Unleashing Your Inner Creative, with Phil McKinney

Announcer: 

Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, a series of discussions with entrepreneurs and innovators about building a successful law practice in today’s challenging and constantly changing legal market. Lawyerist supports attorneys, building client-centered, and future-oriented small law firms through community, content, and coaching both online and through the Lawyerist Lab. And now from the team that brought you The Small Firm Roadmap and your podcast hosts 

Sara Muender (00:35): 

Hi, I’m Sarah Muender, a business coach for small firm owners here in Lawyerist Lab. Today, our amazing lab community director, Jennifer Whigham, talks with Phil McKinney about his book Beyond the Obvious and discovering how to get back to Asking the right questions. Today’s podcast is brought to you by Posh Virtual Receptionists,  NetDocuments  & LawPay.  

We wouldn’t be able to do this show without their support. Stay tuned. We’ll tell you more about them later on. One of the famous quotes that I live my life by is The quality of your life is a reflection of the quality of the questions you ask. 

(01:14): 

You could also say that the quality of your business is a reflection of the quality of the questions you ask, and I’m so excited for Jennifer’s interview today with Phil McKinney because they’re talking about one of my favorite topics, which is about asking powerful questions that lead to breakthroughs and innovation. I’m guessing you’re here listening to this because you’re trying to build a different kind of law firm, one that serves clients better, solves problems, and makes an impact in the most profitable way, of course, and that’s why we exist as someone who relentlessly plays the devil’s advocate, I’m so proud to work at a company that values curiosity and critical thinking and continuously questions, tests, and analyzes the old ways of doing things in order to build better businesses. That’s why we call our law firm Business Coaching Program Lab, and it’s so fun to experiment in the way we do to solve problems. 

(02:12): 

So whether you think of yourself as creative and innovative or not, I know you’re going to have so much to take away from Jennifer and Phil’s conversation, and I encourage you to listen with an open mind because the law firm business of your dreams is going to require it. It’s time to rethink how we practice law and serve clients. There is a better way and we here in the Lawyerist community are going to help you find it and create it. So put your lab coats on and let’s dive right into Jennifer’s conversation with Phil McKinney. 

Phil McKinney (02:48):
I am Phil McKinney. I’m the author of the book Beyond the Obvious, I’ve spent the last 40 years of my career in the innovation and creativity space.

Jennifer Whigham (02:57):
Welcome Phil, and I am the one who brought you on in our podcast brainstorm because I read your book. I’m not a lawyer, our audience is lawyers, but I feel like I suffer from what our audience suffers from is that I think I cannot think of ideas. I’m not innovative that you’re born with it, that it must be something you have innately or you don’t have it at all. But I suspect that is not the case. What is your take on that?

Phil McKinney (03:27):
It’s actually quite common when I go out and I do public speaking or run workshops, and I always ask people in the audience who considers themselves being highly creative, and it’s probably about 10% of the people will raise their hands, and that’s disappointing because everybody is naturally creative. The challenge being is reigniting that passion reigniting the ability to see things differently. Think back, you go into a kindergarten class and you ask kindergartners to show you a piece of artwork or show you a dance they created or sing a song they’ve made up. Every kindergartner will do that. Now you do it for every grade through 12th grade, and it gets less and less and less because we teach conformity. We teach to don’t stand out, be like everybody else, but then you get out of school, you get into your first career and the marketplace needs ideas. The creative economy is where we are heading now, and it’s no longer about what you can do with your hands. It’s going to be about your ability to solve problems and to solve them in unique and different ways, not formulaic.

Jennifer Whigham (04:45):
And I think that really touches on it is that conformity, you get to a certain part in school where what they’re teaching you is to get ready for a world where you go to work eight to five, you listen to a boss, you get into the capitalism wheel and you just go and go and go without using any of your creative potential. How do people knock themselves out of that when it is so ingrained from a small age?

Phil McKinney (05:12):
Well, it is hard. One, you need to drive yourself or you can’t wait for somebody else to pull it out. You’ve got to have the desire that says, look, I know I’m creative. I may not know how to do it. And it’s like it’s a muscle. It’s like any other muscle. You’re not a couch potato on a Friday and say, I’m going to run the Boston Marathon on Monday.

