Speaker 1: 0:00

Is it harder to make your first million or to keep it?

Speaker 2: 0:03

For business owners it sometimes can be harder to keep it.

Speaker 1: 0:06

One of my first businesses was outside of law. I was a lawyer, actually, and I started it and we ran that business to $23 million, I think. And I was just thinking, I thought I was all that and we did it because I'm just brilliant and I'm super smart and I'm the guy. It was anything but that.

Speaker 2: 0:22

It was like luck plays a role, whether we like it or not. Being in the right place at the right time, talking to the right person, that could land you a really high paying client Right.

Speaker 1: 0:31

So well, hello. Welcome to the J Sterling Hughes show, where we share how we have built our family law firm from zero to 27 lawyers and 16 million in revenue in the past 10 years, and my purpose here is to document what's working and what's not working, with hopes that you can take that, recontextualize it and have the family law firm of your dreams. My name is Jeff Hughes and I'm your host, and I have a guest today. I'm excited to have this conversation. I hope they'll learn a lot, darren, but my guest is Darren Wurz. He is the founder and leader of the Lawyer Millionaire. He is the founder and leader of the Lawyer Millionaire Founders Network. He also wrote a book that was published by the ABA. It's entitled the Lawyer Millionaire the Complete Guide for Attorneys on Maximizing Wealth, minimizing Taxes and Retiring with Confidence, and he has a podcast, the Lawyer Millionaire Podcast. And, darren, I think you and I first met on Facebook. I had seen your not Facebook, definitely not Facebook.

Speaker 2: 1:29

LinkedIn.

Speaker 1: 1:30

And I'd seen your posts over quite a few months, maybe a couple of years even, because I think we follow a lot of the same people. So that's how Darren and I connected. And, darren, I got real quick. I got to just tell the story, this hasn't happened before you reached out and said, hey, I got real quick, I got to just tell the story, this hasn't happened before. You reached out and said, hey, I think I have a lot to offer for your guests. And I didn't really see it like obvious. I'm really focused on family lawyers and I really want to add value to family lawyers. I said, no, I don't think it's a great fit, or what can you offer family lawyers? And you shot back a real specific value add list and I go okay, that's something I could benefit from. I know my audience can too. So welcome, darren, I am excited to have you.

Speaker 2: 2:15

Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Jeff.

Speaker 1: 2:17

Thanks so much for bringing me on. I'm excited for our conversation today. Good, so, now you have a firm and just real quick, high level. How did you get going in it? What? What led you to start a firm focused on helping lawyers save their money and retire well, so Absolutely so.

Speaker 2: 2:34

our firm, the Lawyer Millionaire Founders Network, we're a financial planning firm. We focus exclusively on working with law firm owners.

Speaker 2: 2:43

So those are you know are some family law firm owners, but a variety as well. How it began? I kind of have a long history. I started out as a very community-based financial advisor and I learned about the idea of niching and having a really focused target market. I just happened to have a lot of lawyer clients and so I decided to focus on legal, but then I learned legal is too broad. There are so many different types of lawyers. You know there's big law, there's owners, there's solo attorneys, right. So we decided to focus on law firm owners and it was really.

Speaker 2: 3:24

I saw it as a great opportunity because I saw a great need there. There weren't many financial planners talking about law firm owners. You see a lot talking about business owners in general, retirees and things like that but I saw a great need there and actually I started to have law firm owners coming to me asking for help and what I noticed is that they were making really good money high six to seven figures in personal income but they didn't have like they're making a million dollars a year in income, maybe, but they didn't have a million dollars yet, right? So that became my mission was how can we help these folks really be intentional about building wealth and it's cool because it's a cross between some business planning and some personal financial planning.

Speaker 1: 4:18

Yeah, and that's where it gets really fun. I'm real curious. So these, these lawyers that would that you would run across, that had like great income but their balance sheet sucked, like they weren't able to really accumulate. If you can look back and synthesize it down to one or two things that you saw that they constantly did that was a mistake, what would that be? Because I'm all ears on this one.

