How I Went from Embalming Bodies to Take a Law Firm from Zero to $3.5 Million in Revenue in 2 Years
This week on Your Practice Mastered, MPS interviews his father Richard James about his unlikely rise from funeral director to renowned law firm consultant.
Tune in as Richard reflects on his early days embalming bodies through the night. Discover the industries he later disrupted, from life insurance to pet supplies. Hear the pivotal lessons from his successes and failures that apply to any business. Richard will also share his unexpected "aha moment" realizing he could help law firms by applying universal best practices.
Gain insight from Richard's entrepreneurial journey, from his first income streams to how he now advises top law firm owners.
Transcript
[00:00:06] Richard James: Hey, and I'm Richard James. And today, Michael, I don't know. I think we got a pretty interesting guest.
[:[00:00:36] MPS: So this is gonna be a fun episode. We want you guys to enjoy this and get some insight into Rich's journey as an entrepreneur and how he is to where he is today working with law firm owners like yourself. So Rich, why don't we kick off strong and start with something. Obviously, I'm your son. I know a lot, but why don't you start with something? Maybe not everybody know.
[:[00:01:14] Richard James: And so, you know, if you're an entrepreneurial attorney, hopefully you'll gain some value out of today's conversation and some lessons learned. And so, something that people don't know about me, I guess two things. One, I jumped out of an airplane, perfectly good one, when I was 40 years old, to get a little adrenaline.
[:[00:01:46] Richard James: And she told the guy that I was jumping out of the plane with who was in tandem with me that if the chute didn't open, make sure I died when I hit the ground because she didn't want to take care of me the rest of her life. So, that give you a little insight as to who we are as a family.
[:[00:02:20] Richard James: So I'd get two or three hours of sleep a night, most nights, and embalm bodies for, you know, that extra, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 couple hundred bucks a pop, whatever it was. And so that's how I make a living from nine to five and fortune from five to nine.
[:[00:02:54] MPS: Like, well, what did that journey look like?
[:[00:03:15] Richard James: They thought if they were going to work 70 hours a week, why not do it for themselves? Maybe they wanted better pay. Maybe they wanted freedom. There was lots of reasons for them to do it. Maybe they didn't have a choice. I don't know. But for me, it was all of those things. And I chose to be an entrepreneur.
[:[00:03:42] MPS: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I would go a step further and I would say in my mind, the most important skill that an entrepreneur can learn is the skill to sell. I think it's a skill that serves entrepreneurs the best among all of the other attributes, I think that is a [00:04:00] primary function that if an entrepreneur cannot learn to sell, they better be partnered with someone that can. What about you?
[:[00:04:19] MPS: If only it worked.
[:[00:04:25] MPS: Me too. Because now you get the art of closing the deal, and there's something so fascinating and rewarding about that. So, you started in insurance, that's where you kind of grinded out to learn how to sell. What happened next?
[:[00:04:53] Richard James: I know you don't like the business, but maybe I can show you how to be a man. Because you're not much of one right now. And maybe I can [00:05:00] show you how to run a business and it give you a skill that you can use with, you know, you obviously learned how to sell. And so, it didn't take me too long cause my life was headed in the wrong direction.
[:[00:05:21] Richard James: And so, I would just go right up the stairs and wouldn't go through the funeral home at all. Cause I freaked me out completely. Whereas your mom, she's a nurse. She would go down in the embalming room and see the whole process. And so I was like, I always thought she was a little weird. And then, you know, lo and behold I had to do that in order to, you know, obviously get my license and go through that process.
[:[00:05:59] Richard James: But also the [00:06:00] service side of it. So learning how to serve families in, boy, they're Darkest time, right? And how to give how to be that rock for them during difficult times. And that served me really well. So now I filled it with sales. I knew how to close deals and I use that technique in the funeral business to maximize value.
[:[00:06:35] Richard James: And ended up with another one that I bought and he and I built one together on the side and off we were. So we were kind of, for those years when I was 20s, in my 20 something, we were working a lot of hours.