(05:35):
So you got to get up, get off the couch, try a few things. Monday, you walk around the block Tuesday, maybe you walk around two blocks Wednesday you may jog, you build up to it just as you would do any other physical exercise. Your creativity is a muscle. If you haven’t used it, it’s atrophied. So now you need to exercise it. But it’s not that. It’s not this big deep, dark secret. I get this all the time where some big innovation consulting company goes out there and they’ve got the magic 10 steps. You follow their magic. It’s not the case. It’s just your own natural ability. Now, there’s ways to think about ideas and how to come up with them and how to not settle for the obvious ones

(06:23):
And how do you dig deeper to that next level. But once you start exercising that muscle and you start seeing its impact, people’s eyes get open pretty quickly. In fact, I teach a five day innovation bootcamp and I tell people, we start you off on Monday and we actually survey people, how creative do you think you are on Monday? And then we measure it on Friday. And it’s transformative because people see it, the immerse in it, they get the experience with it, and they see that they do have this natural ability, they’ve just forgot about it. It got shoved into the back with do your task, get a high score, get your G P A graduate top of your class. And it’s all about conforming because you’re being measured on giving a predicted answer that teacher, professor, instructor wants versus you get in the real world, there’s never a problem that has a single answer. And so therefore, naturally you have to be creative to look at all those possibilities. And we’ve lost it. And I think one, it’s a great opportunity for people, but I also think it puts, we’re at risk because we don’t help people unleash their own personal creativity.

Jennifer Whigham (07:38):
And I think you talk a lot about how there’s often resistance in companies from people who want to use some of your techniques or think beyond the obvious. And so say people have, they’ve gone through this, they’ve read their book, they’re ready to really innovate in a way that I think is going to make a difference, and then they hit that wall of people above them that say, I don’t know, this doesn’t sound like something you can do. What do you do?

Phil McKinney (08:06):
Yeah, we talk about it in the book. That is what I refer to as the innovation antibodies.

Jennifer Whigham (08:13):
I love that phrase.

Phil McKinney (08:14):
So you come out with a really great idea and you get a response, and the responses are kind of grouped into categories, what we call an ego response. You come up with an idea and your boss or somebody within the firm thinks that they own that and you’re stepping on their turf, so you got a turf battle problem. So how do you win them over? And we talk about in the book, but I’ll just give you the one example that I use on how to get around this and how I got around it. When I was the chief technology officer for Hewlett Packard, I had to convince Carly Fiorina or Mark Hurd to go off on a new idea, the way I did it is I’d work up an idea, I’d sketch it out on paper and maybe make one PowerPoint slide to present the concept. But then what I would do is I would print that out on paper. Yes, HP’s a printer company. But you print that slide out. But then what I would do is I literally would crumple it up, roll it up into a ball, and then I’d flatten it out so it’s all wrinkled and all that. And then I’d take my coffee cup, put coffee cup stains on it, and then I walk into the meeting because it changes the context. You take the threat off the table, you take the turf issue, and you go in and you say, Hey, I got this crazy idea. Can you give me some feedback? You’re the expert. Play a little bit to the ego, and here’s the key. Whatever they say, no matter how stupid it is, add it to the slide. Because now when you do present it and you start taking it around to other people, their words are on it. They’re part of the idea. Now you basically subvert them. So even though you get pushback, and a lot of times people will just give up. Oh, they get the, oh, that’ll never work here. It’ll cost too much. I’m the expert. Who do you think? All the pushback phrases that you get every type of antibody, there’s a method to get around them and it’s not as hard as you think, and they’re just feeling threatened. And how do you then take your idea and crafted as a way for them to become a supporter, not a detractor.

Jennifer Whigham (10:31):
I love that because we have a lot of people, we have a coaching program for small firm lawyers who maybe have come from big law and they really want to be innovative, and they weren’t able to in big law, but then they also want to convince their partners that this is the way to go. And it really comes down to ownership of the idea there is playing to the ego, but if you can get them to also own that idea in whatever way, it seems like that will be the success.

Phil McKinney (11:00):
Yeah, I mean, lawyers have a unique challenge, and I put them in the same category as chief financial officers.

Jennifer Whigham (11:06):
Oh, totally, yes.

Phil McKinney (11:07):
Right. Their jobs is to manage risk. That’s their whole job. So they’ve been trained, educated, groomed, experienced about managing risk. What’s the trade off?

