From Practice to Business: Scaling Beyond Yourself, with Andy Hays

Episode Notes

Transcript

Chad Fox:

Hi, I am Chad.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack. And this is episode 6 0 5 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, Stephanie talks with Andy Hays, a lab store of ours for a law firm case study.

Chad Fox:

Yes, I love Andy. I work with Andy.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, okay. I mean, I guess that would make sense. You do run the lawyers’ lab over there.

Chad Fox:

That is true.

Zack Glaser:

Chad, you guys, we just had an affinity leadership team meeting, I think it was in Chicago. That tells you that I wasn’t there. I’m not really a leader of, I

Chad Fox:

Know.

Zack Glaser:

I Was

Chad Fox:

Missing you on our freezing cold morning runs.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, yeah. I’m glad I didn’t have to lead any of those, man. Well, so one of the things you were telling me about before we got started here was that a theme in that was holding standards and kind of accountability. And I think that’s something that in people’s law firms, especially small law firms where we’re a family, we’re friends where it’s really tough to have accountability conversation sometimes. So what was the framing of holding standards in the firm when y’all were talking about it?

Chad Fox:

Yeah, so I’ll start with saying that the idea of we’re a family, I think is a mistake in a business, right? Because ultimately if in most cases, maybe this isn’t always the case, but in most cases if somebody leaves the business, they’re probably not coming to Christmas dinner. So they’re not really your family. So I think we have to be careful with that when we start calling our work team, our family, and you kind of nailed it. It blurs the lines a bit when it comes time to hold people to standards. And so one of the core themes of the leadership retreat this week was it’s okay to hold standards and there’s nothing negative about holding your team to standards and having consequences of falling short of those standards.

Zack Glaser:

So obviously KPIs are a way to do that. Weekly check-ins are a way to do that. I’m going to push back slightly on this family thing, Chad, because I can, if you’re using it as an actual, we are like a family, great. But if you’re using it as a method to say, we’re really nice to each other all the time, that’s fair. I think that’s the problem. I can get mad at my family. I can hold my family to standards and accountability. And so I don’t know that that’s the issue as much as not, and I think this gets to the guts of holding the standards here. It’s that I don’t want to be confrontational. I Don’t want to irritate somebody. I just want everybody to get along in the office. And if that’s the mechanism or the method for that, then that’s not fair to everybody. That’s not fair to the people that you’re working with, the leaders that you’re training, the people that you’re training. So I don’t know that it necessarily is, can’t think of it as family. It’s just don’t use that as an excuse. Don’t say that and mean well, we’re just nice to everybody all the time, and we have no confrontations. I confront my family all the time.

Chad Fox:

That’s true. And ironically, we don’t all the time when it’s necessary confront our team tend to shy away from those conversations.

Zack Glaser:

So how can you frame it? Let me kind of give myself as an example. Here I am somebody who will, if you don’t give me feedback, good, bad, indifferent, whatever it is, I’m going to think it’s the worst in the world. And I put that out there because that’s to say, even if you give me, Hey, Zack, you’re doing this really poorly, or you’re pushing back, or you’re holding that standard, it is so much better for me if you’ll just do that than if you’re like, things are great, Zack, and I know they’re not.

Chad Fox:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. I’ve also heard it the other way where no news is good news, right?

Zack Glaser:

Right. Some people are going to go that direction. So really be consistent, give people the feedback. And now people that I work with know how I am because I tell them about that. But that’s a way of giving people permission to push. But even beyond that, holding standards is really just are you getting the things done that we were expecting you to do that you’re supposed to do? I think a lot of times though, firms have an issue with that, not like an emotional or internal issue, but they have an issue with that because they don’t actually have KPIs.

Chad Fox:

Well, that’s what I was going to say. The first step is you have to define what those expectations are, and that’s the foundation of it. And that’s what a lot of firms oftentimes never establish.

Zack Glaser:

I mean, that goes to job description

Chad Fox:

Is the only time that we ever look at the job description is when the person is hired. That’s probably what happens.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, what are you supposed to do? So job description and then KPIs, and then, I mean, that’s processes also. I find that a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people will come into it and be like, well, they didn’t do this because I didn’t tell them clearly enough. Or they’ll kind of internalize the blame, and so they won’t go and hold that standard because they maybe didn’t write it down well enough. So write your SOPs, SOB.

Chad Fox:

And I’ll say another thing too is this came up in our retreat this week, is sometimes policies will get created out of mistakes because it’s easier to create a policy than it is to have a hard conversation.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Chad Fox:

Yes. Establish your standards, establish ’em ahead of time, but don’t shy away from having hard conversations. And that was another thing that we talked a lot about was holding back feedback. Does no one any good? And so we have to be willing to have those tough conversations.