[:[00:07:05] MPS: So, what happened next? You obviously transitioned out of the funeral business at some point. What led to that? And what came after?
[:[00:07:28] Richard James: Right. And so I get that. I was never mad about that, but I wanted to figure it out. And my uncle, you know, after we had their third location two of them, which were mine, he just said, and I was going to go buy a fourth. And he just said to me one night, you're never going to change this business.
[:[00:07:54] Richard James: And I went on, took every advice he had, I called him up personally or sent him an [00:08:00] email and then he called me up and said, Hey, you sound like a young man and you sound like you're serious. And he offered to mentor me and I was like, blown away and he did. And he mentored me through my first process. And I bought my first business and first business after the funeral business.
[:[00:08:30] Richard James: So now I had Warehouses and I had manufacturing plants in China and I had distribution centers and I had I mean, every major moving part in a business I had, we had a market, we had a sell, we had a full sales team full phone sales team, full marketing team full warehouse team, you know, the whole nine yards.
[:[00:09:07] Richard James: Cause we just had a crazy high service level, but now it was in the product business, something I didn't know a lot about. And I grew it, we grew it. Like 1500 percent really quickly. But in the product business, it's all about inventory, right? How many sizes, how many shapes, how many styles, how many of everything.
[:[00:09:42] Richard James: And, you know, if you look at today, what is this almost? Oh, my gosh. A long time later, right? How many actual people have an aquarium in their house these days? And the answer is not very many. And so that industry literally away.
[:[00:09:56] Richard James: Yeah. And so that was a lesson, we lost everything in that business because [00:10:00] the recession hit and nobody were buying aquarium decor.
[:[00:10:13] MPS: Well, so each business has had a primary either skill or lesson that came from it. You had sales, you had service, what came out of the pet supply business?
[:[00:10:41] Richard James: And I bought some semi trucks, long story. Suffice to say, I took a loan on them, cause I was gonna try to leverage the RIO.
[:[00:11:06] Richard James: And if you're buying real estate and you're doing it healthfully, which means fundamentally no more than like 60 percent leverage. Then you're probably going to be fine with no problems. But personally, for me, I've seen from, I saw my business get destroyed by just having way too much over leveraged, high interest debt.
[:[00:11:41] Richard James: And so, yeah, I'm not a fan of debt at all. I try to be as debt free as I possibly can.
[:[00:12:00] Richard James: You know, so we, mom and I moved to, sorry, my wife, Maria, he's your mom but anyway, my wife, Maria and I moved to Phoenix. As you well know in 2008 and and we were, I was bald and cold and I needed a change because, you know, we had just went through this major loss. And so mom went back into nursing to make sure we paid the bills and she had health insurance while I went to figure out what I was going to do.
[:[00:12:40] Richard James: But suffice it to say, I was in a mastermind. My mentor was Dan Kennedy. I was being mentored by him through his books and his newsletters. And so Dan Kennedy was my mentor and he had a mastermind program that he was an affiliate of his in Phoenix. And it was actually one of the things on my bucket list or my checklist that we were going to move.
[:[00:13:17] Richard James: And then, he finally came to me afterwards one day and said, Hey, can I hire you as a consultant? And I'm like sure, why not? And so I did it and then I fixed his business and then he wanted me to have a more important role with his business. And then he said, Hey, do you think what you did for me will work for my clients?
[:[00:13:50] Richard James: And so, all of my examples were from the insurance business, the funeral business, the pet supply business, foreign currency or day trading business, but I didn't have any [00:14:00] law firm stories. But despite that when I presented my first presentation, it was October of 2008 made that first presentation.
[:[00:14:28] Richard James: And I didn't know anything about how his firm operated. So, I'm in this business knowing nothing. I just stepped in and applied my thought processes. And that's how I got started. And I was honest with, I really never did it before, but he still wanted to pay me to come in and do it. So I did it and I wrote up my report.