Jennifer Whigham (11:19):
Right/

Phil McKinney (11:19):
So how big of the risk is this? And so even inside the firm where I’m the C E O, now we’re 240 employees and we have a six person legal team for intellectual properties and patents and international law, et cetera. But what I tell the innovators when they’re engaged with the legal team is, look, they’re doing their job. They’re not bad people. They may come across as an antibody, but that’s what they’re here for, is to manage the risk. The way to get around the risk issue is to treat the risk as seriously as they do. Don’t come in and just say, it’s the legal team. They don’t get it. They’re a lawyer. They’re not. That’s BS. The key is think about if you were in their shoes and it was your job to manage and minimize risk, what could you do in describing or structuring maybe even smaller experiments that have less financial risk and less legal risk? Can you structure it in such a way to bring down that risk fear for them? Because that’s going to be just their natural reaction. That’s why they’re hired to do that work is the risk management. I think this is where innovators need to adapt, and that is understand the person on the other side of the table and adapt the idea. Don’t get into this mode of, oh, they just don’t get it. They’re not creative. They’re blocking whatever. No, understand their perspective and then adapt how you present your idea in such a way that you solve for their problem. Their job is manage risk. They don’t want the organization to have a big legal exposure or big financial exposures in the form of CFOs. They’re just doing their jobs.

Jennifer Whigham (13:08):
And I like the idea of when we talk about we have this creativity as a child and it gets kind of beat out of us, but also these people that work in risk management or lawyers, they were also those children. And so it’s almost like you’re trying to access that part of them, that little spark that’s still there, that understands that it’s okay to be playful and it’s okay to have these new ideas even when your job seems against that idea. So I really like that.

Phil McKinney (13:37):
Well, I mean it’s interesting because I’ve, not a lot because of time constraints, but I’ll do one-on-one coaching with CEOs in organizations, and it’s interesting because they don’t think of themselves as creative at work. They’re all buttoned down doing their thing, but then when you really get to know them and maybe invite them, I have a 35 acre ranch here in Colorado. I’ll host CEOs here at the ranch, and they come out and they’re totally different from when they’re in the office. They’re highly creative, but they think of creativity as being a very defined box. But here it’s whether it’s creative in the form of we harvest hay here on the ranch or teaching horseback or writing music, people who don’t think of themselves creative, they have their hobbies, their interests or things outside of their job, and when I look at it, I go, well, that’s creative. And they go, no, it’s not. It’s just my hobby. They’re like, no,

Jennifer Whigham (14:42):
Yeah.

Phil McKinney (14:43):
That’s creative. Now how do we take that and build upon it? And creativity could be anything from parenting to how do you contribute to fundraising at your local P T A to your job,

Jennifer Whigham (14:59):
Right.

Phil McKinney (14:59):
The key here is bringing your whole self to the job, not compartmentalizing and bucketizing it. This job I cannot be creative in. I just got to walk the fine line and these things I do outside. I do ’em for fun, but they’re not creative. They are creative.

Jennifer Whigham (15:19):
Yes, yes. We have a team member who the whole time I’ve known her, she doesn’t think she’s creative, but she is the one who comes up with all the best ideas within our company, but she didn’t see that as creative. She thought creative was having an art form, like you said, playing music, and she was shocked to learn that we all thought she was creative, and I think that’s such a huge point. It happens in anything. Creativity is not the arts. It can be. It is how you apply it to any part of your life, and that really spoke to her.

Phil McKinney (15:53):
Well, I did a TED talk, this is four or five years ago on the imposter syndrome, and at the end of the TED Talk, I talk about the fact that vast majority of people suffer at some point in your career with imposter syndrome. You can have that imposter syndrome on your creativity or your skill levels, or I’m faking it until I make it the Silicon Valley mantra, but when you see somebody doing something amazing, in this case, this team highly creative, the fact that you said something totally transforms their own perspective in their own creativity, just the acknowledgement because we get into that negative speak in our head, oh, I’m not creative. I’m not good enough. I’m not a good parent, I’m not a good grandparent, and we’ll negative talk ourselves out of really unleashing capabilities that could be transformative, not just in our job and our career and our family, but solving big problems that we’re facing out there. In fact, I just wrote on my blog an article about gratitude and being an encourager. If you see somebody doing great work, don’t just think in your head going, wow, that person’s really creative. Tell them, say, man, you are just really crushing it. That’s a great idea. Just that little bit of encouragement feeds into it. It’s like, why do you go to the gym? You go to the gym, you work out and somebody goes, Hey, you’ve lost some weight. You’re looking good. What does it do? It motivates you to get back into the gym.

