← Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
Personal Injury Mastermind w/ Chris Dreyer
330. Data, Disney, and the Death of a Solo Lawyer: Inside Craig Goldenfarb’s Eight-Figure Firm
00:34:59
Inside the PI Firm Where Two CMOs, a Culture Officer, and Daily Metrics Drive Everything
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- [00:00]
Kinsey
Hey there future vip. I'm Kinsey, your on site concierge for Pemcon. The Personal Injury Master Rhyme Conference, October 5th through the 8th. When you go VIP at PEMCON, you're getting the full experience, luxury accommodations included at the 5 star Phoenician Resort, $250 in resort credit for the spa, golf course or wherever your mood takes you, a private VIP dinner and exclusive access to the biggest names in personal injury. Grab your VIP tickets while you still can at pemcon. That's P I M C O n dot O r G. See you this fall in Scottsdale. If I was on a desert island and I had 60 seconds of a cell phone to say goodbye to my wife, I would say goodbye to my wife and kids first of course. And then I would ask, before I die, give me the numbers, give me the 10 KPIs of how my firm's doing so at least I can die in peace.
- [00:58]
Chris Dreyer
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. Let's get into it. Craig Goldenfarb runs a multiple eight figure machine. He's built a three tier leadership team, hired two CMOs, installed a Disney trained chief culture officer and scaled Gold Law all by treating it like a real business. In this episode, Craig reveals the mindset shift that took him from litigator to CEO, the KPIs he checks daily, and how Culture Systems and obsession drive long term growth. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings IO. If you're serious about scaling, this is rocket fuel. Gold Law has seen massive growth. You opened up in 2002 but have been an eight figure attorney for over a decade. Let's talk about the current before we take it back. You know, what are some of the recent wins or milestones that you're proud about?
- [01:44]
Kinsey
Well, we're at multiple eight figures and have been for a long time. I think a great win for us is just the establishment of eos as an operating system the last five years and really built that out. And building out my three levels of leadership, which for a firm my size, it took a while as a CEO to learn the different levels of management in a company. And that's something that certainly never teach in law school. But once you grow as a company, you need to have executive leadership, supervisors, managers, et cetera. So when I realized when there's a gap between certain levels of organization, I insert another level of leadership or management within my corporation just like a real business does. And it took me a while to learn that because of course lawyers are never taught management or Leadership or levels of organization. So that's been a big win for me is the stratification of my organizational chart.
- [02:36]
Chris Dreyer
Well, I can't leave you there. I got to dig into that a little bit. I'm really interested in this three levels of leadership and your title right. On your username you have listed as CEO. And so talk to me about like the key executives that you think at that top level, the leadership level of a successful law firm like yours.
- [02:52]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, let me start by saying there's certainly no right answer. And you know, you have the EOS model, which is a visionary and an implementer. So that's a 1:1. I call that a 1:1 because there's CEO and then a COO, chief operating officer. And there's not a lot of redundancies in that strict EOS model. So if the CEO dies or something happens or retires, you got a problem. And then if the COO dies or retires or quits or something got a problem. So there's two levels of non redundancy. So the EOS coach, or we call her an EOS light coach because she doesn't strict a strictly state at eos. She said, look, every company is different. So mandating that you stick to the 1:1 model is shortsighted. So in my company we ended up having an executive team of six people. And in my company we have two chief marketing officers because they have different roles too. And then we have a chief legal officer who runs all of product. Our product is professional services. We have me as the CEO, we have a chief operating officer, and then we have a chief culture officer because in our company, culture is such a high priority. So as you can hear, any company is going to have a different executive team. But my point is that the top level, we call it the executive team, like many companies do, and it's different. I mean, we have two CMOs, which is absolutely crazy. I don't know of a lot of law firms that have two chief marketing officers. So the answer is you should have an executive team once you're over, let's say 20 people in your organization. And then beneath that we have department heads or our leadership team. And then the third level is what I call your basic managerial level, which is supervisors, directors and managers. So I didn't know any of this stuff coming out of law school. I didn't know any of this stuff till about 10 years ago. But I realized that the levels of leadership is just like the chain of command in the military. And once you realize that in Order to run a really solid organization such as the military, you need to have a chain of command. And people do not refer to their organizational chart of a chain of command often, but I do because there is clear accountability in an organizational chart. And the more layers you have when you need them, the more well run your organization is.
