Discover how to build generational wealth with your law firm by shifting your mindset from lawyer to investor. In this episode of the Alpha Lawyer Podcast, Jason Marsh interviews Moshe Amsel, founder of Profit with Law. Moshe shares his journey, discusses how to break free from the feast-or-famine cycle, and explores what it takes to create a firm that operates independently of its owner. The conversation covers building your team, scaling your business, and creating lasting wealth for your family.
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1:09 What is the Alpha Lawyer Podcast?
2:35 Moshe’s Journey to Building Generational Wealth
5:10 How a Small Family Gift Created a Legacy of Wealth
8:02 Lessons in Generational Wealth and Financial Impact
10:27 Moshe’s Mission: Helping Law Firms Build Generational Wealth
12:27 Thinking Like an Investor, Not a Lawyer
14:14 Common Mistakes Law Firm Owners Make with Business Growth
17:43 Overcoming the Feast and Famine Cycle in Law Firms
18:28 Building a Law Firm Like an Investor: The 7-Eleven Example
20:24 Understanding Profit Margins and Leveraging Capital
23:23 Breaking the Cash Flow Mindset Trap in Business Growth
25:07 How Law Firms Can Access SBA 7(a) Loans for Expansion
28:48 The Path to Scaling Through Team Building and Marketing
30:38 Overview of the Law Firm Growth Summit Themes and Topics
32:07 Building Capacity Before Client Growth
34:04 The Value of Virtual Assistants, Offshore Staff, and Fractional Roles
36:22 How to Create a Sellable Law Firm for Future Growth
39:13 Owner Dependency and Business Value in Law Firms
40:08 Customized Learning Tracks at the Law Firm Growth Summit
42:50 Virtual Summit Benefits and VIP Access
47:41 Implementation Day for Turning Ideas into Action
48:18 Closing Remarks and Next Steps
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Key Takeaways
- Think like an investor, not just a lawyer. The goal is to build a firm that creates value by leveraging other people’s talents, systems, capital, and marketing rather than depending primarily on the owner’s billable work.
- Build capacity before you desperately need it. Amsel argues that putting the right team in place first can make growth easier because the owner can focus on generating business without worrying about personally handling every new matter.
- Do not let current cash flow automatically dictate the pace of growth. The conversation explores using capital strategically, including SBA 7(a) financing, to fund experienced hires, marketing, and other investments that can expand the firm’s capacity.
- Build the firm as if you may eventually sell it. Recurring revenue, predictable lead generation, a strong team, and low owner dependency all make the business more valuable, even if you never intend to sell.
- Replace “How do I do this?” with “Who can do this?” The more the owner delegates execution to capable people, the more time becomes available for higher-value work such as strategy, growth, and capital allocation.
Episode Highlights
Think Like an Investor, Not Just a Lawyer
One of the central ideas in this conversation is that many law firm owners continue to think primarily like practicing attorneys, even after they have built a real business around themselves.
Moshe Amsel argues that an investor approaches the same business very differently. Instead of asking, “How much work can I personally handle?” the investor asks how people, systems, marketing, and capital can be assembled to create something larger than the owner’s individual production.
That distinction matters because an owner who remains responsible for delivering most of the legal work eventually becomes the constraint on growth. Amsel’s argument is that the larger opportunity comes from leveraging the talents of other people while the owner increasingly focuses on building and improving the business itself.
Breaking the Feast-or-Famine Cycle
The traditional solo-firm model can create a predictable problem. When the attorney needs clients, time shifts toward marketing and business development. Once the work arrives, attention shifts back to servicing those matters. Eventually the pipeline slows down, forcing the owner back into marketing.
The result is the familiar feast-or-famine cycle.
Amsel’s alternative is to separate the major functions of the business. Instead of expecting one person to generate demand, sell the work, perform the legal services, and manage the firm, build a team around those functions.
That can mean hiring attorneys who primarily handle client work while other people focus on marketing, sales, administration, and management. The owner can then spend more time on decisions that affect the overall direction and value of the firm rather than constantly moving between production and business development.
Use Capital as a Tool for Growth
A major part of thinking like an investor is becoming comfortable evaluating capital as a business tool.
Law firm owners often frame hiring or marketing decisions around whether the firm currently has enough excess cash to pay for them. Amsel argues that this can become a trap. Waiting for existing cash flow to fund every investment can significantly slow growth.
Instead, the better question is whether an investment has a reasonable path to producing an economic return.
During the conversation, Amsel uses the example of hiring an experienced attorney and investing in marketing at the same time. Rather than assuming the firm must permanently carry those expenses from existing cash, the owner can estimate how much capital is actually required to bridge the period until the additional capacity and marketing begin producing revenue.
He also discusses SBA 7(a) financing as one potential source of growth capital for established firms. The broader lesson is not that every firm should borrow money. It is that financing should be evaluated as one of several tools available when the expected return justifies the investment.
Build Capacity Before You Need It
One of Amsel’s more counterintuitive recommendations is to build capacity before aggressively increasing client acquisition.
Many owners prefer the opposite approach. They want additional clients first so they know there will be enough work to justify another hire.
Amsel argues that this can actually interfere with growth. When an owner knows the firm is already at capacity, there may be an unconscious reluctance to pursue or close additional business because every new client creates another service-delivery problem.
His preferred sequence is to establish the capacity first and then fill it.
That does not necessarily require immediately building a large traditional staff. Amsel points to virtual assistants, offshore and nearshore talent, fractional executives, contract professionals, and other flexible staffing arrangements that allow firms to add resources incrementally.
Build a Law Firm That Has Value Without You
Thinking like an investor also changes how an owner evaluates the long-term value of the firm.
A business becomes more attractive and transferable when it has predictable revenue, reliable lead generation, documented systems, and a team capable of delivering the service without constant involvement from the owner.
By contrast, when clients primarily come because of the owner, the owner performs much of the work, and important decisions depend on that individual, the business becomes much harder to transfer.