Jennifer Whigham (17:33):
Yeah.

Phil McKinney (17:34):
Same thing applies to the creativity.

Jennifer Whigham (17:35):
Yeah. We’re all in this together. I think there’s just this empathy level to it that we help each other be creative. It’s hard to be creative just in your own little silo, so I think that’s a really good point.

Phil McKinney (17:46):
Well, I’m a big believer that innovation is a team sport. Doing it on your own just it doesn’t happen. There’s this what we call innovation myth around the lone inventor. The person comes up with the big idea,

(18:01):
And I spent a good chunk of my career in Silicon Valley. I spent a fair amount of time with Steve Jobs. Steve would even tell you, albeit he was the face of Apple and it was him, but then he would point out that Andy Gigron, who was a key engineer on the invention of the iPhone, and Andy played a key role in a bunch of the others, the six person team that actually developed the iPhone, and I’ve spent a lot of time with Elon. You talked to Elon, right? Yeah. He’s absolutely brilliant, but you’re not going to build reusable rockets and electric vehicle and batteries and all these things without a team. The team is critical, and people have this myth that there’s this myth of the lone inventor, Thomas Edison inventor. No, he had a 300 person lab, right? I had at hp when I left retired at 2011, we had 47,000 engineers at Hewlett Packer. You’re not going to ship 40 million laptops as a one person operation. It is a team sport, and each brings a different skill, a different perspective, and actually what I always encourage people who are trying to build up an organization that has some natural ability is look for diversity. Not in diversity just in the HR sense, but diversity of experiences. People who went to college, people who didn’t go to college, people who were born and raised in the us, people who were military brats, parents were in the military and bunks around because those experiences, when you bring them together, really add richness to the ideas and the creativity that can be applied. Don’t have it be all the ideas coming from people just like you want those different perspectives.

Jennifer Whigham (19:55):
Right.

Zack Glaser: 

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Jennifer Whigham (22:15): 

I’m going to pivot just a little bit to think about, so in your book, you talk about these workshops that you do that I think are fabulous and I think all of our lawyers should do them, but if I do, and I’m possibly going to force ’em to them in some way, but in a day-to-day sense, how can you see this concept playing out in a lawyer’s day-to-day? How I mean beyond just trying to solve problems on the fly or figure out what their clients want. You have a nice quote, how do you know when the core beliefs of your business, this is your quote, those what you do, how you do and do it, and for whom have gone from innovative to obvious and are headed toward obsolescence? How do you know? What are the signs? 

Phil McKinney (23:03): 

The key there is you stop innovating, 

Jennifer Whigham (23:05): 

Right. 

Phil McKinney (23:06): 

You just go into standstill mode. It’s like, okay, we’re going to innovate a process to do something. You get the process all put in place. You go, okay, we’ve rocked it. We’re done. As soon as you stop progressing, as soon as you stop thinking about, okay, now how do I improve it just a little bit more? How do I improve it? If you stop, then it’s in decay. It’s like you build a house and then you don’t do any maintenance on it. What eventually happens, the house falls down. The same thing happens with the innovation within an organization. You may come up with that idea, but then you get into treading water and just letting it run, but over time, it will decay. Even the innovation process, and I tell people, there’s no magic process. There’s no go read that book and that’s the 10 steps and read that book and no, go find and look at all the different ways to innovate and steal from the best you need to create a process that works for you, that works for your organization, that works for your team. Everybody’s different. Don’t try to conform and jam something in that’s not going to work, but also do not settle. 

(24:19): 

Keep innovating, even innovate the way you innovate and keep working it. One of the exercises we do in the bootcamp workshop is teaching what I do every morning to just exercise the creative muscle, and that is there’s a particular format to a mole skin notebook called the moleskin professional, and in it, it has a certain page layout that I just find that works for me. At the top in the block, I’ll define a problem, an opportunity, something I want to go solve. Then down the side, I just crank out ideas. I don’t rank them score, I’m just doing ideas, and I do this for 20 to 30 minutes every morning. I do that for five days. I take Saturdays off Sundays, then I go back and look at the five days of ideas, and I rank them, I prioritize them. Well, that’s really good. That’s not so good. If I could combine these two, that could be pretty interesting, and then I rank and prioritize them. One is it’s just exercise, just exercise of the creative muscle and the problems can be how to raise more money for the P T A or how to sell more popcorn for the Boy Scouts or whatever. Or it could be job related, but it’s just part of that exercise on a day-to-day basis, just giving teams and individuals, staff, whatever permission to say, just take 30 minutes. Even this I do in the morning. I have to get up. I’ve got a podcast. I’ve got, I write two articles a week for publication, so I’m up in the morning writing before my day job begins. 