- [05:01]
Chris Dreyer
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And you know, it reminds me, you know, the one to one that's, that's interesting to think about because we're an EOS based agency, right? So we have, you know, I'm the visionary and I have an integrator. I've never thought about that. It makes me think of Dan Kennedy, you know, when a horse goes lame, you know, you, you, you need to have a backup. You know, I think his, in his book, the no BS people and profits book. And you're right, there's, there's not a redundancy there. So that's, that's something interesting. So you need to surround yourself with the other executives. You know, just. I gotta ask on the, the marketing guy. I own a marketing agency, the cmo. The two cmos is like one for like digital and one for more traditional. Is that kind of the setup?
- [05:39]
Kinsey
Sort of. What was funny is I was interviewing to replace my marketing manager who we separated and I was looking for one. And then because I've interviewed a lot of marketing folks, I know what questions to ask. And let's just pretend there are 50 different skill sets in marketing, whether it's digital or mass media or you know, branding, events, et cetera. And when we gave that list of 50 to both of them, we said, what are your favorites? And these were two top candidates. And they each pretty much clicked 25 different checkboxes. So we were like, oh my God, one dude was an expert in 25 and the other lady was an expert in the other 25. And I looked at my COO who was next to me and I said, you're going to kill me, but we have to hire both of these people. And she looked at me like I had three heads. And so I quick, quickly went back to chat GPT and I said, can a company succeed with two CMOs? And I got like all these great Harvard Business Review articles. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And here's how it'll work. So that was absolutely crazy outside the box thinking. And it worked. And so now I have one guy who really focuses his skill set is, I call it external marketing, which is business development, community events, graphic design, et cetera. He does all my media buys and then the other one is kind of more internal. She does content, newsletters, digital buys, everything that requires her to sit at her desk. And she also runs our intake department as well. So their skill sets were so complimentary. It just blew me away. So that's why I hired two CMOs.
- [07:09]
Chris Dreyer
That's incredible. That's incredible. I like that, the clear distinction of the roles that, you know, like you said, they're not going to fit every law firm, but they fit yours. And what you were looking for. Let's rewind a bit. You know, you were a very successful litigator before, you know, fully stepping into the CEO role. You know, what was one of the biggest breakthroughs? What finally pushed you to take this leap, you know, out of the courtroom and into running a business full time? Like, what was that moment? Walk me through that change of being a litigator to CEO.
- [07:35]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, I think every good leader goes through a period, hopefully, of self awareness and some mindfulness where they realize what their genius zone is. So a lot of books on flow or genius zone. And in 2000, about 2010 or maybe even earlier, I realized that being a litigator was not my genius zone. I was good at it. I got some good verdicts, and I'd been a trial lawyer about 15 years at that point, so I had a lot of verdicts under my belt. But I found I wasn't happy. I was gaining weight, didn't have balance in my life. And then I started to identify through my life coach who I had at the time, and through some mindfulness courses, you know, what was my flow, what was my genius zone? And I realized that once I took the Myers Briggs test and a couple other tests, that I was a connector. And as a connector, that leads towards you being a CEO and building connections, building up structures. And since I do a lot of personality testing, it was obvious to me that I like to build. I'm a builder and a connector. And a trial lawyer is not necessarily a builder or connector. So I like being out in the community. I like building connections, I like building organizational charts, and I like structure. So that led to me realizing that my best skills were business skills. And I had some. But I was busy taking depositions and trials. So I realized, hmm, let me read a couple books and see if they float my boat. So I read, you know, Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People. I started reading some Dan Kennedy. I started reading some Patrick Lencioni, and I was like, oh, my God, this is my favorite stuff. So once you become self reflective and you realize where your genius zone is. Your goal is to spend a lot of your day doing what you're good at. And I realized as I started to build, oh my God, this is really fun. So I think it all starts, you know, I just gave a seminar last week in Orlando. It starts with some, some mindfulness and some self reflection, realizing what you like to do. So the pivotal moment for me was sometime between 2005 and 2010 in realizing my zone or my flow. And it was building a business and creating a, and being a visionary rather than doing the work of trials and depositions. And I made a very intentional shift in my mindset. Instead of identifying myself as a lawyer, I now say my pronouns are C, E, O.