This is why exit planning can also be viewed as good business planning. Building a firm that could eventually be sold forces the owner to develop the same characteristics that generally make the business stronger today.
The objective does not have to be selling the firm. The objective is creating a business that has value independent of the person who founded it.
Stop Asking “How?” and Start Asking “Who?”
Near the end of the conversation, Amsel distills much of the discussion into a simple operating principle inspired by the book Who Not How.
When a problem appears, an owner’s instinct is often to ask, “How do I solve this?”
But that question immediately places the owner back into the role of executor.
The investor’s question is different: “Who can solve this?”
That shift applies to legal work, marketing, finance, administration, technology, and virtually every other function inside the firm. The goal is not to eliminate the owner from the business. It is to reserve the owner’s time for the areas where that time creates the greatest value.
Over time, that shift can produce a firm that is more scalable, less dependent on its founder, and better positioned to generate the profits and enterprise value that ultimately create long-term wealth.
Jason Marsh (00:01)
On today's show, Moshe Amsel, founder and CEO of Profit with Law and the upcoming 2025 Law Firm Growth Summit. We'll be talking about building generational wealth by thinking about your law practice like an investor, not a lawyer.
Moshe (00:19)
When you look at people who have amassed significant wealth, they're in the business of buying businesses, making them better and then selling them, right? Or, or adding them to their portfolio. when you think like an investor, the real
money to be made is when you are leveraging other people's talents and serving a need in the community with that.
Jason Marsh (00:42)
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 (01:09)
Hello and welcome to the Alpha Lawyer podcast. I'm Jason Marsh. But more importantly, today I'm here with Moshe Amsel and today we're going to be talking about the upcoming 2025 law firm growth summit. That's coming up in two weeks, February 4th through the 6th. Moshe is the founder of that. He's also the founder of and CEO of Profit with Law. It's an organization and a corresponding podcast that's dedicated to helping law firm owners.
not just grow their practice, but really focus on the idea of creating generational wealth, which is, and I'm excited to talk about that specifically, but Moshe, you've been featured on CBS, USA Today, NBC, Fox, and now right here. So anyway, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for being on.
Moshe (01:54)
Yeah, the Alpha Lawyer podcast is the the top one there. Like, why did we put it last featured on the Alpha Lawyer podcast? Right on the on the main page there. But thank you so much, Jason, for having me here. really appreciate the opportunity to share with your audience. And as a as a fellow podcaster, I understand the you know that you're getting in front of an audience, but there's no feedback. Right. It's a one way conversation. We're just hoping it's going to land on somebody's ears and somebody is going to get
Influenced by it. So folks if if anything that we talk about today is something that really ignites you and you're like or you know The light bulb goes on you have an epiphany just think about your friends and like okay Who else would benefit from this and just share this episode with somebody?
Jason (02:35)
Yeah, I love it, man. Well, cool. Well, thank you for helping me sort of promote. Yeah, because I was looking at it. mean, you've done like 500 podcasts. I'm like, okay, this guy knows how to do a podcast. But anyway, let's talk about the law firm growth summit. So again, that's in two weeks from now. And now before we get into the specifics of that event itself, I wanted to talk about like the genesis of sort of how you came, not just to that event, but the broader mission that you have of building generational wealth, because you're talking for a few minutes.
sort
of before the podcast that I feel like just the idea of building wealth is so lost on people that, you know, we're talking about Laura's. But anyway, how did this become such an important theme for you?
Moshe (03:17)
So, I mean, we gotta go back to about 2006. I was going through my divorce at the time and whenever you have any big, you know, massive thing that happens in your life, some traumatic event, and this was definitely emotionally traumatic, it really starts to make you think about everything else in your life. And I started to take inventory, take stock of what I was doing at the time. I was an IT professional and basically my claim to fame was resurrecting servers that were
being held ransom by ransomware in middle of the night. And I started to think about, like, what do I want to be known for? Like, what's the impact I want to have on this world? And I decided that just having that be the thing they talk about when I die, that I resurrected servers in middle of the night, just wasn't sexy enough, right? It wasn't a big enough mission. So I started to really think about, what impacted me? Like, where was I influenced in my life that was so great that I feel like this is the thing I want to run with?
And, um, you know, I have a very interesting story just of, of how I entered adulthood. Um, I got married at 19, had my first daughter when I was 19, wasn't a shotgun wedding. was nine and a half months after we got married when she was born. Um, but I was raised, uh, Jewish Orthodox and there were certain parameters of, how to live your life that were put into place that, that kind of drove those decisions. Um, I don't, I don't regret any of it. I love what I did.
But it also forced me to achieve a level of success at a very young age that people just weren't like, your mindset's not there. And it just goes to show that whatever you put your mind to, you can accomplish. At 21, I was earning $100,000 plus in IT a year at W2 Wages. And at the time, I guess that's the equivalent of today, probably, in the 200,000 range, is my guess.
And I was expecting my second child. So I went to my mom and I said, you know, I think it's time for us to buy a house and, know, but, but I know that I can afford the monthly payment, but I don't know how to, how do I amass the 30, $40,000 deposit that I need to buy it, to buy a house. Um, and for those of you in, in, in really middle country locations, I'm in New York. So yeah, houses, even at that time.
were, you know, 300 plus thousand dollars for a home purchase. So you needed 20 % of that, you know, $60,000 was the minimum, you know, gate entry. So I went to my mom and I had this conversation and she said, well, you know, your grandfather had, you know, as you know, owns an apartment building on the west side of Manhattan. So just a little bit about my grandfather. He left Nazi Germany at 11 years old with his dad.
