a short presentation. We'll hop on a, you know, an hour long call where I'll walk you through here's what I see. I'll ask you a couple questions to drill in and you'll come away from that call with just a few clear actionable insights for what's holding you back and things you could do to get where you want to be.

Jason (33:28)
And it sounds really generous in terms of you're going to spend time evaluating their business. You're to spend another hour on a call reviewing it with them. I can't imagine not taking you up on that. that's an easy one to say yes to. And then beyond that, if somebody decides they want to go beyond that, what type of services do you offer? How can you help these firms working directly with them?

Brian (33:52)
Sure, yeah, and I work on kind of a monthly basis, but if somebody decided that they wanna work with me, it's kind of an initial six month period where we'll hop on, we'll do a more robust version of that financial assessment, we'll set growth targets with them, and then each month I'll work with them on kind of reviewing what's going on in their business and what do we need to do to get things where we want them to be.

Jason (34:18)
Yeah. it sounds great. So, I would say if you're an attorney that has been feeling any of the things that we have been talking about, certainly just worth a call with Brian, just, just to get a sense of it. Because again, it just starts with the mindset shift, even if you're not ready to do everything right off the bat, schedule that hour a month, just start thinking very broadly about your business, where you want to be, what metrics

you want to measure. and then get somebody, get, get Brian.

not somebody get Brian to help you with these things. Because here's the other thing too, in terms of the coaching that I've had, again, you're like, Hey, I could do a lot of these

things on my own or learn this stuff and you can, you'll learn faster with a coach. But the other big piece of it is the accountability, right? If you're paying for something, you're paying for someone's time and energy.

Brian (35:04)
energy

Jason (35:05)
to go into your business, you tend to not want to let them down. Whereas if you just have goals that are off, okay, and then before

you know it, it's your monthly review and you didn't do what you said you were going to do and so forth. So I imagine that's a piece that is really important to what you add.

Brian (35:20)
add? 100%, right? Like we tend to value the things that we actually invest in and if we've got somebody else that we know we have to show up for or they're gonna call us out on it, we tend to get more done that way.

Jason (35:34)
Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, Brian, thank you so much. Again, you can

reach Brian [www.flight.financial](https://www.flight.financial). have his email here, brian

at flight.financial again, no.com. And you can book a call with him directly on his website and he, yeah, he's going to get you a free financial assessment, which sounds like a great offer.

Brian (35:57)
Thanks Jason, I appreciate it.

Jason (35:58)
Yeah, great, great to talk to you, Brian. And,

I'd love to have you on again sometime, and maybe we can dive into some of the specifics, but this has been a great start. So I thank you so much for your time here today.

Brian (36:09)
Thank you.

Jason Marsh (36:12)
Thanks for listening to the Alpha Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jason Marsh, and I appreciate you joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with other lawyers who might benefit. You can find more resources and insights on building a thriving law firm at alphalawyer.io or the Alpha Lawyer YouTube channel. Until next time, keep building the firm of your dreams so you can live your best life.