- [09:48]
Chris Dreyer
That's incredible. That's incredible. It's really interesting that you, how you discovered, you know, your zone of genius and those books and you know, I've read all those books as well and that's what I like. But I'd be interested to hear like, well, well, how did you find your, your integrator, the gang to your yin, so to speak, that that takes on those duties?
- [10:06]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, I'm a huge proponent of coaching, both being coached and coaching others. So I had always been in a group in Orlando called Atticus, which is one of the lawyer coaching programs. And they'd always taught me about, you know, different business skills and life management skills. I highly recommend that program. I'm an instructor in that program now in Orlando in their trial lawyers organization. And at that point I realized that they were limited because they didn't teach eos. Atticus did not teach eos. So I read Traction, I read Mike Morse's book. I realized that this was something that I wanted to get involved with. So I hired my EOS coach who was formerly with Fireproof, which is Mike Morris's group. And then she left Fireproof and started her own company. And she's been my EOS coach for five, six years. And she again does not strictly stick to EOS, the 1:1 model. And she helped me design my executive team. And at that point, believe it or not, I did not have a coo. So you know, like you bring in a good general manager or coach to spot something that you don't spot. Well, I was a eight figure firm doing great, and I didn't have a COO yet. I was trying to start at eos. So she came in and it's kind of like a coach coming in saying, oh wait, you got a good team, but where's your quarterback. I was like, oh, you need a quarterback? Yeah. Well, that's why you're not scoring any points, Craig, because you have a running back and wide receivers or an offensive line, but you don't have a quarterback. I'm like, duh. So I quickly pivoted to finding a COO and we used a headhunter. That was far too expensive, but we had several candidates from across industries and I ended up hiring someone from the finance industry to be my magical unicorn coo who is still my COO today. And she moved from California to take the job and she had been in the finance industry. She didn't know what a lawsuit was nor a auto case. Nothing. Zero. But she had all the COO skills that I needed and now she knows everything.
- [11:57]
Chris Dreyer
Thank you for sharing how you use the headhunter to find your COO and that story. It's always interesting. They're number two. A lot of times it's like two trial attorneys and one individual learns that they like marketing and sales and then the other goes the other direction. It's different for you. Does the finance person have that bean counter in them to where you know or are they still able to see the entrepreneurial vision and or do they kind of balance you?
- [12:19]
Kinsey
I also have a bean counter mentality, but I'm not into profit and losses as much as my COO because she has an MBA degree, right? So I do have a three person finance team as well. I do not have a CFO because I don't think personal injury attorneys need a CFO because we don't bill. So that's my personal theory. Do I have a head of finance? So CFO might cost you 125, 150 grand whereas the head of finance costs you 80 to 90 grand. So at least in my market. So we made the determination because we don't have receivables, we don't bill that we don't need a cfo. Plus my COO has a MBA in finance so she loves profit and losses, loves going through QuickBooks, loves doing all sorts of financial reports and Excel spreadsheets and measuring KPIs. So I don't need a CFO. Maybe different from other law firms. So my COO has all the business skills. We do have a, as I said, a three person finance team below the coo. But between the four of them I've made the determination. I don't need a cfo. So I like numbers. I'm a numbers guy and a KPI guy, so I don't mind. There's a lot of lawyers who are like, I hate all that stuff. Don't show me a spreadsheet. It happens to be. One of my interest is I'm a math guy, so I don't mind KPIs and profit and losses and finances. So that for me, that has worked out. So I do have a huge finance team headed by the COO who has an mba. Got it.
- [13:45]
Chris Dreyer
That's intriguing. And I've always found, you know, when you have the good KPIs and the metrics, it makes it a lot easier to deal with some of the people issues. Right? It's, hey, it's not this objective. Like I think this employee is not working. You have actual metrics and it's like, hey, you missed your numbers. And it's, they're established at the very beginning, you know, on that finance, is it more capacity, is it more looking at those KPIs and like utilization, you know, maybe with your case managers or however you're structured for your team.