His twin siblings, one of them contracted pneumonia as they were leaving. So his father was an orange merchant. He owned orange orchards. And because of that, he was in the import-export business, was very well connected with the import-export people, which were the same people who were allowing or stamping your passport and visas and allowing you to enter and exit the country. So when things were really going south with what was going on with Germany and Hitler and World War II,
Jews were looking to get out of the area because it was really bad for them. And my great grandfather was, you know, he was connected, so he was able to gain entry exit for his entire family through Italy. But one of them contracted pneumonia, had to be hospitalized, and he decided that he and his son are going to go and his wife and twin and the twin kids would stay in the hospital and take the next boat out. Well, there was never an expo. They ended up dying in the Holocaust. But my grandfather.
ended up settling ultimately in Washington Heights, New York with his with his father and his father had like sent some of his some of his money that he had he had turned into diamonds and sent it forward to a cousin so that when they ended up there he had the inventory he needed to start a diamond business. That diamond business was something my grandfather took over.
He had some success with it. And with that success, he took some of the money that he had earned and together with four other cousins bought an apartment building on the west side of Manhattan. We all know what happens with real estate. Hold it long enough. I mean, it's really a true wealth creator. And fast forward to I'm now a grandchild married with kids, you know, looking to buy a house. And my grandfather's together with his cousins has started selling off the units in the building, turning it into a co-op. And he earmarked
the money from those sales, the sales of those units to fund the down payment of the first home purchase for all 36 of his grandchildren. And at that time, my mother told me like, you've already got it in place. Your grandfather saved it for you and here it is. My grandfather passed away recently.
Jason (08:02)
And that really is a true
example of how you build not just wealth, but the generational wealth because 36 grandchildren helping or providing the down payment now enabled all 36 of those people to start building their wealth. And I'm sure in the same way it was for your grandfather, you build the wealth, you do things to try to make the world a better place for your family outside of your family. And I imagine.
you as one of those grandchildren and now your grandchildren just it continues to flow in that way.
Moshe (08:34)
You know, Jason, it's not just like you think about it. I think it was forty thousand dollars I received. It's not just the forty thousand is a drop in the bucket. It's a joke. It's not really much. Multiply times thirty six. It starts to be something. Right. But what that small little gift allowed me to do, it was a lever that allowed me to do so many other things in my life that I wouldn't have been able to do. And when I look back on it, it was that small little boost.
that really drove a lot of my financial future. One of the things that happened was I went through a divorce. Well, I had bought a house and we had amassed some equity in it. And when I went through the divorce, rather than squabbling over whatever was that we had built up in the house equity, I fully funded all three of my daughter's college funds from the sale of the home when we went through that divorce. So that $40,000 gift now turned into my three daughters being able to go through college 20 years later.
And then on top of that, because I wasn't saving money for a down payment of a house, I was able to be fully funding my retirement account at the age of 19, 20, 21, you know, in that range. I had a good income and that completely changed the trajectory of my retirement savings where other people are first starting in their 30s. I already had a significant amount of money that not just was saved, but was invested and was recurring, you know, building that
You know that that compounding wealth that happens when you have money that you're able to put to work So that small little gift really started a daisy chain effect of changing the financial future for me and my family So when I in 2006 when I was going through the divorce and I'm having this this, know come to Jesus moment Okay, I'm Jewish. It's not come to Jesus, right? But I'm having this moment of
Jason (10:23)
Yeah.
Moshe (10:23)
like what you know, what do I want to be known for?
I suddenly said, what if I can help other people do what my grandfather did for me? What if I can help people set themselves up, not just for their own success, but to create something so that when they leave, their grandchildren, their great grandchildren are the beneficiaries of what they've created. And
that's what
Jason (10:44)
Yeah, so.
Moshe (10:45)
started me on the journey of really focusing on how do I help people with creating generational wealth?
Jason (10:52)
Yeah. And it's so important. In fact, I was having a similar conversation with someone yesterday. We're just talking about the idea of building wealth, whether it's your lawyer or not. But it's, I've seen this in my own life where you have friends, right? Over time, their income increases. But then right along with that, they increase their lifestyle. And so then there's, there's no savings. There's no investment that comes out of that. I've had friends and whereas I think for me, I've tried to keep, you know, your expenses lower.
and live within your means or as far below your mean as you can because then you take that money, you invest it, you buy assets that cashflow appreciate, all of those things that are required to actually build wealth. And so that's partly why this really resonated with me when I saw that that is your mission because there's so many programs and people and coaches out there. We can help you grow your firm. We can help you systemize your operations. We can help you do all of these tactical things within your business.
But really, those are just really pieces of a bigger, so the way you framed it as the idea of we'll get into this, is sort of thinking like an investor with your practice, not like a lawyer, and building wealth through that vehicle, and of course doing all those things, but that being the end goal. So I just thought that was awesome. Anyway, let's talk about the Law Firm Growth Summit. Again, that's coming up in a couple weeks. I'll get all the details.
that'll be in the show notes as well. But as I said, it really struck me that was the theme to learn all of these things, but again, thinking like an investor and not a lawyer. So what inspired that?
Moshe (12:27)
So actually what happened was is last year when I ran the summit, I had to do a talk and I started to really think about like what's the big lever that my clients are pulling, right? Like at the end of the day, when I'm in coaching calls, I'm having these conversations and I'm talking to people about helping them grow their business, build it, what's the big thing?
that they're stuck with that's limiting them or slowing them down from really unlocking the true potential of what they can create. And when I thought about it, I realized that the difference is just how they view themselves.
And that's where I did a talk at the last summit around this concept of basically changing how you view yourself and thinking like an investor. I've been really leaning into that throughout the year. And now I decided to theme the whole event around it. And it's basically the concepts like this. 99%, this is not a study I did. This is just.
the way it happens, Like 99 % of law firm owners that start their firms start with the idea that I'm a lawyer, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna get my own clients, serve those clients, and I'm gonna have a law firm. And right away...
Jason (13:42)
It's classic E-myth, right?