Speaker 2: 4:41

It would be overspending at its core. It would be overspending at its core right. But let's break it down a little bit more. First, in your business. I mean, we all know it's easy to overspend personally, but it's easy to overspend in your business. We sign up for so many things. You know, and I think law firm owners, business owners in general we're focused on revenue, we're focused on growing revenue, but I think oftentimes that comes at the expense of really being intentional about maximizing profit in our business, and so we really have to be disciplined in how we're managing cashflow and managing our business. There's just a lot of there's a lot of overspending. It's easy to sign up.

Speaker 1: 5:20

Were they overspending in their business more in their personal life? More which one was, was the bigger culprit?

Speaker 2: 5:25

Both it's both.

Speaker 1: 5:27

Yeah, I tend to be all overspend, aggressive, all gas. In the business side I'm more frugal personally. I just see everything as an opportunity. So are you? I mean like, okay, that's just a different mentality that leads to the same path. I mean, I've been at the high income low balance sheet before and I think that was my problem. So how do you coach these lawyers through that and get them to think differently about?

Speaker 2: 5:53

that you know you're right, it's a mindset. You know we can talk about the numbers all day long. I mean, at a basic sense, we do want some awareness, because I find so many law firm owners come to me and they're like you know, I'm making all this money, but where is it going? So let's find the leaks. Let's find the leaks in the bucket, because there are leaks. There are things you've signed up for that you're paying for, that you're not using anymore. You know there's money that's going out the door. So just having an awareness of where the money's going is step one. Step two is really figuring out where you're happy.

Speaker 2: 6:30

The biggest trick in life, according to Morgan Housel, author of the Psychology of Money, is to get the goalposts to stop moving. It's so easy. I mean, as business owners, we are very aspirational, we're very excited, we have big ideas, right. We have big goals, big dreams sometimes, and that carries over to our personal lives. So sometimes we get a little bit ahead of ourselves. There's an interesting correlation between happiness and money. They're correlated to a point, but beyond a certain level of income they diverge. The happiness doesn't increase proportionately with your income, right, a certain level of income does increase happiness, but beyond that it doesn't. So figuring out at what level-.

Speaker 1: 7:18

What's the number for that? Is there a number like once people get to 90,000 a year in income? It's the diminishing return sets in.

Speaker 2: 7:27

Yeah, I'm not. I'm not sure and probably has gone up you know inflation has gone up right, I think it's somewhere. At least last time I checked I think it was somewhere right under a hundred thousand, something like that. Yeah, so figuring out that place at which you are happy, right, and you have a stable life and you can, you can kind of maintain that lifestyle and not continue to expand it, and then let's save the gravy on top, you know, let's invest that and let's grow that.

Speaker 1: 7:57

Yeah, so overspending. And so when you take in a client that you start to work with what, what is your process or game plan to kind of get them through? How long does that typically takes? I mean, I know the first thing you're probably going to say is just being aware of what you're spending your money on and then and then firmly establishing the goalposts. I'm guessing that's what you're going to. I'll let you say it. So what would that be?

Speaker 2: 8:24

Yeah. So our process we try to get like an initial plan put together in the first three months of our engagement just to kind of have the bare bones, and then we'll deep dive into other areas. The way I kind of see it, there's a three-step process. I mean we want to hit certain things right away. You know, in the investing world, earlier you start, the better, right, because you have time is your biggest factor in terms of the growth of money. But there's really like three steps, you know. And first we've got to get the business stabilized. We've got to get the business generating the revenue that it needs to generate and generating the profit that it needs to generate. Some people are not ready yet for really focused financial planning because they're just drowning in their business.

Speaker 1: 9:11

Yeah, can I double tap on that for a second? I'm curious on what? What are you running into now? Let me see if I can ask this question better. When you say the first step is getting the business stabilized, that sounds like business coaching, going far beyond estate planning. And let's just bring it on the family lawyers where I live. So if a family lawyer comes to you, darren, and they're like, hey, I really need some help with my finances, what are you seeing a lot of times that you have to help them stabilize, and then what does that look like?