- [14:12]
Kinsey
So our entire backbone of our firm is KPI's. We are a data driven firm in all regards. And I'm looking up upwards because above my two computer screens is a 65 inch television on my wall. That's my KPI screen. In the fireproof book. They call that their Jumbotron. So my Jumbotron is a 65 inch monitor and what it has up on it all day is my top 10 KPIs. I have about six levels of KPIs as far as granularity. And the top 10 are up all day. So I've nicknamed those in my speeches my desert island KPIs. Which was if I was on a desert island and I had 60 seconds of a cell phone to say goodbye to my wife, I would say goodbye to my wife and kids first, of course. And then I would ask before I die, give me the numbers, give me the 10 KPIs of how my firm's doing so at least I can die in peace.
- [15:04]
Chris Dreyer
That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah. And you know, that's you're on vacation, whatever, you could check that. And you, you have the comfort. The head hits the pillow. You're not, you know, wondering how things are.
- [15:14]
Kinsey
I'm lucky enough I don't even check it. On vacation. There you go.
- [15:16]
Chris Dreyer
There you go. So I kind of want to lean into, you know, a few of your statements on client first. You know, happy employees, happy clients. You know, every firm says that, but you have something that really Stands out because it's different. That I absolutely love is you have this personal injury response unit that actually go and meet the injured clients where they are. You know, how did that idea come about? Tell me a little bit about this unique component of your business.
- [15:38]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, pre Covid and In the last 20 years, before COVID people did want you to come out to their house and sign them up. Now the world has changed since COVID And we signed people up now on their cell phones. They sign our contracts on their cell phone. But before that occurred, we had a car. Called it the personal injury response Unit. Pirou kind of dumb name. But that was our first vehicle probably 10, 15 years ago. That of course was wrapped in our, you know, firm logo, et cetera. So we sent that out to lots of locations to sign people up. And it was of course, a traveling billboard. Now we now have eight firm vehicles. So now we have eight traveling billboards for various purposes. But that was the first one we used. And a lot of people did have folks in house that would go sign up a case, but they would enlist a paralegal. And I'm like, well, that paralegal now just spent three hours signing up a case. That was three hours. They could not do paralegal work. So we hired an in house person a long time ago to be that person who'd drive that car because it's so much more efficient to pay that guy 18 bucks an hour rather than your, you know, $50 an hour paralegal taking time from doing interrogatories to go out sign up a client. So we really devoted a lot of time originally to personal injury response unit, which we don't need anymore. We signed up one case a month by traveling to the location we don't need to. But that was kind of pioneering in the industry about 10 years ago because what we did is we did a no show analysis. So it used to be in the olden times where you'd set the appointment for the client to come in. And we had a 30% no show rate. So if 30% of clients don't come in and don't show up, it means they hired another lawyer. And if you multiply it times our average fee per case at that time, which was $15,000 for pre suit, you get 30 times $15,000 that you'd lose, that's 450 grand. And that would be in, I think, a quarter. You're losing $450,000 in a quarter by not having a car. That ROI is ridiculous. So, you know, that's the data driven type analysis is. And I still know people who set appointments for their clients to come in in personal injury. Like, are you kidding? You're going to wait three days and wait for someone to actually show up? Have you done a no show analysis? They're like, what's a no show analysis? I said, dude, you're in first grade. You need, you need to start with that basic level of data knowledge is your no shows. Just like doctors do, they do a no show analysis. That's why they're always confirming your doctor's appointments with a text, an email, hot air balloon. I mean, these days, every doctor, you get like nine confirmations that you're going to show up. Why? Because they lose money when you don't show up. So do lawyers.
- [18:15]
Chris Dreyer
That makes me think of her Moses, that $100 million offers book on the denominator. You know, a better offer decreases effort and sacrifice by the customer, of course. So if you're decreasing the friction, you know it's going to be a better offer to friction.