Moshe (13:46)
Correct. Exactly. can, Emeth or all of the other books that talk about this idea, but let's just frame it for lawyers, right? Everybody will nod their head and say, yes, of course, that's how I started my business. I either brought a book of business with me or I went out and started to figure out how to get clients, but I got clients so I could serve them. How many law firms started by hiring an attorney and then filling that attorney's plate?
Jason (14:14)
Yeah, it's-
Moshe (14:14)
If they're
out there, it's maybe 1%. It's tiny fraction of them.
Jason (14:16)
Yeah, it's such a small thing. It's just the idea
that a lawyer or other people, even me, I've started business, I know how to do digital marketing. I'll start a digital marketing business. And then I'm doing everything versus what you're describing is that's, and the E-Meth and other things, but that's not the way to do it. It's to think about how did an investor approach starting this business?
Moshe (14:38)
Right, right. If you watch people like Alex Hermosy or Cody Sanchez, right, like, and they talk about their portfolio companies and how they're buying businesses and stuff like that. When you look at people who are, who have amassed significant wealth, they're in the business of buying businesses, making them better and then selling them, right? Or, or adding them to their portfolio. The real, the real, when you think like an investor, the real
money to be made is when you are leveraging other people's talents and serving a need in the community with that.
So when we approach it with I'm the attorney, we're automatically putting ourselves into a position where we're limiting our success. And what ends up happening is, that somebody starts their firm and let's just talk in the solo box for a second, because even when you grow beyond yourself, like I have, I have a fractional CFO business, right? We work with multimillion dollar firms.
And when I come in, even those owners are still operating, even though they've figured out how to hire staff and they're still thinking like an attorney. And when you think like an investor, you'd be looking at your PNL, you'd be looking at your, you'd be doing projections, you'd be looking at leveraging capital, things like that. But they're not doing that. So let's just live in this solo box for a second. So solo attorneys, when you start your firm, you go out, you get clients, now you're serving clients, you get into this vicious cycle.
I need clients. I'm gonna go out and sell and then I've got clients now I'm gonna go and serve and then it creates this feast or famine situation But it also limits your your revenue potential because so much of your time is spent on all the other pieces of the business Cleo did a study back in 2020 2021 I forget which legal trends report it was but in one of those trends reports they did the study of You know, how many billable hours does a solo attorney do?
and it was 2.1 hours per day is what a solo attorney bills and they collect on 1.9 hours. So if we think about it, if you hire an attorney onto your staff, that attorney is only gonna be doing billable work, right? Let's just say that you can only get six productive hours in a day. There's wasted time for lunch, know, whatever time between things, breaks, wasting time at the water cooler, six hours is your productive time. That means that if you hire an attorney,
They can do three times what you can do as your own attorney in your own firm as a solo. Wouldn't you agree that if you put somebody in place and they could do three times as much that you would unlock triple the benefit or potential of what you can do? then they're gonna like, then the argument is like, well, yeah, but then we need to find those clients. Yeah, but if you were spending 100 % of your time finding clients, wouldn't you fill their plate? And then to take it even further, if you...
brought in a salesperson and brought in a marketing person, wouldn't they do a good job of filling that person's plate, right? So when we start to think like an investor and start to assemble the team that it would take to fill one attorney's plate, not the owner, we're looking at a million dollar business for one attorney.
Jason (17:43)
And what are some of the things that, and we know as when you start because, I'm a lawyer, I'm going to open a practice, I'm going to start, you know, I'm going hang my shingle, I'm going to practice law, but you very quickly realize, you know, unless you brought a book of business, you've got to go find those clients. You end up in that feast or famine cycle because while you're serving the business, your marketing and sales pipeline dries up. Then you go back to that and then your service delivery isn't what it maybe should be.
How do you move from that type of scenario and does it require significant capital to say, I'm going to go out and hire an associate and I'm going to fill their plate with work, but I've got to pay them. I've got to pay for the marketing and the sales. Is there a path to doing this that you recommend?
Moshe (18:28)
Yeah, so that's a really good question. in this talk that I did last year, I basically used the analogy of a 7-Eleven. I'll just use that here because it's really easy and it's something I can, you know, I know the numbers off the top of my head. But if you're to open a 7-Eleven franchise, you know what it costs to open a 7-Eleven franchise? It's
Jason (18:46)
I don't, million dollars?
Moshe (18:47)
between $750,000 and $1.5 million. OK, let's just use the upper number, $1.5 million.
Now, do you think that a 7-Eleven franchise owner, when they decide to open a franchise, has one and a half million dollars in the bank?
Jason (19:02)
No, of course not.
Moshe (19:03)
They don't, they don't. They need to have at most 20 % of that in the bank. And it doesn't need to be their funds. They can go to family, friends, whatever, like they amass 300,000 in capital. Then they go and they deal with 7-Eleven to enter the franchise. They choose a location, they get an SBA loan or whatever, whoever's gonna fund it. And boom, they've got themselves a 7-Eleven business. Now, so if they came up with 300,000 and they borrowed the rest, they borrowed 1.2 million. Now here's the kicker.
Do you know what the profit is for a 7-Eleven?
Jason (19:37)
idea.
Moshe (19:37)
The
annual profit for the average 7-Eleven is guess what? $1.2 million.
Jason (19:44)
on a, wow.
Moshe (19:46)
annual every year. Would you borrow $1.2 million if you knew that every year you would get $1.2 million back?
Jason (19:54)
Yeah, of course. one of the things that you're talking about here is leverage, right? Another key piece of how you build wealth, but you can buy
Moshe (20:02)
That's a piece of it, yes.
Jason (20:03)
a $1.5 million business with, you don't need the $1.5 million, but you can do that with say $300,000, $300,000 in equity that you can also get from your friends. The rest is debt. So now you bought it, you've run it, year one, you've made...
put what, $1.2 million on the bottom line? Is that what you're saying the net is?
Moshe (20:24)
Correct.
Jason (20:24)
On $300,000 of equity, you've 4Xed your money year one, right? And this is the whole concept of thinking like...