[:[00:14:57] MPS: Got it. So we transitioned into law firm [00:15:00] owners, which brings us to obviously present day there is a I think you could probably do a podcast episode on the journey from that point to even just right now, but we're here. So right? Yeah. I mean there's a lot to it, right? There's a lot of lessons a lot of downturns, there's a lot to it so on the topic of kind of downturns and lessons what would you say?
[:[00:15:36] Richard James: So the number one lesson for me that came out of the low points, regardless, was that all of these businesses, even though three were service businesses or four were service businesses, and one was a product business, they are all the same. So at their core, they all had the same fundamental principles, and that's what hit me when I was able to do this with law firms.
[:[00:16:15] Richard James: He sat on one side of the desk and I sat on the other side of the desk and we grew that firm from two guys in a room sharing a desk to, you know, three and a half million in annual gross sales in just a couple of years. And that was a great success story. And he was able to take vacations and make money and all that stuff he was never able to do before, but we were only able to do that.
[:[00:16:46] Richard James: But fundamentally, this idea of a client attraction and making sure finance and profit is in the right order, and making sure the workflow's in the right order and making sure the people are in the right order. They're all the same systems fundamentally, and they're just [00:17:00] replaced it. And so that was the biggest lesson that came out of my transitions, losses, movements from one industry to the other.
[:[00:17:33] Richard James: And the moment I got to apply it, I was like, Oh, what I learned fixed the consulting business that I fixed, then it fixed the law firm that I fit, you know, fit. Oh, okay. So this'll work. And so that was the big, so if I can get attorneys to realize that, you know, look, if you're a business transactional attorney in Idaho and you're, and you see somebody that's a bankruptcy attorney in Scranton or a PI attorney in California, the [00:18:00] similarities that run through your business are much greater than the inconsistencies or the differences that run through your business.
[:[00:18:26] MPS: And then you start to implement and realize that it's really the same thing over and over for every single law firm and really every single business. So I think that's good insight. So, we got a double whammy there. We got to learn the lesson and the aha moment. And those two were both kind of combined into one in the same.
[:[00:18:55] Richard James: Yeah, so I would tell you that discipline in my opinion is the greatest success. So [00:19:00] I was, as I said, a bit of a loser in my late teens and it was my uncle who grabbed me by the collar and he gave me forced discipline. You know, I never went to the military. I'm inspired by those who do go to the military had I gone to the military, I think I feel like I might add an easier time than my uncle gave me because he really drilled at home and, you know, acted like a drill sergeant to me and made sure he micromanaged everything I did in the early days.
[:[00:20:08] Richard James: And you will see me run the same routine and have the exact same process that I have every day. And it's not because I'm as attracted to the process. It's because I'm attracted to the results. And what I find is when I don't do the process, and it used to be, by the way, years ago, I would actually, you know, Oh, I'm on vacation.
[:[00:20:48] Richard James: There are still disciplines I wish I was better at. But for the most part, if I lack onto a discipline and a structure, I'm going to do it over and over again until I get the desired result. And that's likely the biggest secret I can give [00:21:00] anybody generally for life, but in business, that's been my number one biohack is discipline.
[:[00:21:13] Richard James: Yeah, that's right. That's right. If you know my address. You could find me in the same chair every morning. Yes that's true.
[:[00:21:37] MPS: One of the other things I know we sometimes like to do is a book reference. Is there a book to the law firm owners listening to this that you'd recommend either reading or listening to, depending on how they consume the
[:[00:21:49] Richard James: I can't give you one because, so in 1993 it's earmarked because that was the year that my friends, I was in mortuary school. I was 23 years old. I was in mortuary school and my friends in mortuary school, all were going to see [00:22:00] the movie, The Firm, with Tom Cruise in it and they had all read the book and I was not a reader I didn't I thought I always said I fall asleep when I read I was bored when I read whatever it was all BS.
[:[00:22:27] Richard James: Cool. Cause I love movies, but now I realized, oh, wow, my mind's eye is a much better movie than even the movie itself. And so, let's read more books. And so I made a commitment in 1993 to read a book a week. And so from 1993 till, you know, till recently, I will tell you, I read a book a week. Now I no longer read a book a week to completion, to fit some goal.
