Overcoming Anxiety and Scaling Effectively

MPS: Hey, law firm owners. Welcome to the Your Practice Mastered podcast. We're your hosts. I'm MPS.

Richard James: I'm Richard James today. I'm excited to have this conversation. Michael

MPS: Absolutely. We're joined by attorney Jamie Miller, and I got to tell you, I'm feeling pretty fired up because I just watched the from chaos to freedom documentary again this morning. So I got to go back through Jamie's story again, and that got me pretty excited about today's interview. So Jamie, super excited to have you on.

Jamie Miller: It's great to be here with both of you. Thank you so much for having me.

MPS: Absolutely. Well, Jamie, I, you know, I would love to kind of kick right into things just to let the audience know a little bit more about you. So, I'd start with an icebreaker, which is, you know, to everyone listening, what is something that maybe others don't know about you? Doesn't have to be no one, but something others might not know about you.

stumbled into the bankruptcy [: 00:01:00

My father had been in the industry for a long time and it was kind of at that time when the big box stores were opening up, kind of the targets and the of the world Kmart was really expanding at that time. And we went into market with an idea that I think had passed kind of that catalog showroom idea.

People may have been familiar with best products or service merchandise

Richard James: service

Jamie Miller: that. We were in

Richard James: out from the past. Yeah, I

ctly. So we went to market in: 1990

We, we were not able to competitively buy products. We were paying at a, at a much higher level. Our profitability was really low. So we ended up having to file a business chapter 11 for the bankruptcy, I mean, for the business. And about that same time my father got ill and I unfortunately ended up finding myself at age 21, just having graduated college, running a business that I really didn't know what I was doing.

tching my own father have to [: 00:03:00

Kind of informed me on what I wanted to do and how I wanted to build my bankruptcy practice and it inspired me to go to law school and it inspired me on this whole journey to where I am today.

Richard James: I thank you for that, the journey towards being an attorney. I have 1 thing that I think I know that I don't know that everybody else does. At least I think your wife told me this. You're actually, pretty darn good at basketball. Didn't you qualify for like the us Jewish American team or some amateur team or something like this?

Am I not correct in that statement when it came to basketball, and that's your favorite sport and you did qualify for some high level scenario?

eans. There's only two of us [: 00:04:00

So I'm still playing. Not, not at the highest level, and I'm smart on the court, but I just can't run as fast as I used to.

Richard James: Yeah. Well, I just watched the Tom Cruise movie last night with Michael and for my birthday, and I think we saw Tom Cruise is trying to run as fast as he wants to be. He doesn't run as fast as he did in the past. We cannot escape age. But Michael, you were a decent basketball player, too. I was useless on a basketball court.

But Michael, you played basketball. You enjoyed that sport as well.

rown and it becomes a little [: 00:05:00

Richard James: Yeah. Good. So, we know we've got two guys and we, would not want to have me as a three man person on a three man basketball team that we know for sure. Dribbling and, I can make free throws. I can even play horse, but I can't make a layup to save my life and I'm not a very good ball handler.

So anyway.

MPS: You're a defensive player. So Jamie obviously. Go ahead.

Jamie Miller: In my bankruptcy where I had a client who did not believe that I knew how to play basketball, and I could tell I could beat him. And so I, I offered to play him one on one. If I beat him, he paid my fee. And if he beat me. I would do his bankruptcy for free,

MPS: That's awesome.

Jamie Miller: I destroyed him.

It was so much fun. It was so much fun.

MPS: That's

story I've ever heard. That [: 00:06:00

MPS: that is awesome. Oh, that's that. Oh,

Richard James: make that as part of your marketing.

MPS: Yeah,

Richard James: could make that as part

Jamie Miller: wish I would have videotaped

Richard James: yeah, but like you can just you know, I don't know call some new person out And and film you beating them right and just challenge them if you can beat me i'll file your bankruptcy at no cost! Oh my gosh! That would be... what, what a great marketing angle.

Oh, man. Now you, you might play more basketball than you want to, but you, you

Jamie Miller: right. Exactly.

Richard James: most of the people will just fold. Right. They won't even show up. But yeah, that'd be great. And, and yeah, I, I, my marketing brain is going now we could we could roll out this for miles, but I'm not going to, Michael, sorry, I, I don't wanna step on

that came to be, but I, I'm [: 00:07:00

And I'm sure there's lots of paths on this. So if you just want to hit a couple of the highlights along the journey, What are some of those highlights?

ankruptcy practice, you know,: 1994

Richard James: No,

cy career. So I started about: 1995

The, the firm gradually grew over the years, and it grew organically more than planfully or strategically. I kind of hit a point, you know, probably in the 2000 area, 2005, where the business was really growing, I was spending more and more money on yellow pages, and it was the most frustrating.