Speaker 2: 9:46

Well, step one is separating the personal and business finances. I don't know if you see this in some of the family law owners that you work with, but oftentimes when you start a business, you start a law firm, you might not have all the infrastructure in place and so maybe you have a lot of business expenses still happening on your personal accounts or there's money flowing back and forth between personal and business. So that's that's really step one, and I do get a lot of pushback there sometimes because you law firm owner will be like, yeah, but my business amex gives me such great rewards or my personal amex gives me such great rewards, I want to put all my business expenses on that. It's like, well, the value of having those things separated and the clarity that that gives you I guarantee you, guarantee you it's more valuable than the rewards that you might get.

Speaker 1: 10:46

I totally agree, and I think family lawyers struggle here because they see their business as an extension of themselves and if they have that line of sight, like that's a business that's separate from my personal it gives them clarity on where to focus some of their efforts on their growth of their business and I see the growth of both. I think that's I didn't say that great, but having that clarity, being able to see what's my business, what's my personal, I think is invaluable.

Speaker 2: 11:16

You need to know what your numbers are. Yeah, at the end of the year you need to know. Okay, so step two. I could give you all the steps. I'll just give you a few Step Now. Okay, so step two, I could give you all the steps. I'll just give you a few. Step two is pay yourself. Pay yourself a normal, regular, automated salary.

Speaker 2: 11:34

So many owners are just taking money from the firm when they need money and then they're putting money back into the business when the business is running low, right, and that just becomes a nightmare and you cannot build wealth on that instability. You need to create stability in your business. Now, you know family law is, you know, like other types of law. Your income can fluctuate. You know you can have dramatic changes in your revenue and so that can be difficult. You've got to build reserves on the business side. You've got to build reserves on the personal side, but getting that owner's compensation down from the get-go that's another aspect of clarity. If you're not paying yourself a market wage, you don't really know if you're truly profitable, right? So that's the other thing is, you know, really trying to build in some stability in your cash flow, some regularity in otherwise usually somewhat irregular cash flow.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Yeah. So after stabilizing the biz, what comes next?

Speaker 2: 12:42

Step two is, yeah, is maximizing profitability. And that's where we start to think really carefully about tax planning and really being strategic with our dollars in our business and our personal life. So really tracking the cash flow more effectively, setting up cash flow systems that are going to help us, like the Profit First system I'm sure you're probably familiar with that. We love the Profit First system, you know just having a framework and a structure for your cash flow that's going to allow you to really prioritize that profitability. And I call tax planning a profitability exercise. The purpose of tax planning is maximizing profitability because that's what it's doing it's reducing your biggest expense, which is your taxes.

Speaker 1: 13:33

So when you talk about profitability, you're talking about the amount of money left over after you're paying yourself right. So call that a distribution or maybe a dividend I guess one of those two and the idea would be to maximize the amount of money the law firm is spinning off and you'll do tax planning to help with that. Do you get beyond that, like into the actual business and how the money's being handled within the business and expenses are flowing through? How deep do you go there?

Speaker 2: 14:05

Well, we can go as deep as clients want us to go. Oftentimes our clients will have other partners that they're working with, like a bookkeeper or maybe even, if you're at the level you need it, a virtual CFO. We're big fans of that. I mean, we don't really necessarily want to do that work specifically. So, you know, at a certain point we will recommend bringing on um, a virtual cfo or, you know, fractional cfo or maybe even a full-time. You know, if you need it, um, because they will help you really be intensely strategic with how you're using the money. You know, when you get to a certain revenue level, you're the 10 million revenue level. You can't play games anymore. I mean, you need to be able to very accurately and precisely predict cash flow. You have a whole team that's depending on you for payroll right, so you've got to be able to know where you're headed and make decisions based on that.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Yeah, I can tell you that we went through all those iterations. We didn't have any of that. We got a fractional CFO, like around 12 million, and that didn't really help us a whole lot. We had a big top line, nothing on the bottom line, and it wasn't until we got a full-time in-house CFO at at uh, at, I think, 15 million, and we took a half million or we dropped back like a half a million bucks but then our bottom line tripled, having that disciplined eye on our finances, so huge believer in what you said about that. That counters my recklessness sometimes where I'm all gas and not really paying attention to what I need to.

