B (3:05)

But what he did was he broke a psychological barrier. It was not a time barrier, it was a psychological barrier. And what's really, really interesting, the reason why I love that story, is that in all of human history, no one had ever broken that record, ever. And do you know how long it took to break his record?

B (3:34)

Six weeks.

B (3:36)

Six weeks. And the two of them broke that record the same year.

B (3:44)

And in the next four years, 20 people broke the four minute mile barrier. And hundreds and thousands have broken it since then. And no one thought it was possible until one person did it. It's really incredible. And we do the same thing in our practices every single day. We tell ourselves we can't do this, we can't do that, and then the reality is that we can't. You just have to get past that psychological barrier. And what I want to do is I want to encourage you to take those risks, go out and take that leap. And many times is just as simple as going faster, striking faster. And I'm gonna talk about that over the next few minutes.

B (4:41)

But what's our four minute mile? What is it as attorneys, as law firm owners? It's that we set these artificial limits on ourselves. We do it every single day. So I want to give you a few things to focus on that are going to help you move faster. And it's really. I've simplified it into three things. One, just clarity. Know what the goal is. It's really, really simple. Know what the goal is.

B (5:17)

Number two, constraint.

B (5:20)

Shorten the time period.

B (5:24)

We had in our firm. We had this goal of a five year plan of building our own case management system.

B (5:31)

And then one day I had this really harebrained idea. I said, hey, what if we did it in 18 months? And then Kashif said, what about six months? And we did get it done in six months, but it was a pretty crappy version. But now we've got a really damn good version. It's just because we started to take action on it. And the third thing is having confidence. So you have the clarity. You know what your goal is, you have the constraints, you shorten the time and having confidence. And it's not just having confidence in you, although that is extremely important. And Jason Selk always talks about that. It's having that confidence, but it's having that confidence in your team to go out and achieve that goal.

B (6:23)

And that's something that we do all the time where we don't rely enough on our team.

B (6:30)

And I had mentioned Jim, we started the podcast in 2016. Jim's right back there, one of my best friends.

B (6:46)

A lot of times people, they focus on perfectionism and they want to get a perfect thing done before they do anything. And a quote I saw the other day was, perfectionism is the slowest way to fail.

B (7:01)

I was like, that is so, so true. It's a very, very slow, painful death. But Jim and I, we're dumb enough to think we're going to look into this computer, we're going to start recording on Skype. And maybe some people will listen to it. We knew we wanted to help attorneys, so we had that clarity. The thing we didn't put on it was constraints. We had no idea what was going to happen after that. But we did have. We were dumb enough to have the confidence.

B (7:38)

To do what we did. When it comes to Maximum Lawyer, we have a global community. There's people from all over the world that listen to maximiliary. When it started, it was probably just Mo and Big Mike. That's probably all it was. And it just kind of snowballed from there. The really, really great thing that I've gotten from Maximum Lawyer is over the years, I've learned a few really, really important things about speed.

B (8:07)

The first is, and what's really interesting is when you have an issue in your firm, what do you normally do? You usually try to add something to it.

B (8:17)

So let's say you're having a communication problem. Maybe we need to add an answering service to it. That's what we need. We need an answering service. Or maybe the team's really overwhelmed. We need to add more people. That's what we need to do. We really need to add more people. Or, you know what? Let's automate things. Let's add another system. Let's do that. We need to add another system. And in the process, what you do is you slow your firm to just a crawl, and you don't even realize it because you're adding all of these things.

B (8:51)

There's actually a scientific term for this. It's called subtraction bias. And the truth is, the reality is, is that.

B (9:01)

Scientifically proven that if you take things away, you will move faster?

B (9:09)

Imagine I was thinking about this. Let's say Roger Bannister wanted to run faster. So he's like, you know what? Maybe I need to get some thicker shoes. That's what I need. I really need some thicker shoes. Let's add some weight to my feet. Maybe I'll put a backpack on. Maybe I need a. I need to drink more water during the run. So maybe I'll put a backpack on.

B (9:30)

Makes no sense. And that's what we're doing to ourselves every single day when it comes to our firms. But the reality is, what you need to do is you need to start subtracting. One thing that we did was really kind of interesting.

B (9:47)

Over the. And this is something we did over the last year is.

B (9:54)

A little dry mouth, is we went through all of our tasks in the entire firm, so every single one. And we audited and we said, what are the ones that are absolutely necessary. Absolutely necessary. And we went through and we probably cleared out two thirds of all of our tasks that were automatically populating for every single case. And what we realized is we were overworking files by tens of hours. Okay? Every file, tens of hours. Just think about how much money that saves us for not doing those. Now, that doesn't mean that a case manager can't decide to go out and, you know, complete different tasks for that file because the file calls for it. They can still do those things, but only when the file calls for it. Another thing that we did, and this is one of my favorites, some of you have probably heard me talk about before, is we took all of our meetings and cut the time in half. We've been doing that for the last two years. We cut the time in half. And you know how many complaints we got about that? Zero.

B (11:06)

Do you know how much less work we got done? None. We're doing more in less time because you spend most of your time just wasting time in meetings. And here's what's really important. I mentioned this yesterday during the hot seats. If you have 10 people in a meeting, a one hour meeting, it's not a one hour meeting. That's a 10 hour meeting.

B (11:30)

Think about it. It's a 10 hour meeting.

B (11:33)

You cut that in half and you've saved five hours of work time. That's a massive amount of work. Now, those of you that might be able to bill for that, maybe that's a little bit different. But so maybe you want to double those times. Just kidding. Don't do that. But start thinking about subtracting when it comes to your firms.

