Get Out of Your Own Way: Strategic Planning With the Right Partner

The problem isn't that you don't care or you aren't trying; it's that you don't know what expectation to set going in. And even if you did, even if you had the skill set to follow those threads all the way through to something that is clear, is meaningful, and is documented, takes practice and expertise you've never needed to build because it's not your job.

When you set out to do this yourself, even with the best intentions, you're setting yourself up to fail. 

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Most of you are getting in your own way when it comes to building and leading your firm strategically. Not on purpose, not because you're not smart, because you are trying to do something that is structurally not possible to do well alone. And nobody has said that to you.  

I was thinking about how I wanted to approach this episode. And I kept coming back to the same mental image, which is sitting across from a good friend who is a law firm owner. Someone I can be completely honest with. Someone who knows me well enough that I don't have to think before I speak. They know I'm not a know-it-all. They know I'm not an egomaniac. They know I don't think everything revolves around me or around Velocity Work. That's just not who I am.

They also know I'm very confident in what I do and in the way I think about this work. And by this work, I mean our work at Velocity Work. I'll say more about that in a little bit. And because of that, naturally, I give them the most direct version of what I actually think. 

Today, I'm going to cover the points I would make to that friend because I'm not sure anyone else is saying what I'm about to say to you. Not in the way I'm going to say it. You may have heard me make some of these points before on this podcast, but not in a wake-up call kind of way. And that's what I want to do here today. 

I give a lot of thought to the things that I say on this podcast. I don't want to give off ever that I think if you never work with Velocity Work, you're screwed. That is not what I think. That's not how I think. But there's no world in which I'm doing you any favors by softening what I know to be true about what it actually takes to get on the trajectory to where you say you want to go. 

There is a certain kind of post that goes around social media. I haven't seen it recently, but it was everywhere a few months ago. It was an expert that would say something like, "If I wasn't worried about hurting your feelings, I'd tell you these things about X, Y, and Z." Or, "If I wasn't worried about hurting your feelings, here's 10 things I'd tell you about," insert their area of expertise. You've probably seen these. This is what this episode sort of feels like. If I wasn't worried about hurting your feelings, this is what I would say. So, let's dig in.

The first is science. John Sweller's cognitive load theory, which is established, widely cited research, tells us that when your brain is running two demanding processes at once, both suffer. You don't get two good outputs; you get two compromised outputs. And task switching, research on task switching proves that every time you flip between two different purposes in the same setting, your brain gets stuck in the muck of switching. Performance degrades, mental fatigue increases, you lose the thread. You arrive at answers more slowly, less clearly, and with less confidence in what you found through the process.

That's what's happening when you try to be the one running the process and the one whose brain the process is meant to unlock. So, your purpose is split, and a split purpose doesn't just hurt one meeting; it compromises the entire process because, and you may not really understand this, people throw the word strategic planning around quite a bit.

Strategic planning is not a session. It's not just a retreat. Strategic planning done right is a process with steps, with assets being built, with data being organized, with truth being surfaced along the way. And every single step of that process requires you to show up as a full participant. Your thinking, your instincts, your vision, that's the whole point. This is what everything is built around.

So, you can lead your firm day-to-day. That's yours, and you're doing it. But when you are doing the deep work of creating strategic clarity, when you are setting out to understand where your firm actually is and where it needs to go, where you want it to go, while simultaneously being the person that the work is meant to serve, you don't get to be that participant. And if you're not fully in that seat, in the participant seat, because you're spreading yourself among trying to facilitate everything as well and you're trying to lead it, you will not get the outcome you should get. It's that simple.

The second reason is that anyone who does this work knows it and says it. Frank Scarpacci, who has run a facilitation firm since the early 2000s, he says it in a quote: "The CEO needs to be a full participant in the conversation, contributing ideas, sharing perspective, making decisions. But they can't do that if they're also responsible for running the session. One person with two different jobs doesn't work." 

And then there's Bill Campbell, author of The Trillion-Dollar Coach, the man who coached Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, the list goes on and on. He built his entire career on one premise: Even the best leaders need someone else in that room pulling things out of them. Not because they lacked intelligence or vision, but because they understood that being led and leading at the same time isn't possible. Not even for the top of the top. 