Speaker 1: 15:56

So, ok, so second step in your process is helping the lawyer maximize the profitability of their firm. What comes after that? Well, hello, jeff, here my team and I put out a weekly newsletter designed for family law practitioners to help you grow and build your practice. So if you go to my website at jsterlinghughescom that's H-U-G-H-E-S, that's jsterlinghughescom and subscribe, it would mean the world to me and what I will do for you there is. I will send you weekly content to help you build and grow your practice, as well as news and developments in the greater world of family law. Thank you, and back to the show.

Speaker 2: 16:34

Yeah, the third step is growing the wealth, and that's really the final step in the three-part series. Honestly, we want to start growing the wealth earlier, but you know, once we to start growing the wealth earlier, but once we've gotten the business in a good place, we've got really good profitability, then we're in a really good place to really pour some gasoline on building the wealth right and making sure we have a really good investment strategy, making sure we're making really smart investment decisions and I'm not just talking about stocks and bonds right, maybe at this point it's time to invest in other businesses. Maybe it's time to look at private equity. Maybe it's time to look at real estate and diversify our income streams different things like that. So it's about trying to get yourself in a place where you are work optional and that's where we want to get to.

Speaker 1: 17:29

So what's work. Optional mean you don't have to work, you have the option. Is that what that means?

Speaker 2: 17:33

That's correct.

Speaker 1: 17:34

That's correct.

Speaker 2: 17:35

Yep, you know it's. Retirement is not really something that I find a lot of law firm owners are really thinking about. I mean, they're familiar with the word and they know they need to do retirement planning, but they're not thinking I want to retire at age 65. You know what I mean. You find that the case.

Speaker 1: 17:55

Yeah, I see that all the time with people in my world where they hang on a little bit just because they like the income. They don't really know when to stop and so it's challenging.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Right. So we want to get your money working for you in a place where and get you to a place where you no longer need the income from the business. That's where I really want to get to. You've got the assets built up, assets built up, you've got things compounding and providing interest and dividend income in the background, so that you're in a place where you could step away if you want to, and that really puts you in a great frame of mind.

Speaker 1: 18:35

How do you go about relative to family lawyers, darren? Because in our world most of our firms are small. Frankly, a couple lawyers that really on average at most. That's pretty normal and that's kind of tough to get to the point where you work optional when it's maybe you and a partner or you and an associate, like how do you help them work through that and get to that level?

Speaker 2: 19:01

Well, it's a combination of thinking about your business and your finances right, because you're right In family law. You've got so many things going on. You've got mediations, you've got court appearances and your clients are going through a time of crisis, right, and so they need you, and oftentimes they don't. They don't necessarily have legal questions, they just want somebody to talk to, and then you've got it's a very contentious, oftentimes type of law that you're dealing with. So the emotions are high, the stress is high, plans get changed all the time.

Speaker 1: 19:47

So talking about their retirement plan, their dates and things like that?

Speaker 2: 19:50

get changed a lot. You see, oh no, I'm talking about like, like work, you know, like you know things like that. So you've got to have help. I think you really have to have help in your business If you're going to get to that place where you could step away. I mean, you might have the financial resources, you might get to a place where you have the financial resources to get there, but you really have to also build it into your business. So at some point you're going to need to hire an attorney or an associate who can start doing those court appearances for you. You we just had a family law firm owner on the podcast who has a very large family law practice and she had to cancel our meeting because she got pulled into a mediation at the last minute. You know what I mean. So that kind of stuff can happen in family law and you got to structure your business in a way where you can get out of that that need for you to be involved.