Zack Glaser:

Well, hopefully this next conversation is not tough between Stephanie and one of our lobsters, Andy Hays to stick around.

Andy Hays:

Hi, I’m Andy Hays with staa Law. We’re a small boutique firm in Chicago. We specialize in estate and trust, administration and litigation.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, welcome to the show, Andy. I’m excited for us to talk a little bit about your business today. And maybe you were just sharing with me, you’ve had your own firm now for about 18 years.

Andy Hays:

I didn’t even realize it was that long until I was kind of doing the math before this conversation. So yeah, almost 18 years in a couple months.

Stephanie Everett:

Congrats. If you had to go back to that 18 years ago, what would you tell yourself that now that you didn’t know then

Andy Hays:

You’re not going to go out of business so relaxed during that first three years, and once I hit the three-year mark, I was like, okay, I kind of see how this can go. But it was very stressful. I had two small kids at the time. I still have those kids. They’re no longer small, but

Stephanie Everett:

That’s good.

Andy Hays:

Yeah, just try to relax. I guess that’s what I would try to do with every life or every part of my life. But yeah, I mean, we grew super slowly, so it wasn’t really like I got over my skis or anything in that way, but we’re still trying to do the same thing, trying to still grow smartly. And if that’s slowly, that’s fine.

Stephanie Everett:

I think that’s super helpful. And I know you’re kind of going through another evolution of your business right now and specifically rebranding it. And maybe I’d love to hear more about that journey and what that looks like.

Andy Hays:

So we’ve kind of rebranded. I started out a long time ago all offices of Andrew Hays, and then I went to Hays firm. That was kind of a minor rebrand, and we’ve changed the logo a couple of times, but we are now in the process of, or we just did change the name of our firm. So our firm is now Staa Law, and it’s owned by my wife and myself. I wanted to get our name off of the firm. I kind of always thought that was an antiquated way to have a business. And in Illinois, there’s no barrier to taking your name off a law firm. And so the word means path in Croatian, though I don’t think that’s not a super important part of it because people start to think of firm as the name of that firm, whether that’s a person’s name, it’s its own entity, and I don’t think people are going to examine too much where that name comes from, but it does play into the branding and the photos on the website, and it is a big, big move for us.

Stephanie Everett:

Why specifically did you decide to rebrand and get your name off of it? Talk about what you were thinking about and thinking about the future of the business.

Andy Hays:

The idea came to me in Lab Con and it was one of the exercises and I was speaking in a small group and we were talking about how to envision your business in X number of years and selling your business specifically. So as I sat down and you kind of go through what you would need to put in place for that to be something you would be able to accomplish, certainly systems are in place, certainly brand awareness is in place, marketing systems, et cetera. But then I was kind of stuck on the fact who would want to buy a business with my name on it? So then that would be a whole, this would have to happen eventually. If you’re going to transition someone, transition the business to someone else, if they’re unrelated to you, you would have to go through this whole process. And so I figured it made sense to go through the process now, and it’s just one part of what we’re trying to do with build the business so that we could sell it and so that we’re not every client that calls wants to talk to me.

Stephanie Everett:

So two important things to unpack there. One is you started thinking about maybe one day I want to sell this. And I think you even said to me, I don’t know if I’m going to sell it, but I’m going to build a better business in the process. And I agree and love that, but then also logistically clients may not be so inclined to insist to talk to you if your name isn’t on the door.

Andy Hays:

Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don’t think, it’s not like I’m trying to hide from my clients, but that is definitely in order to get to that point where this is a desirable asset for someone else to get involved with, whether it’s someone purchasing it or a younger attorney that is kind of entrepreneurial and may want to take it over someday, not having my name attached to it. I mean, I don’t think having my name attached to it really does anything. I mean, people are still going to be able to find me. And it’s not like I have a famous name in the city of Chicago.

Stephanie Everett:

No, but I think to me, what I’m hearing too is so many people listening right now are the bottleneck of their law firm decisions, work, client calls, client requests, come to them, and I’m envisioning all the arrows coming at this one body, and I’m sure that that’s how you’ve felt for many years. Everything’s flowing to me. How do I get myself out of that? And I’ve had so many conversations with lawyers that are like, oh, if I could just get my clients to be okay talking to my team or talking to someone else, I don’t have to be the only one that answers their questions. Again, you’re not trying to hide from them. You’re trying to help them, but you’re trying to also scale your business beyond you. And something as simple as the name of the firm can be a huge signal in other people’s minds about who it’s okay to talk to. That’s what I heard when you were saying that. So such a small, small but important. Right?

Andy Hays:

Yeah, that sounds better than what I said it, but I agree with you, and that’s part of what we’re trying to convey on our website for people that don’t know us, is that it is a team and it’s not just one person and that one person’s super lawyer status or where they went to law school or whatever.