Moshe (20:30)
Correct. Now, of course, you have debt service,
right? have to, some of that money is going to go to pay down the debt that you took in in order to start it. But you
Jason (20:38)
Right.
Moshe (20:38)
also don't have to pay back 1.2 million the first year. So you've already got a really nice income from that business in year one. Now, let's switch gears to a law firm for a second, right? If we look at the salary of an attorney, the salary of a paralegal and marketing as 10 % of revenue, right?
So let's say a million dollars of revenue, 10 % in marketing is $100,000 in marketing, a lawyer's $150,000, a paralegal's $100,000. We're talking about $350,000 of expenses for the bare bones stuff that you need. Of course, there's overhead, there's rent, all that other stuff. But you bring in a million in revenue, you can spend $350,000, right? And still have $150,000 for overhead, and you're still making a 50 % margin. So I know I oversimplified the business, but.
When we look at the end result of having an attorney who's fully booked, that's doing a million dollars worth of business, at the end of the day, your margin, and this is another sticking point, so I'm the profit guy, profit with law, I'm a profit first professional,
Jason (21:43)
gotta be.
Moshe (21:44)
and a law firm should be generating between 35 and 50 % profit margin, and attorneys will fight me on this, and they'll be like, it's impossible, I've been doing this for 20 years, you cannot do that, and I will tell you,
that we do it day in, day out with our fractional CFO clients. We take multimillion dollar businesses. I've got a client that came in December of 2023 running a 7 % profit margin on a $7 million business. In the first 90 days, we were at 23%. He made more money in the first 90 days than he did the entire year before. And we are marching towards 35 % with him now leading into 2025. It is possible with
Jason (22:20)
Amazing, I mean, that's a-
Moshe (22:21)
every single business. So if you build a million dollar business,
You can assume that at least your margin is 35%. So if you had to borrow the salaries and the marketing of the first year, which you're not going to have to, right? It starts to cashflow itself fairly quickly. But let's just say you needed a whole year's worth. So you had to borrow $350. Would you borrow $350 to make $350? And of course, the answer is yes. It's the same thing as the 7-Eleven example. But we don't think that way. That's not where our mind is.
Jason (22:54)
Yeah, I think most
entrepreneurs...
Moshe (22:56)
Every law firm
owner, sorry Jason, let me finish this one thought and then I want
Jason (22:59)
Yeah.
Moshe (23:00)
to hear your question. But the mindset of every law firm owner is I don't have the cash flow to support the salary of an attorney. I don't have the cash flow to invest in marketing. When I get one more client, then I'll be there. And that is a trap that keeps you trapped for five, 10, 15, 20 years when
Jason (23:22)
And.
Moshe (23:23)
you could have changed the entire script of the conversation. And I'm not saying go out and borrow money, like that's not the message, but that is one of the possible ways that you can grow it. So let's use it as an example. Go out, take out a $300,000 loan, and in one year you'll be at a million dollar business with $350,000 in profit, and you'll never look back.
Jason (23:46)
Yeah, it's so interesting because what we're talking about here, just as you put it, we're talking about really the difference between looking at your business as an investor versus just trying to get the work done, figuring out how to make incremental progress. And I think, you know, part of it too, is you talk about the importance of profit, profit first, because
know, revenue is a great metric, but it's a vanity metric, right? Cause as the saying goes, it's not what you make. It's how much you keep. you said a 7 million. Can you imagine doing $7 million worth of work? The amount of effort it is to generate that level of business, to service that level of business and only put 7 % on the bottom line. I mean, that's still a good number for anybody, but the performance.
is poor. And so I guess my question is like, so if you're an attorney, you're in this phase, okay, I started a law firm, I'm doing all the work, I'm trying to, I'm just trying to make some progress here. Like the 7-Eleven, can you go out and say, all right, you know what? I have some capital, I'm gonna put a couple hundred thousand down. Can you go to a bank and raise the additional 80 % capital to say, hey, now I have a million dollars I can put into a business.
And we can start, I can start to look at this thing like a real investment and how I'm going to build out this, this firm so that I can return capital to myself and pay the debt service.
Moshe (25:07)
The answer to your question is yes, but or yes, and somebody with good credit, somebody with cash in the bank should be able to unlock significantly more than they have in the bank. But I don't think you need a million. I don't even think you need 300,000. I think that was a worst case scenario. Like, let's really talk about the reality of the situation. If you were to invest $10,000 a month in marketing, how long would you expect that you need
to have that running to start to see clients coming in from it. I don't mean max return. I mean just clients coming in from it. Would you agree 90 days is probably a good number?
Jason (25:44)
Yeah, of course. Yeah, there's a number of tactics. You can start investing these dollars and within a fairly short amount of time, you can start to see some type of activity and a return, even if it's like you're saying, even if you're just sort of breaking even at that stage before you get to the part where you can actually start generating an ROI.
Moshe (26:02)
Right, so if the timeframe for bringing in clients from a marketing effort is 90 days, right? And let's say that you were to go out and hire an attorney who's not a baby attorney, right? They're not coming in green. They've been practicing in your practice area for five years plus. And you're gonna pay a premium for that. Probably 30 to $40,000 more than you would pay somebody straight out of school, but that's another mistake that law firm owners are making.
Because when you're approaching it from how is the cheapest way that I could get somebody in the door, you're going to think of it that way. But instead, you need to think about it as this is the person who's going to be serving every one of my clients. I'm not here to babysit them. I need to put somebody in who's going to get the job done. So I'm going to pay for that.
Jason (26:48)
because otherwise it's going to suck up your time.
Moshe (26:50)
Correct. You don't need a project. You need somebody who's going to hit the ground running. So you go out and you hire somebody who's got five years of experience.
If there's cases coming in, should they be able to handle those cases on day one?