Speaker 1: 20:50

So you were talking I'm curious on the building the wealth part. So your your third step and that's obviously the longest, because once you get there it just becomes something. You stay with the lawyer for years and help them build their wealth. But you mentioned a whole lot of different types of investments, and Is there one class that you focus on more, that you're more of an expert in than others, or can you kind of unpack?

Speaker 2: 21:17

that. So probably our highest expertise is in your traditional portfolio of stocks and bonds, right, yeah, and I find there's a lot of myths around investing, even in this day. I mean, I've been around for many years in this business. In fact, my dad was a financial advisor and his dad before him, so we have a long history in this business. And years and years and years ago, you would typically invest through a broker. You would buy stocks and you would pay commissions to buy these stocks, or you would buy mutual funds and they had these 5% upfront charges.

Speaker 2: 22:01

Well, we've seen costs come down so dramatically in the financial industry and it's fantastic for consumers, for consumers. So my golden advice is passive, indexed investing is really the best way to go. Are there funds that sometimes beat the market from time to time? Yes, there are, but the thing is consistency, right. Is that going to happen consistently? So here's the thing I can afford to not be the world's best investor, but I can't afford to be a bad one. That's the thing, right. So I need a really good, solid index portfolio that's going to deliver strong returns over the next 20, 30 years. I can dabble, you know, with a small amount of the money, but we need to make sure we've got a really solid investment plan in place. I find that sometimes, when you're at a certain income level, you start to think that you need certain exotic strategies, you know, and those can be appealing, but don't miss the basics. You really need to have a good foundation of the basics.

Speaker 1: 23:17

Yeah, it seems to me and I'm not a, certainly not an investor but the world's best investor one year is a crappy investor, the next year and it's the. It's that consistent just blocking and tackling over many, many years that makes the difference.

Speaker 2: 23:31

right, that is a hundred percent true, and you know we've we've tried different tactical strategies. So a tactical strategy is one where you're going to, you know, shift your allocation. Maybe you're going to go into stocks, you know, because stocks are looking good, the indicators are good, and then you're going to get out of stocks when the indicators are not good, because you want to avoid a market decline. And you see these right? You see these newsletters. These people have these newsletters and they put out about how their strategy right, if you would have followed this strategy for the last 15 years, you would have beat the market by 400% and you would have avoided the 2008 crash. But the golden question you have to ask is how long has real money been in this strategy? That's the only thing that matters. And when you look at that and you're like, oh, you've only actually been using this for the last year, well, what were you doing before that?

Speaker 1: 24:33

Okay. So they're coming up with some strategy and then looking back in history and say, well, if I'd had this strategy 15 years ago, I'd be a trillionaire today.

Speaker 2: 24:43

Yeah, it's a fallacy called overfitting, because anyone can look at history and create a strategy that would have done fantastically well. Well, whoop-de-woo, we don't know how it's going to do. Going forward, it might suck. Going forward, yeah.

Speaker 1: 24:59

One of the things we talked about a little bit before the call and then on your email was helping family lawyers scale their firm and build it. I love that topic. A lot of what I do is around that, so how do you support family lawyers in doing that?

Speaker 2: 25:14

So you know we will help our clients think strategically about steps they need to take um in that hiring process.

Speaker 2: 25:23

Um, some of the biggest things I see, um, I see a reluctance to hire people virtually. Um, and certainly you know there's there is aance to hire people virtually, and certainly you know there's there is a value to having people in person. But if you are able to expand your thinking a little bit like I have one family law client, I've been trying to get him to hire an executive assistant for years and he won't do it. And I'm like, I'm like, if you can just do this one thing a virtual executive assistant who could offload some things for you, like checking your emails, maybe doing some social media for you, maybe creating a newsletter for you and having that eat these are the basics, right, you know. So, thinking through who we need to strategically hire and when, maybe it makes sense to bring on an actual attorney and really start expanding and growing things in terms of billable work, yeah, so that's that's kind of where we help Thinking about how you're growing the team. I'm sure that you're probably much more of an expert in that area than I am.

