Maybe this hasn’t happened to you yet, or maybe it has and you still have this feeling in your core of Betrayal, Outrage… And simply feeling like you’ve Been Taken For a Fool.

And if you hope it NEVER happens to you (again), you must actively prevent your employees from throwing your money down the toilet!

It’s not necessarily because your staff wants to see you fail or that they want you to have $1 less in your pocket tomorrow… but it happens when (if) they become complacent and apathetic.

And keep reading because when we say your employees are “throwing money down the toilet” we’re not talking about stealing.

You see, at the end of the day it’s not THEIR hard-earned money that started this small law firm, or THEIR kid that won’t get a new bike if that new client didn’t get signed, or THEIR credit card that gets maxed out when the office needs new equipment… Your staff will still get their paycheck, even if you had to overspend on staples and pens for the office this year because THEY made a clerical error!

Yes, it was an unintentional mistake, caused perhaps by the most well-meaning employee –However, if it was their credit card being charged for the office supplies they might double check the cart upon checkout….

Yesterday, our firm’s marketing director arrived to the office after returning the keys to the old condo she was leasing which expires on Nov. 30. What she noted that enraged her was the fact that the landlord’s leasing agent had not even TRIED to get the condo lease renewed, and never once showed the condo to prospective tenants who could rent the unit upon her move-out. So now, the condo owner is likely making December’s mortgage payment without collecting any rent income from a new tenant.

If the leasing agent had to make part of the owner’s mortgage payment, would she have let the condo sit vacant without even listing it?

If you think this has nothing to do with your law firm, pay close attention because we’ve never worked with a law firm owner who wasn’t having this issue show up somewhere in their firm.

At the root of it all, employees need to be motivated. They must be motivated in order to make a profit for you, and the way you motivate one employee is not how you will motivate all of your employees.

Your team must be enrolled in your firm’s mission, and the mission your firm is serving should be helping your employees accomplish some part of THEIR OWN goals/mission.

How do you do this?

It starts with having a conversation with each of your employees — if you have a larger staff you should have a conversation with your key employees, and those employees have the same conversation with those who report to them.

The conversation goes like this:

How are you doing with your current projects/tasks/assigned cases?
What would you like to be doing more of, what would you rather be doing less of?
Why?
Where do you want to be in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, 18 months in terms of your personal, professional, and financial life? (It will be up to you, the nature of the employee/firm and frequency you have this conversation to decide the right timeline.)

How can the firm help you get there?

Be prepared to discover NOT all of your employees are planning to work for you forever… We hate to break it to you, but most of them will have other goals/aspirations/plans they want to accomplish… AND THAT’S OK.

The key is for your firm to offer your employees something TODAY, that will help them achieve the goals THEY have set for tomorrow.

Clearly, the leasing agent in the video lesson was not motivated enough & had the condo owner had this conversation with the agent who she hired, she could’ve discovered this and found another agent that WOULD be motivated by the commission… and actually made a profit for her.

With Thanksgiving behind us and holidays & the New Year right around the corner, it’s a perfect time for you to initiate this conversation with your staff. Get a fresh perspective on their goals for 2019 and you will discover how to align that with the goals of your firm… And maybe you discover that your staff’s goals DON’T ALIGN WITH YOUR FIRM.

~How To MANAGE a Small Law Firm

P.S. Your employees are probably not bad people, and they’re probably not intentionally doing anything wrong. They are just people, and need to be motivated by something in order to generate a higher ROI for your firm. We’ve helped hundreds of small law firm owners recruit, hire, and build a PROFITABLE A-Team for their law firm, so that they can be free of day-to-day work. Most of them had never done it before, and perhaps you haven’t yet either, but with the right system you can learn how.

“Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.” –Dwight D. Eisenhower