So even if we say 90 days is the timeframe to get them onboarded, to get them into your systems, and that's way too long, by the way. Literally three to four weeks is all it should be, and they should be billing six hours a day if you have the work for them. So you get an attorney, let's just give it 90 days. You get the marketing, give it 90 days. Say you even bring on a salesperson. bring on, like all of these pieces.
they're going to take 90 days to come to fruition. Say it also takes 90 days to find them, to vet them, to put them in place. Six months. At most, you need the capital of all of these jobs to pay these salaries for six months. At most, you need six months of marketing. And at that point, even if you're not running a 30%, 40 % profit margin, you should at least be covering your expenses. So
When we said, hey, you need 300,000, you don't need 300,000, you need 150. Right? So even dialing back what you actually need is a piece of the puzzle. Now, for you to get access to 150,000 in capital, would a bank entertain lending that to you if you had the other $30,000? And the answer is absolutely yes. The beautiful thing is that if nothing else, there's an SBA program for you. Right?
There's SBA 7A loans and you can take an express loan, which you have to be in business for two years and you can look at your previous revenue. But if you're making the switch from, hey, I've been a solo for 15 years and I'm finally understanding that Moshe's knows what he's talking about and I'm going to do this. You can go to the SBA, take out an express loan and you can get $150,000 with minimal paperwork overnight. Right. If you need more than
Jason (28:48)
Yeah, the expect ones are quick.
Moshe (28:50)
that, or if you don't have the revenue to support
that 150, you can still take out a regular SBA 7A loan that might be backed by personal assets, might be backed by other pieces of the puzzle that you have. But at the end of the day, you can get access to $300,000, $400,000 in capital through that program. You can get access to a lot more if you want to buy a building, stuff like that.
Jason (29:11)
And this 7A
loan, the SBA 7A loan, so I'm certainly aware that they're great for purchasing businesses and funding that. I wasn't aware that they will actually help with startup funding or sort of early stage funding.
Moshe (29:24)
There's different
programs. One of them is startup funding. Another is existing business. You can do debt restructuring. You could do growth. You can invest in your growth. So even if you're, you you got four attorneys on staff and you're like, okay, my next big thing is I got to do radio and TV and I need $500,000 of capital to do that. You can go to the SBA and you can get a $500,000 loan under the 7A program just to fund that marketing effort.
Jason (29:52)
Great to know. definitely wasn't aware of that. So for anyone listening, absolutely need to look into the SBA 7A program. And clearly you have a roadmap or a blueprint to do all of this, sort of from A to Z. And just as an entree to that, right, you have the Law Firm Growth Summit coming up that's going to cover, I would imagine, a lot of these different things. I know you have over 40 speakers lined up on one of them.
But maybe we can highlight just some of the key topics that we're gonna see covered during that. know you have stuff about just improving cashflow profit margins, generating, using marketing to grow, building out the team you need, all the things you were just discussing. Maybe we can go through each of those just to give people an idea of what that framework looks like.
Moshe (30:38)
Yeah, absolutely. So what we did for this event is we structured it, and the first day is investor day, right? Like, everything on the first day is themed around this idea that you need to switch how you look at your business. You need to look at it as a business owner, as an investor, make your decisions from there. And everything that we're talking about that day is all the topics and themes that are related or surrounding this concept.
of thinking of your business differently in that way. On day two, so then once you think like an investor and you've decided, okay, I'm either going to invest some capital, buy another practice or find another way to accelerate this growth, but I'm going to start thinking differently about it. There's two pieces to the business puzzle. One piece is the team. The second piece is the clients, right? Like
People like to overcomplicate business. Business is not that complicated. You need people to do the work and then you need clients to fill those people's plates. Now, we can have the conversation of which came first, the chicken or the egg. The people who are more risk averse will say, I'm gonna invest in marketing first. I want the clients coming in so I have the assurance that when I put people in place, there's work for them. I, on the other hand, with my experience and working with hundreds of law firm owners and understanding how things actually work,
would argue that you need to put the capacity in place first because you cannot approach the sales conversation within the back of your mind knowing how in the world am I going to serve this person.
Jason (32:07)
Yeah.
Moshe (32:08)
When that conversation is going on in the back of your head, you cannot close sales. And what's going to end up happening is that you push people off on their appointments, their follow ups. You don't follow up on sales calls. You don't send them a proposal you said you were going to send them. You do all the things to get in your own way that you don't realize you're actually doing until you have somebody's mouth to feed.
And the moment you have somebody's mouth to feed, all of sudden sales become easy.
Jason (32:31)
Yeah, that's a real strong
incentive, I would imagine. Yeah, now you've got these people on the payroll, you've got to get them to work.
Moshe (32:37)
Exactly. So I believe in capacity first, fill the capacity second. So day two is going to be geared towards building that rock star team. And we're going to have conversations about leadership, conversations about how to hire, different ways to think about hiring, offshore, nearshore, overseas, Philippines, whatever. There's so many options. The beautiful thing about starting a business today is that you have so many different ways.
to make this happen, including fractional work, right? Like you can put us in as a fractional CFO. You can put somebody in as a fractional CMO. You can put in a part-time VA that's going to be doing support services. And then when it gets busier, you make them full-time. You can go to lawclerk.legal and you can get somebody on a contract basis when you've exceeded your capacity and you haven't found the person to fill that next role. You can go and hire contract workers to get the work done.
We're in an environment where there's an answer to everything. And the only thing that's going to prevent you from doing this is you. You have to be the when you're an investor and you think like an investor, you understand that the way to success is perseverance and grit and that everything is a numbers game. When you come to me and say, I can't hire an attorney, there aren't any attorneys out there. I'm going to call bullshit on you.
And the only reason you haven't found an attorney is because you haven't looked hard enough, you haven't looked under the right rock. Right?
Jason (34:04)
Yeah, and
it seems like the nice thing about, I mean, the law firm, it's a service business. The people you hire, you can tap into geographical markets all over the world. You're not digging holes. They don't have to be in any particular place. So yeah, all of the ways and places in which you can hire people are more available today than ever.