Stephanie Everett:

And what else in terms of trying to remove yourself from being the bottleneck are you guys focused on right now? Besides the branding, which I think is super important.

Andy Hays:

I’ve always tried to make sure that I have enough staff and that no one is overworked. What you’re always told to do in running a small business, have that operating manual and all of those kinds of things. We’ve been lucky to not have a ton of turnover, so we haven’t needed it for that so much kind of emergency situation where someone could just fill in the desk and do the job. But that certainly would be able to be accomplished. A lot of the automation tools as a small firm, you are on your own. I mean, literally. And I’ve got a lot of feedback from folks and lawyers on the technology stuff, not something that I really enjoy or don’t have some kind of love of tech gadgets, and you could quickly end up with so many that it’s just overload and you have so many things and you’re not using any of ’em.

We’ve kind of gone through that phase a little bit, but now we’ve got it down to where we really do have a lot of these things, automated tasks. A lot of it has been through Clio and there’s many other services that can do the same thing. But yeah, just so I kind of come in when the staff can handle a very skilled paralegals and other counsel here, and they can handle most everything unless it is truly some litigation type of situation or some extraordinary circumstance. So if it’s the bulk of what we do, not necessarily my time, but the bulk of our files are regular administration, not litigation, just helping someone get the bank accounts distributed to the heirs or sell the home or settle the debts, transfer the business, that type of thing is obviously not litigation. And a lot of that can be done by paralegals, honestly, and other attorneys.

Stephanie Everett:

Did you guys have a process that you followed to put some of those systems in place? Because I think a lot of people know, oh, I should do that, but it feels like it kind of gets kicked down the priority list or feels like, oh, another thing on my to-do list, now I got to document how we do things and that doesn’t feel as important. How did you guys tackle that

Andy Hays:

With lawyers? There’s a lot of different coaches people talk to. I found that I have trouble keeping up with the quarterly coaching sessions, but even having those quarterly sessions is perfect for me. That does give you some quantifiable goal to set because it’s so easy. That was the story of my whole career before I got this kind of structure in place was, I mean, I knew what I had to do. I knew what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to have a business and not just a law practice with other people helping me, but having that accountability goals for a small firm, I mean, unless you’re hyper disciplined, it’s very difficult because you don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of or hold you accountable to do these things. So yeah, we would set goals of, so we’re going to automate this quarter, we’re going to automate these five things, and it’s always something we can find to do.

The low hanging fruit was pretty easy, and that’s proved to be the best type of things that we’ve automated. But yeah, there’s always some of those business oriented to goals, and I’ve started having meetings with my paralegals talking about those things. So all the stuff that I never did for so many years and thought that everybody liked to operate how I do where I just kind of do my things, and you can use that term siloing or something, but that has negative connotations usually when you’re talking about it in this type of context. But I realized that not everybody and probably few people want to just be left and just deal with things. So I’m trying to figure out ways to communicate with people and make sure people know what is expected of them, and having those quantifiable goals placed is definitely helpful for that

Stephanie Everett:

For

Andy Hays:

Me.

Stephanie Everett:

Totally makes sense. What advice might you give somebody else maybe in a similar situation, a little bit behind you, trying to figure out where they should focus on their business? Maybe they’re just feeling overwhelmed and they don’t even know where to get started. They still have a practice, not a business. That’s something we’ve been talking a lot about lately and how do they start shifting to have that business owner mindset that you clearly have adopted. Now,

Andy Hays:

I went through a situation where I have a rather large office physical office here in Chicago, and I ended up having to sublet it. My partner on the lease actually went out of business during COVID. It was pretty, to say stressful was the understatement of my career. But anyway, so I’ve seen how other folks work. We got a lot of subtenants in here, and I’ve worked in these kinds of situations, so I’ve been around a lot of different types of law firms. Not really any experience with larger law firms, though I can kind of see how that goes just from knowing so many folks in that culture. But the thing that I can see is so many folks are stressed out and it used to say they’re licking the envelopes. I mean, we don’t really use envelopes as much. We used to, but they’re doing every single thing in that business.

And I think even just hiring someone to do all of those things, even though it seems like, and this isn’t just someone starting out, this is anyone. I mean, every time I’ve hired someone, the business, because I’m able to do other things and the business kind of fills in to where they’re paying for them, the business grows to where they can pay that salary and grow the business. So I think what I’m trying to say in a long-winded way is a lot of folks, especially starting out, are too slow to hire people. People are like, oh, you hire for not the business you have, but the business you want. Now, I don’t know about that. That seems a little aggressive of a slogan, but I feel like a lot of attorneys are, I could just do it myself, and they don’t see the value of their time when they’re doing that work that someone else could easily, easily do.