[:[00:23:05] Richard James: And I found myself burning through the books, but never stopping and implementing. And I had so many books back in the day that would have, you know, earmark bent over corners and dog eared books that I wanted to go back to, but I never actually got back to cause I was onto the next book. Right? So, now I read to Revelation and I'll have four or five or six books open on audible two or three, four books open on the Kindle at all times.
[:[00:23:53] Richard James: But it is a wonderful business book and mindset about how the business owner thinks. It's a very long read, but it's, in [00:24:00] my opinion, one of the greatest books written about that subject.
[:[00:24:19] Richard James: Dan Kennedy's Ruthless Management of Time And People massively important book of understanding the value of your time and how to manage time and manage yourself around time and manage your people.
[:[00:24:49] Richard James: But the 4 Hour Workweek, because it just provides, yeah, it worked, but it provides some great practical advice. And it's a real head nod for me, because it was the book that helped me break away [00:25:00] from being stuck to a physical location and realize I can operate anywhere. And it was really the book that gave me the courage to move to Phoenix and be able to build my business the way that I wanted to, so those are the few I would give you to start with.
[:[00:25:30] Richard James: Yeah. So today you know, we have doubled down and recommitted to the legal niche because we're always asking ourself, can we take what we teach and teach it other businesses? Cause my business is no different from yours and we've really doubled down and we've said no, we are committed to the legal niche.
[:[00:26:01] Richard James: How are they classified as a law firm over based by taking an assessment? So working on some assessments to help them understand. Are they level one, level two or level three law firm owner? We won't get it. We won't have enough time to get into all that.
[:[00:26:21] Richard James: Is it your profit or cashflow pipeline? Is it your people pipeline or is your process pipeline that's broken and figuring out how to go about fixing that. So I'm really excited about that release and what we're developing and we're in beta with that now. So that's, what's got me excited at this very moment.
[:[00:26:54] Richard James: Yeah, I think you go to YourPracticeMaster. com, certainly, you know, listen to these [00:27:00] podcasts because I didn't want this to be, I hope this didn't come across as a pitch for us or Partners Club or anything else. I hope that they derived lessons from this as they were listening to the lessons I went through because there's some really good ones.
[:[00:27:28] MPS: Absolutely, and to the law firm owners listening, I hope you like this little peek behind the curtain or the mic, again, if you're watching or listening. To learn a little bit more about Richard James, the background context of kind of how he came to be and why he's working with law firm owners today and what we're all excited about around here.
[:[00:28:03] MPS: And then don't forget to hit that subscribe or follow button, depending on where you're watching or listening. As we appreciate it. And of course, if you know, another law firm owner or even business owner, that's a listening or could use this, share it with them. It never hurts.
[:[00:28:25] MPS: Rich, obviously appreciate you sharing for everything you did. And I think there was a lot of great lessons for the law firm owners listening to pull out from today.
[:[00:28:48] Richard James: That I want to recruit you and that's what you did. You went out and made yourself so valuable that I really wanted to have you as a partner. And when that was something that you wanted to do, it became very exciting to me. So thanks for joining our [00:29:00] company. It excites me every day that I get to work with my son.
[:[00:29:11] MPS: Absolutely. Appreciate the opportunity and looking forward to continuing in our words, selling and
[:[00:29:17] Richard James: Selling and serving. All right. That's it.
[:[00:29:25] Richard James: All right. How much time do we leave?
[:[00:29:41] Richard James: Yeah. I don't know how long.
[:[00:29:44] Richard James: That was 31 minutes.
[:[00:29:55] Richard James: But I think it was good timing. It was about 30 minutes. We probably could have went longer, gave [00:30:00] more, but I think we gave a couple of good nuggets today and a couple, you know, I think they got something out of it, so.
[:[00:30:11] Richard James: Awesome. All right. So we got another one in the can. What else do we need to do, Michael?