Moshe (34:23)
Yeah, so I mean, you wanted specific like like talks. I mean, go to go to law firm growth summit dot com and literally on the registration page, if you scroll down a little bit past the speakers, we have all of the topics that people that people are speaking on. Like it's all there. But and we break it down by the size of your firm. So we we.
invite our speakers to come in and tell us who are you best talking to, right? Are you talking to the solo? Are you talking to the one to two person firm? We call those startup sessions, right? And like we've got Dianneff who's talking on beginning with the end in mind, exit planning for the solo small firm. She's doing a talk on how to structure your solo practice in a way that it's prepared for sale, not because you want to sell it, but because when your firm is prepared for sale, it means that
You're profitable. It means you have systems in place. It means that you have consistent client growth, right? Like it means you've done the work to create a business because now you've got something to sell. So I love that talk. I love that idea. And then just going down the list, Jacqueline Foster, she's, I mean, she's been training paralegals to run their own paralegal business. And then they, she got bought out by one of these companies that does, you know, staffing, you know, virtual staffing and stuff like that.
She's doing a talk on how to build a firm that grows itself. And I'm sure she's going to be talking about how to use the resources out there to grow your practice in these unique ways that when you think like an investor, you can start thinking outside the box. If you're approaching it from what you know and what you've experienced, you might have been in big law. You might have been in an office where everybody was there in person. You might have been in a place with bloated salaries. And that's your vision of what a law firm might look like.
But who's to say it can't be like my accounting practice where I'm in the downstairs of my house in my own office and I don't have not one employee that works in my office. And we've got employees all over the world. I was running late to this call and somebody in Columbia jumped on and told you, Jason, hey, Moshe's running a few minutes late. He'll be here shortly.
Jason (36:22)
Yeah, I I would imagine even just the value of having an executive or administrative assistant that can handle all these small tasks, right? There's plenty of books out there. Dan Martell, buy back your time. But the objective here...
is, and this is certainly something I work towards in our lives, is like to be spending your time on only the things that one, you enjoy, and two, deliver maximum impact. And everything else gets delegated to people that enjoy those things and actually do them well. Because oftentimes you're doing low value tasks, you're not even good at them, and so many other people like it and can do them far better. But it really becomes the difference.
I guess going again back to kind of the E-Met or whatever it is working instead of in your business, you're working on your business all the time. That's how an investor would view it. And that really seems to be what this conference or this summit is going to just be full of amazing sessions on how to get there. Like even just you're talking about exit planning. want, know, I've sort of was.
led to the idea that exit planning is nothing more than good business planning because it's all about value creation. And what it allows you to do is not that you have to sell your business, like you said, it's just that you are able to sell your business whenever you're ready. If something comes up, there's whatever life things happen, you have a business that is built to sell.
Moshe (37:45)
You know, it's kind of like I just I just sold my house and bought another one. Like my family just moved in June, right? When we decided we were going to sell the house all of sudden, now we're repainting rooms. Now we're covering the holes on the wall. Now we're organizing the house and making sure it's presentable every time somebody walks in. Like, what if we ran our house that way all the time? How much better would our lives have been if we always had our house ready for sale?
And that's what happens in your business, right? Like if you start thinking about what does, what creates value in my business, it's going to be one of a few things. It's either recurring clients. So if you're in a business where you have repeat customers, so for example, you do business law and you have business clients and you get them on a subscription model, that is something that somebody would be willing to buy because they know that consistent income is coming in. If you have a marketing
system that is bringing in consistent leads, you've figured out the marketing beast. So many people spend so much of their energy trying to figure it out. You figured it out. That's something that somebody would be willing to buy. And if you have a rock star team that's delivering the service and you're basically hands off, that becomes something that people are willing to buy. But when you, the owner, are integral in the business, when you don't have consistency in sales coming in or you don't have recurring revenue, you have nothing to sell.
So even if you're producing three, four, $500,000 a year, nobody wants that.
Jason (39:12)
Yeah, you know, I heard a quote recently, I don't know if you're familiar with Nick Bradley, right? But he was talking about like, generally speaking, the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable that business is, right? Yeah, owner, you know, owner dependency is a value killer in any business, certainly in a law firm. I wanted to talk about, so something cool you guys are doing this year, I think it's new, but...
makes a ton of sense, right? You have different learning tracks depending on what stage of firm you are. And I think that's great. Like I'm speaking on Google ads and sometimes when I'm talking about, like, I don't know if I should go super basic for people who don't know about it, but then the people who do are like, this is nothing of value. and vice versa. So you have different tracks, startup, expansion and legacy creator.
So I think that's an awesome thing because now not only does it appeal to a wide range of attorneys with different challenges, but there's tracks specific to where they are at this time.
Moshe (40:08)
Yeah, 100%. And it's actually not new. We did it last year. We're getting better at helping people see it, like identifying it. So we're getting better in how we deliver the marketing piece of it so people understand what's available to them. But I think it's really important to just take two seconds to talk about just how the summit came about. When I started the podcast March of 2019, I started interviewing a ton of amazing people here in the industry. And through post...
interview questions and conversations, I was asking like, why aren't we, you know, why aren't we collaborating and doing something together to make an impact? And everyone was like, yeah, we should make our own conference. Like we should, you know, and the whole thought was like, we should do an in-person event. And I said, you know, I've got little kids at home. My wife would kill me if I traveled for a week at a time, right?
going and doing the conference circuit is just not, it's not in my wheelhouse, it's not something I'm gonna do. I said, how many other people are out there that can't leave their business or their families for whatever reason and therefore conferences are out of reach? How many people are out there that a $2,000 ticket actually would be difficult for them to invest in right now, right? And that's when I had this epiphany, like, what if I don't have to worry about how to get all the speakers there? What if I don't have to worry about how people are gonna be able to carve out the time?