Speaker 1: 26:37

Well, that's a great service, though, because I do see that with family lawyers we get kind of reluctant to want to make the investment. But it requires that if we're going to continue to grow and offload some of that work.

Speaker 2: 26:49

But you don't have to be scared. It doesn't have to be a huge investment. You can bring people on part-time, you can bring people on as a 1099 and then transition them to W2 when you're ready for that. So it's not and you want to think about where your time is best spent? Right? If you're doing you know, if you're doing $15 an hour work, you're not optimizing your time. Now I will tell you right, when you're building the team, let's think strategically about your clients and what they need, right? So many attorneys think. So many law firm owners, small law firm owners think that their first hire should be an attorney. Yeah, maybe, maybe not right? I can see where they'll be doing billable work and that'll be great. But at the same time, attorneys are expensive. Let's be, real.

Speaker 2: 27:39

So think about some other support staff. One of the most innovative things I've heard is bringing on a life coach or a divorce coach to work with your clients, someone who they can just talk to and unload to and who can help them navigate some of the emotions of that process. I think that's a fantastic idea and that would free up some of your time to be able to do a lot more of the actual legal work and be a great service, a great value add potentially to your clients.

Speaker 1: 28:16

Yeah, the Merrill Law Firm in Chicago has recently done that and, according to the post, it's going well, and we've kind of talked about that. I can see that being a workable thing. We haven't pulled the trigger on it yet, though. One thing I was thinking about too in preparation for our conversation, darren, was in family law. I mean, we see, unfortunately, people really go through a really hard time, and part of that is they make a lot of poor financial decisions, especially as they're coming out of their divorce, and they want to kind of get back to the same lifestyle they had before, or they want to keep the house when they shouldn't keep the house, and so we we have a front row seat in a lot of these kind of shoot yourself in the foot financial moves. Have you seen family lawyers treat their work with you differently on average right Versus other lawyers? Because of the insights we have watching some of our clients, I'm just curious if there's a higher education level in the world, in the real world of hard knocks from the family lawyers coming to you.

Speaker 2: 29:21

I don't know, I don't know about that All right.

Speaker 1: 29:24

So that's just my fantasy. Thought that maybe that would be the case, okay.

Speaker 2: 29:29

In my experience, it might be the opposite.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Oh, okay, tell me about that. Why? Why do you think that?

Speaker 2: 29:35

I think maybe it has to do with the level of if you're doing all the client work and you're deeply involved in the process. I think it may have to do with just the, the emotions and the stress of of the work. Um, I I find that maybe that, maybe that has an effect on how you manage your finances. Maybe it causes you to be a little less disciplined in your investments or your, your finances, because that stress just carries over. You know, like we need to blow some money because you know we're, we're stressed out. Um, I have, I have one family law client who I, I, what I see, jeff, that really um, that I find troubling is clients who who just kind of been stuck in the same place for so many years, and those are the ones I really want to liberate.

Speaker 2: 30:38

I find yeah, I find that a lot with family law too, because it is kind of a stressful type of law. So a lot of folks are kind of reluctant to grow necessarily. A lot of folks are kind of reluctant to grow necessarily. So you've got to really be intentional about how you're managing your stress load and take progress right. I mean, we all do these, you know 10-year vision, five-year goals, whatever, and that's great, but I like to put a number on it, like how old will you actually be in five years? Okay, now let's think where do you want to be then versus now and let's get there right. Let's get out of being stuck in the same place for so long.

Speaker 1: 31:22

Yeah, is it harder to make your first million or to keep it?

Speaker 2: 31:30

Well, it is certainly hard to make the first billion.