- [18:30]
Kinsey
We're looking for ways to reduce friction. I mean, I noticed Amazon has gotten better in the checkout process. When you go to your cart in Amazon, it used to take about three clicks or four clicks before the order would be placed. Now everything's set up. Your credit cards in there, your shipping preferences in there. It's now a one click. Once you go to the shopping cart in Amazon and instantly you get an email, your order's been processed. So that's, that's reducing all the friction points. And now you get it within like six hours at your door. So you know, they're brilliant at reducing friction points. In the sales process, we wanted to do the same thing on pim.
- [19:05]
Chris Dreyer
We focus on building external success, marketing growth strategies, the systems to scale a firm. But there's another side of the story. What it takes on the inside to lead in law. That's what Law Her Powered by Rankings IO is all about. Hear from the boldest women in the legal world how they navigate power and lead with purpose. If you want that kind of insight that makes you a better leader, not just a better operator, this one's for you. Search Law her wherever you get your podcasts and hit subscribe, you won't regret it. You can have the best marketing, the best case results, but if your revenue engine is broken, your firm won't scale. That's the gap most law firm owners miss under oath. Powered by Rankings IO is the podcast to bridge the gap. Zach, Cole and Scott go deep into how high performing revenue teams win big. Quarter over quarter, week over week, and sale over sale. From intake to hiring leadership to tech. It's sharp, practical and built for people who want to grow on purpose. Search under oath, revenue and practice and hit subscribe. Yeah, that makes me think of a lot of the, the, the tech advantages, the different marketplaces have been built, the different network effects like your doordashes and Uber. Uber for example, from a network effects perspective, they become better when there's more drivers cause you have to wait less for less time. So you know, all these different things kind of got my head spinning in regards to this one thing. I wanted to talk to more about this client service and value and people that you've hit on as your, your chief people or your chief culture officer from Disney to make your firm the happiest place on earth. You know, so how does that differ? Like, you know, that role? I hear, you know, my peer, my friend Michael Mogul, talk a ton about culture. We have our core values, but how does this culture officer, this people officer, how do they contribute to the growth of the business?
- [20:52]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, some people view HR as bad cop and we try to dissuade our employees from that. But HR definitely has some regulatory aspects to it. HR also has some disciplinary aspects to it and a lot of rules and regulations in the HR manual. And it's, there's rules based. Culture is fun based. Right. So we don't call it good cop, bad cop, but that is, you know, good cop being culture, bad cop being hr. But that's a way sometimes the employees view it and we try to dissuade them of that evaluation. But our culture team, their mission statement is, as you said, to make this place the happiest place on earth to work. And that's because I stole my culture officer from Disney World and she modified their mission statement. And her job is to make sure everybody's happy. Literally like at Disney World, their job is to make sure everybody's happy and satisfied so she can separate herself from rules and regulations. And we have the gold log games every month, which is a new fun thing. Whether it's bring your pet to work or, or bring your, your best high school yearbook photo to work and everybody tries to identify who they are. Or we have, we have a game room, or we have bumper pool tournaments, foosball tournaments, pinball tournaments, we have, you know, contests, we had Easter egg hunt, you know, this is every month. And within the month we have little mini games as well. And if you think about how Boring. A law office can typically be. What if you're engaged every week? Whether you choose to participate or not, you have the option of being engaged every week and especially once a month in a gold lock game with something that might be fun. That's why people stay at companies because they're engaged, they're engaging a different part of their brain, the fun part of the brain, which may keep them somewhere. So along with all our normal stuff, which is great benefits and 401k and profit sharing plan, which is wonderful but boring, we want to engage the other half of their brain. So we have a wheel, you know, contest wheel for various, you know, once a week we give away something, whether it's an Amazon gift card or two hours off or something that culture designs. HR doesn't have time to do that and HR might not have that skill set because HR isn't thinking of fun. So we have two separate departments that work together and one is the chief Culture Officer and one is the chief of hr. But they really collaborate together as a team to make this the happiest place on earth to work. And we've won South Florida best place to work mid sized business for like four years in a row.
- [23:20]
Chris Dreyer
When that Monday rolls around where they've had, you know, maybe the Friday off and they're excited to come back to work and not dreading that Monday, you know, those memes don't really apply.
- [23:29]
Kinsey
Well, I said I had a quarterly office meeting this morning, which we had with almost a hundred employees. And I said I have two goals, two main goals in this company. One is to provide an excellent product which is our legal service. And the second is to provide an atmosphere where everybody wakes up in the morning and is happy to come to work.