It was my main lead source, and it was just so frustrating. Every time my yellow page rep would come in, I'd have to take a Xanax or something like that, because it just caused me so much stress. I got to this point where we were having tons of leads, and business was going really well. Revenue was good.

s good, but I was frustrated [: 00:09:00

It was just kind of, you know, I just reached a point where it grew to a point where I knew it grew beyond me.

Richard James: I have a question.

Jamie Miller: Or my

Richard James: And I asked this question as a plus one on to what you were going through, Jamie, because I don't know that I know the answer, but were you personally, as your firm was growing, were you making more money personally too, or was it growing and you, your personal income and life was staying the same or getting worse?

Like, what did that look

evels were through the roof, [: 00:10:00

And meanwhile, I'm also, I'm not taking any notes, right? So this was kind of before we had these magical CRMs and stuff. And I wasn't doing any followup. I was just, Hey. Jamie Miller, Love it. We can help you with your bankruptcy. You know, get back to me. Right. So it's just kind of nothing beyond that.

e continued to go up because [: 00:11:00

Richard James: Yeah. I mean, it's unfortunate a lot of firms feel that way. I bet there's somebody that's listening to this right now that feels exactly that way. So Michael, let's keep speaking to them.

MPS: So I, to that point, Jamie, was there a defining moment for you in your journey? Not a breakthrough moment, but actually a moment that you considered a low point or a failure, and what did you take out of that?

I was you know, sitting at a [: 00:12:00

I knew that I had people waiting for me in the waiting room for consultations. I knew I had emergency bankruptcy petitions that needed to be scheduled. And I actually remember being in the 341 hearing and the trustee who I'm good friends with saw that I just wasn't right. You know, saw that I was, fidgety and anxious and, sweating.

And he asked me if I was okay, and I said, yeah, and he said, you're not okay. He goes, why don't you go and he says, I'll just cover these 341s, you know, I'll just ask the questions with these cases aren't complicated and we'll move on. And I remember going home that night and I said to my wife, Felicia, I go, I just, I just can't.

Something's got to change. I just can't continue to do what I'm doing all by myself. It's affecting my health and my mental health and my family and that type of thing.

Richard James: I know, [: 00:13:00

It was pounding so hard. I had such a case of anxiety. And I didn't know what to do about it. And this is 2001 ish, 2002, so 22 some years ago. [00:14:00] And I just had said yes to so many things. There were so many things pulling on me in so many different directions, and I didn't know how to replace myself.

And I didn't have, I had some systems, but I didn't have great systems. And I'm driving home, and I did two things. I also talked to Maria, but I also, on the whole, I can remember myself talking to God going, if this is what it's supposed to be like, then sign me out, 'cause I, I can't handle it. I need, I need to go do something else.

I go, you've gotta take control here or else I'm done. And that was the moment for me where I just, between my faith based scenario and my wife sitting down, my wife going, yeah, enough is enough. Let's figure this out. And that's when that moment was for me that we're like, we just, we just got to figure it out.

And I think a lot of small business owners, regardless of the industry that you're in, have those moments at some time. Now, Michael, you're, I don't know if you've had that moment, Michael, you, you've

I, I have when I did the web [: 00:15:00

Richard James: I remember, I remember that day because, because you called me. You were what? How old were you then? 20,

MPS: 19 or

Richard James: 19 years old. So Jamie, this is who we're dealing with here, right? He's 19 years old. He's running his own web development company. I think you're doing a couple 2, 3, $400, 000 in business at that point.

me, and you were a hot mess, [: 00:16:00

MPS: yeah, it was because that was the moment when I had scaled up the agency too and hired a bunch of people, and so I had all these refund requests plus a bunch of people and payroll was coming up in two days, and I was freaking out. And yeah, I think I did meet payroll that period, but I think after that is when I just... at that point, because I was in college, I really did not want to have that much anxiety.

I decided to roll back on that and just focus on the YouTube channel at that point. Because yeah, it's not a great feeling. So to the law firm owners listening, I am sure many of you can relate in this sense. It's something most business owners go through at some point in time, various times during the journey.

s so relatable in this sense.[: 00:17:00

Jamie Miller: It's interesting, 'cause when you have, when I have an opportunity to get away, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I would go up to Door County, Wisconsin, which is a beautiful place and we love it there. We've been there many times. And we'd go to the same places, and like, even today, we'll be at a spot, a restaurant in Doerr County and Felicia said, You remember about 15 years ago, this is when Debra called and quit, right?

Or, do you remember this is when the trustee called and said your

Was a mess? It's a, you know, just those stressful times. You remember exactly, just like Rich being at Fry's, you remember when and where that call came in.