What if I create a virtual event? What if I make it free to attend? And then what if I offer the recordings for people who can't attend the specific sessions? Now it's basically, there's no excuses. Everybody can attend this thing. And that's really where the idea and the concept of the Law from Growth Summit was born. And for those people in the room who are like, oh, I've heard this before, we had our first event in December of 2019, a full three.
three months before COVID was a thing and before everybody realized that they need to have virtual events in order to get people in a room. So we've been doing this for a long time. This is our fifth event and we've figured out how to make it an experience, how to give people an opportunity to collaborate with each other if that's what they're seeking, but to also give you the ability to come and go as you please, attend the sessions that get your attention the most. And if after you register for free,
You're like, there's so much here. There's no way I'm to be able to get it all. There's a VIP ticket that you can buy. Yeah, you'll get a cool box of swag in the mail. But besides for that, you'll get access to all the recordings. there's over 50 sessions that you'll have access to. And I've had multiple conversations with people after the event, two, three weeks later, who spent weekends, two or three weekends going through the content and completely transformed their business because of it.
Jason (42:50)
Yeah, it's so valuable and I know when I go to conferences, oftentimes in addition, they'll sell the recordings, which I often buy and then often refer to. And I think the big thing is, is you can be present during the conference, listening, soaking it in, but then you have a resource to go back to and rewatch sometimes a couple of times to truly get the concepts. But anyway, listen, I know you only have a few minutes left, so I just want to make sure we get all the information here. So I'm here with...
Moshe Amsel, we've been talking about the upcoming Law Firm Growth Summit. It's a free three-day virtual conference for law firm owners. Again, that's February 4th through 6th, 2025. So for the latest information, the agenda, the speaker lineup and registering for free, visit the official website, lawfirmgrowthsummit.com. Again, that's lawfirmgrowthsummit.com. And I've just jotted down a few of the highlights, 40 industry leading speakers.
insights into various investor tactics to drive growth, roadmaps for scaling systems teams, techniques for client acquisition, just overall building a firm that operates independently of the owner and allowing them more freedom. So thank you, Moshe. This has been an amazing conversation. I could go on for another hour with you, but I know you have some time constraints here.
Moshe (44:08)
Yeah, as can I, Jason. So we'll just have to come back and do it some more,
Jason (44:12)
Yeah.
Moshe (44:12)
But I want to leave your listeners with two things. Number one, there's a book that I wanted to mention earlier. I want to bring back and talk about it now. And it's called Who Not How. You may have heard of it. You may have heard of the terminology
Jason (44:23)
awesome book.
Moshe (44:24)
of who not how. But it is a wonderful book that really brings home this concept of every time you have a challenge, start asking that question. Because our instinct
Especially when we're building a firm based off of the backs of our own knowledge, our instinct with every challenge is to think of it as how can I fix this? And when you start asking how, you're in the wrong seat. You're in that seat of I'm the executor. I'm the person who's going to do it. Everything relies on me. The reality is, is that if you were an investor, you would never ask, how do I do this? It would always be who can do this for me or who can figure out how to do this for me. And that if when you get
Jason (45:01)
who's better at this.
Moshe (45:02)
really good at asking that question,
That is going to completely change your world, change your business, and really get you on that rocket ship to success. And when you have business success and when you're doing million plus in revenue at a 35 % profit margin, that's when you start to have the flexibility and the financial muscle to start to create that generational wealth. People ask me, like, how do I pay off my student loans? Well, it's easy. Get to a million dollars, 35 % profit margin, knock him out in one year. Right?
Jason (45:33)
Yeah, it happens
real quick.
Moshe (45:34)
So
doing this, getting your business operating at a high enough level, at a maximum efficiency enough level from a financial perspective is the stepping stone to completely changing everything in your life. And I don't even remember what the second thought that I had was, but what I am going to say is the law firm growth summit starts at 830 in the morning. We open a networking session then. The first talk is at 10 a.m. and that's Eastern time.
go to that networking session, connect with other attorneys, other law firm owners. You never know what's gonna come from those conversations. But even if you don't have that time available to you, join us at 10 a.m. We have a keynote speaker each of the three days. So I kick off with a talk, then we have a keynote speaker, and then behind that, we start to go into all these different topics that you see highlighted.
And the keynote speakers have yet to be announced, so I'm not going to spoil it here, but they'll be announced over the course of the next few days. And if you go to law from growth summit dot com, you'll see who's already been revealed. And we have some really great rock stars coming your way. And I'm super excited about the lineup. And I think that if you're able to attend, even if you're if you're able to mark out three days, I'd be awesome. I definitely encourage you to attend. And then the last thing is, is after you buy that VIP pass with the recordings,
You're going to be offered to join us for an implementation day. And that's new this year. So many people come, they drink from a fire hose, like, you know, they've got a notebook full of notes and then they do nothing with it. And we want to change that. We want you to be able to not only learn, not only get a ton of amazing ideas, but then put those ideas into action. So we created, we're calling it an implementation day. It's actually two days over the course of two weeks.
where we're just gonna get in on Zoom together and we're gonna help you focus on the thing that you decided you're gonna implement, be there to answer your questions and guide you and just help you get that into place and get it started. So I'm super excited about this event. We're gonna welcome in a couple of thousand law firm owners and you should be one of them and join us and really just start changing the story of your business.
Jason (47:41)
Yeah, awesome. Yeah, I mean, I can't wait, you know, both as a speaker, but also as an attendee, I'm looking forward to it. There's no question. There's going to be a ton of value, so much to learn. I love the idea that you have an implementation game plan to follow to really execute on the stuff that you learned because yeah, going to these conferences can be a fire hose. And so to have some approach to start to implement everything, that's brilliant. Again, go to lawfarmgrowthsummit.com. Moshe.
You're the man, dude. Thank you so much for being on here. This was a great conversation. I look forward to future conversations with you.
Moshe (48:14)
Appreciate you having me. Thank you, Jason.
Jason Marsh (48:18)
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.