Now, there's another layer. Thorough, deliberate, well-thought-out strategic planning that follows a real process from beginning to end is a specific skill set. It is not your skill set. Your skill set is the legal services that you provide to your clients. And thank God for that. But this is not that. If you're a rare unicorn who is out there and genuinely built this skill set and actually uses it because of the nature of work that you do, great. Get on with your bad self. But in all the firms I've worked with, I haven't met that person yet.

This is my skill set. It's why I built this company. And it's the skill set of the people at Velocity Work. We know which thread to stay with and how long to stay with it. We know what the deliverable needs to look like at the end. And I hold Velocity Work to that standard because that's where the bar should be.

The problem isn't that you don't care or you aren't trying. It's that you don't know what expectation to set going in. And even if you did, even if you had the what, the skill set to follow those threads all the way through to something that is clear, is meaningful, and is documented, takes practice and expertise you've never needed to build because it's not your job. It's mine. 

When you set out to do this yourself, even with the best intentions, you are trying to lead yourself through a process without the expertise that actually makes it work, and you're setting yourself up to fail because of the dual-purpose role you are trying to handle at the same time. This is not a knock on your intelligence. It's just not possible to do at the same level of job as what we do. Structurally, it cannot work the same way.

The second thing I'd say is that one of the biggest things that happens when you try to do this alone, you operate on assumptions you haven't tested. We all have assumptions. I have assumptions too. As a matter of fact, I walk into every new client engagement with assumptions, rooted in what I know about how healthy firms are typically structured and what tends to work at different stages of growth. My job from the very top is to either validate those assumptions for the firm I'm working with or determine if they are not true for them. I am completely agnostic about which way it goes. I am just seeking truth so we can work from facts, not feelings.

Law firm owners have their own assumptions too, and theirs aren't coming from the same place as mine are as my company's are. They're coming from gut feeling, from what they've pieced together over time, from what sounds right, from what other people are doing, not from a deep knowledge base about what healthy firms actually look like under the hood. That is not meant to be a criticism, but it's true. And it's exactly why having someone in the room who can look at an assumption and determine whether it actually holds up for your firm changes everything. 

Take hiring. An owner will have an assumption. They'll say, "I need to hire another attorney." Maybe, but how do you know? Have you actually looked at the data? Have you had someone get underneath your numbers, your capacity, your team, et cetera?

Here's a real example. I work with a boutique firm in a highly specialized practice. They handle M&A, offers and exits for executives in Silicon Valley. I walked in with a standard assumption about what they would likely need. And the owner's assumption was that he needed to bring on another attorney. And when I looked at the ratio of support staff to attorneys, it felt like hiring top down instead of bottom up. So, I figured I'd probably come out of the process helping him see it differently, that the data would point somewhere else entirely.

I dug in, like really dug in. And through discovery, through the data, through the asset building that we do, which I'll tell you more about in a minute, what I found was a completely different truth than what I expected. When I looked at the full picture, the nature of their work, their specific set of circumstances, bringing on another attorney actually made a lot of sense. His hunch held up. But only after the real work was done.

Now, if I had come in and made a recommendation with no data behind it or tailored logic for him and his firm, something that went against everything in his gut, he would not have trusted it. He wouldn't have trusted me. And he shouldn't have. Trust is built on truth. I wasn't going to make a call until I actually knew what was true for his firm. 

A real partner doesn't come in with the answer. They come in with the process that reveals the answer, specific to you, your firm, your numbers, your vision. And then they follow the facts wherever they go. 

Now, the third thing I'd say to this friend at the coffee shop who is a law firm owner is when you understand what this process looks like, you'll understand why you can't replicate it for yourself.

It starts with discovery. It's not heavy on the owner, but it is critical. We dig in to understand the firm: the practice areas, the case types, the entity structure, the team members and their positions, whether there are core values or a mission statement, yada, yada, yada, the facts of the firm. And separately, we want to understand the owners', and maybe there's more than one owner, their experience of the firm, what it actually feels like to run it, where the friction is, how they see it from the inside. Those elements of discovery are two different things, and they both matter. 

Through our lens, our pattern recognition from working with hundreds of firms, what we get out of discovery surfaces opportunities the owner won't see on their own. Not because they aren't paying attention, not because they don't care, but because they're inside it. We are outside it, looking at both the facts and the experience at the same time. We know what we're looking for. You can't see what we can see from where you are standing. And discovery is just the first step. Opportunities continue to surface at every step that follows. 