B (11:56)

The second thing that I learned is that you don't need more time.

B (12:02)

You don't need more time. What you need to do is you need to do more with your time and stop focusing on the less important things.

B (12:11)

And.

B (12:14)

I had a meeting with Jason Selk and I meet with him every single month. And there's a couple times where I've been like, oh, I'm out of time. I don't have enough time. And we've kind of gone through everything. We've cut things from the counter or remove this. And he calls me on my BS and he says, well, you know, what do you do when you have a couple minutes? Well, I just. I don't know. I just kind of, you know, I'll use that time just to kind of catch up on email or maybe I'll just move on to the next thing. He's like, no, no, Create an attack list. Create an attack list. So what we did is I went and I created an attack list and he told me that the best executives in the world, what they do is they focus on one minute tasks, two minute tasks, five minute tasks. So if I've got a minute, I go knock out a one minute task. If I got two minutes, go knock out a two minute task. If I got five minutes, go knock out a five minute test. Because that's what the best executives in the world, they do. They do more with their time. They're way more efficient with their time. So if you want to be.

B (13:21)

Not just a wonderful law firm owner, that's a great leader of your people, if you want to be a great executive, you're going to find a way to do more with your time.

B (13:32)

That is, I can tell you one of the most important and the most valuable things that I have done when it comes to my practice.

B (13:43)

And the third thing that I learned, and this is one that is the hardest, but it is maybe the most important, is that speed is culture. It's actually something that you can teach to your team. It's not just something that you do yourself. It's something that you teach to your team. It's something that you have to build into your culture. How many people here raise your hands. If your people waste time, okay, that's your money.

B (14:17)

Out the door. But if you can build a culture of speed.

B (14:25)

That will save you tons of time and tons of money. One of my favorite parts about our last quarterly meeting was that everyone was talking about and one of the most common things we get is can we get rid of this task? Can we get rid of that task? Can we get rid of this software? Can we get rid of that software? But one of my most, my favorite parts of the last quarterly meeting was can we use AI for that? Can we use AI for this? And there's gonna be plenty of AI, so I'm not gonna talk about AI today, but.

B (14:57)

We have built a culture where everyone is looking to speed up the process. No one wants to slow things down, no one's looking to waste time. It's a culture that we have built internally where everyone's looking to speed up the process. That's incredible. So what I want you to think about when it comes to striking faster, you have to make faster decisions. Here's a really interesting statistic, and I've seen multiple statistics, but this is one that, this one caught my attention, where.

B (15:32)

Law firm owners or company owners that make law firm decisions faster than Their competitors, they increased their revenues by 16%.

B (15:41)

Just by making faster decisions. And I found that to be a really, really interesting statistic. It doesn't even mean that they were making the right decisions. They were just moving faster. They were striking faster.

B (15:56)

So it makes me think of we actually have a trademark. Strike fast. Strike often. The because we think it's really, really important that we get to leads fast, we follow up. So we strike fast. We strike often. We send demands out fast. We follow up on those demands. We file lawsuits fast. When we have to, we follow up. We get service. When it comes to depositions, discovery, fast, fast, fast. Follow up, follow up, follow up.

B (16:22)

But when I was thinking about strike faster, it makes me think of lightning, right? Lightning bolts. And a lightning bolt doesn't ask for permission, right? It just strikes, right? It doesn't go out into a committee and say, hey, this is a good time to do a lightning strike. No, it just strikes. So when you think about striking faster, think about a lightning bolt, right? When you have an idea, okay, when you have an idea, don't go out and ask for permission. Don't run it through a committee. That's where everything goes to die.

B (16:56)

When you have these ideas that you know deep down, I'm not talking about some hair brain idea. I'm talking about, you're like, this is what I believe. This is going to work. Strike on it and move fast.

B (17:10)

There are so many tools. The earth is moving beneath our feet. But these, the earth, these movements, when it comes to AI and technology, we can use those to our advantage. Vibe coding. I don't know if you've ever heard of vibe coding. Most of you probably have, but you can go out and build about, build pretty much anything that you want these days in a matter of minutes. In a matter of minutes. And so go out and build the things that you're wanting to build. We're in the era of the idea people. We are in that era firmly, because you can go out and build whatever you want in the matter of minutes and hours. You really can. So here's my challenge. You're going to have a lot of great ideas over the next couple days. We have incredible speakers that are going to give you so many things that are working, so many things that are not working. And you're going to want to go out and implement all of these changes.

B (18:10)

Let's say you get an idea about that, or maybe it's an idea that you've been sitting on for the last few months. What I want you to do, pick one thing before tomorrow, and I don't care if you leave a session, the speaker's man, like this. But I don't care if you leave a session to go up to your room to build it. Go do it before tomorrow. Pick that one thing. Maybe. Maybe you. You know, you're supposed to fire that person.

B (18:34)

I don't like that. I hate firing. It's the worst. But sometimes it's the best thing for your firm. Or maybe you know, that there's this wonderful lead magnet that you know you need to do, and you've been sitting on it for months. Go do it here. Here's the time you're gonna put in the work. You're gonna do the work, this the next couple days, get it done, go out, and then you can move on to the next thing. Because what's so valuable, you got to know this. You have to understand this. Speed compounds. It compounds. If you take action this week, next week, you can go to the next thing. And the thing that you built this week is working for you already. Next week you build that, that's gonna start working for you. And the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, it compounds. It's like, interest. So go do those things. Quit sitting on them, and go take action. And I promise you, when you strike faster, you will start to see the results.

B (19:31)

Sa.