Richard James: it's unbelievable. The triggering mechanism. It's unbelievable. So, so, okay. So where do we go from here, Michael? Cause now we got the anxiety out of the way. What, what happened from here?

nt off and things started to [: 00:18:00

Jamie Miller: Well, it was figuring out that I needed to reach out and find someone that could help me with the office management. I knew I was good at managing people, managing the office, but it wasn't the best use of my time. So, it's when I really reached out, and I found an office manager that could take off the accounting and the HR and those issues.

were using a program called [: 00:19:00

So, I would open up the case, I would put the sticker on, on the file, and I would walk, go home with these huge stack of files from the people that hired. And you know, I was working 24 seven. So my first breakthrough was that I needed to hire someone that was competent, that could handle kind of those tasks that necessarily weren't the best use of my

Richard James: I can remember, Jamie, I bet you time matters had it too. I used a program when I had the pet supply company called Mail Order Manager. And it had a, like a manual that thick. So three, four, five inches thick. Right. And I can remember being at home at night, reading in my bed, the manual on Mail Order Manager so that I could figure this thing out. So that I could try to make it do things that because I didn't have any more time until I finally figured out the problem was that I was doing the work instead of hiring somebody else to be able to do the work.

t I had learned the software [: 00:20:00

Jamie Miller: Yeah, exactly. Yep. A hundred percent. And it was, it was stressful. You remember the January or December 31st, 1999, as we were rolling into 2000, Y2K. I was, everything was in, and I had this laptop that was about this thick that everything was on that laptop, and I was freaking out as to what was going to happen on January 1st of 2000.

Fortunately, everything worked out fine. But that was a huge anxiety level.

t part of the journey? Where [: 00:21:00

Jamie Miller: Right. So, I started really scaling up the practice right in 2006, 2005. It really took off when the bankruptcy laws changed in October of, 2005 right before that as people were trying to get all their bankruptcies in before the BAP CPA came in. I really got a sense of what volume looks like and how to handle the volume. And scaled up ,and it was really busy during that time period.

You know, it slowed down for: 2006

And the only way that I could increase conversions in my mind was I saw the correlation between leads and hires. That, that was my vision. The more leads I got, the more hires I got. As I went through that journey of spending more and more and more on advertising, and not having a great, what I know now, which I really didn't understand that word then, ROI. I didn't, I didn't realize that improving my ROI required me to do much better job with my, leads and managing my leads.

And so going into: 2012

You know, working really hard to take those leads, convert those leads into appointments, convert those appointments to shows, convert those shows into hires. Now, in retrospect that's a huge undertaking. It sounds like, Oh yeah, that's easy, you know, but how do you do it? So how many, we spent hours trying hours upon hours, first of all, trying to learn infusion software, which was a battle in itself, right?

t and help manage it, but we [: 00:24:00

We had this bulky software costing 500 bucks a month. We didn't really know how to use it, and we were still kind of using spreadsheets and handwritten notes to kind of figure things out. I realized that we could do better. And I saw such a huge opportunity. I was getting 100 -150 leads a month.

So I went into the infusion soft marketplace, and I was looking for... and I've always realized in business that there's always, I know what I'm good at and I know what I'm not good at. And there's always people out there that can do things better than me. And I was always in search of finding those resources.

body that could do it better [: 00:25:00

So taking me back to Infusionsoft and the marketplace, I ended up going into the marketplace and I found this guy named Richard Strauch, at that time. It just was you know... I looked at his kind of resume. Had run a bankruptcy law firm in Phoenix. Had built that business to a, you know, a significant level. Knows how to use infusion soft.

n though I had overcome some [: 00:26:00

And you know, in 2013, 2012, when I found Rich, that was really when I was able to change my mindset on many different things that allowed me to build the practice to where it is today.

people on a daily basis and [: 00:27:00

I can remember 2012 driving down the road with Maria going, you know, I think I'm going to change my name and she was like, what? And I go, yeah, I'm sick of people not being able to say Strauch. And she's like, I'm like, well, Dan Kennedy told me I could be whoever I wanted to be. So why don't I just change my name?

Actors do it all the time. And she said, well, you can change yours, but I'm not changing mine. I go, what do you think it should be? She goes, well, your mother always called you Richard James when she was mad at you. So why don't you use Richard James? I'm like, Oh, it's a great idea. So here we are, Richard James 12 years, 13 years later, whatever it's been now.

You know, Jamie, I think that, yeah, we did. And I remember, that first phone call. I know exactly where I was pacing around my living room when I was having the conversation with you about your business and about what it is that you were looking at, realizing that we were kindred spirits and we were aligned. But I want to take the acknowledgement off of me and put it towards you.