- [23:47]
Chris Dreyer
Incredible. Incredible.
- [23:49]
Kinsey
I just boil it down to two things really.
- [23:51]
Chris Dreyer
You know, wanted to touch just a little bit more on marketing and You've got over 900 reviews when we did the research for this. And that speaks to client service, that speaks to happy. That's been, what do you call that, the marketing that?
- [24:04]
Kinsey
Social proof. Yeah, social proof is what they call it, I think. Talk to me about that. Yeah, sure. That's been intentional. Everything we do is intentional. We know that if you, if you're looking for a blender at Walmart, you know, you Google blender at Walmart and then you read the reviews so everybody knows the reviews count and that's called social proof. So what we did is 15 years ago when reviews started becoming a deal, we started to incentivize Google reviews within the firm. And we came up with a very complicated system. And the reason it's complicated is because people will cheat the system if you put money behind it. So we Pay, I believe, $50 a Google review to our employees. And then people started saying, well, what if my brother does a Google review? Does that count? And we're like, yes, as long as they don't claim they're a client. So, you know, an employee's brother will do a Google review and say, my sister loves where she works. That counts. They get 50 bucks. But we had to put parameters on this because if you have 26 cousins, we don't want you to earn $5,000 for your Google reviews. So we put all these guardrails. It took us 10 years to put all the guardrails in place to see how people were trying to game the system. But what it results in after you perfect it is hundreds of Google reviews and thousands of Google reviews. So we have two offices, we have about 940 as of yesterday in one office and about 100 in, in our Port St. Lucie office. So we're above a thousand. And we're up there with Morgan and Morgan in the number of Google reviews. And, and we expanded it this year to Yelp and Lawyers.com and other platforms because we know that some people are on those platforms. So we want to encourage the use.
- [25:33]
Chris Dreyer
Of those platforms as well on those other platforms. Like for example, Yelp. That's one that I, I talk a lot about because if someone's on their mobile device and they use Apple Maps, well, it's pulling from Yelp and you don't want to, certainly don't want to have a one star review on Yelp. It has their own issues from filtering reviews and things like that. And, and yeah, I love that you have a process, you have a, an incentive structure for these reviews and that's how you get them.
- [25:58]
Kinsey
And it's one of the KPIs of our customer service relations expert who deals specifically with customer service. She does not handle any cases, loves to talk to clients and she does the closing meetings with the clients and personal injury. So at the end of the case, after they get their money, they've talked to their lawyer, they've talked to their case manager, she walks in last. And because we know that the lawyer doesn't give a crap about, you know, the testimonial or the Google review, we know that that's not high on the lawyer's priority list. They want to get back to their work. So Jennifer comes in and she Has a strict checklist. She goes over, requests the Google review, teaches them how to do Google review, and then requests the video testimonial. And our in house videographer and social media expert are on call to come up and do the video testimonial right then. And One of her KPIs, Jennifer's KPIs is the percentage of clients that give a Google review that also give a video testimonial. So we try to keep that at about 30%. So you can tell the overall key to my speech, as always, is intentionality, which is that you can pull levers and change any metric with intentionality.
- [27:04]
Chris Dreyer
That's incredible. Craig, a few final questions. This has been a lot of fun. You know, one of them teed up. You know, we hear a lot about this work life balance, but what's your approach to work life balance?