Stephanie Everett:

I couldn’t agree more especially, well, I can just handle it. We don’t do the mental math to say, well, what’s the opportunity cost? Of course, I know how to make photocopies, I know how to seal envelopes, but me spending time there means I’m not spending time doing this other high value thing that could really move the business forward. And business owners at all levels get stuck in that trap. We have to keep reminding ourselves.

Andy Hays:

Absolutely. And I mean, we recently, we’d always had a full-time paralegal and a part-time paralegal, and then when our part-time paralegal went to law school, we hired a full-time paralegal. So now we have two full-time paralegals. And so we’re kind of going through that situation just on the paralegal end, very experienced by one paralegal so she can do higher level work. It’s not just even attorney or business owner stuff. So that whole kind of thinking can be applied to any part of the business, just getting people doing the right jobs.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, absolutely. I know so many people struggle with that, and actually I’ve just developed a new course that we’re on that specifically because it’s about delegating the right way, but it’s also about developing other people. It’s kind of shifting that you’re also, you’re not just getting work off your plate, you’re actually giving someone else a chance to grow and strengthen their skills. And maybe it does take more hand. We always revert to, I could do it faster, I could do it better. It’s like, well, yeah, and that’s always going to be the case unless you give this other person a chance to do it. I mean, part of it is giving them some space to learn and grow and make mistakes, but then improve upon it. And I think we forget that a lot of times, and we deny our team that chance to grow and get better.

Andy Hays:

I mean, it keeps ’em engaged. What do you like to do about your job? And then you can, if you’re lucky and you have the business, craft it to where that’s what they’re focused on.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, absolutely. I had someone yesterday on our team actually say, Stephanie, can I do that task and I want to take it off your plate? And I was thinking about it and I was like, it kind of is my job in this case. I said, but if you’re asking me because you want to grow your skillset, then totally, that makes sense. I mean, I kind of had to work through it in my head and I was like, actually, yeah, this person’s asking for a chance to go negotiate with one of our partner vendors. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, I don’t need to be the one to do that. I was like, yeah, let’s schedule a little strategy call so we can brainstorm how it’s going to go, and then you do it, love

Andy Hays:

It, manage yourself out of a job. You don’t want to go that far, I guess, but I

Stephanie Everett:

Don’t think you can

Andy Hays:

Get close

Stephanie Everett:

Closer. Yeah, and it’s interesting, right? We are, I think, worried about that, but I don’t think that line actually exists. And as owners, if it does, I mean, I don’t know. There’s something always for us to do as owners maybe.

Andy Hays:

Definitely. Yeah, definitely.

Stephanie Everett:

Cool. Well, what’s next for you? What are you excited about? Maybe what are you learning?

Andy Hays:

Not really lawyer stuff, but business owner stuff, which is what we’re talking about. I guess I, like I said, have an office here in Chicago. I’ve been working in the loop, the downtown area of Chicago the whole 18 years. I’ve had an office down here ever since the pandemic. The probate court here has been mostly on, I mean, we have contested hearings we have to go to in person, so I’m kind of not tied to the loop, not, I’m definitely not tied to the loop as I once was. And rents are not really going down, as you would think, because all these, it’s not just attorneys. Every business has the same pressures to remote work and things. So anyway, that’s a long way of saying that. I just bought a building like a couple neighborhoods outside of the loop in a place called Ukrainian Village, and so we’re moving there in May, so we’re going, I just got a text from completely renovating the building. It’s necessary, and I just got a text from my contractor. I’m going to go over there, so I’m kind of in the process of that. So aside from the day-to-day of running the firm, what’s next for the business is that it’s definitely a huge move. It’s going to be very odd to be outside the loop, but it’s a very cool neighborhood and it’ll be nice.

Stephanie Everett:

Well, yeah, exciting. Congratulations. I know lots of folks buying a building is a huge opportunity and investment for a lot of firm owners. I know we did that when I was a partner at a law firm, and so congratulations, and that’s very exciting.

Andy Hays:

I never thought it was possible at Chicago. I guess I can thank COVID for that because it wasn’t possible. But in smaller towns, yes, it happens all the time, but you kind of had to be in the loop, at least in my mind. And there are a lot of other attorney’s minds. You had to be in the loop.

Stephanie Everett:

I love it. Well, thanks for chatting with us today. I hope some folks got some ideas. I think it’s always great to hear from people in the trenches living it and figuring it out, and we’re glad to be able to work with you and help you do that, and for you to help other listeners maybe get some ideas and some change their mindset a bit. So thank you.

Andy Hays:

Absolutely. I mean, if anyone wants to call me to ask me anything or give me ideas about something I said or something, I’m totally open to it. I think that’s the best part of the lawyers thing is being connected with not only other small firm owners, but similar mentality, business owning law firm owners. So thank you.

Stephanie Everett:

Absolutely.

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