And from there, from discovery, we move into the next step. We produce an asset that organizes the data in a way that powers insights for your firm. Most of you have access to the data that you need, at least mostly. It's sitting in your case management system or your QuickBooks or other software that you might have. It's stuck in there. Or you've got disparate spreadsheets, or you're tracking some things but not all the things that are actually going to be the most helpful and useful to this process.

We work with you to get it. We pull it together. And again, what we build organizes the data in a way that helps power insights: charts, graphs, trends. Your data becomes something you can actually see and act from. This is an asset. Every month, you keep adding to it.

We also build an accountability chart, tailored specifically to your firm, not a template. If you're not familiar with what an accountability chart is, it looks like an org chart, but it's not an org chart. An org chart shows you who reports to who, which is not that helpful for law firms. An accountability chart shows you who is responsible for what inside of the firm. And there are many, many things that happen inside of a firm. We get really granular about it, so it's crystal clear who owns what. And when you can see all of that in front of you, issues become visible, opportunities become visible. 

And we know what makes an accountability chart most useful and how to build it for you to get the most out of it. It gives you maximum visibility into the levers you need to pull in order to shift your business in a way that aligns with what you're wanting. Through our lens, looking at the truth about the firm through this chart, there tend to be a lot of opportunities that surface. 

And then, I don't know if you can hear the drum roll, we get to the strategic planning retreat. This is the day everything culminates. By the time we get here, we have studied everything. We understand your current state. We understand where you want to go. The data is organized and visible, the opportunities are surfaced. We are not walking in cold, we are walking in loaded. This is not a presentation; it is a guided process.

My job is to pull all of this together into clarity for you: documents, drawings, and notes on huge post-its that end up going around the room, and guide you through our strategic planning retreat process so that we can come together over all the information and knowledge that we now both understand and line you up with where you want to go.

We make important decisions that day about what levers you're going to pull, about what opportunities you're going to act on in the near term, and where to put your foot on the gas. When you leave, there is no question in your mind about what healthy numbers look like, about what you should be shooting for your scenario and where you're headed, what you need to do, and how you need to shift.

This is priceless. The owner who has that can go build what they want to build. The one who does not have that just cannot do the same thing. That's the truth.

Everything I've walked through today comes back to one thing: You cannot do this alone in the way that you can with the right partner, someone with real expertise who cares about you and where you're trying to go. Not because you're not capable, not because you're not smart, not because you don't care, but because the work itself requires someone outside of it, someone who isn't also trying to run the firm, live the life, carry the weight of it all at the same time. 

The owners who figure this out are the ones who stop trying to be everything at once. They get a partner and everything changes.

If you have been listening to this podcast for a while, I think you already know whether what I'm describing is for you. The people who become our clients almost always come to us this way. They've been listening. They've been thinking about it. And at some point, something clicks, and they decide they're ready. They already trust the principles because they've heard me talk about them for months. They're usually right about that instinct, that they can trust it. They do align with the principles. 

So, if today is the day that something clicked for you, pay attention to that. You don't need to have it all figured out before you reach out. You don't need the perfect numbers or the perfect timing. You just need to know that where you are is not where you want to be and that you're ready to actually look at it with someone who knows what they're looking for. A consult is just a conversation. We'll find out together if it's a fit.

The information I'm giving you today is really important for you to understand so that you can arm yourself with knowledge about the truth of what strategic planning really is. Someone who is taking the time to get as clear as you need to get in order to even think about creating a plan that is strategic, this is a process. It takes two to three months.

And when you're guided through that process, you can bank on the outcome. You know you're going to be clear. You can trust the experts who have seen things, done things. They know how to set your data up. They know how to build you a chart that's not a one-size-fits-all. Nothing about what we do and nothing about anyone who does strategic planning should ever be some generic fit. It should always be custom because if it's not custom, that's not strategic. 

So, I'm hoping that you can start to see why it's tough to do on your own. That's just the nature of the beast. And the sooner you accept that and you make a decision to get a partner to help, you'll speed everything up.

All right guys, that's it for today. I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

And we give away some pretty great free resources that help law firm owners who aren’t clients learn some of the core principles that we use in our framework. An example is a Producer Calculator, which lets you put in your producer salary and production numbers to give you a sense for how healthy your firm is and how your team is performing. Head over to velocitywork.com to try it out.

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Thank you for listening to The Law Firm Owner Podcast. If you're ready to get clearer on your vision, data, and mindset, then head over to VelocityWork.com where you can plug in to quarterly Strategic Planning, with accountability and coaching in between. This is the work that creates Velocity.