At the end of the day, [: 00:28:00

You still had to be ready to make these changes. And so you, I mean, you'd get all the credit, you know, this is how I feel about this. You had to be able to be willing to be a good student, be coachable and go forward and be willing to make mistakes along the way. And I think, there's a truism there that when you decide to, you know, if there's a firm out there right now that's struggling, which CRM they should use, it's not the magic in a particular CRM, whether they used Infusionsoft, now called Keep or whatever. It's the fact that they're committed to figure out how to make this tool actually convert leads in the way that it should maximize it.

And you were committed to that process. And I'm guessing there was a lot of learning curves. Would you agree?

There was a lot of learning [: 00:29:00

Richard James: mindset.

Yeah, you no longer had to go pump more money into advertising, buy a bigger ad, spend more money on TV. You might have done some of that stuff, but you were able to generate more clients without spending more money on marketing. Is that a fair statement?

click from the yellow pages [: 00:30:00

Richard James: Did you, did

MPS: Absolutely. So go

Richard James: it was good. No, no, no, no, I think you're right on. You're probably going to ask the question I was going to ask. Go ahead.

MPS: Well, so my, my question, Jamie, is, you know, as you've done this and as you brought the firm to where you're at, what, what success habits or what daily things do you do to contribute to that success and sustain that success?

y think about where, or what [: 00:31:00

I love meeting with people and helping them, and I don't like going to court, and I don't like writing briefs. And so you know, kind of being able to really sit down and spend time. Thinking about what, what I want to do and then tailor the practice around that has really been a learning movement and moment and, has really taking, taken the stress off of me. But the big moment, the big turning point is data and recognizing how that data allows you to find every hole in the practice that is there and in setting metrics and setting goals.

e secret sauce to, you know, [: 00:32:00

Richard James: no, I,

MPS: I see Rich nodding his head.

Richard James: Yeah, I mean, the two things you said were getting the data and then being committed to designing the life that you want, rather than saying, well, I'm going to have a business or whatever life I happen to get out of it, I'll take, you said, no, no, no, no, no, this is the life I want. Let's design my business to get me what I need, and I'm going to use data to help me understand that.

And that, that's a great discipline.

got you fired up and excited?[: 00:33:00

Jamie Miller: We had a really tough time in COVID the last a couple of years really dried up, and we, during that time period, really fortunate to get the PPP money and the EIDL and the ERTC money, and, and it allowed us to stay focused on what the future was going to be. Now, I always, you know, I would take a great economy.

Because during good economies and bad economies, we're still busy. I feel like we do things the right way. Our bankruptcy numbers have been consistent, but I knew and you know, along with my colleagues, we knew that once we got out of the COVID era that things were really going to take off. So by by keeping our staff together, we didn't lay anybody off.

and energy into the business [: 00:34:00

it's, it's always our busy season. And I had employees that had been with me for two years through COVID that never experienced that Christmas season, you know. So we were telling them, you know, we trained and we trained and it's, I tell you, Christmas is coming, right? It is coming in 2023. I can tell you. And then in November of 2022, all of a sudden, we saw our leads just start to go up, which is odd for November and December, because that's usually a really slow time.

ng people. We're doing it at [: 00:35:00

we're going to hit revenue number. I think I can, I can tell you this as friends and grateful, but I think we're going to do more than ……this year, which is just a goal that... and it's not in that month. That doesn't mean like I'm excited about the revenue. But to me, I translate translate that into just the number of people that we're helping, and that's what really gets us jazzed as a business that really runs on core values where we're able to help more and more people at a high level and getting people to, you know, get rid of their debt, fresh start, get a 720 credit score, great google reviews that that's really what's more gratifying than, you know, than even the money.

Richard James: Michael, what a great call

MPS: That's [: 00:36:00

Make sure you get the most value possible. If this is not your first time listening or watching, we kindly ask that depending on the platform you're listening or watching you hit that subscribe or follow button, hit that like button, comment if you've got any questions or just want to give props to Jamie on a job well done.

And we appreciate you guys listening. But Jamie, again, thank you very much for being on today.

Richard James: Yeah, Jamie.

Jamie Miller: Appreciate you guys more than, you know,

Richard James: it's always a joy to hear your journey. And to hear where you're at right now and where you're going from here, what's exciting is the foundation is now in place. Your team is in place. Your structure is in place. You've built the practice. It supports the life that you want.

o get really, really fun. So [: 00:37:00

Jamie Miller: done.

I appreciate you both. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Really great to be with you.

Richard James: Thanks so

MPS: Our pleasure, Jamie. I appreciate you.

Richard James: All right, everybody, that's a wrap for today. Next time we're going to bring you back yet another fantastic member of our world attorney who's running the race just like you are. And so our goal, Michael, is always is to inspire them, right?

MPS: Absolutely. Our goal is so you get something out of every episode we do, and we'll keep bringing on some incredible members of our community.

Richard James: All right, everybody, make it a great day. We're out.