(25:56): 

So I do this as just my exercise. It’s kind of my warmup, but giving teams permission says, you know something, it’s worth it to the organization for you to take 30 minutes every day and innovate, create, come up with ideas, organizations, you can hand out a problem statement to the organization and say, this week everybody spends 30 minutes a day coming up with ideas, and we’ll have pizza on Friday, and everybody shares their ideas. So there’s ways to warm an organization up, but it’s an activity just like walking, just like going to the gym, whatever your passion is that gets you into a habit, playing golf every week, whatever creativity needs to become that habit needs to be something that’s done where it just becomes just part of everything you do 

Jennifer Whigham (26:46): 

And how do you create, so say you have your team do these warmup exercises in the morning, which I think is great, and maybe you all get together, like you said, you have pizza, you go over the ideas. How do you create this sense of psychological safety where people feel comfortable just saying whatever wild idea that they wrote down? Because sometimes the wildest ideas get distilled down into a great idea, but not everybody feels brave enough to say what they think sounds crazy. 

Phil McKinney (27:17): 

So the way we do it, the way we teach it is, so when you’re doing it by yourself and you’re doing it in your notebooks or whatever, that’s what we would call individual ideation, whether you do brainstorming or what we call electronic suggestion box, there’s thousands of methods to collecting ideas, but it’s all part of ideation generating ideas. So you’re sitting by yourself, you’re coming up with whatever approach, but you’re listing out your ideas. Then what we do after a time could be the end of the week. It could be after 20 minutes, we have everybody go back through their list and pick what they think are their three most exciting ideas, and then we just have them put it onto the post-it notes. So then they stand up and they go through the post-it notes, and what you tend to find, particularly with a team of eight or nine, is you’re going to have some pretty close duplicates people coming up with. So then you just person one puts up idea and person two says, well, my idea kind of similar to that, stack it on top of the post-it note. So now you’re building it up. You’re seeing where there’s common thoughts. Then what we do is we take a little bit of a break. Here’s the key step. When we come back, we say, you have to pick one idea that is not yours and build upon it. So you say, wow, Tommy, I really like that idea, and if we could do this, wouldn’t that be great? You’re building upon somebody’s ideas because what that does is it reinforces to the first person, and if they had a good idea and gets people in the habit of building upon, not tearing down, we actually, I give out these stickers and workshops that’ll has the word but through at but, and it’s got the red circle and the line through, because whenever anybody says, yeah, but you’re just waiting for the negative shoe to drop, And it’s a criticism. So we actually outlaw the but word in the ideation because it’s not about the negative. It’s about pick an idea, it can’t be yours, it’s got to be somebody else in the teams. Pick that idea and build upon it. How do you make it better? And we also then do an exercise in some of the workshops. It’s based off of a Walt Disney approach called Plussing it. So Walt, when they were working on movies or designing the theme parks and people would come in with ideas, Walt would always say, how do we plus it? And what he meant was, how do we make it two times better, five times better, 10 times better? So it’s about building up using the initial idea as the spark, as the inspiration, and then how do you build on it? And that’s how you get around this, the safe space issue. Once people have experienced that a little bit, they’re like, oh, okay, maybe my idea doesn’t inspire everybody, but the way people treat other people’s ideas, treat people’s ideas as valuable as you would treat their kids if you were being introduced to their kids, because ideas are emotional. They are, you are exposing yourself. You are really kind of hanging it out there when you throw that idea on the table. 

Jennifer Whigham (30:23): 

Yeah, that almost makes me want to cry because it is like a, I’m not going to cry. I don’t cry, but it’s like a very vulnerable situation. And when we go back to your childhood or teenagehood, there’s a point where somebody told you your idea was not good or it was wild and you closed all up and you’re like, well, maybe none of my ideas are good. And to re-experience as an adult of having someone accept your idea and think about it thoughtfully, I think is such a transformative experience, not just in ideas, but then how you’re going to show up at work in general. You’re going to feel like you can bring your whole self to work. 