Speaker 1: 31:32

Yeah, it's hard, I get that, but I'm talking relative to each other. Yeah, it's harder to make it or keep it.

Speaker 2: 31:42

For business owners, it sometimes can be harder to keep it, and the reason is the skill it takes to create money in the first place is not necessarily the skill it takes to keep it. And the reason is the skill it takes to create money in the first place is not necessarily the skill it takes to keep the money after you've made it, because the skill to keep it is all about discipline and caution and being a little bit more conservative, whereas the skill to grow it, you know, is risk, you know opportunity, you know things like that, you know. So, yeah, here's a great story, right? Have you ever heard of the stock trader Jesse Livermore?

Speaker 1: 32:21

No, he's got a cool name.

Speaker 2: 32:23

Yeah, so he was a stock trader during in the 1920s and he was I think he was the only stock trader who shorted the market on Black Friday when the market crashed. Okay, so, overnight he became the wealthiest man in the United States and then, but the problem was, after that he thought he was invincible, invincible, and so, you know, he died basically penniless. He made all this money. He made all this money taking a risk, taking a bet, you know, taking advantage of an opportunity. But then he didn't change his perspective and think, okay, now it's time to protect what I have and make sure that I keep it. The same thing happens in our businesses, right? Sometimes we're so focused on pouring fuel on the fire and growing, and that's great, but at a certain point we have to change our perspective a little bit and start to really think about maximizing profitability. Now it's time to really make sure we're keeping a lot of this money that we're making.

Speaker 1: 33:31

Yeah, I can identify with that. I one of my first businesses was outside of law. I was a lawyer actually when I started it and we ran that business to 23 million I think. And you know, I was just thinking, I thought I was all that and we did it because I'm just brilliant and I'm super smart and I'm the guy. It was anything but that. It was like I took a risk. It happened to land on red when I bet red and it was so hard to hang on to that and you know, eventually eventually rolled the business right back down to a couple million before I sold it, so did not maximize what I had been. I just didn't have the discipline, like you said. Well, and.

Speaker 2: 34:13

I think we often we forget to acknowledge the role that risk, does risk and luck play in building a business. Yeah, luck plays or plays a role, whether we like it or not. Being in the right place at the right time, talking to the right person, you know that you could land you a really high paying client right. So there is a bit of luck and we've got to let that give us some humility in how we approach our business.

Speaker 1: 34:42

For sure. Last question I'm just curious what's the wildest? Is there a story that sticks out to you where a lawyer came to you and wanted to allocate some of their resources to some wild harebrained scheme? Have you ever had any of that?

Speaker 2: 34:58

Let's see Wild harebrained schemes. I have seen some right. So I have one client that does civil litigation defense and he's in the same boat, you know, making a lot of money but struggling to actually keep it and struggling with credit card debt and and all of this and just trying to get him like for the longest time, like let's just open a brokerage account and start an auto, pay $100 a month, let's just start it Right. And just so reluctant to do that, well, he emails me with this private real estate syndication that he's thinking about investing in and it's like $100,000 minimum investment and they've got these you know illustrations of what they think their returns are going to be and it looks pretty decent. And I'm like, dude, you don't need this yet, you need the basics first. Where's the money going to come? You won't give me, you know, a thousand bucks to put in a brokerage account. Where are you going to come up with a hundred thousand? I mean?

Speaker 1: 36:09

come on now, so yeah, basic work.

Speaker 2: 36:11

Let's, let's, let's, prioritize those first.

Speaker 1: 36:14

Well, thank you, Darren. This has been a super fun conversation and I know that some folks may want to get ahold of you. What would be the best way for them to reach out and get your attention?

Speaker 2: 36:25

Absolutely. It's super simple. Our website is lawyermillionairecom. You can learn all about the book, the podcast and, if you want to chat with me, there's a link to my calendar there as well.

Speaker 1: 36:35

Very good. Well, thank you for coming on today, grateful for that.

Speaker 2: 36:39

Thanks, Jeff.