- [27:15]
Kinsey
Sure. The same advice I just gave on everything else, which is intentionality. In fact, my wife Colleen, who is a former TV news reporter and anchor woman, is a better speaker than I am. So I've invited her to the last three, four seminars. She has an amazing speech which I am getting her on a TED talk on work life balance and how it is being married to an entrepreneur. So it's not my perspective because my perspective is jaded, but how about your spouse's perspective on how our personality as a driven workaholic entrepreneur affects the spouse and the kids. Now we're empty nesters. We are a cautionary tale because I'm a driven entrepreneur. I have 10 businesses. But she speaks on all the tools we've developed in the last 10 years once we became aware of the imbalance in our marriage, the imbalance in our work life balance. So we started utilizing a lot of tools, got a marriage counselor, got a life coach for the two of us and found all these wonderful tools in order to reconnect, in order to make some sacred spaces in our presence, in our connection, communication techniques. And so work life balance is kind of a misnomer. It's more like work life integration because our brains as entrepreneurs, it's tough for us to get home and stop thinking about work. So what do you do with that? What do you do with that default? So my wife has started to speak nationwide on her title is actually while your identity as a provider, as an entrepreneur is bullshit because we all defend ourselves. We're looking to provide for our families. But what if we get divorced and our kids hate us? Well then who did we provide for? So it's bullshit when we say we're providers. And honey, you certainly like the vacations. You certainly like the purses and the nice house. That's just us hiding the fact that we don't have any work life balance or work life integration and hiding behind money. And that's absolute garbage because you have no connection with your wife or your spouse or your kids. It's garbage. We're deluding ourselves when we make a lot of money that that's an excuse for not having a complete and whole life. So we've utilized so many tools, we've stayed married after 26 years. My kids think I was a halfway decent dad. I won't go to great dad because I was a workaholic. But I have really open communications with them as adults. And I apologize. And I say, here's what was going on for me and how's, how, here's how things are going to change in the future. And I don't want this to affect your choice of spouse. I have two daughters and I realized that what I modeled for them could be harmful.
- [29:54]
Chris Dreyer
So powerful. Thank you for sharing. Two final questions. First, you know, tell me about the Seven Figure Attorney seminar you just had in April. You know, what's the next seminar on the horizon?
- [30:03]
Kinsey
Sure. I'm speaking at the Neostella conference in Milwaukee in May. Neostella is a software company that works with Filvine. It's one of Filvine's partners. I will probably, I'll give it a probably do the Seven Figure Attorney summit next year. I always do it in April. I've done it eight years in a row. And I say trial lawyers don't come because my seminar is not for trial lawyers. It's for business owners. It's to teach you how to manage and hire people to do the business aspects of your firm. If you're a trial lawyer and you do both come because you need to learn some of those skills or you need to hire people who have those skills. There are a lot of trial lawyers who belong trial lawyers, but if they own a business, they're going to fail because they want to be a trial lawyer all day. So I, I've done that eight years in a row. I just did in Orlando last week. A couple hundred attendees, I believe. And I'm teaching business owners how to navigate that really difficult process between being what I call a plumber, which is a trial lawyer, and the guy who owns the plumbing company, which doesn't plumb anymore. But he's miserable because what he used to love to do was plumb. Because he was a plumber. So where do you fall on the spectrum? And all us lawyers are definitely on the spectrum between plumber and the guy who owns the plumbing company. Are you the technician, which is the trial lawyer or are you the entrepreneur who owns the company or somewhere in between. And most people are somewhere in between.
- [31:26]
Chris Dreyer
You know what comes to mind for me is so my sister and brother in law own a plumbing and H vac company, a very large, probably the largest in southern Illinois. And they would get a lot of value from attending. So just on those highlights and then Craig, this has been amazing. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more?
- [31:44]
Kinsey
Sure. Well, my website is one place I have. It's goldlaw.com I'm branded as Gold Law because my last name is Golden Farb. The other is the Seminar, the seminar website which is 7Figureattorney.com so you can see an example of the amazing speakers. They're all from my law firm. I'm the only seminar in the United States where all the speakers are the heads of one law firm. So it gives you a soup to nuts under the hood view of how one law firm is run. That's my law firm. So that's 7Figureattorney.com. It's spelled out 7Figureattorney.com. Also I have an ice cream truck that's branded that we send out to charities to give away free ice cream which is also a massive billboard. So you, you can look up sweetjustice. Com. We named the ice cream truck Sweet Justice. We actually crowdsourced it to get a name. So we gave $500 to the person who came up with the name. But the easiest way is probably the website for my law firm.
- [32:41]
Chris Dreyer
That's it for pim. If Craig's story lit a fire under you, don't just take notes, take action, build Systems, track your KPIs, hire the right leaders. And if you want more insight on how to grow your business, not just a firm, be sure to subscribe, share and leave a review. I'm Chris Schreier. Catch you next time.