Phil McKinney (31:01): 

Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into people. You go to a coffee shop, there’s a person on the corner playing the guitar. You’re like, okay, why is this person not in Nashville? And when you really get to know them, then you find out that one person five years ago dumped on them in some song they wrote, and so they just let that negative talk from somebody else start cycling around in their head, and the result is then they never try. Once you knock somebody off the ladder, getting them back up on that ladder can be really hard. 

Jennifer Whigham (31:39): 

Yeah, it can be really hard. I think we all, and especially when you get into corporate situations or law situations where there is this very severe structure often and it’s not looked happily upon to go out of that structure when in fact your company will be more successful, your clients will be happier if you are doing this in the background. 

Phil McKinney (32:04): 

Well, very much. And in fact, Courtney, who’s my general counsel, she reports directly to me as the CEO, and I hired her out of the beverage consumer packaged beverage industry where she was a general counsel, but we’ve got patent agents and contract law, lawyers, et cetera, but we hire specifically, not obviously have to have the law. We think of that as the equivalent of an engineer. You got to have the technical skills, but we hire for the creativity. We need to solve the problems in a different way. We need that creativity applied to how do we negotiate contracts or how do we deal with challenging or problems we run into or whatever, and it’s just the standard kind of steps through that everybody else does. That’s not us. So we need people who’ve got really creative problem solving skills who bring their technical skills, solve this with software design, a piece of hardware to do X craft a contract that does Y differently, that it meets the objectives that we’ve got, but also is a unique solution to a problem that nobody thought could be solved. We need that creativity in everything, and law is a CEO of a company. It’s critically important just as the creativity and finance, albeit I do tell the C F O I like creativity, just don’t make up the numbers, right? 

Jennifer Whigham (33:38): 

That’s right. Yeah. There’s a line. 

Phil McKinney (33:40): 

There’s a line there, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s the receptionist at the front desk or my executive assistant or the legal teams or whoever. Creativity plays in every job, every role, every function, and 100% of everybody, I don’t care who you are, you are creative. You just need to find it. You need to unlock it, and you need to exercise it. 

Jennifer Whigham (34:06): 

I love that. And to finish up, we always end our workshops and things like that in our program with an action step. And is there something, anybody listening to this tomorrow could start doing to think this way? Something small? 

Phil McKinney (34:22): 

Yeah, it’s real simple. Just pick one thing, one problem that you’re facing, personal, private, doesn’t matter. Set your timer on your phone for 10 minutes. Get out a notepad and come up with five ideas. Don’t judge ’em, don’t rank them. Just come up with five ideas and then tuck ’em away. Wait till the next day, look at them at that, and then continue to build on ’em. You just do that. Just start off with five or 10 minutes every day, just like your exercise before you know it, your creative muscles back and shoot. 

Jennifer Whigham (34:53): 

That’s something I’m going to start doing tomorrow. Thank you for that. Well, thank you, Phil. I really appreciate you right here. It was very exciting to read your book and then actually talk to you in person, so I appreciate it. Do you have anything else that we should know about? Any upcoming projects or anything like that? 

Phil McKinney (35:10): 

No, nothing on the project base. I think probably the best is if people are interested in the space, they can follow my podcast. We are now in season 19. 

Jennifer Whigham (35:21): 

Oh, wow. Congrats. That’s a lot. 

Phil McKinney (35:23): 

Started 2005, and then I write pretty regularly on my blog over at philmckinney.com once or twice a week, and it’s all on career, leadership, creativity, innovation. 

Jennifer Whigham (35:34): 

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. 

Phil McKinney (35:37): 

Thank you. 

Announcer: 

The Lawyerist Podcast is edited by Britany Felix. Are you ready to implement the ideas we discuss here into your practice? Wondering what to do next? Here are your first two steps. First. If you haven’t read The Small Firm Roadmap yet, grab the first chapter for free at Lawyerist.com/book. Looking for help beyond the book? Let’s chat about whether our coaching communities, are right for you. Head to Lawyerist.com/community/lab to schedule a 10-minute call with our team to learn more. The views expressed by the participants are their own and are not endorsed by Legal Talk Network. Nothing said in this podcast is legal advice for you.